FILM REVIEWS: Now You See Me

Do you think that hypnotism is possible by merely snapping your fingers in someone’s face? Will you swallow a plot that calls for a man to hire a team of magicians to rob banks to avenge his father’s death? Can you put up with the most halfheartedly written dialogue know to man, coupled with some of the most half-assed performances ever put to film? If so, Now You See Me is the movie for you! It’s been a while since I’ve been this disappointed by a movie, but this enormous piece of shit delivers with bland characters and an overly convoluted plot that I really couldn’t care less about. God, this movie is ass.

Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Dave Franco, and Isla Fisher as four magicians who are given an express set of instructions to organize a series of three robberies over the course of a long career. Even though they have no idea who gave them the instructions, they proceed accordingly... because fuck logic. In their first performance, they teleport a French guy to a vault, where he siphons all the money back to the audience. But of course this isn’t possible, so cue Morgan Freeman coming in to do what he does best: WORDY EXPOSITION! He debases their magic, and then tells the police that they robbed the bank long beforehand to play the trick. So why weren’t they arrested or charged with anything? Eisenberg tells the police that if they arrest him, they will be admitting that magic exists. But how in the fuck does that make sense? His magic had already been proven false! The facts show that he robbed the bank! The proof, as they say, is in the motherfucking pudding!

But for whatever reason (Plotline), the lame police agent played by Mark Ruffalo lets the four of them go, and they continue to rob people using ‘magic.’ All of their actual robberies are debased by Freeman, but their stunts aren’t, and those are usually the most interesting thing in the movie. How does Isla Fisher float in a bubble across the audience? How is Woody Harrelson able to hypnotize people merely by snapping his fingers? How is it remotely feasible to pick one random guy, follow him around while planting subliminal messages in his head, and ensure that he ends up seeing your magic show on a certain day at a certain time? None of this makes an ounce of sense, but the movie doesn’t even try to explain why any of these things are happening. At the end of the day, the film owes most of its magic to the power of confusing camerawork to keep the audience distracted, not anything to do with the actual plot. In this sense, the movie is even trickier than the characters it’s about. Which is not necessarily a good thing.

The characters aren’t even remotely believable, and their dialogue is consistently stilted and dull. The only thing they have going for them are their magic tricks, but when the magic is so clearly CGI, and is not even remotely possible, the audience couldn’t care less. None of the characters interact in realistic ways, and when they do they are so stereotyped it hurts. Morgan Freeman is always the wise old man, Michael Caine is a rich British guy, and Mark Ruffalo’s police chief doesn’t know what the fuck is going on (just like every other policeman in every movie ever).

But Now You See Me’s biggest insult is its final plot twist (which I’m going to spoil for you so that you don’t have to actually sit through the movie). In the end, it turns out that Mark Ruffalo was using the four magicians to set up Morgan Freeman all along, in order to avenge his father... or something. The movie insults the audience’s intelligence on astronomical levels here. It expects us to buy that Ruffalo could possibly have conjured up this ridiculously convoluted plot to leave Freeman in ruins and make off with a buttload of cash. But not once does his character ever allude to that. I’m fine with plot twists, but there isn’t a single moment throughout the entire movie that makes you think that his character’s twist is remotely plausible. It should have at least been hinted at so that the audience’s reaction would have been “WOW” instead of “Yeah, thaaaat’s fucking ridiculous.”

Final Score for Now You See Me: 3/10 stars. The effects are cool and the story is fine, but this is really one of the year’s guiltiest pleasures. None of this movie makes even the slightest amount of sense, and if you start to think for even a second about the proceedings, you will realize how lame it all is. None of the characters act the way they should, and every part of their conversations are only for serving the plot. An associate of mine, Jay Cutler, recently pointed out that small talk is one of the things that makes movie dialogue great. But there is absolutely no small talk in Now You See Me; literally every single line someone speaks is used later for the service of unbelievably asinine plot twists. For instance, if you bother looking for a second and aren’t distracted by the pretty lights, you’ll notice that the last performance that the four magicians give is about five minutes long. It’s all concocted, it’s all bland, and the movie feels like it came off an assembly line. And at the end of the day... it did.

HORROR WEEK: The Blair Witch Project

If running around in the woods for an hour and a half is scary to you, you’re scared pretty easily. The Blair Witch Project, the movie that started the found-footage horror genre, may be inventive, but there’s something that’s inherently not frightening about a pile of rocks sitting in the woods. While movies like Paranormal Activity were able to bend the audience’s perception of reality enough to be truly frightening, it’s very difficult to watch The Blair Witch Project and shake the feeling that it’s just a movie about three idiots with a $400 camera who went camping. And yes... it’s as bad as it sounds.

Starring three nameless actors, The Blair Witch Project is the film that supposedly revolutionized the horror genre with low-budget effects and a documentary format. I have a lot of respect for movies that start trends, but the thing is, the trend that this movie started sucks. Found-footage has been done to the death, and nowadays films of its ilk have enormous budgets and insane special effects, making it impossible for this generic original to compete. I admire it for not resorting to jump scares, and attempting to keep up the suspense consistently for 90 minutes, but the result isn’t scary-- it’s terribly boring.

Not much can be said about a movie like this, because there isn’t much to it. It’s just an overload of shaky cam, bad dialogue, and classic horror movie decision-making. “Hey, I have a map. Let’s throw it in the river! What a hilarious prank!” People don’t act like this in real life, so why should they in movies? I don’t ask that all movies directly parallel reality, but people should still act like people, and they should still make decisions based on logic and rationale. And sorry if I can’t imagine a situation where this happens, but I don’t see someone charging out into the woods, dragging along a couple of unqualified morons, to film a documentary on something as nonsensical as the “Blair Witch.”

I watched this movie at 10:00 at night, in the quiet of my room, and I wasn’t remotely frightened by a moment of it. If you’re willing to allow yourself to be immersed in the ludicrous world the movie creates, then I’m sure you’ll be scared. But for the viewers who actually have taste, and don’t find close-up shots of someone’s runny nose to be scary, this is not a good movie by any standard. The most frightening moment comes when the characters stumble across a grouping of human-shaped effigies hanging from the trees. But even here, I couldn’t shake this lingering thought in the back of my mind: “Wow, the budget on this movie must have been ten bucks.” Not to say that good movies require big budgets-- far from it. But to have a certain level of quality, a certain amount of money must be invested in the final product. And here, it felt like they grabbed three people off the street and said “Do you want to be in a movie?” Then they got some interns to set up rocks in little piles, and WHAMMO! A horror classic!

No effort was put into this movie, so I’m not going to put any more into my review. Final Score for The Blair Bitch Project: 2/10 stars (official anus-of-cinema seal of approval)! The acting is bad, the characters are dumb, and there’s not one moment where you are emotionally invested in the movie whatsoever. The iconic line in this movie, “I’m so scared,” is monumentally misguided. Sure, you’re scared! Show us instead of tell us! Anyway, this movie isn’t watchable even as a timewaster. If you want to get the same effect, take a cheap camera from Best Buy, then flush it down the toilet. After a week, go down to the sewers, recover its memory chip, and watch the video it took. It’ll probably be better than this piece of shit.

HORROR WEEK: Final Destination

Ah, yet another fine premise hindered by horrible execution. Final Destination, the film that spawned four subsequent installments, may be dumb, but it’s dumb fun nonetheless. Sure, it’s basically no different than thousands of other young adult movies about kids who have amazing powers (Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, etc), but Destination seems to understand why movies like those are so bad, and even play off of them a little. It’s not a spoof, but parts of it are so ludicrous and hilariously over-the-top, it’s hard not to laugh.

Final Destination stars a plethora of child actors (most of whom will be recognized by any X-Files aficionados out there) as a group of French class students. While en route to Paris for a school trip, a student named Alex has a prophetic vision that the plane they are on will crash, causing him to leap out of his seat, cause a panic, and get off the plane with a few of his classmates. Of course, as it always is in these kinds of movies, Alex is right and the plane blows up on takeoff.

This is an epic premise, and gives way to an astoundingly awesome series of events that pits Alex against the FBI, who clearly think the circumstances are a bit suspect. It’s got a little bit of that ‘question authority’ factor that I (as a teenager) enjoy so much in movies. But a lot of the acting is pretty bad, especially from the main characters. It’s not like you’re supposed to really take the movie seriously, but most of the characters overemphasize their dialogue, making the whole thing feel more like an MTV video than a serious horror movie (which it isn’t). This is pretty much the horror equivalent of a Michael Bay movie: Character development is virtually nonexistent, but for clean and unbridled craziness, this is what you want.

The deaths themselves are amazingly ludicrous, to the point of outright slapstick humor. I never thought I’d laugh out loud at a woman being impaled by a set of kitchen knives, but I definitely did here. Sadly, this was not really the filmmaker’s intent, because the movie is SUPPOSED to be truly scary. However, it’s hard to be terrified when you’re watching a guy slip on toilet water, fall into his shower, and get strangled by the shower curtain. Not to mention a girl who walks into the street, says “You can all drop dead,” and then gets hit by a bus. Shock humor is fun, and this movie utilizes it to no end. By the time the final sequence rolls around (which involves a clothesline and lightning), you’re watching a movie so gleefully ridiculous you can’t help but enjoy it.

But at its core, Final Destination is really nothing more than an empty, fluffy film that just so happens to have an intriguing premise. There’s not much else that sets it apart from the pack, no memorable scenes, bad acting, bad dialogue, and some pretty dumb sequences. It pains me to say this, because I actually had fun watching it, but it’s nothing more than nonsensical gore and asinine plot points. Its central premise relies on the characters finding messages that death itself sends them, but why does death have a plan OR pattern, and if it did, why would it share it with them? Cheating death is one thing. Cheating the audience, though... that’s the anus of cinema.

Final Score for Final Destination: 4/10 stars. Much like Kick-Ass, Pacific Rim, and Event Horizon, this is an immensely entertaining movie to watch, and the perfect bargain-buy horror movie rental for a slow weekend. Sure, it’s filled with obnoxious characters and confusing death sequences, but that’s what movies like this are made for: Hilarious in-home commentary. It’s by no means a good movie. However, for outside-the-box concepts and chaotic gore, there’s no better place to turn to.

HORROR WEEK: Paranormal Activity

When something happens five times, is it still technically classified as “paranormal?” Well, no matter whether it’s original or not, it’s still pretty fucking scary. After the enormous success of The Blair Witch Project, directors everywhere decided that the next frontier of horror lay in the world of found-footage films. Some were shoddy reproductions of the original-- in fact, all of them were. But some of them did it right. Paranormal Activity is one of those special few which actually put some effort into their scares, story, and effects, making it one of the best horror movies of the past decade. But remember... that’s not saying much.

Following in the footsteps of classic horror movies such as The Exorcist, Paranormal Activity is about a malevolent demon that stalks and haunts a girl named Katie and (after she moves in with him) her boyfriend Micah. This premise is far from original, but wonders are done with it. Not many movies are actually capable of making a moving door scary. There’s a lot of scenes in the movie where literally nothing is happening at all, yet the suspense and terror is no less palpable. Sure, there are jump scares, which I regard as being the lowest form of horror, seeing as they’re a cheap and easy way to scare the viewer. But even in between the sudden noises and things that go bump in the night, the movie never lets up the gut-wrenching suspense.

Paranormal Activity is famous for its camera format, in which it uses a typical video camera to tape the events as if it were being filmed by an amateur. However, this concept (as it always does) leads to a lot of problems. Although it does feel more realistic, it also forces the hand of the scriptwriters to write in reasons for the video camera to be present at all times. The result are thousands of throwaway “Put away your stupid camera” lines, which feel increasingly repetitive and out of place. You’d think that eventually, the guy would have the sense to... I don’t know... PUT THE STUPID CAMERA AWAY. Also, it’s pretty easy to tell right from the get-go that none of the cameras used are actually $400 camcorders-- In fact, they’re often some heavy-duty shit. The zoom-ins, framing, and quality are just too precise to be a cheap camera from Best Buy, as the filmmakers purport it to be.

The acting isn’t much to speak of, but then again, nobody really cares about acting in a horror movie. Micah’s character mostly consists of being aloof and self-centered, which really is nothing new to the genre. There’s always the skeptical character who, of course, is eventually proven wrong as the supernatural occurrences become more numerous and frightening. Meanwhile, Katie is pretty generic as well, and all she really has to do throughout the movie is yell “MICAH MICAH I’M SCARED, MICAH OH PLEASE MICAH COME BACK TO BED MICAH.” Sure, looking terrified is a big part of acting in a horror movie. But I really can’t commend the performance of someone who is given so little to work with.

But Paranormal Activity is really at its best when presenting the audience with some of the simplest scares ever crafted. There are extended shots of a door moving, a sheet rustling, footsteps, and a slightly ajar attic door. And I’m not going to lie-- it’s not very involving. However, once you turn off the movie and go to bed, and start hearing strange noises outside... you won’t be able to control the terror. I can’t say much for Paranormal Activity as a filmmaking achievement, but when a movie’s main plot point is the scariness of randomly moving household objects, and it succeeds in scaring the crap out of the viewer, you have to admit that it has some merit.

Final Score for Paranormal Activity: 6/10 stars. It’s pulse-pounding, scary, and involving entertainment, and even though the camerawork is shoddy, the fade-outs are lame, the dialogue is bad, and the acting is even worse, I can’t deny the fact that it actually scared me a bit. And since that’s the one goal of horror movies, well, mission accomplished. It does what it sets out to do-- scare the pants off of people using a minimal budget and random noises. There are plenty of cliches (people being dragged down the hallway is a classic horror effect), but demonic possession never gets old. However, I don’t intend on watching the sequels, as the creators undoubtedly used the ideas that weren’t good enough for the original in the subsequent installments. It’s not that the series is bad... it’s just inevitably repetitive. They should have left it off on a high note and kept the activities paranormal.

HORROR WEEK: Scream

When directors take a stab (pun intended) at the horror genre, certain things should be expected of them. Firstly, a little creativity must be involved in the making of the movie, as horror fans have gotten tired of seeing the same old plot played out over and over again. Secondly, attention should be paid to the actors and dialogue, two things that are often neglected in the genre. And finally, the deaths need to be fun. It pains me to say that Wes Craven, the hit-and-miss director who has in the past given us A Nightmare on Elm Street and Deadly Friend, hits only one of those high points with the derivative and boring Scream.

Retelling the classic (or as I like to call it, recycled) story of the small community terrorized by a serial killer, Scream stars Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, a teenager whose friends begin dropping like flies after a mysterious killer surfaces in her town. After doing in Drew Barrymore in an iconic sequence, the killer (known as Ghostface) goes after Sidney. Now, here’s the thing: Rotten Tomatoes calls this movie a comedy, but there’s nothing funny in it. Sure, there are plenty of cute nods to horror fans, with references to Halloween and some of Craven’s own films, but there’s nothing about a girl being hung from a tree in front of her parents and disemboweled that one can really find humorous. Sorry-- but the movie just isn’t funny. In fact, I don’t even know if that was its intent.

What is probably Scream’s greatest asset soon becomes its worst affliction, as the in-jokes with slasher fans become so numerous and tongue-in-cheek, the casual viewer will want to slit their wrists. The horror genre has become so self-referencing and self-deprecating, it’s nearly impossible to take seriously. Even Scream, which some call a spoof, was in turn spoofed by the even less entertaining Scary Movie. It’s a never-ending cycle of stupidity, emphasized by franchise-blending movies such as Freddy VS Jason. It’s almost as if the genre knows how dumb it’s become, and has decided to accept its fate and live out the rest of its decidedly numbered days as an ever-spinning wheel of bad pop culture references. What a disappointment.

The characters in this film, as if it needed to be said, are one-dimensional and utterly uninvolving. Clearly, this was intentional, as nobody creates characters this badly without knowing what they’re doing (unless they’re Tommy Wiseau). But contrary to popular belief, when you make a crap movie and you KNOW that it’s crap, that doesn’t make it any more of an ‘art form.’ It’s still crap. Perhaps slightly more clean-cut, but crap nonetheless. The dialogue is atrocious, stilted, and annoying. And even the camerawork, which features a ‘spooky’ atmospheric that seems to bend the shape of the lens, is distracting and uninventive. This movie isn’t merely conventional-- it’s aggressively average.

And yes, horror fans, before you lose your minds over my lack of respect for this movie, I understand that it’s supposed to be self-referencing, unimaginative, and an affectionate look back on teen exploitation flicks of old. It holds such campy, bad horror in reverence. But here’s my problem-- Why couldn’t it revere the GOOD ones? Instead of reusing every single horror cliche in the book, why couldn’t Craven (a man who has proven himself time and time again to be very creative with the genre) think of something new to bring to the table other than this lackluster and banal exercise in dreary camp? How depressing.

But for all its flaws, Scream does deliver some good scares, some ridiculously over-the-top deaths (one even involves a garage door), and a damn good plot twist at the end. Although it’s not good by any means, the movie still was able to cohere a story that should keep less demanding horror fans watching. And although the dialogue is bad, the acting is worse, and the whole thing is one big amalgam of ideas stolen from other, better films... it’s still a far better movie than Friday the 13th.

Final Score for Scream: 3/10 stars. This is pretty lenient, but I suppose that I had a fun time with the film at the end of the day. If you’re willing to set aside more interesting horror movies for a while, turn off your brain, and watch something with absolutely no redeeming qualities other than pure and unbridled entertainment value, you won’t be disappointed. I just hope that this obnoxious exercise in pop crap is just a momentary detour from the genre. Because as the number of horror films I see for horror week gets higher... so do my standards.

FILM REVIEWS: Prisoners

If there’s any moral to the story of Prisoners, it’s that a bad ending can absolutely destroy an otherwise great movie. If you’ve heard anything about the final twist of this film, you have probably heard that (in short) it sucks. But Prisoners represents one of the biggest challenges in making a movie. After building up consistent suspense throughout, how do you end your film? Other movies have squandered their potential with flimsy and poorly-constructed final acts, but few have been as good up until that point as Prisoners. In fact, if it weren’t for that last twenty minutes, this would easily be my favorite film of the year. What a disappointment.

Prisoners is a film about how a person, under enough emotional strain, is capable of doing horrible things for the betterment of his family. This is a theme that seems to be popular nowadays, with the great TV series Breaking Bad coming to a close, and Luc Besson’s Taken slowly becoming a franchise. Stories of men who do whatever it takes to provide for or defend the ones close to them resonate powerfully with a wide audience, as most people are easily sucked in by an everyman who, when put in an unusual situation, must do whatever it takes or pay the price. However, Prisoners and Breaking Bad go a little deeper than most, as they show the initially sympathetic main character’s slow and gut-wrenching spiral into insanity and/or evil, all the while daring the audience to continue rooting for him. As the mistakes and evil deeds of the lead character pile up, the audience must then question their own morals and how far they are willing to follow the character into the dark.

This phenomenon is incredibly powerful, and most movies that attempt to make the audience look within themselves deserve immense praise. If only Prisoners had done it a bit better. Hugh Jackman and Cuba Gooding Jr. star as the fathers of two girls who go missing on a rainy day in suburban Appalachia. The only lead is an RV (Walt and Jesse’s, maybe?) that was parked outside the house and vanished with the girls. A detective (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds the RV and arrests its only occupant: A mentally handicapped man played by Paul Dano. Dano steals the show among some seriously accomplished actors, and that’s saying a lot. He works with society’s inherent mistrust of the mentally ill, and Hugh Jackman’s violent reactions to his complacency are pretty shocking.

Jackman kidnaps Dano, brings him to an abandoned building, and torments him in various brutal ways in order to discover where his daughter is. As his methods of torture become more and more visceral and cringe-inducing, the audience is forced to wonder whether or not Jackman is right. Because even though all the evidence points to his claim, it’s impossible to think that his inhuman cruelty to Dano is somehow defensible. I refuse to spoil this aspect of the film, as it forces the audience to choose a side-- Are Jackman’s actions justified or reprehensible? The choice that the viewer makes speaks more about his perception than it does the movie. It’s incredibly amoral, but it gets the point across.

However, as I don’t want to spoil this film, I can’t reveal the twist ending. But I can reveal PART of it. So, the person doing the kidnapping (Dano or not) did it because he/she wanted to “Wage a war with God” for the loss of his/her son/daughter/nephew/niece/uncle/aunt/father/mother (just trying to cover everything here, people, it’s not easy to avoid spoilers). It seemed like a massive letdown that catered to people who wanted to be let off the hook for the cognitive dissonance brought up in the previous paragraph. Also, it smacked a little too much of a stereotypical horror movie-style cliched ending. I’m sure that the director had a big vision for the end of this movie, but I’m also sure that it got lost somewhere along the way.

The acting, fortunately, is enough to hold up the flimsy plot. Jackman makes an epic transformation from an average redneck father into a soulless madman hell-bent on the preservation of his family and the integrity of his position as the head of the household. Gyllenhaal, meanwhile, is just as good as he’s been in some of his other best movies, from Donnie Darko to Source Code. He has a huge amount of range as an actor, and he delivers a great performance here as the voice of reason and moral center of the movie. If it weren’t for his grounding performance, the film would probably feel unrealistic and impossible to connect with, as all the other characters are so over-the-top and unrelatable. But fortunately, he creates a character who is not only easy to relate to, but extremely well-written.

Final Score for Prisoners: 8/10 stars. It’s well-written, well-acted, and will have you gripping the edge of your seat even as the credits roll. It’s definitely not perfect, but it certainly outperforms a lot of the emotionless, unoriginal movies masquerading as dramas that have come out recently. In a year that has been polluted by special effects extravaganzas, shitty sequels, and horribly pretentious indie dramas, Prisoners and films like it are the saving grace. I’ll gladly take a great showcase for Jackman, Gyllenhaal, and Dano if it means that I have to suffer through the occasional Movie 43.