Arizona-based film journalist Henry Cabot Beck informs that last weekend in Pheonix “a sign was posted on each of the box-office windows of the AMC chain theaters warning people that they might get sick watching Cloverfield. When I asked the ticket seller, he told me there had been some upchucking and retching and like that. Next thing will be barf bags handed out with the tickets. William Castle would have made a mint with a gimmick like this.”
I’ve almost never felt queasy from jiggly, hand-held photography (I eat films like Dancer in the Dark for breakfast), although I’ll admit that Cloverfield has more than its share. Yesterday, however, I saw the King Kong of hand-held nausea jiggle movies — Tia Lessin and Carl Deal‘s Trouble The Water, a doc about the Katrina disaster.
Half of it was shot by Lessin and Deal in the usual fashion and is no big challenge, but the other half is shakycam footage of Katrina’s devastation shot by one of the film’s main subjects, Kimberly Rivers. (The other is her husband Scott.) The footage is so scattered and whip-panny that I was starting to think about bolting less than ten minutes in. Show Trouble The Water to those Cloverfield sufferers in Pheonix and they’d spew in their seat.