domino harvey wrote:It's silly to include this in this thread: nothing is "ridiculous" about that review other than that you don't agree with him.
And other than that it's such an obvious statement that a fifth-grader reviewing the movie for his middle-school paper could have made it.
Every disaster movie shows "the human faces," and it's usually the most sentimental tripe imaginable in the film. I included the second quote because it's a more obvious example of what I objected to in the first.
I'm thinking of the effort to show the human faces in the recent
Poseidon Adventure remake, or
Independence Day, or
Volcano, or even the
Resident Evil movies, just to name a few. But the list goes on. They all delve into the "human" element of the disaster flick. For that matter,
damn near every film does exactly that--it's called 'exposition.' In other words, according to this review,
Cloverfield is to be commended for... having exposition.
Now, if Phipps had said that
Cloverfield, has better exposition than most films, i.e. shows the human element in a much more effective and compelling way than most films of its genre, then I'd accept that he and I merely disagreed. Instead, Phipps makes a formulaic statement that's broadly applicable to any number of disaster movies that flat-out sucked, so his review is indeed ridiculous.
[EDIT: Given what a silly review it is, I have to wonder if he isn't being completely ironical at his readers' expense (mine included). Maybe I'm feeling generous, but I don't want to believe that he actually meant what he wrote.]
#-o
