Paranormal Activity 3 is the third installation in a film franchise that up to now I’ve really enjoyed. I’ve previously reviewed Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2 on pretty positive notes. Like The Blair Witch Project, which scared the crap out of my friends and I in the 90′s, the Paranormal Activity series has been pretty pioneering in its creation of thrills and chills.
The third installation, however, makes it clear that the premise has worn itself absolutely thin.
Ah, the 2011 list. For a hack of a blogger like myself it’s my once-a-year bread and butter. This year instead of separating music, movies, and television I’ve decided to produce a comprehensive list and lump it all together. Hold onto your hats, and enjoy.
Favourite Films of 2011
I had a quick look around because I was curious and it seems like Tree of Life is topping everyone’s lists this year. We have it in the queue but haven’t got around to watching it yet. I’m curious now though and I wonder if it would change things if I were to watch it first.
The curious bit, however, about the two films that did make my list is that both feature the unmatched Paul Giamatti as the leading actor. This wasn’t intentional but when I looked at everything I’d watched this year and boiled it down to just a couple of my favourites… Do I have a particular bias towards anything that Paul Giamatti does? Perhaps. Is he undoubtedly the best actor working in Hollywood right now? Yes, sir.
Barney’s Version
Barney’s Version is a brilliant take on the novel by Canadian literary heavyweight Mordecai Richler. I remembering having to read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in my O.A.C. (Grade 13) English class. I probably only understood about a third of what I read at the time but I can certainly appreciate a heavily nuanced and deeply moving plot a lot more now that I’m older. Barney’s Version is a movie about love, marriage, family, and memory. It’s wonderfully-acted (duh), well-written (duh), and unfolds itself in a fantastically pleasing fashion distilling all the very best parts of a well-developed Woody Allen movie. Complicated, comedic, and charming sums it up pretty well too.
Win Win
Win Win follows in the same genre of comedy as another of my all-time favourite movies Lars and the Real Girl. I’ll sum it up like this: Small town, quirky characters, social conundrums, and the kind of plot that sometimes seems like something you couldn’t make up if you tried. Like Lars, we’re treated to ninety minutes of some truly great and wholly surreal story-telling about people, a place, and a number of situations we’d never even thought about before. In this film, Giamatti plays and small-time lawyer and high-school wrestling coach as if he were born for the role.
Win Win is a movie about a small-town lawyer who coaches a high school wrestling team. It’s about an old man in a retirement home, his grandson, and his wayward mother. It’s about relationships, how they begin and how they end, how they break down and evolve, and the consequences of our actions. It’s a creative and inventive story, full of the same kind of deep humour that packed a movie like Lars and the Real Girl or The Family Stone. It packs a similar moral punch, too.
It struck me, after unintentionally watching two very similar films, to do a themed review. I’m calling this Summer Films in Small Spaces; these are two excellent movies to watch this summer—popcorn thrillers—dealing with very small, cramped, and confined spaces.
Back in 1988 a man named Jack Rebney and a crew of amateur filmmakers were under contract with Winnebago Industries to make an industrial promo film for Winnebago salesman to use across the country. The infomercial was filmed over the course of a dozen days, in the heat of the summer, in the middle of Iowa. Rebney, being a seasoned broadcaster whose career included two stints with CBS, quickly lost patience battling the scorching heat, the vexatious fly population, and his bumbling production crew. The result of Jack’s lost patience? The famous Winnebago Man outtakes reel. Outtakes peppered with so much swearing and so many breakdowns and brilliant catch phrases that it earned Rebney the title “The World’s Angriest Man” and became, arguably, the first viral video (originally passes around on VHS tapes).
Winnebago Man, the 2009 documentary, is the quest of one filmmaker, Ben Steinbauer, to track Rebney down and find out exactly what made him so angry. The resulting film is brilliant.
Steinbauer, while annoying and vexatious himself at times, hires a private detective to find Rebney and from there we begin an emotional, mysterious, and humorous adventure into the foothills of Northern California. Without spoiling too much I can tell you that this film packs a wonderful story, has a very good pace, and if you like human interest dramas about truly interesting people than you’ll enjoy this film. In fact, after watching it I thought how interesting it would be to see more of these “Where Are They Now” videos about former YouTube stars—those, of course, who didn’t intend to achieve stardom.
All in all, if you like documentaries, or even if you can mildly tolerate them, this is a great summer film to spend an afternoon or evening with. Oh, and it has a lot of swears.
Last year, Paranormal Activity took the box office by storm. Shot for a staggeringly low $15,000 the movie quickly became the highest grossing film of all time, in terms of return on investment. The popularity was due, in part, to a pretty successful viral marketing campaign using Twitter and Facebook.
Paranormal Activity 2 did it again, according to Wikipedia, breaking box office records for the highest grossing opening for an R-rated movie—beating out Watchmen. This, again, with relatively little to no traditional marketing or promotion.
If you didn’t see the first installment what you need to know about the franchise is this: the movies follow the lives of ordinary people who are being tormented by a ghost—an evil spirit—and is filmed in a reality-TV, first-person kind of perspective. In the first movie, it was shot largely by one of the lead characters who captured the poltergeist activity on an HD video camera, sometimes hand held, and during the night, on a tripod using nightshot. This perspective, in the first film, lent to the creepy, restrictive atmosphere of the whole thing and like The Blair Witch Project before it, served to really scare the heck out of viewers.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get around to reviewing all of this year’s Oscar picks even though Maria and I were able to get through watching most of them. Still, since we’ve seen lots, I can at least make some predictions and ruminations about this year’s awards. I’ll skip categories that I haven’t seen enough of the films to weigh in on.
Best Actor in a Leading Role
Colin Firth for The King’s Speech
Maria and I were never able to see Bitiful, which the always brilliant Javier Bardem is nominated for, but we’ve heard that he was really good. Still, I’d find it very hard to believe that his performance was better than Colin Firth in The King’s Speech. Firth absolutely lived his role as the stammering reluctant King of England. Firth became the awkward, nervous, bleary-eyed King George using his entire body, in scenes that made me cringe. I loved even the way he carried himself, so unsure, so scared of everything. Throughout the film too, I thought his transformation was subtle and believable.
Compared to Jeff Bridges in True Grit—who was hilarious but fairly run-of-the-mill—and Jesse Eisenberg—who was pretty one-dimensional—Firth is the clear stand-out choice. His character was complex, incredibly complex, and his interpretation is absolutely brilliant.
Best Actress in a Leading Role
Natalie Portman in Black Swan
I admit I’m at a bit of a disadvantage in this category having only seen Black Swan and Winter’s Bone. I’ll tell you what though, if Portman doesn’t win I would be incredibly surprised. Portman’s otherworldly transformation as the lead dancer in her company’s production of Swan Lake has to be the best performance by an actress for 2010. Her madness was subtle. Her take on the character was very simple, but I think that just lent to an even more frightening performance: she appeared, on the surface, to be a simple character but then layer upon layer begin to, literally, peel away. I think this will be Portman’s year when she takes the stage and when her career moves up to that next level.
Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Geoffrey Rush in The King’s Speech
If Geoffrey Rush doesn’t win for Best Supporting Actor then it better be John Hawkes for his role in Winter’s Bone.
Let’s start with Hawkes. In his role Teardrop, the emotionally unpredictable Uncle to a girl searching for her father, Hawkes is pretty stellar. He’s scary, but believable. He’s complicated but like all of the actors in Winter’s Bone, he makes it seem real like he isn’t acting at all, like you’re almost watching a documentary—a very good one.
However, absolutely hands down, Geoffrey Rush needs to take this award. If Colin Firth’s stuttering King is an unforgettable performance then so is Rush’s pull-no-punches speech therapist Lionel Logel. Rush is nothing short of hilarious through virtue of being so confident in himself and so clever. It’s a brilliant juxtaposition: Rush playing a headstrong, self-assured common man against Firth’s nervous, stammering monarch.
Best Cinematography
Black Swan
In my opinion, this is perhaps the hardest category to call this year because there are three pretty predominant front-runners.
First is Inception. For all those naysayers, Inception was, visually, a pretty stunning film. There were lots of interesting things done with the camera to create a cohesive, yet absolutely mind-bending movie. Think of the action scenes, that whole upside-down segment, etc. It’s definitely in the running.
The King’s Speech is also nominated and if you weren’t paying pretty close attention you might’ve missed it but this film has some stellar camera work. Framing Colin Firth in a super wide angle against the crumbling wall of Geoffrey Rush’s office. Or filming Rush, rising from his chair, his face taking up the whole frame, looming over Firth with an absolutely palpable sense of authority and confidence.
Finally, there’s Black Swan, and this is the film I’m going to pick as the winner. When I reviewed this film I made a bit about how great I thought the camera was, following Natalie Portman around so closely and so controlled it only added to the sense that Portman’s life was constricted, constrained, and enhanced her madness. I loved it, and I think it worked well enough to deserve an Oscar.
Best Editing
The Social Network
I don’t think editing needs to be wildly impressive to win an award, I think it needs to be good and in the case of The Social Network, it was really well done. The movie was edited to keep the pace as a good clip, to unwind the story with perfect timing and the multiple storylines told around the different lawsuits, if you’ve seen the film, were done really well. The way it was written, this was a film that could’ve easily fallen apart without a good editor but obviously it had one and I think it’ll easily win in this category.
Best Adapted Screenplay
The Social Network
The only other contender in this category, in my opinion, is Winter’s Bone which could also easily win. In both cases, the dialogue is pretty outstanding but I think The Social Network is the more likely to take the prize. Aaron Sorkin is simply the dialogue master and his screenplay was so fast and furious, so clever and complicated, that it made the film that much more enjoyable to watch.
Best Original Screenplay
Inception
Easily, folks, easily. It’s a pretty brilliant concept for a film even if it was robbed from Total Recall. No other contenders.
Best Picture
The Social Network
In my mind, in this heavyweight category, the one that matters the most, there are two contenders: The King’s Speech and The Social Network. Both films are about really interesting, niche subjects: the inventor of Facebook and the stammering King of England. Both are character-driven dramas with really interesting lead characters, really snappy dialogue, and both are really well acted.
In my opinion, The King’s Speech has far more compelling characters. Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth stand heads and shoulders above The Social Network’s Jesse Eisenberg. But The Social Network has a quicker pace to it, it feels slightly better put together. While The King’s Speech feels a bit weighty and dragging, at times, The Social Network never slowed down. I liked that about The Social Network, and I think, despite the better character performances in The King’s Speech, it’s overall feel and pacing might see it lose to The Social Network.
Still, it’s a very tough call… and we’ll have to see.
