Warning: This Film Attracts Cretins

So when I went to see Paranormal Activity 2 at 6:45 on a Friday night, I knew my sister and I were in for a contentious, highly attended showing with all manner of lowlifes - teenage boys who wear basketball shorts with their SEC haircuts and their girlie pals who giggle and squawk and go to the restrooms in pairs. 
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I knew what we were in for, was prepared to face it and yet, I was still caught off guard by one of the the most riotous, disruptive and disrespectful crowds I've ever sat and watched a movie with. 
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One has to expect a certain amount of audience participation with these late-night horror films, but loud talking and ironic jeers and screams is unacceptable anywhere - I wouldn't put up with it in a private setting with people I know and like. 
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But what are you gonna do when over half of the audience is misbehaving? Usually, if there is a small gaggle of abusers you can give 'em the death stare or ask them to be quiet or simply move,  but in this case, you're at their mercy, they win - you have to sit back and take it.

Short Take: Paranormal Activity 2 (2010)

I saw Tod Williams' Paranormal Activity 2 last Friday and I found it creepy and effective just like the first, but more in a "been there, done that" sort of way. 
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It's shot and composed very much in the spirit of the original, takes its time getting to the meat of things and throws a few wrinkles in for good measure, but if you're asking me, it doesn't shake things up enough and lives firmly in the shadow of its predecessor for the entirety.
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Doors creak open, Google searches are made and all manner of things go bump in the night, but with the exception of those pesky kitchen drawers, there isn't a trick up its sleeve that skews from the realm of predictability. 
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With Oren Peli's micro-budgeted original, the strange, paranormal occurrences were frighteningly real and yet obscure, occasionally blurring the line between night-lensed mockumentary and startling lost footage. It was a discovery, an effective flash in the pan - here, it hardly makes a spark. [C]

Review: Catfish (2010)

It's funny how certain years bring about trends in the industry - like the outburst of female-directed films last year and the subject of the Iraq War in 2007 - and this year, it's all about social media, or in particular, Facebook. 
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David Fincher's The Social Network, released three weeks ago, is a minor masterwork about a social outcast who invents his own form of communication and socialization to the point where he, quite ironically, cuts himself off from the only true friendship he ever had. 
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In Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost's Catfish, a supposed documentary examining the hazardous pitfalls of online identity, the cautionary mood of a culture devolving towards keypad communication and startling cyberspace reinvention continues further into the realm of psychological splintering and vicarious fantasy. 
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To the film's credit (and ultimate disbelief), it's an oddly spooky backwoods mystery that molds and reveals itself to be a story of a tragic love unfulfilled and unfounded and a deeply complex study of preservation through virtual escape.
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In fact, the film's final fifteen minutes are so staggeringly (and surprisingly) affecting that questions of its authenticity are completely viable, given the poetic punctuations and the goldmine of cinematic exploitation that Angela, the mysterious online contact, provides.
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The filmmakers may refute any accusations of falsehood they want, but the validity of the work is ultimately irrelevant as - either truth or fiction - this is a scary, timely tale of 21st century miscommunication that, like its title implies, is meant to preserve our instincts and sensory antennae. [B+]

50 States, 50 Movies

This Film.com feature, which labels the most iconic film from each state is a pretty brilliant idea, but the execution is too modernly skewed. 
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There are the slam dunks, Gone With the Wind - Georgia, The Wizard of Oz - Kansas, Rocky - Pennsylvania, etc, but picking There Will Be Blood for Texas doesn't work for me since anyone who loves that film as much as I do knows that it's set in California, yet shot in Marfa, Texas (the same location as No Country for Old Men, which actually - you know - takes place there.)
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The Town for Massachusetts? No thanks. Mulholland Drive for California makes sense and it's a great film, but I think Zodiac, with that stunning digital cinematography, bears the fabric of the state more convincingly. And there's no question that I'd take Stakeout over Sleepless in Seattle, but that's just me. 

A One-Legged Dog

Every aspect of Paramount's marketing campaign for David O. Russell's The Fighter (12.10) appears too glossy and inspirational in a friendly, affable kind of way. The trailer looks just okay and this one-sheet is its equal. 
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The Fighter, on paper, sounded like a gritty handheld The Wrestler with the usual self-destruction and slumming and family issues, but to this point, aside from a probable standout performance from Christian Bale, this looks more like a soft-serve Ron Howard thing. 

Dead and Gone

It's pretty sad, although not altogether shocking, that Anton Corbijn's The American is just going to wither and die this fall like that poor, hapless donkey from Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar - if it hasn't gone to pasture and laid down already.

I really liked it when I saw it back at the beginning of last month, but the film (unsurprisingly) didn't catch on at the box-office (turning a profit at $35 million domestically, but hardly anything to brag about) and divided critics sharply as something either glacially drab or fashionably European.

It's no secret that the film feels like it came from a different time and place, like something from that Bernardo Bertolluci or Jean-Pierre Melville mold where men are quiet, lonely, honorable fools who go about their business, wear a nice suit and then wallow in their own shallow existence and inevitable fate. 

The American is certainly one of the best 2 or 3 films of the fall and George Clooney's performance is wonderfully introverted and slick a la Alain Delon, yet its fate is sealed already as a come and gone, thanks for playing blip on the radar - an early casualty.

Review: The Art of the Steal (2010)

Don Argott's The Art of the Steal is a solid, instantly engrossing doc about the century-spanning legal battle over the most valuable and exclusive private art collection in the world, The Barns Collection in Merion, Pennsylvania. 

The film lays the groundwork very early on that Albert C. Barnes was contemptuous of the commercial art world and sought to keep his private collection (valued today at $25 billion) exclusive to students and artists and out of the hands of the city councils and profiteering trusts, including (and centered around) the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

It's a long-winded, facts-driven story of slow, greedy political deception that takes almost a hundred years to finally set into motion and the film captures that gradual, underhanded disloyalty, if not expertly, than skillfully at the very least.

Its objectivity can certainly be called into question as the filmmakers and the interviewees soon begin to feel smugly superior in their narrow quest for exclusivity and anti-commercialism. Nevertheless, its depiction of political and legal deceit is startlingly potent and its portrait of public injustice difficult to dismiss. [B]