I thought that in light of tonight’s big Times Square soirée, this article by the New York Times’ Sewell Chan on filmmakers’ penchant for destroying New York City with aliens, monsters, natural disasters, nuclear war, terrorist attacks, rampant crime, marshmallow men, viral vampires, the passage of time and so on is all too appropriate. What’s more, it references The Blair Witch Project when discussing Cloverfield, thus providing fodder for my Blair Witch trend post’s lively comment thread.

One quote from the article perplexed me, however:

In contrast to “I Am Legend”–which like “The Omega Man” (1971) is based on a Richard Matheson novel–the “Cloverfield” images verge on being tasteless, [Celluloid Skyline author James] Sanders said. “They are playing on feelings not just about New York as civic symbol but on the shock of Sept. 11,” he said. “To some degree, that’s not fair ball.”

Okay, first of all, I Am Legend did the exact same thing, believe me. I don’t even think you needed to be in an opening-night screening in Union Square, listening to the uncomfortable laughter of your fellow New Yorkers as neighborhood after neighborhood and landmark after landmark is shown abandoned and destroyed, to figure that out. (Though it helped.) And Legend isn’t even the first such post-9/11 horror film to go there–Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, anybody? But the thing that really sticks out is Sanders’s assertion that playing upon 9/11 anxiety is unfair for a genre filmmaker to do. That’s really like saying it was unfair of, I dunno, Godzilla to play upon the Japanese people’s experience with nuclear war. Maybe he means that Cloverfield is crassly exploiting 9/11, but that’s not what he (or Chan, to be fair) actually said. It’s simply an unsupportable position as articulated.

(Via Matt Zoller Seitz.)

This entry was posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.