i would like to start a thread for movies we liked but may not be worth writing whole reviews about. i will start with Welcome, a Film Movement french movie about an iraqi boy who wants to get to england but is stuck in calais. it’s a slight, watchable, and rather sentimental movie, but it highlights pitilessly something i didn’t know, namely that denizens of calais (and presumably other french towns) are forbidden by law from befriending illegal immigrants. it is literally illegal, and severely punished, to give them rides, buy them food, or host them in your house. and it is legal, on the other hand, to bar them from shopping in supermarkets. someone at some point mentions history books. the similarity with nazism are appalling. no wonder the whole islamic world is seething with fury. they are eating brutality and humiliation for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all over the world.
Kisses. impressive acting by two irish kids with the foulest mouths imaginable (especially the sweet little girl, who, the extras demonstrate, speaks even worse IRL). heavy on the soundtrack/atmospherics, but still a worthy effort and an endearing look at plucky kids forging alliances while faced with impossible lives.
Micmacs is full of lovely set-pieces but never soars. (Still, it also never falls on its face despite its incessant whimsy.) A man whose father had been killed by a landmine is later in life struck by a stray bullet. He then orchestrates–with a band of misfits–his revenge on the munitions houses. I liked that silly stance on sober issues: slapstick as political critique. And I enjoyed watching — all these great faces, all this silent-film energy.
The Last Exorcism works pretty damn well–a couple of nice twists, a careful attention to mood, and some great character work, particularly by the leads. Patrick Fabian plays a reformed evangelical minister now out to expose the fraudulence of exorcism; he gets the charisma and the compassion and the sense of desperation right–it’d be easy to slide into outsized hucksterism, but he gives the film a strong leg to stand on. The other is provided by Ashley Bell, an even tougher role to avoid the overdetermined–she nails the quick-shifts (emotional and physical) of this young haunted girl. A couple of late-game plot turns test belief, make the film less the character study it might have been and more a delightful little scare machine. But damn I like scare machines.
Guillem Morales’ The Uninvited Guest is exaggeratedly melodramatic, and becomes increasingly effective as it moves from its suspense to something creepier and strange, like a film that collapses earlier- and later-period Hitchcock into one compressed narrative.
Felix (Andoni Gracia) is now alone in the house he designed, his ex-girlfriend Vera (Monica Lopez) trying to stay friends but move on; something happened between them, but we’re not sure what. Felix lets a passerby into his home to make a call, but the guy disappears — and Felix suspects the man is still in his house.
At first, the suspense seems a bit forced, and then Felix’s reactions a bit histrionic. That’s the point. About a third of the way in, the film turns its creepy-stalker story inside out, in a plot involving a neighbor in a wheelchair (also played by Lopez) whose husband has gone missing.
This isn’t great; its story isn’t entirely coherent. But at its best it creeps into Felix’s head in ways that are unnerving and unsettling. And it’s shot really well–Morales is yet another promising Spanish horror-film director. . . (his next is produced by Guillermo del Toro).
“like a film that collapses earlier- and later-period Hitchcock into one compressed narrative.”
Can you elaborate?
No.
Well, okay. But probably in a half-assed way, as you most likely expect.
Overdetermined distinction:
–An emphasis on the innocent character caught in a narrative trap; the character is bewildered and has to learn how to engage an environment that has suddenly become uncanny. (A more definitionally-exact “uncanny”–the unheimlich house that is and is not yours.) But there’s a sense that the film is playing up the psychological impact of reality shifts. The hero is hapless, mostly likable, beleaguered; he’s Bergman in Notorious, or Peck in Spellbound, maybe even Stewart in Man Who Knew or Rear Window.
–An emphasis on the psychological experience, such that we’re far less certain about whether the characters’ perceptions of what’s happening are “there;” the sense of the uncanny is now ours, because the film we thought we were in is now something else. The hero is almost (or actually) unhinged. More Stewart in Vertigo, or tonally more Birds/Marnie/Frenzy.
I probably shouldn’t say that AH’s early films weren’t destabilizing in those ways… but they feel more grounded in a reality that gets (conspiratorially or mysteriously) messed up but everything gets tidied up later on, whereas in later films it is a sense that this messed-up reality is echoing or compounded by the hero’s (and the audience’s) own messed-up psychology…
I viewed, and liked, Mauer’s post saying farewell to Peter Fonda. Then it disappeared from the blog. I guess Fonda is alive, but he found a dead body in a parked car on Sunset Boulevard.
I blame Palin.
black swan. very well-made but there’s less to it than meets the eye.
Easy A. Not much to say except that it is good fun and offers up a breakthrough, star-making performance by Emma Stone (who appears to have matured by leaps and bounds since her appearance in Zombieland). All involved look way too old for high school (I mistakenly believed the film was set in a community college for about ten minutes), and it doesn’t necessarily feel as fresh as Clueless, but I had a great time watching it. The scenes with Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci are worth the price of admission on their own.
Animal Kingdom. It’s a rather lethargically told but obliquely menacing story about a family of small time criminals collapsing into entropy. The central character (a lumbering, sixteen-year-old “innocent” who has no where to go but his grandmother’s after the death of his mother) is emotionally numb, but he snaps out of it as the body count starts to rise. The last thirty minutes or so are really tense, building some palpable mystery as to what is going to happen next and how, but I don’t think the film adds up to too much in the end (the first eight minutes were so very promising). The grandmother character has gotten a lot of press (Oscar talk even), but I wouldn’t say the actor does anything truly interesting (short some rather uncomfortable kissing scenes). Her performance is all about juxtaposing the character’s seemingly genial affect against everyone else on the screen. I admired the writing, but anybody could have played the role. Australian with thick accents.
The King’s Speech. Sure, it’s fusty and old-fashioned, creaky and schmaltzy. Sure, it’s full of royal psychobabble (my daddy didn’t love, my big brother picked on me) . . . but it is an effective, well-executed love story between two men – one the stammering King of England and the other a lowly Australian thespian who holds the elocutionary key to the fate of the British empire (which doesn’t turn out so well under the reign of George VI but I won’t tell the Weinstein Brothers if you don’t). Tom Hopper favors tacky wallpaper and wide-angle lenses, but the film does indeed work when Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth are left in a room on their own. It is possible that Firth can rise above almost any material, and for that reason alone, I watched and I liked.
I liked The King’s Speech as well. But 12 Oscar nominations? Crikey! If I could only choose 2 of the 12, I’d give one to Rush and one for art direction. Maybe a 3rd for cinematography, because I thought the choice of wide angle lens was good. The wide angle used to be a stylistic cliche, but now it’s quite uncommon. Anyway, the film seemed to favor the small, confined and intimate, and I thought that was excellent.
I also thought the idea of the King of England bouncing up and down, flapping his lips, and shouting “fuck fuck fuck” was interesting, and I would have liked to have seen a bit more of that–the wonderful silliness of the flesh, the great leveler. But the film tipped more toward what Jeff calls the “royal psychobabble.” Still, it must have been hard trying to strike the right balance between George/Lionel, the King/Queen, the Church, the rest of the royal family, the Logue family, etc.
Nice touch, having Derek Jacobi play opposite a stuttering head of state. And Archbishop Cosmo? Sounds like a character dreamed up by Russell Brand.
Speaking of the Oscars–the Academy has nominated Hailee Steinfeld in the Best Supporting category. What the hell?
interesting article by hitchens in slate yesterday about the airbrushing of history in the king’s speech. me, i’m deeply suspicious of any film that has to do with plummy english accents and aristocrats/royals UNLESS it’s a ludicrous sword and sandals epic.
Art direction? Do tell? Logue’s apartment (loft, factory space, air hanger) seemed shabby-chic times thirty (who in London lives in rooms so grandly and artfully deconstructed). I guess they were going for a high/low divide, but it did seem all a bit over-determined.
Did you not like Steinfeld’s performance or did you think she should have taken Nicole Kidman’s spot in the best actress race?
Two words: John Hawkes!
I’m a little embarrassed to have watched this, but “Easy A” was thoroughly enjoyable. Just as “Clueless” was a clever contemporary retelling of “Pride and Prejudice”, so “Easy A” offers a high school romantic comedy take on “The Scarlet Letter.” Emma Stone, last seen as the older sister in Zombieland, plays the lead, Olive, who confesses to some sex that she did not in fact have, and so sets off a chain reaction of whispering and accusations that roil her southern California high school. The dialogue is hilariously funny, particularly the lines delivered by Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as Olive’s wildly implausible progressive parents. The Christian kids are skewered, Thomas Hayden Church gets to play the cool English teacher, and Stone spends most of the movie sporting a scarlet A on her outfit du jour. Clever, funny, poignant, recommended.
Don’t be embarrassed. See comment #11.
Oops! I need to catch up on my reading. I guess we agree on every detail.
Red Hill is a straight-up, stow-your-fucking-irony update of the Western, set in the high country somewhere in Australia. (It looked a lot like Western Montana.) The film was shot with a clean, unfussy, yet exact style — every shot and sequence carefully composed. It’s a bit hyperbolic, overshoots its mark a little, but damn it was a dose of unabashed B-movie hooch. Good stuff.
here’s my review of the king’s speech, channeling my inner frisoli: the next king of england stammers? boohoo! fuck him, and the rest of his palace-dwelling, empire-mongering, nazi-sympathizing family!
Your inner frisoli bears a striking resemblance to your outer arnab.
This is not a “watched. liked.”
God, was anybody watching “Downton Abby” on PBS? Yikes. One can only hope three-fourths of the characters die during the war. I mean I understand why Americans would watch it, but how could any Brit possibly not be embarrassed by it’s treacly, old-fashioned reification of class distinctions and unapologetic celebration of aristocratic privilege. Julian Fellowes must be one masochistic dude! Maggie Smith sure knows how to chew the scenery.
Haven’t watched and not entirely sure I’m going to like (actually it sounds like a lot of fun), but the documentary American Grindhouse, which was released in cinemas today, is available for streaming on Netflix. John Landis is one of the directors.
good work, Arnab. but you forgot, fuck the MP academy for its backsliding into slavish “English Quality” worship. In substitution for Colin Firth, I suggest Dieter Laser from The Human Centipede (First Sequence). if you want Nazi’s at least get a real one.
Eugene Jarecki’s HBO documentary Reagan works to deconstruct the former president as mythic, ideological giant without necessarily trampling roughshod over the man. The film reminded me why I naively and ignorantly voted for Reagan in 1980 (in my defense I was eighteen and searching to rebel against something, and the south I lived in was still predominantly Democratic; the media narratives and legitimate crises circling around the Carter administration didn’t help much). But, in addition to telling Reagan’s life-story, the film focuses in on an eight-year period when I truly came of age and began to sort through my political beliefs with greater rigor. Jarecki certainly doesn’t sugar-coat the former president. If anything, he employs little nuggets of irony (music choices, wry juxtapositions of sound and image) which underline the film’s political stance without alienating the right too explicitly. There are many famous talking heads (Schultz, Baker, Ron Reagan, Arthur Laffer, Dan Rather, Edmund Morris, Pat Buchanan, Thomas Frank, Peter Robinson, even the Talking Heads) who wrote about the man or played a major role on one side or the other, but a former military officer continues to appear throughout, and Jarecki’s use of this particular interview really pays off. I will admit it is hard to watch (Reagan’s problematic legacy reverberates so loudly these days), but it is also very well researched, well-crafted and well-financed (lots of wonderful archival footage as well as clever pop culture references). Good stuff.
Cedar Rapids. The perfect blend of heart-warming sentiment and gonad rattling raunch. It shouldn’t work but it does, beautifully. John C. Reilly is hilarious. Anne Heche, Sigourney Weaver, Ed Helms, Isiah Whitlock, Jr. (playing the whitest, black man in America), Alia Shawkat (Maeby from “Arrested Development”) – all really good. I don’t want to oversell it, but I haven’t laughed this much at the movies in ages. Reynolds will hate it.
Rabbit Hole. As far as middlebrow, mourn porn in well-appointed rooms goes, this film is mighty restrained – emotionally moving without being overtly sentimental or mushy. The performances are honest and, for the most part, understated. This is probably due to director John Cameron Mitchell (he of Hedwig and Shortbus). Plus, you know I love Nicole Kidman, and in this film she actually looks her age, which suits her. The plot (David Lindsay-Abaire adapted his Pulitzer Prize-winning play) is probably a little too symmetrical. Diane Wiest is always a treat, and Tammy Blanchard (who I did not know) does some nice work as well. Not for everyone. I cried.
Curious. Is there something about the “dead child” trope in western lit and film that plays into parental anxiety and desire (at least at the level of representation) at the turn of the millennium?
Anybody watching “The Hour” on BBCA? It’s reminiscent of “Mad Men” and Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Great cast (Dominic West, Ben Whishaw, Juliet Stevenson); great “Cold War” atmospherics (tres noir). Set in a BBC, hour-long news show as Britain is set to lose the Suez Canal and Khrushchev runs roughshod over Budapest, the show works to highlight the disappearance of one empire while another struts its stuff. Back in London, a questionable suicide of a notable debutante leads a young journalist to investigate her death, and, of course, mysteries and enigmas ensue (MI6, you say). It seems there may be a Soviet spy at the BBC! Egad! Plus, there’s a love triangle and the obligatory investigation into rigid codes of class-based decorum. Good stuff and well-written.
Attack the Block. A misfit gang of council house teens in south London take on some fugly aliens in this clever, low-budget genre exercise (imagine Mike Leigh mashing up Super 8 and John Carpenter’s The Thing and you get the idea). It’s nowhere near as fun as Shaun of the Dead, and the narrative gets a bit sentimental in the third act, but sharp jabs of really smart social satire keeps the film relevant and definitely worth the effort.
Paul and Your Highness are both films made by fans of genre and people who are friends; heck, The Trip is, too, or so far–I’ve seen just two episodes. But YH is a Sandleresque bore, a punishing distance between whatever Danny McBride and David Gordon Green thought was a hoot and the dreadful slapdash potdream bullshit that made it into the can. Pegg and Frost, on the other hand, keep a tight focus on the small pleasures of character, and its sorta sentimental spin on scifi geeks helping out an actual ET is always pleasant company, even if sometimes you get the sense the friends are having a better time than you. (Kristen Wiig is superb.)
Coogan, Winterbottom, and Brydon are the only filmmakers to really nail the possibilities–every lived-in jab at one another reveals depths of backstory and is more biting, bitter, and moving– not to mention damn funnier–than just about anything I’ve seen this year.
PS I think season 6 of Doctor Who is the best ever made– an utter delight. If anyone hasn’t checked out the show since new Who Matt Smith and showrunner Stephen Moffat came on, go back to ssn 5 and dig in.
I think I posted on Paul way back when it came to theaters. I can’t find the post, though.
I almost never disagree with Mike but here in my household the level of dislike for the Matt Smith incarnation has reached new heights. We have only watched the first of part II of season 6 so far (let’s kill Hitler) and I have to say that I was very disappointed. Set aside the fact that every even remotely plausible time lord rule is violated in that episode, and that the Hitler title is a cheap come-on that is promptly ignored, and that the series is reduced to bringing back River Song every episode because the rest of the cast is so weak, but Matt Smith is just so… annoying. Tennant managed to be funny and eccentric while also conveying that serious stuff was happening (end of the universe, love, that sort of thing). Matt Smith just plays the wacky professor with some silly wordplay. The Doctor Who universe had some sort of internal logic, and even if it was occasionally violated, the violation was acknowledged as such. Moffat seems to have entirely ditched any notion of coherence. Moffat wrote some great episodes within the Russell T. Davies universe, when Davies wrote the series arcs, but he looks lost when he is in sole control.
Paul is crap.
The first 20 minutes are actually good, very good. And I think the fatal error of this film is that Pegg and Frost failed to realize that they do not need a sidekick. Frost is the sidekick. There’s a whiff in this film that the writers know this–that Frost’s character Clive wants to be second banana to Pegg’s Graeme, and that the alien Paul has usurped Clive’s role. But it’s just a very small whiff, and a whiff of some pretty stale, lousy weed.
This film fails badly. At some point, you get the feeling they’re moving along just to get to the next “wink-wink” moment. No one can save this film. Not Not even the magnificent Kristen Wiig. Jane Lynch could have saved the film, but her character is gone once Pegg and Frost find Paul. She makes an awkward and totally baffling, totally pointless reappearance at the end.
Watching this film to its end made me long for the first 20 minutes. Right up to the moment the valet brings out the RV, I’m with them. The second Paul appears, I’m done.
Kudos to Bill Hader and Jane Lynch, who showed up to work.
Two disagreements with me! Fuckers.
I won’t spend much time on Paul; as a person who’s made a pilgrimage to Devil’s Tower, I might have been more inclined to like not just the film but the alien. And there’s certainly a more interesting, knottier film in there without Paul, you’re absolutely right. And seeing it at home liberated me from feeling invested right about when I stopped feeling invested. Still, I think it is utterly genial, and that is no small feat. (It reminds me of lesser Hope & Crosby Road movies–there’s not much more going on than good will and charisma, but that’s okay.)
I utterly disagree with Chris–but we seem to be reenacting a schism also rippling through the whoverse. I tuned in when they rebooted with Eccleston, and I made it through the series, but the combination of the lead’s standoffish anticharm (which was interesting but not really fun) and the rather persistent tendency to take silly things seriously was no fun. The latter continued through what I saw of the Tennant years, which was really about a year. I will admit: Tennant was great fun. But I hated Billie Piper, and more I tended to get frustrated by the tone — I get Moffat’s style, and I think he does the highwire winking-but-also-really-caring without equal. (And I think Smith captures that screwball spirit wonderfully.) I also enjoy his love of puzzlebox narratives, working the series into a corner and then dancing the way out. I suppose it’s worth noting that I also found the central arc of The X-Files to be utter stolid nonsense, while adoring the strange one-offs, most particularly when the show (in the Darin Morgan episodes, for instance: Jose Chung, Clyde Bruckner) seemed about to implode from its own self-consciousness.
The issue for me is not arc vs no arc. Moffat’s seasons have an arc, and in season six that arc almost overwhelms everything else. Season five gave us the rip in time, and season six the death of the Doctor. The strange one-offs are fewer and further in-between that at any time since the reboot with Eccleston. But I do think that the series thrives on a sense that there is some sort of logic to how time works, and Moffat has completely given up on that.
In part, certainly, it is a matter of taste. I grew up with Pertwee and Baker as Doctors, and both hewed much closer to Eccleston and Tennant. Matt Smith reminds me of the dark days of the end of the old series when SylvesterMcCoy was the doctor, kind of a buffoon right up until he saves the world. And I liked Rose and Martha as companions much more than Amy (whose appeal I cannot fathom).
But more than all this, it is simply the construction of the episodes that I find part flimsy, part overwrought. Compare Moffat’s episode “Blink” in the third season, with his two-parter on the stone angels in the fifth season. Blink was, I though, as close to a perfect one-off episode as you could find. The terror of the stone angels was remarkably simple, and their power was to send you to another time, so the episode could be constructed as a puzzle to find the Doctor and Martha. The season five two-parter had to give us Alex Kingston in full “sweetie” mode, an entire army of angels, which now kill and have mental powers. To me that encapsulates what is wrong with the series since Moffat took over. The last episode of the part I of season six has the Doctor beating an entire Cyberman fleet in about 30 seconds because he wants to save Amy. So, why are the Cybermen to be feared? It’s just sloppy. Perhaps Moffat is too busy writing Sherlock Homes episodes to focus.
Do you like the Holmes? Moffat also had a hand in the new Tintin. (He seems to have a career built on old properties–Jekyll, Who, Holmes…)
I should add, though, that however disappointed I have become with DW, nothing can compare to the awfulness of season 4 of Torchwood: Miracle Day. I actually subscribed to Starz for it, and by episode 2 my kids and I watched only in order to then be able to cathartically dissect its decrepitude after each episode.
I haven’t watched the Moffat Holmes. It is on my list, but I’m not yet there.
Thor. Great Saturday morning popcorn movie. I had no idea exactly what was going on at times, but the film didn’t take itself too seriously (was actually warm and funny when it wasn’t being cold and mythological) and Branagh wielded the camera well enough (lots of canted frames). Cate seemed to really enjoy, and Natalie Portman, well, what’s not to like?
Margin Call. Swift and entertaining with fine performances from a wide variety of B-list talent, Margin Call is an apolitical, amoral, Mamet-esque tale that privileges character over economics (in other words, you don’t learn a damn thing about mortgage-backed securities which, in retrospect, makes the whole damn thing rather facile). Furthermore, the folks behind this enterprise seem to want to humanize most of its characters, scapegoating everything onto Jeremy Irons’ angular shoulders (fucking Brits always fucking up everything). Still, Irons seems to relish playing the vulture. Kevin Spacey, on the other hand, is far too sympathetic. His dog is dying. Boo hoo. He has scruples except when he doesn’t. Choose a side J.C. Chandor! Stanley Tucci and Demi Moore have some nice, understated moments. Zachery Quinto’s eyebrows are outstanding! I keed. It’s a slick diversion but in the end rather empty.
I probably felt more of the negativity you express above. The film had all these great ingredients, but it was like a microwaved meal: undercooked here, flaccidly overdone there.
I’ve been surprised to see Margin and Warrior show up on year’s best lists. Like the (more predictable but still unearned) inclusion of Woody Allen’s annual disappointment, these films are so damn flat, but they massage the audience’s ego…
I kept waiting for Margin Call to up the ante and get smarter. Still, I was entertained which was enough. The new Julian Barnes novel (The Sense of an Ending), however, is outstanding. So, there you go . . . Warrior ain’t my cup of tea so I’ll forgo the inevitable. I’m still mildly annoyed that people rally around Midnight in Paris.
Midnight in Paris is not a bad film. In fact, it’s a good one. I’m not effusing, nor am I panning (to do either would be wrong). It’s just a good film. ‘Kay? And it’s not the first “just good” film that people have rallied around.
Why don’t you marry it, you love it so much?
You loooooooooooooooooooooove it.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
anyone in the mood for chili?
I just watched Margin Call and I was also underwhelmed. The strange thing is that it seemed to want to create a morality tale where there was only amorality. Sam (Kevin Spacey) is set up as the guy with the conscience, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why his preferred alternative (hold the toxic assets?) was superior to that of Jeremy Irons. The system was going to collapse anyway. No one stays in their home longer because of Sam. As we all know, movies find it hard to deal with systemic, structural problems; they look for people to blame when, in the realm of finance capital, people are mostly trager (the word Marx used to mean bearers of class relations rather than subjects in their own right) which makes the morality play even less convincing. What were we meant to do with Sam’s dog? Was he burying capitalism, or hope, in the final scene? Inside Job is just far superior on every level.
John, I can’t for the life of me recognize that Woody Allen clip. Chili sounds good. Toro sounds better!
That’s not a Woody Allen clip. It’s footage of a guy being forced to watch Interiors.
I’m probably one of handful that has seen Interiors more than once (maybe four times since its release; maybe more). Geraldine Page is phenomenal. The cinematography is beautifully chilly. Sure, its a Bergman knock-off . . . but I dig it.
Why don’t you marry it, you love it so much?
You loooooooooooooove it.
fire in babylon. a documentary about one of the greatest sports teams ever: clive lloyd’s west indies. the trailer for the film is thrilling, but the film itself is a little better than pedestrian. thankfully, the subject matter is so good, and most of the cricket shown so pulse-quickening that it rises above the film-maker’s (and probably the budget’s) limitations. this needed to be an hour longer, and it needed to incorporate a more sophisticated take on the political/cultural context of the caribbean, as well as more voices of non-west indian cricketers–but if you (and by you, i mean chris) followed cricket in the late 70s and 80s you will be taken back to those moments each summer/fall when you knew that there was no hope for your team when viv swaggered out to the pitch or when those fast bowlers commenced their run-ups. at least the indian team never imported a south african captain who made the error of promising to make the black team grovel.
source code is a source of minor pleasures. interesting for the first 20 minutes, inoffensive after that. on the whole, it is neither fish nor fowl: it doesn’t try to be a whiz-bang thriller, nor does it seem interested in exploring the meta/quantum physical implications of the unexplained bit of technology at the heart of the plot. but it has the grace of being only 93 minutes long. duncan jones is the director for hire here.
in the watched/tolerated category: the eagle, starring channing tatum (who is, by the way, the answer to the question, what would happen if you made josh hartnett even more of a douche?). this movie is a mess. at 93 minutes it could have been decent, but it is closer to 120 minutes. it seems to gesture vaguely in the direction of interesting politics, but there’s nothing worth talking about there. the roman empire was an empire, and they did some bad things, but some of the people they did bad things to were even worse, and at any rate one of the not so bad people they did bad things to forgives this one roman and becomes his bff. and there’s a lot of running while being chased by brutal savages, but, alas, no being chased by a jaguar.
Chronicle. This is a clever mash-up of a number of genre staples (superhero origin stories, found footage flicks, Sundance indies about sensitive teens living in a cruel world, sci-fi thrillers, etc.). The script feels fresh and inventive, both funny and scary, taking unexpected, truly surprising turns and investing in its characters with an unusual display of psychological depth. I don’t want to overpraise its charms and thrills – it’s not perfect – but it really is entertaining and surprisingly moving. Director Josh Trank gets some really nice performances out of his teen leads. Dane DeHaan, who was excellent as the angry, adopted teen on HBO’s “In Treatment” a couple of years ago, makes strong, emotionally resonant choices, and Michael B. Jordan, who was memorable in the final two seasons of “Friday Night Lights” is also very good.