* I reviewed Cloverfield, if you missed it. Since I wrote it I think that if anything I underplayed the effectiveness of the actual monster-attacking material, which is pretty terrific, if not frightening than at least awesome in the old-school sense.

* I’ve now heard several anecdotal reports–and witnessed one in courtesy of my poor wife–of people getting wicked cases of motion sickness while watching the film. One friend of mine actually walked out after 30 minutes and got her money back, and then was basically incapacitated for the following two hours. Interestingly neither of these ladies was affected by The Blair Witch Project, though obviously a lot of other people were. Figuring that first-person docudramas will only become more common as the YouTube era continues, and with at least two I can think of off-hand on the way (Diary of the Dead and The Poughkeepsie Tapes), this seems like a genuine obstacle. I wonder if there’s any way for the filmmakers to overcome it, aside from handing out dramamine and ginger to ticketholders.

* Bloody Disgusting points out an Easter egg–almost more of an old Mad magazine-style “eyeball kick”–at the end of the film that kinda sorta reveals the monster’s origin. Which it doesn’t, unless you think “it came from out of the sky” explains what it is and how it got here and what it’s doing and so on. Anyway I bring it up because it’s classic Abrams to hide a key piece of information for eagle-eyed fans to “decode,” and while part of me thinks that in this case the hidden info is pretty neat, the critic in me really resents the whole puzzle-making school of fiction.

* Under the sobriquet Neill Cumpston, a potty-mouthed movie-theatre wage slave, comedian Patton Oswalt has written the mother of all Ain’t It Cool News reviews for the film, which he refers to as “Cloverfield Monster Goes Apeshit.” The funniest thing about this–well, there’s two: 1) That AICN basically allows Oswalt to insult its writers and readers on a regular basis on the site itself; 2) That I’ve seen at least one critic quote “Cumpston”‘s money-shot line on the movie–“It’s like a pussy that eats YOU out”–as though it was being said with a straight face. (To be fair, I’m sure the irrationally exuberant Harry Knowles is wishing he’d used the line first.)

* Manohla Dargis’s pan of the movie in The New York Times is worth your time both for its more dubious assertions and its occasional flashes of insight. In the former category, Dargis joins the ranks of those attacking the movie’s use of 9/11 anxiety and imagery from the perspective of an aggrieved Noo Yawker resentful of outsiders claiming the trauma for their own; the high dudgeon she works herself into while dutifully informing readers that writer Drew Goddard, director Matt Reeves, and producer J.J. Abrams are all (gasp!) from Los Angeles is absolutely hilarious. Her implication that the film would have been better had the characters displayed Scream-style familiarity with the conventions of the apocalyptic monster-attack movie is another one for the head-scratcher file. On the other hand she’s right to point out the inescapable shadow that H.R. Giger’s Alien design–surely the most singular movie-monster look this side of flat-headed, bolt-necked Frankenstein–casts on the movie’s rampaging beast (though she gives the result way less credit than it deserves). And perhaps her smartest point is that for all the subjective camerawork, it’s never used to express how our cameraman, or any of his friends for that matter, are really feeling about the situation. Rob Humanick makes this point quite cogently while comparing the film to its oft-invoked predecessor The Blair Witch Project, a movie that’s about its main character and camerawoman Heather and her deteriorating mental state a lot more than Cloverfield is about Hud or any of his friends. (Dargis via Jason Adams; Humanick via Matt Zoller Seitz.)

* Speaking of Jason Adams, he says something regarding Dargis that I think we can accept as a firm rule from now on:

I just wanted to point out that this lady loved that sodden turd The Host and therefore cannot be trusted when it comes to Monster Movies ever again. FYI.

Amen!

* Bearing this in mind, the first victim of the Adams Axiom may well be Eye Weekly’s Adam Nayman, who in his review of Cloverfield calls The Host “sublime.” Oh dear. Nayman also sees Dargis’s chauvinistic critique of Cloverfield‘s terror allusions and raises:

…there’s something cynical and even objectionable in the way these filmmakers are playing off collective memories of 9/11, as if a B-movie scenario about a gigantic, otherworldly beastie laying waste to a city were an acceptable allegory for a real-world act of terrorism.

Um, it isn’t? Judging from the movies Nayman unfavorably compares this one to, zombies are apparently an acceptable allegory for racial turmoil, vegetable people from outer space are an acceptable allegory for both Cold War/Red Scare and post-Watergate/New Age paranoia, and man-eating frog monsters are an acceptable allegory for American interventionism, so god only knows why Godzilla-gone-Lovecraft is out of bounds for jihadist menace. Finally, Nayman refers to the end of the movie as a “predictablly nihilistic finish,” dismissing the love-story angle out of hand–even though that love story is the very thing that the filmmakers structure their sodden avoidance of nihilism around in the first place. All that being said, I’m coming across a lot harder on Nayman than the review, which is well-written and fairly circumspect in most of its assertions, really deserves, so judge for yourself. He also gets kudos for referring to the leads’ “screenwriting-workshop-stolid character arcs.” Ouch! (Via Seitz.)

* Despite its credulous citing of Neill Cumpston and the usual “hey no fair” response to the 9/11 imagery, Keith Uhlich’s review deserves kudos for pointing out the power of the film’s single best shot–the horsedrawn carriage, its missing driver a symbol of all the slain people and its sad, confused horse a symbol of all the collateral damage such disasters, and really all of human existence, inflicts on the natural world–and its single biggest weakness–leaving the childishly romantic quest of the protagonist unchallenged. (Via who else?)

* My friend Jim Treacher writes of the film’s only stand-out performance, that of Lizzy “Freaks and Geeks/Mean Girls” Caplan:

Everybody else was acting like OMIGAWD I CAN’T WAIT TO BLOG THIS, and she was acting like she’d actually just lived through a giant-monster attack.

It’s not like Daniel Day-Lewis has anything to worry about, but hers really was the only performance that contained gradations beyond “I’m snarky,” “I’m, like, totally determined to rescue someone,” and “yikes!”

* Finally, Giant Monsters Attack! posts its pan of the much-hyped, long-anticipated, potentially genre-redefining but ultimately disappointing…Godzilla Unleashed for the PlayStation 2!

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