Paranormal Activity 4

Rather like the Saw films, the Paranormal Activity series is the result of taking a very simple first film made on a low budget but with a compelling idea, and spinning it out into more and more films with a more and more convoluted premise. And like the Saw films, even though the sequels all totally lose the vision of that first grim story, some might actually be decent narratives in their own rights. But crucially, where I thought the first Saw was clever in its visceral, realistic and fundamentally quite feasible set-up, Paranormal Activity was a protracted set-up to a single jump, making it ultimately quite dull.

The second film I skipped, which meant I was a little ill-prepared for the backstory here featuring Hunter, though it seems a lot of blanks weren’t filled in anyway. The third was a flashback, and so absurd I found it primarily dull – bereft of atmosphere and good scares – and then at the end absolutely hilarious with its random old ladies in a shed.

This one was another sequel, and actually told a neat little scare story, a kind of modern Poltergeist with the usual gimmick of being recorded by the characters themselves still lingering on and letting the filmmakers save a fortune. Not a lot happens and if you hope the series’ mythology will be advanced, you’re going to be disappointed, but there are some good creepy moments and as ever, it all kicks off at the end, this time in a more effective way than its predecessor. It’s not a good film by any means, but its young leads are likeable, there are moments of good tension – especially with the knife, though I don’t think most of the audience even remembered it was there in the scene it fell – and the usual good cheap jump moments, some of which, like the one with the cat, made for some very funny surprised sounds from the audience.

Other than that, though, I have to say I found myself getting quite annoyed by a lot of people in the theatre. It’s my view that if you have to chatter, joke, shout and groan through the still moments of a horror film meant to build suspense, you’re a big wuss because those are all techniques to build up tension. And however else this film failed, it succeeded at those long, slow moments that get the audience on edge before a scare or a fake-out. But the theatre was full of wusses today, trying to show they weren’t scared in the one way that most clearly signals that they are – the release of their nervous tension by making a lot of comforting noise. The trouble is, the film would have been far, far more enjoyable had they let themselves get worked up and then let it out after the scares. I suppose that doesn’t give the veneer of indifference, which equates to bravery. But of course, it doesn’t. It actually very obviously equates to wanting to distance yourself from the fictional world because you’re finding it too difficult to engage with it. And that was what seemed like half the crowd. Ah well! Such is the experience of seeing a horror film. Most people are wussy!

A throwaway film, then, bringing nothing new to the fold, but doing most of what it did very well. And I loved the Kinect motion dots. 

The Perks of Being a Wallflower – film adaptation

I’m not sure it’s ever been done before. A film where I wish to punch every single speaking character in the whole piece. Or at the very least watch them fail dismally and have their smug illusions shattered.

When I read the book in 2002 or 2003, I hated it. So it was no surprise that I was going to dislike this adaptation, coming in the wake of hipsters becoming a ‘thing’. But I expected to find it enjoyably bad, with its cute cast members trying really, really hard and coming over as adorably useless. In fact, their strong performances were the best thing here – but that only meant the sheer horror of the dialogue and plot came through.

I’m just going to make a list of things that got under my skin. First, the use of mental issues as a tacked-on, glamorous substitute for actual character depth or likeability. Second, the tokenism in the portrayal of the openly gay character, who is an insufferable and insulting caricature. Third, the way a film supposedly about being a calm observer has at a key moment violence solving problems without the obvious US high school consequences. Fourth, the way none of the kids recognised one of Bowie’s most well-known songs, and the prevalence of that most false of posers Morrisey. Fifth, the presentation of the most obvious, godawful books as worthy literature someone of superior taste would enjoy – notably On the Road and Catcher in the Rye. Sixth, making light of serious eating disorders to show edginess. Seventh, also using child abuse, death in the family and homosexuality as further substitutes for character development, and even suggesting them to be glamorous for they make for an appealing fucked-up character. Eighth, drugs making people likeable and silly, and the oh-so-daring juxtaposition of Holy Communion and dropping a tab. Ninth, Emma Watson’s dodgy accent. Tenth, the endless, endless smugness – we’re so alternative; we’re so individualistic even though we do all these clichéd things; we’re going to top universities because we’re effortlessly smart; we’re into all this stuff you’ve probably never heard of even though it all feeds into a stereotype.

Even the things I liked in the book are gone. I recall the observations on Mary Elizabeth as wry, subtle and cutting. Here she is an absurd comedy figure that looks like an apologist inclusion for the people sickened by the left-wing fantasies. Gone was the scene where Charlie actually gets called on how his submissive behaviour is harming those around him who are in vulnerable situations. And of course there can be no attempts at literary pastiche.

I remember the slight shock to the system when I joined bands with this sort of person in it, and realized that I was deluded to think myself left-wing as I was actually only moderately left of centre. And I remember how when it came down to it, these people didn’t lead charmed lives where people notice their awesome qualities and rely on them in their troubled times – they were mostly lonely, unhappy souls who craved a dramatic life and never got it. So they complained, and sought attention, and purposely got into abusive relationships. Or wrote about it. And one in a billion of them managed to get published and even asked to direct film adaptations. Why oh why this resonates with anyone and gets critically acclaimed I cannot comprehend.  

Resident Evil Retribution

Resident Evil seems to have completely lost its way. I don’t just mean these incredibly iffy movie adaptations – I mean the games as well. I played the first one when it was the only one out – importing the NTSC version because PAL regions got a version with big borders and censored cutscenes (though I don’t think eve the US one had the proper zombie introduction CG movie). It was a creepy, atmospheric game with shuffling zombies, claustrophobic fixed cameras and jump-scares, building to an action climax involving a rocket launcher. Now it seems to be running around mowing down hundreds of screaming zombies and ever-more-goofy mutant enemies – all-out action with nothing in the way of horror atmospherics.

And the Hollywood movies are even further removed. I’ve missed…probably 3 of them, from what I can remember, but I don’t think continuity means anything here. In an absurdly silly plot, Milla Jovovich’s Alice character gets captured by Umbrella, and they imprison her in a daft containment facility deep under Siberian ice, in what looks like a recycled Inception set. In a ploy to market their virus as a weapon, Umbrella have recreated Moscow, Tokyo, Shanghai and suburban American in order to simulate what their biohazards can do. Absurdly, they create and use artificial humans based on people like Alice for this, leading to the team picking up a little girl for Ripley-and-Newt-derived substitutions for character motives.

The film is terrible, and knows it. It barely even tries, and for that – it becomes enjoyable. It’s terrible, but it’s good fun to laugh along. Introducing Ada Wong allows for the film’s one interesting development, but poor ole Barry gets the shaft again, and what part of ‘Leon is a prettyboy’ translated to the casting of someone one in our party charitably said looked like Woody Harrelson in The Hunger Games but in my eyes looked like Gary Busey I really don’t know. Jill Valentine being brainwashed is absurd, the cast of The Curse of Fenric dealing with a super-pumped-up adversary was absurd and the final sequence was mainly joyous because I’d been teasing a friend about Wesker all day and whispered ‘Wesker’s the President!!’ moments before he came on and was indeed effectively the president – which I feel no compunction whatsoever about spoiling for anyone who may be reading because it was so very stupid. Fun, yes, but only because it was so stupid.  

Looper – minor spoilers

Looper asks a lot of its audience. It asks them to accept its strong central premise – that in the future, a machine is invented to send things back in time, but outlawed and used only by criminals to send back men they want murdered, which becomes the job of ‘loopers’ in a gritty near-future. It then asks them to believe that someone in that future thinks it’s a good idea to make loopers execute themselves to ‘close the loop’ rather than, y’know, sending them to one of numerous other loopers to do the job as any sensible person would. It then sneaks in the idea of telekinetic mutants, which is a good bit harder to swallow, and by the end presents us with a very muddled sense of time travel, where you have to accept elements of both linear and multi-world possibilities, Back To The Future-style ways for actions in the present to affect a person from the future, and a mind-boggling final scenario in which the only way the mysterious Rainmaker comes into being is if main character Joe goes back in time, but his going back in time sets into motion events that mean there will be no Rainmaker. Part of this is the conception of a time-traveller faced with contradictions from his past self having his memories gradually reshaped – which means that at the end of the film, when Joe has the revelation he does, really there should have been no need to do what he did, and everyone should have just dropped their guns and maybe initiated the awesome adventure of going around in a crime-fighting gang making sure the kid was brought up right. That would definitely have made for a better film that what we got, which was largely two people with a fascinating relationship staying very far away from one another.

Looper isn’t really for picking apart the intricacies of the timelines, though. It’s mostly for enjoying as an action flick, and in that, it mostly works – other than one very far-fetched scene where Bruce Willis takes out an entire crime syndicate by shooting through a doorway at something offscreen – amongst the worst such action shots I’ve ever seen. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is likeable even though his character is so unappealing, which makes the film work, and it’s astonishing that it becomes believable that little Tommy Solomon could grow up to be Bruce Willis. Some moments have Levitt look very odd, like his eyebrows have been badly darkened, but others – especially when he is being interrogated by his boss, or face-to-face with him in the diner – have him look uncannily like Willis. The former may be all angles, hair and the way he holds his face, but the latter looks like some digital manipulation of noses and chins has gone on. Either way, it works far better than I expected.

On a final tangential note, the D-Box moving chairs are hilarious to sit behind. The little synchronised wobbles were funny, but when a series of explosions happened, the chairs did a brilliantly funny synchronised dance together. Distracting but fun!

Dredd

Judge Dredd comics are very hard things to translate to another medium. The overall bleak, nihilistic and yet blackly humorous ‘Ho-hum, let’s just get on with it despite all this violence’ tone needs a lot of contextualising. The previous attempt with Stallone didn’t work at all, but had a campy charm. On the other hand, this one, while it may not have had the horrible matter-of-fact shots of dead bodies going into recyc machines that have endured with me since early childhood, it managed to maintain the tone of bleak hopelessness and casual violence while introducing a perfect little humanising element – the young, sensitive rookie being taken out with Dredd for her first day. It gives the audience someone to empathise with while letting Dredd maintain his icy cool attitude.

The plot, written by The Beach and The Tesseract author Alex Garland, who seems to have given up on novels in favour of scriptwriting, was actually very simple, to the point it felt to me like a half-hour episode of a TV series fleshed out rather than a large-scale movie plot, and honestly I wasn’t at all impressed by the idea at the end, where a device has to transmit a signal rather than what it triggered simply happening when the signal stops, which is what anyone in Mama’s situation would have opted for. Still, the small scale was clearly intentional, to allow for the world to soak in. But I think a bit more of a chance could have been taken expanding the storyline outside its location, perhaps to the justice headquarters or some narcotics refinery outside, just to give more of a sense of scale, even if it meant sacrificing that neat conclusion.

The result is that the film is entertaining and satisfying – and of course very gory – but ultimately doesn’t feel like it’s o much of a scale and thus feels a long way from memorable, which is its main fault. Still, if I’ll remember anything from the film, it’s the beautiful ultra-slow-motion scenes of water droplets – and the chilling ideas the gang members have for using the drug that induces a feeling of time passing incredibly slowly…

The Expendables, then, which was our film for the sort-of party yesterday. I wanted to put on The Expendables in particlar because (a) we could largely ignore it and I knew nothing we put on was going to get watched seriously, and (b) I kinda wanna see the silly sequel so needed to watch the silly first film. No need for a decent review – basically, a bunch of huge names of 80s and 90s action films get together, then Sylvester Stallone, Jet Li, Dolf Lundgren, Jason Statham and Terry Crews (whose ridiculous ‘muscle music’ video for Old Spice I recently had hysterics over) go and overthrow a South American dictatorship with only Stone Cold Steve Austin to stand in their way. Mickey Rourke also turns up as the behind-the-scenes man. They essentially blow a lot of stuff up, fight a lot, have a car chase and win in the end. What more do you need from this action piece?

I was only a little sad it wasn’t the ensemble piece it was set up to be. Stallone was the only big, nostalgic name to be featured throughout. Jet Li was an action star but doesn’t have the stature of the big names that made the project appealing, Statham and Crews are really new to being called ‘stars’ and Dolph Lundgren was always a step below the big, big names. Of those biggest names, it unfortunately turned out that Willis and Schwarzenegger only had the smallest of cameos and even then in a scene with Stallone where they were conspicuously never all sharing the same shot, making me doubt all three were even in the same room at any point. Doing a little Googling, this seems too have been a common observation.

But hey. It’s dumb fun and taken in that context was hilarious. ‘Porn for action fans’ is probably right. It was never meant to be anything but silly and enjoyable, and that’s exactly what it was. And the sequel includes  Van Damme and the remarkably old Chuck Norris. Sign me up!

The Rutles: All You Need is Cash

At last, I got around to watching the original band documentary parody film, the precursor to This is Spinal Tap and another step along the way of reminiscing about The Bonzos. In 1975, Eric Idle of Monty Python and Neil Innes of the Bonzos got together for a sketch parodying the Beatles. The skits made the transitions to Idle’s appearances on Saturday Night Live, and then in 1978 this feature film followed, and despite an iffy start has endured as a bit of a cult classic – though of course, Spinal Tap does pretty much everything this does, but better: by parodying a whole movement rather than an individual band, it’s more affectionate and gets laughs because you know there will be people who actually believe it, and it’s just got bigger laughs. 

All You Need is Cash starts awkwardly, with Eric Idle’s usual trying-too-hard way of trying to inject laughs into straight exposition casting away all possibility of veracity without actually being very funny. The parody of the early Beatles are obvious and predictable, though the music – aping a general style rather than individual songs – are clever. Fortunately, it gets a lot better as it goes on, with big laughs in the reporter’s trip to New Orleans, Dirk’s highly awkward marriage and the brilliant scene where George Harrison (as an interviewer) asks Michael Palin (as the Rutle Corp.’s spokesperson) about problems with people stealing things while an increasingly outlandish succession of items is wheeled out behind them. There are brilliant moments in the interviews with Mick Jagger and great little cameos from Ron Wood, Roger McGough and the biggest names from SNL – Aykroyd, Belushi and Murray. It also has a brilliant parody of the Yellow Submarine animation and expertly skewers the Maharishi in a surreal way. I also had a fit of giggles to the ‘Ouch!’ video, even though it was the lowest and most politically incorrect form of humour. Neil Innes’ Lennon impression also develops into a thing of great brilliance, both in his spoken impression (like the shower sit-in) and especially in the music – ‘Cheese and Onions’ is a marvel of pinpoint accuracy.

While it’s great that it was released early enough that John Lennon could appreciate it and fixed on what were relatively recent events, I had to cringe at how it treated Brian Epstein, no matter how vilified he has been. I know over a decade is much too long to cry ‘too soon!’ but the humour aimed at him went from gentle teasing – the awkward interview where it was suggested all he liked about the Beatles was how tight their trousers were – to jibes at his being Jewish (his book here being ‘A Cellar Full of Goys’), but mostly I didn’t like the humour extracted from the Rutles’ awkward reaction to his death (or, here, his moving to Australia). It all seemed too cruel to be amusing.

Overall, though, I feel like All You Need is Cash is under-appreciated. It’s not as good as Spinal Tap, but almost everyone who loves that film would really enjoy this one, too. But it seems to me it doesn’t get much of a look in. And that’s a shame.