The Blair Witch Project

Released:  July 16th, 1999

Rated:  R

Studio:  Artisan

Staring:  Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, Joshua Leonard

Directed by:  Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez

Written by:  Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sánchez

Personal Bias Alert:  easily scared, likes things left to the imagination

9.5 of 10

            Three college students go into the woods…  It’s a classic scary story setup, perfectly at home being told around a campfire, whispered at a sleepover, or projected on a theater screen.  I first saw “The Blair Witch Project” in a dorm room, late at night, and it scarred the hell out of me.  It was years after the film had been released, and from the cultural firestorm it had kicked up I knew how the story would end.  At the time its effectiveness surprised me, but sitting at breakfast the next morning, groggy from a fitful night, I chuckled at the simplicity of it.  It was folklore, urban legend, a tried and true method of scaring the sleep out of people.

            The students in the film allegedly went into the woods to make a documentary about a local legend called the Blair Witch and never returned.  We are told that the footage we are seeing was recovered a year after their disappearance, sans bodies.  This claim of truth is the first in a long list of urban legend hallmarks that the film utilizes, all subtly adding layers of dread during what is an otherwise uneventful start.  The next step is a series of interviews with locals regarding the legend, which because the interviewer, Heather (Heather Donahue), lacks experience, comes off as stiff and awkward.  This is the key part of the entire movie, though.  The local’s stories vary, but they manage to cobble together a loose idea of the horrors that have taken place in the woods.  That way, when things start to go down later in the film, the viewer knows enough to be plenty scarred, but not enough to know what will happen next.

            Despite the beginning claims, you aren’t supposed to believe that this story is real any more than you are supposed to believe in Bloody Mary or Hookman.  Its claim is there simply to make it possible, to make some little part of your brain pipe up with a “but what if it is” every once in a while.  You’ll quickly tamp that thought back down, but fear thrives on possibilities, and that little voice will make enough room for fear to fester in your brain.

            This film was famously made for very little money, so don’t expect any effects or fancy camerawork.  The movie is about three people who disappear in the woods, and that is what you get.  Three people, two crappy cameras, and a very muffled audio track.  Writer/directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez have a firm enough grasp on horror to know how to work this into a positive, though.  The found footage spin circumvents the need for a large crew and also whittles down the audience’s world to that of the trio.  We feel their strain, their frustration, and their growing fear as the days wear on, aided by the fact that we are often picking up these emotional signals from the disembodied voice of the cameraperson.  In a way, it’s very much like life.  We hear our own voice, see our hands and feet moving around in front of us, and because that’s all we see of the cameraperson, it feels as if we are moving around in their world.

            I recommend watching this film at night, with all the lights turned out, and the sound at a normal level.  Resist the urge to turn it up so you can hear every whisper and scratch.  Let the mystery play out, and you’ll be treated to one of the most effective horror movies out there.

            Other Notes:

Ø  I liked that they used very common names for all three characters (Heather, Michael, and Joshua).  It really lends to the “this could happen anywhere” feel.

Ø  Why did Heather take the time to sew up those pants?

Ø  I’ll be keeping the lights on tonight. 

Trainspotting

Released:  July 19th, 1996
Rated:  R

Studio:  Miramax

Staring:  Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald

Directed by:  Danny Boyle

Written by:  John Hodge

Personal Bias Alert:  has a dark sense of humor, doesn’t do drugs

9 of 10

           Ain’t Danny Boyle great?  He’s got such flair, such style.  His films are peppy; they bounce off the walls, threatening to burst out of the screen.  He notably hopped for joy on the Oscar stage, explaining that he had promised his children to receive the moment in the spirit of Tiger from Winnie the Pooh if he was so lucky to win.  Although, he’s never apologized for his spirit.  He palpably loves filmmaking, and that energy makes me predisposed to liking his films because, hey, I love films, too.

            “Trainspotting” is one of his more effervescent directorial efforts, bounding along through its character’s lives even when there’s dark turns.  It’s easy to forget, especially early on in the film, how crappy these people’s lives really are.  They’re all heroin addicts, bumbling from hit to hit, constantly broke, willing to degrade themselves to maintain their habit.  But Boyle keeps us slightly removed from the proceedings, and the camera observes them with an arched brow, like the friend who hangs around because he finds your antics amusing.

            The main group is a volatile hoot, each so lost to their own individual faults that you know they can’t exist together for long without blowing something up.  Most often it’s their own lives that go down, and in the lesser falls Boyle and editor Masahiro Hirakubo find their comedy stride.  For instance, I was laughing aloud when main character Renton (Ewan McGregor) was listing off the things you need to quite heroin and ends matter-of-factly with “one last hit.”  We all know that attitude is a recipe for failure, and the editing and accompanying music cues invite us to laugh at Renton’s dreary situation.

            There is a turn, about thirty minutes in, when their situation stops being funny.  It’s a perfectly timed transition, having allowed us the space to connect and sympathize with the characters before the rug is pulled out from under us.  While the comedy largely gets left behind, the movie continues to amble on at its lively pace, which dulls the blows it continuously hits us with.  The events in this film are just as disturbing and hopeless as anything seen in other drug horror stories like “Requiem for a Dream” or “A Scanner Darkly,” but Boyle wisely avoids making things too dour.  We all know the destructive power of addiction, and perhaps this sort of presentation gives us a better idea of why people cling to it so fervently.  But what do I know, I’ve never been an addict.

             As I’ve mentioned before, the camerawork has a strong influence on how the audience views the proceedings.  It responds to the mood of the scene, drawing the audience along for the ride.  It jostles when a character’s excited, observes the absurd humor of a situation, and wraps you up in a rug to carry you through a high (that literally happens).  Boyle is known for his creative camerawork, and here it is integral to maintaining the film’s pace.  Through the darkest moments it tugs you right along, never allowing you to dwell on any one disaster.

            “Trainspotting” is a fast-paced little film, jamming in an absurd amount of story in 93 minutes.  The plot points aren’t always as fleshed out as they could be, but it’s an acceptable sacrifice in light of the tone the film is able to hit.  It won’t leave you smiling, but it’s one of the more enjoyable ways to spend time with self-absorbed drug addicts.

            Other Notes:

Ø  Oh Miramax, I miss you what you used to be.

Ø  Those shots of McGregor falling and hitting his head make me cringe.  How did they film those without hurting him?

Ø  “What a penetrating goal that was.”  He he, context.

Ø  Did I miss the train?

Heathers (1988)

Released:  March 31^st, 1989

Rated:  R

Studio:  New World Pictures

Staring:  Winona Ryder, Christian Slater

Directed by:  Michael Lehmann

Written by:  Daniel Waters

Personal Bias Alert:  likes dark comedies, went to high school post-Columbine

6 of 10

  

            I went into this film knowing remarkably little.  I thought it was just an ‘80s movie about a clique of popular girls who are overthrown by Winona Ryder’s Veronica, so I sat down expecting a John Hughes-esque version of “Mean Girls.”  Those of you who’ve seen “Heathers” are probably laughing at me, and rightly so considering what I was getting into.

            What the film ended up being was a darkly, darkly (did I say darkly?) comic take on high school movies, eschewing the traditional lampooning in favor of some killer satire.  It doesn’t make jokes as much as it blows everything slightly out of proportion, and in the very near reality of this world everything seems a bit silly.  Veronica’s mom is constantly making pâté, the hippy teacher says things like “I want you all to feel the pathetic beauty,” and pent-up frustrations are dealt with by murdering your fellow students and staging it as a suicide.  Yep, I said straight-up murder.

            New student J.D. (Christian Slater) is behind the trend, and Veronica tentatively goes along with his plans to a point.  After several popular students appear to commit suicide, the school’s population becomes fascinated with the idea, and talking about or attempting suicide becomes almost cool.  It’s a biting indictment of trends and the mindless way some people will follow them, but the social commentary is more the filler to the comedy’s tasty goodness.  When asked the classic question against following trends, the one about jumping off bridges if everyone else did, a student responds simply and hilariously:  “probably.”

            Three paragraphs in and I’ve already thrown out two quotes.  I normally go an entire review without mentioning a single one, but writer David Newman crafted an irresistibly quotable little gem.  The film’s cult status is understandable simply by this calling card.  Remember, this movie was released before the internet was widely used, when you’d have to throw out little references in everyday speech and fish for a twinkle of recognition to find your people.  There’s no mistaking these quotes.

            Now I’m a young doe, so this film was fifteen years old when I was in school.  I didn’t watch it until long after my high school years, and I can’t help but feel that I missed the sweet spot for when this film should be viewed.  Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed it, but I couldn’t help rolling my eyes a bit at its over-the-top judgment of high school.  Not that I ever connected much with such depictions; my own high school experience was rather tame.  I had friends, we hung around, we fought, but the drama never really left the group.  I was by no means popular, but I don’t recall being picked on or teased.  This sort of thing must happen, though, or we wouldn’t be so inundated with depictions of high school as caddy, sadistic battlegrounds.

            “Heathers” violent streak, while oddly prophetic, doesn’t play well for post-Columbine kids like me.  The fear of gun-toting classmates was in full swing by the time I hit adolescence, and the lessons that taught me makes it hard to chuckle when J.D. and Veronica go all Bonnie and Clyde on people.  It doesn’t help that the humor is so pitch dark that it’s hard to tell when they’re joking and when they’re making a point.  Granted, those are often happening at the same time, but my brain simply has trouble finding anything funny when someone’s pulling out a gun in the school cafeteria.

Now while these violent images have taken on a new meaning, I’m sure this was still wildly inappropriate at the time the film was released.  I can imagine Newman, upon being asked why he took such an extreme approach to telling his story, shrugging and slyly answering with his own line:  “The extreme always seems to make an impression.”

            Other Notes

Ø  I’m sorry, but I can’t stand Christian Slater.  He fits the part well, but he’s just too slimy for me to understand the appeal.

Ø  So did this film kick off the overuse of “Que Sera, Sera” in female-centric movies, or was that already a thing?

Ø  Fakest cow-tipping ever.

Memento (2000)

Released:  March 16, 2001

Rated:  R

Studio:  Newmarket Films

Staring:  Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano

Directed by:  Christopher Nolan 

Written by:  Christopher Nolan

Personal Bias Alert:  loves “The Prestige,” not a fan of flashy storytelling that bogs down a movie

6.7 of 10

            Reverse chronology is a technique not unheard of, but not commonly used in film.  Going into “Memento,” I was told that the film was structured using this technique.  However, I quickly found that that wasn’t entirely true.  A large portion of it is told backwards, but there are also several scenes that clearly play out in a linear fashion.  Now, considering that this wasn’t my first foray in reverse chronology, I wasn’t too thrown by this.  I had previously seen “Irreversible,” a film that goes all in and tells its story entirely in reverse chronology (it goes all in in many other ways, too, so I must give a big warning to those curious about the film).  Perhaps it was this familiarity, or just my familiarity with writer/director Christopher Nolan’s later work, that made “Memento” lack the punch it seems to have for other people.

            That being said, I was very confused by the nuts and bolts of the story.  I doubt anyone figures it out on their first viewing, and considering I’ve only just watched the film for the first time, I’m not 100% sure what happened, either.  I know that our main character, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), is trying to track down the man who assaulted and killed his wife.  The complication is that Leonard has anterograde amnesia, which prevents him from converting short-term memory into long-term memory.  Essentially, he can’t remember anything after the attack on his wife.  There are two people currently helping him with his investigation, Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss).

            The nuts and bolts are intentionally hazy, and many facts that you thought you knew are brought into question by the end.  Nolan makes well thought-out films, so I’m sure you could watch this movie a few times and piece it all together, but I’m not sure it would really add anything.  “Memento” ends with some very clear statements on its themes, and those are the real points of the film.  It’s much like my argument that the question left hanging at the end of Nolan’s “Inception” doesn’t matter, that the significant thing is that Cobb gave up his obsession and chose to live his life.  Here, Leonard makes a clear choice as well.

            Unfortunately, where Nolan makes a cinematically elegant statement at the end of “Inception” and, in what is in my opinion his best work, “The Prestige,” here he ends with a bit of a clunk.  The exposition-heavy end scene isn’t masked by metaphor or strong visual storytelling.  Instead, we get some straightforward dialogue and some terribly on the nose narration.  This muted the sense of thrill that the ending should have evoked, and to me is the clearest sign that, at this point in his career, Nolan was still learning the finer points of his trade.

            Nolan’s decision to use the aforementioned chronology doesn’t make for a sleek film either.  It does get across how confusing life is for Leonard, but it also makes it distractingly difficult to follow what’s happening.  Lots of time has to be devoted to making the story semi-clear, like the repetition of the beginning and end of scenes and the exposition-heavy, often stilted dialogue.  The two main side characters, Teddy and Natalie, suffer the most.  It’s hard to care much about them; at the beginning you are struggling to get a grasp on them, and by the end you are wondering if (or how much) they are lying to Leonard.  It doesn’t help that Pantoliano gives a one-note performance and that Natalie is terribly underwritten.

            The end effect is a narratively interesting, but otherwise stiff film.  Twisty narratives are strong enough to carry a film up to a point, but there needs to be more to make it feel like it really mattered.  Luckily, Nolan figured that out, and he went on to make some truly excellent films.

            Other Notes:

Ø  Pearce and Moss were both good in their roles, but they were there to serve the story, not play real characters.

Ø  Who spotted the cast crossovers with “Battlestar Galactica” and “Sons of Anarchy”?

Ø  If Natalie recognizes that Leonard is driving her boyfriend’s car, why doesn’t she look in it for the missing money?  Or is she just completely lying to Leonard about Dodd going after her for the money?

Ø  So many questions, and yet, I don’t really care if I know.

Short Term 12 (2013)

Released:  August 23rd, 2013

Rated:  R

Studio:  Cinedigm

Staring:  Brie Larson, John Gallagher, Jr., Kaitlyn Dever, Rami Malek, Keith Stanfield, Kevin Hernandez, Melora Walters, Stephanie Beatriz, Lydia Du Veaux, Alex Calloway, Frantz Turner, Diana-Maria Riva

Directed by:  Destin Daniel Cretton

Written by:  Destin Daniel Cretton 

Personal Bias Alert:  likes Brie Larson, likes realistic cinema

8 of 10

            I was unsure going into this film if I would buy Brie Larson playing a reserved character.  I was first introduced to her through her role on the television show “United States of Tara,” where she played a very forward young woman that rarely kept quiet.  She was great in the role, but I’ve got to admit that when I think of her, I remember her in full Viking woman attire sitting seductively (and comically) on a cake.  That’s not an image that syncs with the mousey character she seemed to play in this film’s trailer.

            I didn’t have to wait long for my fears to be assuaged, though.  “Short Term 12” starts with a story told by Mason (John Gallagher, Jr.) to his fellow line staff at a group home for teenagers.  It’s a wonderfully told story that sucks you right into the world, and I quickly forgot my reservations.  By the time Mason finished, I was chuckling along with the group and ready for the explosion of energy that interrupts the scene.  The pacing for the rest of the film follows suit, mixing realistic moments that seem to drag on regardless of whether they are good or bad with abrupt outbursts of emotion and pain that can no longer be contained.  It’s an ebb and flow that I recognize from real life, which really helped make the little world that the story exists in seem more expansive.

            It’s a little world because the budget of the film was so small (less than 1 million), and it’s a testament to the writing that they were able to do so much with such a paltry amount of money.  The script attracted the supremely talented leads, Larson and Gallagher, without whom this story easily could have fallen flat.  They form the central couple and the teenager’s main allies in the film, and almost nothing in the story occurs outside their purview.  Larson is the lead and the more troubled of the two, making her performance the flashier and the more often singled out aspect of the film.  Rightfully so, as she shows the many ways that her past has shaped and is still shaping her future.  It’d be a shame to ignore Gallagher, though.  His performance is just as essential, showing how a more well-adjusted person handles the stresses they encounter while bringing a levity that makes the whole thing go down smooth.

            There is a problem, at times, with the emotional outbursts being too dramatic.  I have no doubt that the problems the characters face are true to their setting, but the entire movie takes place over such a short period of time that the buildup seems like a bit too much.  I won’t list them all out, but suffice it to say that by the time the climax comes, you can’t blame Larson’s character for losing it.  Anyone would be broken.

            There’s an odd balance the movie tries to strike, surrounding its essentially decent characters with the often horrific realities of what people are capable of.  It leads to some riveting moments of hard-earned honesty, but there are times when writer/director Destin Daniel Cretton fails to maneuver the tricky story between all the rocks.  As often as it riveted me, there was always offsetting moments of melodrama, and I could never shake the sensation of seeing the strings being pulled.  Watching the movie was like being told a great story, but one you’ve heard so many times that you know the beats by heart.

            Other Notes:

Ø  Some of the performances weren’t on par with Larson and Gallagher, but none were so bad that they derailed the film.

Ø  The mood is a strange mixture of comfort and pain, sorrow and joy, sentimentality and reality.  I loved it.

Ø  Floyd gets me all sweaty, too.