Discland
edited by Jonathan Doyle
Cloverfield [BLU-RAY] (Paramount Home Entertainment, 6.3.2008) Disguised under deliberately goofy, yet deliciously edible-sounding, aliases such as Cheese and Slusho, Matt Reeves' Cloverfield was produced and rushed into theaters under an equally appetizing shroud of secrecy. From last year's incredibly elusive Super Bowl ad to the film's viral marketing campaign, Cloverfield had everybody scratching their heads and drooling in anticipation. Aside from the as-yet untitled title and the Blair Witch-ian visual style, the film's biggest appeal was the enigmatic creature who was last (un)seen hurling the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty onto the crowded streets of New York City. All we knew about the mysterious beast was that it was big and angry. Now that the highy-anticipated project has come and gone, one question has fortunately been answered: Cloverfield was a major success. (continued)

There are many, I presume,

There are many, I presume, who will agree with my praise of that killer suspense sequence at the end of Act Two in Sydney Pollack's The Interpreter, but now I know New Yorker critic Anthony Lane is one of them. Here's the passage from Lane's current review: "Still, to be fair, there is one part of The Interpreter that would, without question, have earned [Alfred Hitchcock's] smile. All the characters are in different places -- one agent is following Silvia, another is tailing a Matoban suspect, and Woods and Keller are in a booby-trapped room. (Catherine Keener, by far the driest deliverer of lines in the movie, looks up at an overhead light strung with explosives and says, 'Now, that's just rude.' Imagine Celeste Holm packing heat, and you're there.) Gradually, Pollack pulls the figures together, [Sean Penn] starts to yell into his phone, and calamity opens its maw. It is one of the smartest passages of action, allegro sostenuto, that I have seen for a long while -- as neat, indeed, as the infamous bomb-on-a-bus sequence from Hitchcock's Sabotage, and true to his faith in the revelatory powers of excitement, in what it means to have movies burst against our nerves."

Posted by Jeffrey Wells on April 17, 2005 at 11:05 PM

Post a comment