{"id":1848,"date":"2008-02-17T13:02:04","date_gmt":"2008-02-17T13:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1848"},"modified":"2008-02-17T13:02:04","modified_gmt":"2008-02-17T13:02:04","slug":"critic_at_large_34","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1848","title":{"rendered":"Critic At Large: Cloverfield"},"content":{"rendered":"

I went into Cloverfield<\/a> not sure what to expect. The New-York-City-getting-fucked-up-by-a-Big-Bad is a plot device that is beginning to show its age. I was also wary of the Handicam-style of filmmaking. Sitting through ninety minutes of jerky home video footage could quickly become a test of patience. And the cast had the bland, generic good looks typical of teen soap operas. But I actually had a lot of fun at this movie. It has the reassuring predictable elements of most monster movies: the destruction of a famous landmark or two, the epic throwdowns between the monster and the military, and terrified citizenry running and screaming through streets strewn with rubble. Yet it also includes a few elements that invigorate and propel the story forward. A movie is doing something right when it elicits surprised yelps from me. The script is also funny in its self-awareness. When one character first catches a glimpse of the monster and asks what is, another character gives a hurried reply: “I dunno. Something terrible.” Minutes later, after encountering something equally horrific, he responds to the same question with “Something else. Also terrible.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I went into Cloverfield not sure what to expect. The New-York-City-getting-fucked-up-by-a-Big-Bad is a plot device that is beginning to show its age. I was also wary of the Handicam-style of filmmaking. Sitting through ninety minutes of jerky home video footage could quickly become a test of patience. And the cast had the bland, generic good […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-tO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1848\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}