REVIEW: Paranormal Activity 4

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012): Directed by: Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. Written by: Zack Estrin and Christopher B. Landon. Starring: Kathryn Newton, Matt Shively, Katie Featherston and Brady Allen. Rated R (I can't imagine why this is R - there is almost no violence shown and not much more than a few bad words). Running time: 88 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

 

Fourth time around, the same old shit. A girl who thinks her home is haunted, a guy who rigs the house with surveillance equipment to catch the action on film, a creepy kid, creaking doors, bumps in the night and poor decisions made to go investigate the noises.

The invisible demon from the first three movies is at it again and he’s up to the usual pranks. He’ll breathe on you, throw you against the ceiling, drag you halfway across the floor. Anything but show his face. That would, of course, cost more money for the filmmakers and the Paranormal Activity movies are a franchise built on budgetary frugality.

The girl is fifteen-year-old Alex (Kathryn Newton). She and her boyfriend Ben (Matt Shively) document their lives all day long on their laptops and smartphones for reasons never explained. Are all teenagers these days this vain? When my friends bust out a camera and start filming me, I tell them to knock it off. The characters in this movie make little to no objection over Alex and Ben’s incessant filming even when the camera gets right up in their face. I realize the found footage shtick is necessary for later when the spooky stuff starts but the gimmick is wearing pretty thin.

A young mother and her son move into Alex's neighborhood and the boy, Robbie (Brady Allen), is real weirdo. Something happens one night and the mother is hospitalized, leaving little Robbie all alone. Alex’s family decides to take him in until his mother is better and, sure enough, creepy things begin to happen while the kid is in their house.

You’ve seen it all before and you’ve seen it better. The scares are the usual cheap tricks – loud noises, objects suddenly moving – and at this point the franchise is well into self-parody territory. There is one bit with a missing knife that makes you think some much-needed blood and gore is going to be introduced into the series, but it's a tease and a letdown. The only good scare comes in the last thirty seconds and the whole ending is really just a rip-off of the final scene from the third film. Still, if you see the movie with a packed house, you’ll probably have a good time.

There are a lot of shots in the film that allow us to take a whole room in while we watch and wait for something to happen. It often feels like a communal version of one of those “Spot the Difference” cartoons from the Sunday paper and spread out on a big screen, it can actually be kind of fun. “Yo, the clock just stopped,” shouts a kid from two rows behind me. He’s right, it did. I wouldn’t have noticed that otherwise.

For what it’s worth, I believed the actors and their dialogue feels like overheard conversation. I especially enjoyed Matt Shively as the boyfriend. His character is a classic horror movie archetype – a well-intentioned doof who believes in the boogeyman but mostly just wants to get laid. When Alex reads online that demons are only interested in virgins, he kindly offers to go upstairs and rectify this problem for her.

That bit about virgins does not jibe at all with what we’ve learned about the demon in past movies but whatever, this is not a series interested in developing its mythology or furthering the plot from film to film. Katie (Katie Featherston), the poor girl who got possessed in the original, shows up for some series continuity but, regrettably, without the generous amounts of cleavage on display in the first two movies.

The Paranormal Activity films would have you believe that they’re all about the same thing, that they’re building toward something, that they’re gradually revealing some secret about the demon and its origins. The real secret of these movies though is that nothing actually happens in them.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/21/12

REVIEW: Argo

Argo (2012): Dir. Ben Affleck. Written by: Chris Terrio. Based on the books The Master of Disguise by Antonio J. Mendez and The Great Escape by Joshuah Bearman. Starring: Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin and John Goodman. Rated R (Violence, language). Running time: 120 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

Argo tells an unbelievable story, a prime cut of Hollywood entertainment complete with a daring rescue, down-to-the-wire phone calls and by-the-skin-of-their-teeth chases. That this story is also a true one dampens none of the thrills director Ben Affleck and screenwriter ­­­­­Chris Terrio cull from declassified files of a CIA mission from 1980.

The mission, which occurred during the early months of the Iran hostage crisis that began in 1979 and lasted until 1981, was to save six civilian lives who narrowly escaped the U.S. embassy before it was flooded and overrun by protestors. When it comes to the attention of the CIA that these six men and women have fled to sanctuary in the Canadian ambassador to Iran’s home, the government plots a rescue mission.

Enter CIA officer Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck). He has the look of a guy who has spent countless hours in smoke-filled backrooms of the government agency – both intensely focused and somewhat dazed. He is brought in to advise the CIA on the mission and quickly concludes that none of the proposed plans are even remotely achievable. The only way out of Tehran, he says, is the airport, which means they will need a plausible cover story and fake identities.

Here’s an idea: What if they pretend to be members of a Canadian film crew scouting locations for a science-fiction film to be shot in Iran? It’s a crazy idea but is it just crazy enough to work or simply crazy? The CIA, seeing no better alternative, gives Mendez’s plan the go-ahead.

An operation like this will need lots of help, which is also to say the movie offers a number of opportunities for choice supporting roles. Ben Affleck, making good use of his friendships with fellow actors, has assembled a strong ensemble cast filled with fantastic character actors. John Goodman as the genial John Chambers, an Oscar-winning makeup artist and Mendez’s Hollywood connect, and Alan Arkin as Lester Siegel, a crotchety veteran producer, make a lively pair. They spend most of their screen time together, trading quips and banter, and Mr. Arkin in particular gets most of the film’s funniest lines. An intense Bryan Cranston plays Jack O’Donnell, Mendez’s direct superior, and Mr. Cranston’s commanding presence drives many of the more tense scenes late in the film.

Mr. Affleck gives a strong performance too but more impressive is the sure command he maintains as a director. The film toggles between scenes of the six Americans hiding out, jittering nervously about their fates, and scenes of Mendez preparing for the mission. We get a real sense for the politics at work not only in the CIA but in Hollywood as well. Mendez must contend with the difficulties of planning a dangerous undercover operation in addition to navigating the bureaucracy required in order to get a film – even a fake one – into production.

Argo acknowledges the absurdity of this process while also addressing the grave reality of the larger geopolitical conflicts that defined this period of American history. And it illustrates the strangeness of all this with startling clarity. One superb scene shows Mendez arriving in Tehran, riding through its streets in the back of a taxicab. He glances out the window and sees an Iranian woman eating outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken followed by – no less than a few blocks down – a man hanged for treason from a construction crane.

It is a strange world we live in and Argo streamlines its strangeness and complexity into an engrossing two hours of commercial entertainment.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/18/12

REVIEW: Frankenweenie

Frankenweenie (2012): Dir. Tim Burton. Written by: John August. Featuring the voices of: Charlie Tahan, Martin Short, Catherine O'Hara and Martin Landau. Rated PG (Spooky and cuddly in that order). Running time: 87 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

Frankenweenie, a new black-and-white claymation movie from Tim Burton, opens with its young protagonist, a boy named Victor Frankenstein (voiced by Charlie Tahan), screening a homemade movie for his parents. A plastic bat terrorizes a town made of cardboard boxes while horribly outmatched toy army men battle it. Suddenly, the family dog, Sparky, makes a cameo and saves the town, happily chewing up the monster.

There are moments in Frankenweenie that have the endearing feel of a boy playing with his toys, as though Mr. Burton had stumbled across the clay figurines used in the film and started imagining a story with them. (All of the character designs, particularly a morose science teacher with quite the long face and the voice of Martin Landau, are delightful.)

But just as often the film’s low-key vibe feels scattershot. As the movie jumps from one half-formed idea to the next, it feels less like the off-the-cuff imaginings of a child than a lack of inspiration from a director who has a good idea but doesn’t know what to do with it.

After a patient set-up introducing us to Victor and his parents (dryly voiced by Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara), the story begins in earnest when Sparky gets run over by a car. Victor, ever the inventor and amateur scientist, decides to harness the power of lightning to resurrect the poor pooch for a science fair project.

The problem with Frankenweenie is that I’ve already described all the essential plot points. Everything that follows is fluff. There are occasional sprinklings of inspired slapstick but no jolt of energy on the order of that which brings the titular canine back to life. This is not the tragic story of Mary Shelley’s original tale but rather an intermittently playful (if ultimately tepid) tribute to the shadowy gothic imagery of classic horror films and to the campy pleasures of old monster movies.

Frankenweenie is based on an early Tim Burton short and this feature-length version bears the stretch marks of a script padded in order to meet a minimum running time. Screenwriter John August adds a few middling subplots and tangents but all he really does is slow down the fun. The movie comes alive when Sparky slip-slides down a roof in pursuit of a bug-eyed neighborhood cat but is as stiff as a corpse when Victor’s father, in an attempt to bond with his son and add some human interest to the movie, encourages the boy to play sports.

Tim Burton’s movies rarely look bad and Frankenweenie’s crisp animation indulges in long shadows and dark suburban streets lit up by bolts of lightning. But though Tim Burton may be a lively visual artist, his storytelling is far too often as anemic as the pallid faces of his characters. As a result, this monster mash ends up being rather lifeless.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/16/12

REVIEW: Looper

Looper (2012): Written and directed by Rian Johnson. Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels and Paul Dano. Rated R (The future is not a happy place.) Running time: 118 minutes.

3 stars (out of four)

The premise of Looper is the kind of big sci-fi concept that’s so good it carries the whole film. The dense, knotty plot will appeal to puzzle-solvers who loved Inception and may well frustrate many others but the movie’s success rests heavily on the degree to which you accept the following:

The year is 2044. Thirty years in the future (that is, in 2074) time travel is possible but has been outlawed. Ingeniously, the mob uses it to carry out hits, sending victims back in time with a bag over their head. They arrive in the past on their knees in a field, a warehouse, or somewhere similarly out of the way, and are killed on the spot by “loopers,” for-hire assassins wielding high-powered shotguns.

Loopers are paid well enough – for reasons never totally clear to me, they are paid in slabs of solid silver – but have pretty bleak contracts with their mob boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels). Termination of a looper’s contract means termination of his life. He receives a handsome payout and enjoys the next thirty years until a bag is thrown over his head and is transported back in time to be killed by his younger self. Most loopers accept this as a grim fact of their trade.

Word through the temporal grapevine, however, is that a new mob kingpin in the future is ending the looper program. He’s closing all the loops, so to speak, sending every looper into the past to their death whether they’ve asked for an end to their contract or not.

Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt underneath some very convincing makeup and prosthetics that provide continuity between the present and future) is a looper. He enjoys the cavalier lifestyle associated with his work; he takes narcotics through eye drops, goes to the club with his best pal (Paul Dano) and has the standard Oedipal relationship with a prostitute (Piper Perabo) that all brooding men in movies have. Imagine his surprise when one day, on the job, his future self appears in the form of Bruce Willis – on his knees to be killed but without a bag to hide his identity – and books it.

What does Present Joe do? If he doesn’t hunt down and kill Future Joe, he’ll have to answer to Abe in the present day. If he can kill Future Joe, he’ll at least be able to enjoy the next few decades, moral and metaphysical trauma notwithstanding.

If all this sounds complicated, you’re right – it is. But Looper has a reassuringly flippant attitude toward its mythology. During one confrontation between the two Joes at a diner, a highlight of the film, the Bruce Willis iteration dismisses a logistical question about the rules of time travel. They could sit there all day drawing charts and diagrams, he says, but he doesn’t care about that. What matters is the here and now, subjective though those concepts may be.

There is more to the film than I’ve mentioned but describing it all would be difficult, not to mention spoil some surprises. For a while the movie seems as though it will play out like a sci-fi variation on The Fugitive, with Present and Future Joe playing hunter and hunted, respectively. But a mid-film development invites meditation on the age-old time travel question: Is it ethical to punish someone for a crime they’ve yet to commit if it means preventing future tragedy? The film’s center of gravity during this latter half shifts from Joe to a remarkably precocious kid (Pierce Gagnon) and his tenacious mother (Emily Blunt).

Personally, I prefer the movie’s setup to its payoff but don’t let that discourage you from seeing it. Writer/director Rian Johnson’s noir-tinged style (carried over partially from his debut, the highly stylized and incredibly fun nostalgia binge Brick) makes Looper addicting entertainment. The script has wit and rhythm; the dialogue during the diner scene crackles like water in a pan of hot oil. Joe has the charismatic appeal of the classic Bogart antiheroes. (In a dry voiceover, he reveals that ten percent of the population in 2044 has a telekinetic mutation. “Assholes levitating quarters in bars to pick up girls,” he explains.)

Looper makes a genuine effort to be Great Science Fiction, which is kind of thrilling to watch even if it falls a bit short. The last act feels less sure of itself than what precedes it (a barrage of bullets fired by Bruce Willis late in the film seems to be from another movie entirely) but a great idea is still a great idea. With any luck, Rian Johnson has a few more in store for us.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/9/12