what??? there is absolutely nothing impressive about the acting in cloverfield
Well before Cloverfield it had been a long time since I saw a movie full of ordinary people reacting to a situation (the only other one I can think of right now is Alien... maybe Battle Royale too, but I'm not used to hearing Japanese speech enough to tell if someone can act or not, and there were some pretty over the top characters in that too). Saying that, I'm flat broke and can't afford to see many movies at all lately, but every "good" movie that comes out these days gets just as slagged off as it is praised, so it's getting impossible to tell if a movie is genuinely good or not because the standards change every five seconds.
It's easy to play a hero, but it's quite hard to play an ordinary person. Sure there are a few stock characters in this movie (guy who wants to save person in trouble because he feels responsible, his annoying best friend who has a lame sense of humour*, and so on) but seeing as I'm the kind of person who'd go back to help one of my friends in that situation while at the same time being the annoying person with a lame sense of humour...
*And a compulsion to point his camera at anything with a huge NOKIA emblazon on it somewhere
