PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2

You won’t lose any sleep over it but it is worth a jolt or two and that might be enough for a night out. Paranormal Activity 2 makes some additions in effort to stand out from the original but it is also a bit of a recycler, it is still entertaining but too eager to scare. The higher budget sequel still employs the grainy home video and scratchy audio, and in addition to the family video camcorder, it has multi-prop surveillance video hovering over the premises. But it also wants to bring the house down with bigger effects – did a cyclone come and thrash the house apart? In this brand new household occupied by a married couple with a teen daughter and a toddler son, the unseen poltergeists are back. They are a prototypical American family of chatterboxes except for Hunter, the toddler.

The original was, in my book, one of the all-time great horrors, and it kept me up for several nights. Occasionally I experienced drowsy night tremors and thought I was seeing shadows moving in the dark. It messed with my head and I was surprised by fears that I hadn’t known were fears to me. Technically, the 2009 original benefitted from having the annoying Micah, who if anything, taunted the supernatural. The effects then were subtle, and all the more disquieting, until in one big swoop (maybe two, three) it sprang stupendous that-didn’t-just-happen and “Hell no!” wave of shocks.

The sequel has too many off in the distance bangs and clangs audio effects. It’s like the filmmakers are aware to not shock the audience too early, but they are also too conceding by giving us too much a taste of the pudding. During the “Night” titles the cameras crosscut between different angles chosen by the force of the director Tod Williams (no involvement with the first film). In “Night 3,” and “4” and “7” and on and on, the editing skips to one next shot after another, and we hear bumps and clanks (sometimes bashes) on the audio. We could see where the sounds were coming from if the director just stayed on the shot where the audio source occurred (the original benefitted from only one camera). This is manipulative to not bridge the audio and visual aspects together. As the story progresses though, there is more of a liberal willingness to show you what is happening, like direct information.

This haunted family seems to pick up the home camcorder for just about everything, hey, it must be what they do. Daniel (Brian Boland) is the father, both congenial and disagreeable to the ideas of spirits and metaphysics. Kristi (Sprague Grayden) is the sprightly wife who is full of good humor but professes that spirits are not anything to joke about. Ali (Molly Ephraim) is the teenage daughter who is the first to use playback tape as paranormal evidence. Hunter is the toddler, restricted at night in his crib, who stares at unseen apparitions on the other side of windows and mirrors. The house dog, sleepy one minute but ready to pounce when the unknown encroaches, is the most captivating character besides… Hunter.

When the camcorder is not rolling, the action and inaction is captured by surveillance cameras rigged with time codes. Theses high ceiling fixed cameras, peering down with their wide angle lenses, are effective. On the big screen, the audience’s eyes bounce back and forth looking for house objects to move scantly or to spring up in our eyes within the grainy blue nightscape of the visuals. At its tricky best, we wonder if we see something or if we merely see a blur that we thought was something.

We wait and wait to see something in each shot until we realize that the director doesn’t want us to see something in every shot. “How about it, already?” the audience might ask. But really, it would have been a stronger horror film if the filmmakers had waited a bit more. And taken excess sounds off of the audio track (the supernatural is too obvious making noises). The terrifying activity in the basement, when the film finally goes down there, has us engrossed with our eyes wide open and yet the peak result is damn confusing. One moment is terrific: Is that Hunter hanging upside down or is it merely the camera that is upside down?

To not appear like a cash-in byproduct, the sequel finds a neat-o if hambone way to intersect the events of the first film into this one. That’s one whiplash shock… to see Micah Sloat and Katie Featherstone make appearances (one of them is relative to Hunter’s family). They are happy, pre-disturbed visitors that just come over to hang out, but they are also there so the studio marketing team can cross its T’s and dot its I’s for future DVD packaging. But you might be here not to hear about graces of storytelling but to know whether or not you will have a body shuddering experience. Well, you might get rattled nerves but you won’t quite flip out and go through sleepless nights by this sequel.

Go to the official site at http://www.paranormalmovie.com/

Grade: B

HEREAFTER

Sodden and drowsy, as well as clumpy and slack in its editing – the film goes on interminably. Clint Eastwood has made three criminally underappreciated films in a row (“Invictus,” “Gran Torino,” “Changeling”) but now he has uncharacteristically unspooled a blemish called Hereafter. At the least, short-stack hunk Matt Damon does fine work in an understated role of a San Francisco forklift operator who has psychic gifts that he sees as a curse. This runs concurrent to two other storylines of varying interest until a final act overlap. The expensive set pieces include a shoreline city submerged by a tsunami, a road kill accident and a subway train bombing. You can call the heaven of afterlife scenes whatever you want but they are murky and vaporous, not to mention brief.

Renowned French journalist Marie (Cecilé de France) is a tsunami victim who gets sucked under the waves as the tide ravages the city, but she is dragged out and resuscitated. Two preteen brothers (George and Frankie MacLaren) cover up for their drug-addled mum in London (shot on location), concealing her habit from justifiably nosey social workers. At the end they both need George to tie up their loose ends.

George is the lonely guy psychic, played by Damon, who eats most nights alone until he meets a bubbly Midwest gal Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard) after joining cooking school. In case it matters to anybody, let it be said that Howard is a distinguishable presence for the first time in her career that hasn’t done much for her thus far but shown her lackluster personality (“Lady in the Water,” “Terminator: Salvation”). Thank the cinema gods that at least one happy person occupies the screen.

Prompting George to use his psychic gifts is brother Billy (Jay Mohr) who can’t wait to open up a multi-suite office and tweak a services website. When George holds hands with the living, he can see the souls of the dead. He can also succinctly hear their messages which he translates to their surviving relatives. In the low-rent Spielbergian visuals, we can see for ourselves that death isn’t that much of an experience. Let’s hope that none of the audience goes there, and finds the afterlife of “What Dreams May Come” (Vincent Ward’s 1998 film) instead. And for a film that is to a degree about miracles, or at least fate, nothing is particularly exceptional.

The London boy, Marcus, is looking for a psychic to help him get in touch with a recently deceased loved one, and he initially finds one flim-flam psychic after another. The social workers get Marcus under the protective care of foster parents, marginally characterized by Eastwood and writer Peter Morgan (“Frost/Nixon”). Meanwhile, Marie is losing ratings on her TV magazine show and credibility in various professional and personal facets of her life. “When I went underwater I had visions,” she insists.

Perhaps Eastwood chose this film to be more about death than life, based on his colorless and blah visual scheme that at times looks like gloomier than his Oscar-winning “Million Dollar Baby.” His bummer approach with the story is about as much fun as a sleepover at a graveyard. Which would be fine if the film was after something originally insightful. But it’s not, and the gloom is further underscored by the mostly grimacing actors. Eastwood, like Brett Favre of the NFL, has so bungled this project that he cannot even contemplate retirement here, as he better bounce back and produce something else to make up for this.

Go to the official site at http://hereafter.warnerbros.com/

Grade: C

LIFE AS WE KNOW IT

Not badly written as one would expect, as long as you get past the high concept, but the lack of star chemistry blows it. Katherine Heigl (“The Ugly Truth”) and Josh Duhamel (“Transformers”) intend to blend pathos with humor in Life As We Know It, a movie in which the characters hardly contemplate the future five years ahead. Both of their best friends die, and as godparents, they inherit their baby girl, Sophie, who pretty much stays a baby girl but she at least takes her first steps. Duhamel is the happy beer-drinking guy working to become a network sports director and Heigl is working to expand her bakery of cupcakes, scones and more. Looking at Heigl, one would have a hard time imagining her doing anything in the kitchen other than microwave instant brownies.

Director Greg Berlanti forces Josh Duhamel to go to extremes early to establish his wild bachelor behavior as Eric Messer (think messier) but after he settles in, he is quite magnetic within an otherwise predictable rom-com format. He has the programmed traits of a Vince Vaughn-type without being sitcom-y. Duhamel proves with his charisma that he has a future in a swinger’s movie.

That Goldilocks Katherine Heigl, as Holly Berenson, has a Miley Cyrus smile but the pout of a wench, investing in hideous grimaces during dramatic scenes that scream of desperation that she wants to be taken seriously as an actress. To not be boring or unaccountable, Heigl toils feminist equality into her on-screen persona but mistakes ballbusting and passive aggressiveness for feminism. “I’m a little bit of a control freak,” Heigl ad-libs, a line that she’s used in more than just one of her movies. “You’re such a killjoy,” she says of Messer, but not of herself.

They meet in 2007 on a blind date setup that does not last five minutes. He shows up on a motorcycle to take her out to dinner. “I’m not really dressed for 40 mph winds,” she says. They get in her Smart car and before they takeoff he is already making cell phone arrangements for an 11 o’clock date. The next couple of years they have too many run-ins with each other, out of script convenience, only because they share mutual friends. Then suddenly – whopper dramatic scene – they are godparents who inherit their deceased friends’ home and their assembly of dorky WASP friends. Plot essential: Holly has feelings for the token hunk pediatrician played by Josh Lucas (“Poseidon”).

The bulk of the rest of the movie consists of scheduling conflicts, diaper clean-up, unexpected romantic triangles, Christening the house, borrowed money, job advancement, fights about who needs to step up the responsibility and multiple interviews with a Child Protective Services social worker. Some of the baby mishaps are actually funny in a way neither Vin Diesel nor Eddie Murphy ever got to acquaint themselves with when they did their babysitting movies. There is an especially funny scene when Duhamel unloads babysitting chores on a taxi driver pal of his so he can squeeze in work. But in the end, the stars force themselves into a commitment in order to satisfy genre expectations even if it means self-deception. In five years for these two, who will be lying to themselves?

Go to the official site at http://lifeasweknowitmovie.warnerbros.com/
 
Grade: C

SECRETARIAT

Secretariat is a noble effort but it doesn’t work well as a consistently pleasing entertainment. Director Randall Wallace can’t keep track of why we came to his movie in the first place, for the love of the horse that would become the 1973 Triple Crown winner. In particular, there are no real close-up encounters with a horse for the beginning half hour. Benefits are certain: the golden hue cinematography almost puts you in the mood to applaud. But the indecisive storytelling is lumpy and mawkish. We get sucked into family turmoil when we should be enchanted by the horse. On a slow Saturday afternoon you might be able to fix your eyes on the screen for some of this but you need an open heart for schmaltz.

In Denver 1969, housewife Penny Tweedy (Diane Lane) takes over her incapacitated father’s (Scott Glenn, motionless) horse stables. This new venture serves as a distraction, according to her peevish husband Jack (Dylan Tweedy), nor does it involve the children either. Penny has the belief that she can make a thoroughbred racehorse out of one of her stable ponies. That horse will become Secretariat. Lane is pretty and proud, ambitious and determined for an otherwise prim and proper mid-west woman.

John Malkovich is a hoot with his ad-libs as the trainer Lucien Laurin, and yet at the same time, one is not convinced that Malkovich has ever rode a horse. Margo Martindale is Miss Ham and Nelsan Ellis is Eddie Sweat, two of Tweedy’s associates. Otto Thorwarth in his acting debut is the jockey Ronnie Turcotte. Dylan Baker plays Penny’s disbelieving brother Hollis who complains of family debt. James Cromwell is a potential investor who refuses to pay top dollar and thus bails. Dozens of other stuffed shirts play snooty Kentuckians.

What it comes down to is a semi-boring film about the world’s greatest racehorse when a horse of this pedigree deserved an exciting chronicle – the whole thing has been Disney-fied. The actors do more huffing and puffing than the horse, and some of the lesser cast members make arbitrary walk-ons and exits. The filming on Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky derby, is an appreciated site. Another track stood in for the Belmont Park in New York. Wallace and his cinematographer Dean Semler do their best for the races themselves not to whizz by, they supply visual vigor. See “The Black Stallion” (1980) and “Seabiscuit” (2003) however for more satisfying, rhapsodic horseplay.

Go to the official site at Secretariat Disney site

Grade: C

TAMARA DREWE

From Great Britain’s Stephen Frears, it is supposed to be endearing but it is kind of slimy if you think about it. Tamara Drewe is an ugly duckling who returns home to her small British village after she has turned into a smoking hot babe. As played by Gemma Arterton (“Quantam of Solace”), the once ignored and dumped on Tamara is now she the object of desire of many men. You don’t get as much Tamara as you would think, instead it’s about the guys around her that are affected by presence. We are meant to care about Tamara and who she falls in love on the outskirts, but this is another one of those stories where the goddess falls in love with an unkempt, greasy-haired, pierced-rings rock star (Dominic Cooper). This is entertainment that is less sumptuous then yucky, and yet the Academy might impulsively eat this up by mistaking British smugness for British wit.

This should be a star vehicle, as said, for Arterton. But Tamara is rather a shallow character, though. The supposed depth is that she is this journalist who gleams of self-confidencene now that she has returned home to remodel and refurbish the family estate. Heads turn when she shows up in a red body tight halter top and short jeans. The women feel threatened and have a right to be. Among the leering gentlefolk, Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam) is a middle-aged writer who has already carried an on-going affair with a young tart intern once, and his wife Beth (Tamsin Greig) can’t do much to improve on her dowdy looks. Obviously, Tamara could come between them.

The country farm boy Andy (Luke Evans) doesn’t amount to a hill of beans as a character (or does he at the end?), but he was the hotshot who slept with Tamara and then dumped her back when they were teens. When you see the flashbacks, Tamara’s nose was quite a honker – like Angelica Huston’s only more exaggerated – and even after plastic surgery she is still insecure about it. Poor, insecure Tamara Drewe… but don’t feel too bad about her since she’s got gusto. She snaps, “I wouldn’t sleep with you if you were the last man after a nuclear bomb.” She makes fun of guys who must have small shlongs. That’s the thing about fantasy girls. Once they open their dirty mouths, they no longer are as desirable.

Two adolescent girls who make mischievous trouble start an internet rumor about Tamara which is supposed to kick in the high gears in the third act. This wannabe classy comedy fare succumbs into a plot of misunderstandings and first kisses and rekindled love and relationship turnovers as if it were a game of musical chairs. The ending is poorly staged and unearned, more tacked on and obligatory – lips smack in an embrace and there you have it. Tamara is still hot after it is all over as long as you only judge such a girl by her appearances. But next time give a girl like this more on her plate to start with. One is not so sure that she would be able to fill out a playmate data page of likes and dislikes since this Tamara doesn’t even seem to know enough about herself.

Frears is usually known for intelligence and good taste with such films as “The Queen,” “The Grifters” and "Dangerous Liaisons" and he is adapting the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds. Here he tries to make comedy out of extreme contrasts: The beauty and the loud greasy rock star, the loud greasy rock and the quiet country people, the quiet country people and the infidelity scandals, and so on. Some scenes feel like long, big clumps.

Go to the official site at
 
Grade: C

NOWHERE BOY

Nowhere Boy, about the early life of John Lennon, plays like an anthology of negativity and not the wonders of musical creativity. While there is some early auspicious musical talent and first public performance at a neighborhood carnival festival depicted, the core is a tug of war over maternity issues of who was John’s real mother. Aaron Johnson (“Kick-Ass”) does play the necessary broad, if complex notes of John, encompassing the whimsical charisma, but he is also required to play pissy, mean and smug. It doesn’t help that director Sam Taylor-Wood’s maladroit pacing puts the audience’s emotions at stagnancy. The film grabs you for a few fleeting moments like when we observe John breaking out of his repressed home life and becoming a rebel.

“Do you know about rock n’ roll, what it means? It’s sex.” John starts running around, sweet-talking girls in his Liverpool hometown, and gets in trouble at school, and so on. Anne-Marie Duff, as his mom, gives him guitar lessons and dancing lessons. The actress shimmies delectably. But it was Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas) that raises John, and on a contempt-filled night, will sell his guitar and such. She doesn’t believe that John, with his Elvis ducktail imitation hair, can succeed making music. John spends the course of the movie going back and forth between mom and surrogate mom, and yelling at them in how he feels betrayed.

An unedifying, torpid soundtrack fills the ears, “Mr. Sandman” and “Wild One” among them. These songs remind us that we are in the ’50’s, and they remind us as well these are not the most important days of John at all. With all the effort in trying to get a movie made, you would think filmmakers and screenwriters would want to do a John Lennon movie that captures the height of his popularity, or at least his genius. “Nowhere Boy” is yet another downer biopic that does its damndest to destroy the myth of a legend. Thomas Brodie Sangster though does a good puppy-dog impression of a young Paul McCartney.

At the end of the movie John is off to Hamburg – where the movie should have been by the 15 minute mark and not the 92 minute mark of a 98 minute film. We learn of the fate of his natural mom, Julia, and by the title card, how he continued a respectful relationship with his Aunt. We are supposed to leave and say, “John’s early life was sad, wasn’t it?” And the message is supposed to be how he transcended his lousy upbringing to create transcendent music. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

Go to the official site at http://www.nowhereboymovie.com/

Grade: C

IT'S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY

It’s Kind of a Funny Story is just that. But it is not really going to be watched by anyone except by those who like to watch indie films as a chore, since this will be no breakout indie in terms of artistry or popularity. If that’s you, then you could do a lot worse. It is written by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (“Half Nelson,” “Sugar”) and if you know those names you might have another reason to watch it. Keir Gilchrist, looking like Bastian from “The Neverending Story,” plays the depressed and overachiever 16-year old teenager Craig Gilner. After volunteering that he is a suicide risk, Craig is admitted into the psychiatric wing of a hospital for seven-day observation. He wants to get back to his homework, and friends, but now he can’t.

You almost want to say that Zach Galifianakis (“The Hangover”) is worthy of an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. As Bobby, a man-child that can no longer bear the stress of the real world and being a husband and father, Galifianakis is a real scene-stealer. His performance is nearly matched by Emma Roberts (“Valentine’s Day”) as the 16-year old cutie-pie Noelle who actually made a suicide attempt. Viola Davis (“Doubt”) is just decent as the ward staff psychiatrist.

The thing about mental hospital movies is that they inevitably spend the entire running length there and boredom clouds us as much as clouds its protagonists. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) is virtually the only nuthouse movie that keeps you riveted. The filmmaking here is highly skilled, without a doubt, and yet interest declines. One could be on the fence about whether this film deserves a three star or merely two-and-a-half star rating, and I was leaning on the high end until a highly improbably visit by high school classmate made me dock the grade. Nia (Zoe Kravitz) stops by to check on Craig, and to make-out with him. Would a girl like Nia really be surprised to find, that at the mental hospital, Craig probably has a roommate? Would a girl like Nia really been able to locate the correct wing where Craig was staying?

Nia freaks out which is no good, but there are nevertheless more entertaining freaks of nature in this offbeat comedy such as the fuss around a coin operated phone. The screenplay ennobles Craig as he tries to be peacemaker between some of the committed who seemed lost before his arrival. But it’s Galfianakis that our hearts return to, especially poignant and by means hilarious when he stresses out feverishly about how he has nothing to wear but his hobo-smelling sweater to his psych evaluation interview.

Go to the official site at http://focusfeatures.com/film/its_kind_of_a_funny_story/

Grade: C+

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

Electrifying and vivid entertainment for adults but leave the kids audience out of this. The Social Network, tracing angry-geek whiz kid, Mark Zuckerberg, during his creation and invention of Facebook, is as well-written and as tech adroit, not to mention suave, as the greatest screenplays by Robert Towne, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Schrader or the Coen Brothers. In other words, the screenplay by Aaron Sorkin (TV’s “The West Wing,” “The American President”) ripples through the definition and meaning of the very information age we have become a part of and has caught its colloquial essence as well. Jesse Eisenberg, in the performance of the year as Zuckerberg, proves that he can do everything that Michael Cera cannot do. He exudes as a nervy, pugnacious S.O.B. who stomps over friends for what is first bragging rights and then over friends for billions in revenue.

As the first scene fades in at a college pub set outside Harvard in 2003, Zuckerberg is giving his girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) a verbal attack on the validation of belonging to one of Harvard’s elite final clubs. She mispronounces, and makes misusage, of the word final. Zuckerberg condescendingly corrects her as well as brashly scolds that she will never meet any cool people without him being admitted as a member, and without that, she would have to… (fill in the sex insinuation) in order to belong. She breaks up with him on the spot. “You think that a woman will never want you because you are a geek, but in truth, nobody will want you because you are an asshole,” she says, lowering the boom. He never loses his obsession and desire for attachment with Erica, even after he writes a blog that discerns her small and unsatisfying cup size subsequently read by peers everywhere.

On another impulsion, Zuckerberg uploads the female student body on a web creation called “Facemash” that invites peers to vote on the hotness of competing coeds. The site has so many hits that the Harvard internet server crashes, which issues Zuckerberg to face his first hearing board. But he gets the attention of other Harvard undergrads who acknowledge his gifts in web design artistry and code-making, and believe that web communities could be a viable enterprise.

This is a movie of wild ambition about wild ambition, and there is not a dumbed down line of dialogue in it. If Sorkin is the genius linguist then director David Fincher (“Zodiac”) is the mercurial orchestrator, interlacing multiple storylines and flashbacks into biographical and persuasively speculative fusion, and doing it all with visual virtuosity. Fincher might be the very first to truly capture the scene of today’s reckless and sloshed college parties, the fraternity and sorority stunts pitched somewhere between orgiastic adventure and narcissism, and the rave-bombard boom of cosmo city nightclubs without making it feel like any of it was done on a sound stage or diffused in post production at a recording studio.

The embedded colors and fastidious details will certainly keep the film sealed with freshness years from now, but the movie is best because it thinks fearless and yet tactfully, and pryingly, about its core subjects. The key to getting by the real Zuckerberg and his disdain for this film project, as well as the tainting of his public persona, was to pivot the movie around two simultaneous depositions. Hearing the testimony of two legal parties that claim they were screwed over as creators – positioned as if it were their point of views – and their corroborating voices only makes the film more persuasive. The Winklevoss Twins (both played by Arnie Hammer), are Harvard crew champions who accuse Zuckerberg of ripping off their Harvard Connection idea, intended for exclusivity among the Harvard Ivy League.

Close friend, associate, launch partner and appointed CFO Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) put up all the capital – for the servers, intern pay, office instruments – at a cap of $19,000. In all developing stages Saverin says yes to every demand by Zuckerberg, and also gets him laid for the first time. Saverin carries on a relationship with the first Facebook “groupie,” a lusty, high heels Asian girl (Brenda Song) who is so paranoid jealous that she sets fire to Saverin’s gift to her as if it were a pouting gesture. Saverin, who is just as committed to Facebook, is thinking internship connections and door to door visits to wealthy New Yorkers. But the economic wellspring seemed to be Silicon Valley, where the real internet venture-capitalists are seated.

Saverin makes the mistake of letting himself stay a day behind the progress updates. Zuckerberg forms a hearty partnership with Napster and Plaxo creator Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake, an ecstatic actor) who sees not millions, but billions at stake. Their sudden partnership has a lot to do with Zuckerberg looking up to Parker as a party connection badass. As a consultant veering on co-partner, Parker brings sound ideas to the table, such as how to overcome the illegality of the site and usher in new iron-clad clauses standards for state of privacy on the internet. Zuckerberg forms alliances with those who help him at the nearest immediate minute.

The portrait is of Zuckerberg as a geek pining for widespread acceptance while at the same time he is so glued to his computer that there is not enough time for social interaction outside his Facebook bubble. But after he masters the infinite possibilities of cyber space his contentment is to spew his superior genius and self-righteousness onto others. Yet the positive and negative language of it all (kudos again to Sorkin) is more revitalizing and complimentary to audience intelligence than anything that has come into American movies in years.

The saving grace to Zuckerberg’s character is his invitation for any hot girl to validate or tutor him on how he could behave better (Rashida Jones, as a litigation lawyer, might as well be that girl at the end). That’s when he listens. Zuckerberg made a success of himself, becoming the world’s youngest billionaire, by linking the world together. Yet success for him was a means of revenge against the world and all the pretty women that rejected him. The rest of us, probably more happy than he, are among 500 million users that smile on daily. That upshot resonance is worth pondering over what has become one of the key revolutionary dotcoms of the internet age.

Go to the official site at www.thesocialnetwork-movie.com/site/

Grade: A+

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