Inner ear misbehaviour...
Mar. 3rd, 2009 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnYesterday we watched 'Cloverfield'. It is a film that in many ways exactly meets my requirements for films. There were explosions. There were helicopters. There was a giant monster (and a lot of little monsters) loose in Manhatten. There was a a grim warning about the dangers of using a mobile phone in the event of alien invasion, supporting all my secret technophobe tendencies. (My tastes in films are not elevated, you may have gathered...)
As I watched, I became more and more nauseous. I was trying to think what on earth I could have eaten to give myself such an upset. Could it have been tasting the fish pie we had for tea before the fish was entirely cooked through...?
I finally worked it out about 2/3rds of the way through - it was the dratted camerawork. The conceit (rather clever, I thought) of the film was that it was a personal record by a bloke who happened to be operating a video camera when monsters came to town, so there was lots of whirling about, changes of focus, camera jiggling about, etc, etc. I've had this problem with computer games before: my brain really cannot cope with being told it's whirling about while it knows perfectly well that it's actually just sitting still. But a mere film where I'm not even controlling the action, and am sitting well away from the screen, has never had this effect before...
The last bit of the film I had to just listen to the sound track,with philmophlegm doing a commentary and occasionally opening my eyes for a brief flash of visual. Then I had to crawl painfully upstairs and have a bath to try and calm my worried inner ear. I'm so glad I didn't go to see it at a cinema!
So: good film, not ideal if you have this particular oddity though. Weirdly, I almost never get *real* travel sickness. Give me a ferry leaping like a dolphin over the waves, and I'll be all : "where are the doughnuts?"
As I watched, I became more and more nauseous. I was trying to think what on earth I could have eaten to give myself such an upset. Could it have been tasting the fish pie we had for tea before the fish was entirely cooked through...?
I finally worked it out about 2/3rds of the way through - it was the dratted camerawork. The conceit (rather clever, I thought) of the film was that it was a personal record by a bloke who happened to be operating a video camera when monsters came to town, so there was lots of whirling about, changes of focus, camera jiggling about, etc, etc. I've had this problem with computer games before: my brain really cannot cope with being told it's whirling about while it knows perfectly well that it's actually just sitting still. But a mere film where I'm not even controlling the action, and am sitting well away from the screen, has never had this effect before...
The last bit of the film I had to just listen to the sound track,with philmophlegm doing a commentary and occasionally opening my eyes for a brief flash of visual. Then I had to crawl painfully upstairs and have a bath to try and calm my worried inner ear. I'm so glad I didn't go to see it at a cinema!
So: good film, not ideal if you have this particular oddity though. Weirdly, I almost never get *real* travel sickness. Give me a ferry leaping like a dolphin over the waves, and I'll be all : "where are the doughnuts?"
