No surprises here: Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity, currently terrorizing people across North America, is genuinely scary. It’s also clunky, half-realized, and frustratingly compromised—none of which reduce its central, primal experiential heft. As far as inevitable comparisons are concerned, Paranormal Activity is no Blair Witch Project, as it misses out on that inadvertent masterpiece’s allegorical elegance (the film was downright Hawthornian in its portrait of mythical Americana seeking vengeance against interlopers) and technical coherence, not to mention its unwillingness to give up its ambiguities right to the final devastating image. One leaves Blair Witch with more questions than answers; Paranormal Activity has a more predictable shape, even if that shape also plays into elemental fears of nighttime. Day Night Day Night might have made for a more appropriate title in some ways: the former providing catharsis and relief, the latter bringing on irrationality and doubt—emotions mimicked in the experiences of the viewers. For all its damning quiet and general lack of razzle dazzle, Paranormal Activity lives or dies on the level of audience interaction; it plays off that immensely satisfying suck-in-your-breath-and-wait-and-exhale emotion that few artistic mediums can induce.
During last year’s “Great Pumpkin” series, I extolled the virtues of the face in horror cinema. It’s so simple, really: few things are as terrifying as the makeup of a face, whether forthrightly demonic or human but just a little . . . off. The doubling terror effect of the mask, then, is not only the fearful visage of the false face but also the possibility of the human one hidden underneath. Kaneto Shindo’s breathtaking Onibaba (1964) exploits this tension to masterful effect, building a slow rhythm to an unbearably frightening climax predicated on the terror of one mask—what it shows and what it conceals.
This year, Reverse Shot’s annual end-of-October “Great Pumpkins” series can finally get off on the right hobbled foot. We normally like to begin our Halloween recommendations with something of an assessment of the state-of-the-art of horror filmmaking, and since for the past few years the genre has become decidedly moribund, what should be a demonic celebration ends up something of a eulogy. Sounds funereally appropriate, but it’s been disappointing nevertheless. So we can begin with very good Monday box-office news: The latest installment of Gruesome, Poorly Edited Faux-Morality Tales an Incredibly Cynical Mini-Studio Churns Out for Easy Profit Every October (or if you prefer, Saw VI.....I repeat, VI!!!!) has been roundly spanked and sent to bed by Paranormal Activity. Normally these sorts of weekend money assessments come with bogus pronouncements (if, say, Ice Age 17 beats Duplicity, does it really mean that audiences prefer woolly mammoths to Julia Roberts?), but this one seems pretty clear-cut: Audiences seeking horror chose Paranormal over Saw; they craved fear over gore, mind over matter. Not that the former is without its flaws (and more on that later in the series this week), but it’s encouraging that word-of-mouth prevailed over retarded redundancy. Cross your fingers that any future Saw installments will go straight to DVD.
Mira Nair’s Amelia Earhart biopic Amelia will easily be criticized for simply being the kind of film that it is. And you’ll know the type from the very opening, when an awestruck pubescent Amelia Earhart stands in a golden wheat field, brushing her hands against the whipping grains, staring up at the sky with dewdrop eyes while a voiceover states elegiacally, “When I saw that little plane, it lifted me above the Kansas prairie.” Yes, we’re in glittering, hagiographic territory, ripe with nostalgia: every time a plane soars, the traditional score by Gabriel Yared will swell; scenes will frequently dissolve to “inspiring” blinding brightness; many suited men will explicitly tell Amelia (Hillary Swank) that her dreams of flying around the world, by Jove, “cannot be done!” which she’ll refute with can-do cheeriness.
Yet just because Amelia will be dismissed by many solely on its tacit admission of its own old-fashioned genre makeup doesn’t mean it deserves sympathy, despite its good-natured deployment of these tropes. Amelia comes across as the kind of dispassionate Hollywood “property” that was made with little interest or fervor and that only in retrospect forces its makers to backpedal and wax rhapsodically about how inspired they were by its subject. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky’s review of Amelia.
“What Does Motherhood Mean to Me?” wonders Eliza, Uma Thurman’s harried West Village mother of two, as she works her way through a day of tough city living in Katherine Dieckmann’s Motherhood. Somewhat sadly, this existential pondering doesn’t spring organically from the material at hand: an episodic catalogue of indignities visited by the evil urban environment upon those who choose to procreate therein. Instead, our heroine, a creative sort left at wit’s end by the mundane distractions of her life, fresh from finishing a quickie post to her mom-blog “The Bjorn Identity,” is sparked to answer this rather large question by a crude pop-up internet ad announcing a writing contest—500 words on being a mom could be Eliza’s ticket back into a regular writing gig and the adult workforce.
No sooner has Eliza found opportunity knocking than Dieckmann whip-zooms to a calendar garishly scribbled with a notice about daughter Clara’s impending sixth birthday party, set for later in the day we’re witnessing, the same day as the deadline for the contest, thus setting in motion the film’s twinned narratives and themes: balance between the needs of children and the needs of the parent. 30 Rock episodes often build themselves around such narratively inconvenient confluences sketched out in brief before the show’s madcap credits, only to launch from this sitcomy footing into unimaginable feats of absurdity (I’d love to see an afternoon with Mama Lemon juggling a baby and an impending TGIS episode sketched out in 22 minutes). Dieckmann’s reliance on the tried-and-true only highlights Motherhood‘s links to convention. Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert’s review of Motherhood.
Syndicate this site