The Screengrab : the blair witch project

SXSW Review: Humpday

Andrew Osborne — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

So far at the 2009 SXSW Film Festival, I’ve seen at least one movie with a good shot at landing on my year-end Top Ten List and one that may already be my personal lock for Worst Film of The Year.

Let’s start with the one I didn’t like: My Suicide, an achingly self-important act of digital onanism by David Lee Miller about a rich teenager who really FEELS, man...a pampered “rebel” who can’t deal with the fuckin’ family that bought him thousands of dollars of filmmaking equipment so he can make over-edited, under-conceived videos of himself doing bad Frank Caliendo/Fred Travalena-style impressions of Christopher Walken and Robert DeNiro saying lines from much better movies, like the not-at-all-played-out quote, “You talkin’ to me?” (Take THAT, Mom and Dad!)

My esteemed colleague Scott Von Doviak has already reviewed Miller’s Aronofsky-Lite homage at length, but I mention it as an example of the flashy, faux-edgy crap that’s just as mindless and cynically conceived as any high-concept Hollywood swill, yet frequently gets overpraised simply because the director has enough money for a trade show demo reel’s worth of digital effects and new “hot” indie bands on the soundtrack every few minutes to cram some "anarchy" or "ennui" down our throats (no matter how we actually feel about what’s happening on screen).

I work at a creative arts camp in the summer, making original mini-DV movies with young people, and I tend to cram my no-budget epics with songs, rapid-fire A.D.D. edits and gobs of iMovie special effects to distract the audience when scenes aren't working on their own.

On the other hand, when the writing and performances are strong, then I don’t need all the flash (or Flash animation): I just get the hell out of the way and let the actors do their thing...a strategy writer/director Lynn Shelton employs to great effect with Humpday, described in the SXSW catalogue as a comedy about Ben and Anna (Mark Duplass and Alycia Delmore), a smart yuppie couple whose seemingly perfect relationship is thrown into disarray by the arrival of Ben’s old bohemian pal, Andrew (a hilarious Joshua Leonard, finally reemerging from the oblivion of the Blair Witch woods).

That’s all I knew about the movie going in, and though the above summary makes Humpday sound like You, Me and Dupree, it actually develops into something far less predictable and a hundred times funnier. But even if you discover Humpday’s central plot twist in advance, the movie is still a goddamn delight: the only thing funnier than the dialogue is what’s left unsaid in double-takes and reaction shots. These are characters who actually think before they speak, refusing to flatten into predictable stereotypes, and the actors work together with the chemistry of a virtuoso jazz combo...especially Leonard and Duplass, a writer/director in his own right who’s developed into the mumblecore movement’s answer to Paul Rudd (or possibly Ron Livingston).

(And click here for a SXSW mumblecore double-feature review of Beeswax!)

Smells Like Indie Spirit: Our Favorite Sundance Films Of All Time (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 22:30:00 GMT

SEX, LIES & VIDEO (1989) & ON_LINE (2002)

In his entertaining film biz tell-all Down and Dirty Pictures, Peter Biskind chronicles the ways in which Robert Redford and Harvey Weinstein defined, respectively, the artistic integrity and the razzle-dazzle gold rush hucksterism of the current independent film era. With sex, lies and videotape, Steven Soderbergh fell somewhere in between: the critical and commercial success of his Audience Award-winning Sundance debut secured the festival’s place on the cultural radar, stoking the rags-to-riches dreams of countless would-be filmmakers, producers, and acquisitions execs in the years to follow. Yet at the same time, looking back, it's hard to see what all the fuss was about: unlike subsequent buzz dynamos like Reservoir Dogs, sex, lies and videotape is merely a quiet, low concept talk-fest about...well, the title says it all. The writing and directing are fine, and James Spader, Andie MacDowell, Peter Gallagher and Laura San Giacomo all turn in top-notch performances, but the quirky dialogue and somewhat (but not too) edgy subject matter (impotence, masturbation, voyeurism, etc.) are by now such familiar staples of the cinematic landscape that it’s hard to remember a time when a film like Soderbergh's could be considered groundbreaking (in the same way Sam Adams was amazing once upon a time to people who’d grown up on Bud and Miller, but hardly stands out in the microbrew-packed liquor stores of 2009).

My own (far-less-heralded) Sundance debut, meanwhile, came thirteen years later, when I attended the festival as co-screenwriter of the Jed Weintrob feature On_Line, a digital age chamber piece consciously patterned on Soderbergh’s film (right down to our original title, Sex, Lies & Internet). Yet, like many indie hopefuls attempting to follow the overnight success template of filmmakers like Soderbergh, our project fell through the cracks (despite somehow making the hyper-competitive Sundance cut): there were no high-stakes bidding wars, and (with the exception of a few astute critiques from the likes of Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir) most of the reviews were downright nasty. But though many are called and few are chosen, it’s nevertheless hard to resist the lure of Park City as a filmmaker or cinephile just hoping to be there when the lightning strikes again.

MEMENTO (2000)

Christopher Nolan had already made a festival splash with his creepy first film, Following, which, like Memento, was a collaboration with his brother Jonathan. It was no secret that his latest was going to be a big deal – by the time it got to Sundance, where it eventually won Nolan a screenwriting award (anticipating the Academy Award nomination it would get the following year), it had already garnered tons of acclaim at the Venice Film Festival for its clever narrative structure and intricate chronological unfolding. There was a lot more to Memento than most critics realized, though; Nolan and his brother, by telling the story of a man with no memory on a desperate quest to avenge the death of his wife, weren’t just presenting Park City audiences with a fairly cerebral noir. They were actually telling one of the most philosophically complex stories that any recent film has presented, a sneaky-deep meditation on identity, memory, and the way truth is created rather than discovered. It’s not in the fairly pedestrian revenge plot that the depths of Nolan’s film are to be discovered, but in Leonard’s memories of Sammy Jankis, and what they reveal about himself and his quest. Nolan went on to helm the Batman movie franchise, which only slightly suggests what seemed obvious when watching Memento: that he was a filmmaker of big ideas dressed up in genre clothes.

TARNATION (2003)

Jonathan Caouette's film stirred up terrific buzz at the 2004 festival, and for good reason: a visually raucous, stirringly expressive depiction of Caouette's relationship with his schizophrenic mother, which Caouette assembled from a mix of photographs, Super-8 footage, videotape and answering machine messages and mixed together on his home computer, it was probably the most exciting foray into filmed memoir to screen there since Ross McElwee started unreeling his diary entries. The movie inspired some trepidation from critics who feared that it would inspire more bad imitations than any Sundance hit since The Blair Witch Project, but it actually didn't take off in theaters as some expected; it may have been too painful for mass consumption. Caouette is currently putting the finishing touches on his second feature, the music documentary All Tomorrow's Parties.

OLD JOY (2006)

Reportedly to the disappointment of even Sundance director Geoffrey Gilmore, Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy screened at Sundance 2006 not in competition – where it belonged, as evidenced by its prominent inclusion on numerous critics’ year-end top ten lists – but instead in the more obscure “Frontier” section. Despite such a low-profile debut, however, Reichardt’s feature nonetheless garnered the attention it deserved, its tale of two childhood friends’ reunion for a camping trip in Oregon’s Cascade mountains proving the very type of modest, poised indie Sundance was originally conceived to showcase. Infused with the regret, fear, and anxiety that accompanies growing up, as well as a mood of socio-political unease conveyed by Air America radio broadcasts that function as the story’s de facto Greek Chorus, it’s a film with a sorrowful temperament and a shrewd sense of visual space (Reichardt shooting the Oregonian wilderness with awe, trepidation and reverence), as well as one that pulls off the delicate feat of commenting on larger national concerns that its character-driven narrative never overtly addresses.

TROUBLE THE WATER (2008)

Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's documentary about Katrina and its after-effects really fleshes out the lives hinted at in the news headlines. Specifically, it's a sprawling portrait of Katrina survivor, aspiring rapper, and amateur camera bug Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her nearest and dearest, and Deal and Lessin deserve a lot of credit for being able to think on their feet and improvise: they had headed to Louisiana cold in hopes of making a movie about the hurricane relief efforts but ran into a stone wall of government unhelpfulness and were about to head back home when Roberts, who they met in a shelter, got up in their faces and asked if they'd like to see her home movies of the gathering storm and the days she and and others spent stranded in their attic, watching the waters rise. When they saw what they had, they must have felt a little like the guy in Hunter Thompson's story about falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids. (Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 2008 festival.)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

15. THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)

Yes, I know you never actually see the witch. Yes, my wife and my father and countless other people got motion sickness from all the whip-pan video camera shots, and many others felt ripped off when the scariest thing in the much-hyped “new horror classic” was a bundle of sticks. And, true, the sequel was a jaw-dropping fiasco. And yet, I defend The Blair Witch Project on many levels. First, it did its job and creeped the bejesus outta me. Now, maybe that’s because I grew up (and later got stoned) in the dark woods of New England, where we used to actually burn witches, and so I’m the ideal audience for a flick about the paranoid possibilities of a forest at night. I also saw the movie on the big screen, after watching the brilliant small screen promotional faux-documentary Curse of the Blair Witch, so I was up-to-speed on all the Elly Kedward/Rustin Parr mythology and ready to be seduced by the film's tone of ominous forboding (rather than waiting to be impressed by gory special effects or whatever the haters didn’t find in the film). Plus, directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez turned a $22,000 budget into a $200 million dollar indie smash and then disappeared without a trace, kinda like the actors from the movie...so maybe there really is a curse.

14. CARRIE (1976)

Brian De Palma's purest and best horror movie is also the most potent of the horror genre's many essays on just how close high school is to hell on Earth. Sissy Spacek, at 26, turns in a phenomenal performance as the outcast who has to contend with mean girls at school and a mean mother of a Jesus freak (Piper Laurie) at home. Given the chance to shine for the first time in her life, she winds up onstage dripping with pig's blood in front of her jeering adolescent tormentors, who don't know that she's telekinetic and is about to stick the local tacky-jewelry manufacturer with a whole lot of unclaimed class ring. If you can watch the ensuing carnage without rooting for her, you must have been a cheerleader.

13. AUDITION (1999)

Ringu, a.k.a. The Ring, kicked off an American hunger for the weird eyes and dark, stringy hair of the ghosts of Japanese horror, but even more scary than a ghoul that crawls out of your TV set (a highly frightening but fairly uncommon occurrence) is an actual living woman who wants to do terrible, terrible things to you with needles. Sure, Sadako’s victims in The Ring may have a bad week and die, but the victims of shy, pretty, bat-shit crazy Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina) wind up with no feet or tongue in a burlap sack for a much longer time. And then die. What makes the film even more disturbing is that it starts out like a carefree romantic comedy, until suddenly...not so much, kinda like Sleepless In Seattle with torture.

12. THE EVIL DEAD (1981)

Shot in the woods of Tennessee over the course of almost a year and half on a budget of less than $400,000, and slowly released to the public over an even longer span of time, Sam Raimi's gore-drenched take on the lost-out-here-in-the-middle-of-nowhere-with-weird-shit-going-on genre looks like the work of some enthusiastic kids who'd stayed up late watching junk like Equinox on TV and went a little crazy making their own home-movie version of it -- except that these kids had talent, as well as the rare determination to see their little art therapy project/get rich quick scheme through to the end. Some connoisseurs see this early, primitive effort as just a stepping-stone to the slapstick wonders of the openly parodic Evil Dead II, but the raw energy of this thing, which is often funny and just as often genuinely scary, is a testament to how well primitivism can work in the horror genre.

11. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978)

Jack Finney’s classic novel of (literal) social alienation was first brought to the screen in 1956, and since then it’s been officially remade three times (not counting rip-offs and “homages"). And, while the original Don Siegel adaptation has its rightful defenders, I’ve always been partial to the 1978 version starring Jeff Goldblum, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Leonard Nimoy and, of course, the incomparable Donald Sutherland. Naturally, I’m biased: I saw this version on the big screen at an impressionable age, and it was the first movie I’d ever experienced where the good guys didn’t win...making me wonder if I could really trust the other people in the theater with me (or even my parents) and giving me an early taste of the existential angst I would become a lot more familiar with in my adolescent and adult life. Best of all, the movie inspired a game in my neighborhood where one pod person would go around infecting everyone else until there was only one “human” left. Trust me, you don’t know terror until you’re the last survivor on your street, waiting for the end as a dozen weirdly screaming pre-teen aliens slowly surround your hiding place.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Unborn; The Vengeful Ghost of Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: Freaks and Straights

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Fresh off the Pineapple Express, David Gordon Green is preparing to lead the Freaks of the Heartland. The horror flick will be based on a Dark Horse graphic novel by Steve Niles. The “six-part 2004 series about the horrible secret of a rural Middle American town involves Trevor Owen's attempts to protect his ‘monster’ of a 6-year-old younger brother and Gristlewood Valley's other ‘freaks’ from their parents' worst instincts,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.

If you couldn’t get enough of John From Cincinnati, there’s more surf-noir on the way. Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban have optioned Tijuana Straits, a novel by Kem Nunn, who collaborated with David Milch on the aforementioned HBO obscurity. Variety reports: “The novel's about a reclusive ex-surfer drawn into helping a Mexican woman who's being hunted by a killer hired by cartels to silence her before she exposes corruption in Tijuana.”

Rob Reiner, who apparently missed the Blair Witch sequel a few years ago, will direct Book of Shadows for Castle Rock. “The story follows a young man who must embark on the perilous journey of first love and face many trials of maturity while on the dangerous quest to close a mythical tome called Book of Shadows in order to restore balance to the world,” sez THR.

Related:
Face/Off: Judd Apatow and "Pineapple Express"
OST: This Is Spinal Tap

Coming Soon: A Screengrab Salute To Movie Trailers (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We were going to continue our Back To School salute with this week’s Top Ten list, but thought we should pause for a moment to pay tribute to Don LaFontaine, the king of movie trailer voiceover talent (who died on September 1) with a list of some of our favorite coming attractions.

This is a strange subject, perhaps, for a Top Ten(-ish) List, since many people regard previews as nothing more than glorified commercials that give away all the good parts, annoying time wasters before the movie you really wanted to see (or, at best, a last minute chance to rush out and get popcorn without missing anything important).

As for me, I sometimes go to movies I’m not even all that excited about just to get myself a good dose of coming attraction action. Trailers are like a perfect little ADD film festival: four or five upcoming releases boiled down to their purest essence in high velocity speedballs of action, music and memorable sound bites designed to goose my anticipation of movies I’m looking forward to or draw my attention to unheralded films I might otherwise have missed.

Most of the time, though, previews allow me to vicariously enjoy all the best moments of flicks like Death Race and Disaster Movie without requiring me to actually sit through them, thus expanding my cinematic horizons while saving wear and tear on both my ass and my wallet.

So here’s a quick Screengrab preview of coming attractions: next week, The Top College Movies of All Time!

And now...on with our feature presentation.

DON LAFONTAINE: THE VOICE

The man...the myth...the trailers. Hard to choose just one LaFontaine original to write about, so this seemed appropriate. But as far as individual coming attraction previews go, there’s no better place to start than with...

The trailer for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980)

In a previous Screengrab list, I wrote: “After the pure, cinematic orgasm of Star Wars blew my pre-pubescent mind beyond any hope of repair, even The Empire Strikes Back was something of a let-down (although watching the teaser trailer for the sequel during one of the theatrical re-releases of the original may stand as the most exciting two minutes of my entire movie-going life).” Allow me to elaborate, for those who were NOT 12-year-old boys in 1979: I had Star Wars sheets, a Star Wars poster above my bed and roughly 1200 plastic Star Wars figures, vehicles, playsets and little tiny guns in my toy chest. I’d seen Star Wars theatrically at least a dozen times, and I’d already read the screenplay, the novelization AND the Marvel Comics adaptation. I knew every frame of film, line of dialogue and Ben Burtt sound effect by heart. And then, in the Year of Our Lord 1979, they re-released THE BEST FILM EVER once again into theaters...only THIS time with the promise of a trailer at the end for the long and desperately awaited sequel, The Empire Strikes Back. And so I paid my parents’ money yet again, and watched Luke blow up the Death Star yet again, and then...at last...the music surged, a brand NEW logo in that funky Star Wars font drifted into view...and...well, the rest was such an undiluted rush of adrenalized oxytocin bliss I essentially disappeared into a barely cognizant state of pure sensation usually reserved for ketamine addicts and William Hurt’s character in Altered States. I only began to process the experience on the second or third viewing of the trailer (following my 14th or 15th viewings of Star Wars)...but, in a nutshell, seeing Luke, Leia, Han Solo and the rest busting free of scenes I knew like Catholic liturgy to suddenly act out BRAND NEW scenes, in BRAND NEW vests and hairdos was equivalent to waking up and discovering the sky was suddenly green and ice cream was a breakfast food. Reminiscing on the embarrassing geekiness of my pre-pubescent obsession (and, uh, this entire blog entry), I can fully empathize with the new generation of kids who waited up ‘til midnight in full Harry Potter drag to snag their Deathly Hallows hardcovers the second they went on sale...and I even (almost) forgive George Lucas for Jar-Jar Binks and (ugh) Stinky the Hutt and all the future disappointments that eventually followed that one glorious trailer.

The trailers for INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), TWISTER (1996) & THE PERFECT STORM (2000)

And then, of course après Star Wars, le deluge. It may not be fair to blame George Lucas (and/or Steven Spielberg) for double-handedly ending the glorious era of ‘70s filmmaking, but the Midas-fingered directors certainly helped to usher in the current era of commerce driven “event” movies. But unlike the aforementioned Empire Strikes Back trailer, which enthralled my pre-pubescent soul while promoting an actual movie worth seeing, many of today’s “event” trailers have become stand-alone short subjects far superior to the films they ostensibly advertise. Independence Day may not have been a great movie, but the trailer (with its exploding White House, embattled New York and stirring call to arms by a faux-macho American president) was certainly a grabber (and, in retrospect, an eerie pre-post-9/11 propaganda film). The same CGI highlight-reel approach, featuring at least one big compelling “gotcha!” moment -- like the glimpse of that giant wave in The Perfect Storm preview or the truck (or is it a tractor?) flying right at the audience in the final seconds of the Twister trailer -- has become an art form unto itself in recent years, not unlike a carnival barker spiel far more entertaining than whatever the unwary are likely to find if they actually buy a ticket and step inside the tent.

The trailer for ROBOT MONSTER (1953) and this freaky-ass trailer for VIDEODROME (1983)

But, of course, mainstream blockbusters aren’t the only productions that generate trailers as good or better than the films they promote. With no stars or Burger King tie-in promotions to aid them, B-movies and indies have always lived or died by their posters and trailers. The 1950s was a golden age of schlock movie previews (like this one for Robot Monster), with all the wooden acting and dull exposition stripped down to just the juicy monster money shots. Meanwhile, indies prefer to entice with their critical raves, film fest appearances, and/or (in the case of this Videodrome teaser) a freaky, inexplicable smörgåsbord of sight and sound compelling enough to lure audiences into uncharted waters if only to find out what the hell is going on...even when said imagery bears little relation to actual scenes from the movie.

The trailer for BUBBLE (2005)

If you were a big-name director who’d just made a low-budget film with no stars in a town most people couldn’t locate on a map, how would you sell it? If you’re Steven Soderbergh, you’d break pretty much every rule of trailer-making. This brilliant spot for Bubble contains exactly none of the following: voiceover, shots of the actors, plot summary, or critical or festival notices. Heck, there’s barely even a human presence at all, aside from the “Another Steven Soderbergh Experience” credit at the very end. Instead, Soderbergh gives us a montage taken from the inside of a doll factory (the film’s primary setting), with isolated doll parts progressively taking the final shape of the dolls. All this set to a jaunty yet creepy orchestral piece (anybody know where it’s from?), giving the proceedings an eerie feel. In the context of the story, the montage has an air of hopelessness -- are we merely dolls slapped together by an uncaring hand? -- but taken on its own merits, it’s a brilliant bit of salesmanship, a distinctive trailer for a movie that otherwise might fall quickly under the radar.

The trailer, website, etc. for THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)

It figures that The Blair Witch Project would have made good use of the fleeting-glimpse concept that has been at the heart of so many great trailers; after all, it was at the heart of the movie, too. The trailer's real innovation was to combine a tried-and-true gimmick that linked it to such films as Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and even Fargo -- the deliberate confusion as to whether this was a "true" story and what was then still a new idea, the use of a promotional web site -- and really work that sucker in a way that no one ever had before. By using the trailer to whet the viewer's curiosity and then flashing the site's URL with its implicit promise to provide more information at the click of a mouse, Blair Witch really fuzzed the line between hype and hoax, and in the process served up an all-encompassing promotional campaign that may have been more fun than the movie itself.

The trailer for THE BIRDS (1963)

This sinister mini-movie – a twisted take on the educational short film – may be the most clever theatrical trailer ever produced. Alfred's macabre sense of humor is on full display here, and he draws out the gag just a little too long, making the audience comfortable before -- gaa! scary birds! The Birds never explains why all the world's winged creatures suddenly revolt, which only adds to the horror. This trailer's answer? They were just tired of being made into chicken dinners and fancy hats.

Click Here for Part 2!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Gwynne Watkins

Tribeca film Festival Review: "The Objective"

Phil Nugent — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 07:00:00 GMT

The horror movie The Objective, which follows a group of American forces soldiers led by a poker-faced CIA man on a mysterious mission into the mountains of Afghanistan, has been greeted as a comeback for its director, Daniel Myrick, who hit paydirt nine years ago as the one of the directors of The Blair Eitch Project. So it's a little surprising and more than a little dispiriting when you begin to notice that the new movie is really very much like Blair Witch minus its found-footage gimmick, which is sorely missed. Once again, we're out in a remote, ominously creepy location that seems all the creepier when the landscape seems to begin to change. And once again, we're stuck out there with a small group of characters who start out overconfident and become more and more unglued as something starts picking them off. Although this movie had a written script (by Myrick, Mark A. Patton, and Wesley Clark, Jr., it even has the same kind of numbingly uninspired and repetitive dialogue, which is made to seem all the flatter by the uninflected non-acting of the principles. (There's also a voice-over narration droned by the CIA guy: "Maybe this is what it takes--getting completely lost first before you can find what you're looking for." The charitable may assume this is meant as a parody of Apocalypse Now.)

Myrick's Blair Witch co-director, Eduardo Sanchez, actually did a much snazzier job of direction on his aliens-among-us horror comedy, Altered, but that movie went straight to DVD, maybe as punishment for its not having a War-on-Terror setting to imbue the proceedings with an air of phony relevance. The Objective does turn out to have a punchline waiting for those who manage to make it through the tedium. It's not wholly coherent, but it seems to suggest that the original expert on al=Qaeda might have been Erich von Daniken. But a punchline with a sprinkling of gore do not a midnight movie classic make.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000, Joe Berlinger)

Paul Clark — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The box-office success of The Blair Witch Project made a sequel inevitable. However, despite the ongoing profitability of horror franchises, most sequels to classic genre films suck. Hoping to avoid falling into this trap, the bigwigs at Artisan Entertainment made an inspired choice for the sequel’s director: Joe Berlinger, an acclaimed documentarian who co-directed with Bruce Sinofsky the excellent Brother’s Keeper (1992) and the Paradise Lost films (1996 and 2000). Surely he would turn an admittedly unnecessary and money-grubbing sequel in an interesting direction, right?

Sadly, it wasn't to be. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is not simply another in a seemingly endless line of lousy horror sequels. Tt’s practically unwatchable, easily the worst film I've watched yet for this series, which is no mean feat when you consider I've already reviewed The Serpent's Egg. The fact that I’ve had to see it twice in my life should dispel any illusions you might have that a critic’s work is glamorous.

Book of Shadows mostly ditches the faux-documentary style of the original film in favor of more conventional direction, but it still begins promisingly enough, as a take on the Blair Witch phenomenon as seen through the eyes of four Blair Witch enthusiasts visiting the film’s locations and the would-be tour guide who leads them on their journey. But after that interesting setup, the movie goes wrong. So, so very wrong.

Berlinger complained at the time of the film’s release that Artisan took the film from him, shot some new scenes, and re-cut it in order to make it more commercial. So it’s entirely possible that he’s not entirely to blame for the film’s overwhelming awfulness. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I’d guess that he probably had little say about the film’s gratuitous use of “boo!” moments, such as the brief flashbacks to the killings at the center of the story.

However, the problems with the film run far deeper than a handful of gratuitous scare tactics. For one thing, there’s the misguided use of the old unreliable narrator trick. It’s bad enough that the protagonists of Book of Shadows all conveniently black out just before they go on their killing spree and only discover their misdeeds after they’ve discovered the video footage. But the movie can’t even decide whether video is reliable- first we’re meant to buy that the killings (and drugs’n’booze filled Wiccan orgy beforehand) happened like we see on the tapes, but then the circumstances of Tristan’s death are differ between what we’re show in the film and the video footage of the incident. Or did the Blair Witch manipulate the footage? Oooooooooh, scary!

In addition, Berlinger should bear most of the blame for the amateur hour performances by most of the cast. It's difficult to say which of the principals is most embarrassing: Jeffrey Donovan as the ex-mental patient tour guide with his repertoire of roughly three Crazy Faces, Stephen Barker Turner and Tristen Skyler as the world’s blandest couple (no mean feat in their histrionic later scenes), and late-period Woody Allen supporting player Erica Leerhsen as the foxy Wiccan whose primary qualification for the role appears to be her willingness to disrobe. Of the principal cast, only Kim Director as the requisite Goth emerges with her dignity relatively intact, largely by virtue of playing the most grounded character. And the less said about lawman Lanny Flaherty, whose jaw-dropping performance is too broad to pass inspection in a barn-door factory, the better.

But what takes Book of Shadows from the simply awful to the truly reprehensible is the way it exploits the case of the West Memphis Three, the subject of Berlinger’s Paradise Lost films. In those films, Berlinger and Sinofsky documented the case of a group of young men who were convicted of the killings of three young children largely (in the film’s view) due to their affinity for black clothing and heavy metal music and their curiosity about witchcraft. Watching that film, one could see the sympathy the filmmakers had with these outsiders. By contrast, Book of Shadows paints its outsiders as a bunch of black-wearin’, metal-listenin’, witchcraft-lovin' crazies who are but a beer and a toke away from going a killing spree. In doing so, it essentially buys into the same anti-outsider hysteria that convicted the West Memphis Three. Near the end of Book of Shadows, as the survivors are being led into the police station, we overhear a newscaster who says the line, “sadly, as has happened so many times in this country, violent art has inspired real-life violence.” Really, Berlinger- you ought to know better.

In an uncharacteristic display of good taste- or perhaps because they were simply sick of all things Blair Witch- the moviegoing public roundly rejected Book of Shadows. The film scared up barely 20% of the original’s domestic gross, thus causing a proposed prequel to be directed by original Blair Witch filmmakers Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick to be mothballed. Berlinger, no doubt smarting from his less-than-amiable flirtation with studio filmmaking, high-tailed it back to the land of documentaries, directing 2004’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster and an episode of the mammoth History Channel miniseries Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America. And Artisan Entertainment, once riding high on the success of The Blair Witch Project, struggled for a few more years before being sold to Lionsgate in 2003.

Links to previous When Good Directors Go Bad columns can be found here.

Yesterday's Hits: The Blair Witch Project (1999)

Paul Clark — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, our own Scott Von Doviak checked in with Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, the seemingly MIA directors of the 1999 sleeper hit The Blair Witch Project. But what of the film itself?

What made Blair Witch a hit?: The Blair Witch Project was the breakout hit of the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. This micro-budgeted, documentary-style horror movie came seemingly out of nowhere to scare the pants off the festival-hardened audience, and was promptly snapped up by Artisan Entertainment, a fledgling distributor looking for a hit. For months afterward, the Sundance buzz became deafening, as word of this mysterious indie — allegedly "the scariest movie ever" — began to spread. With the aid of an Internet-heavy campaign — fueled primarily by the film's then-groundbreaking Web site, which treated the film it advertised as a legitimate documentary, complete with backstory about the Blair Witch legend — word of mouth for Blair Witch was at its peak in time for the film's late-July release.

What happened?: Unfortunately for the film, the Internet giveth, and the Internet taketh away. Blair Witch rode the buzz to a rock-solid $30 million opening-weekend gross, on its way to a $140 million domestic take. However, no sooner had audiences seen the film en masse than the backlash began. Many complained that the film wasn't scary; others, that the advertising had been a bait-and-switch, tricking them into believing the events of the film were real. Still others were rendered nauseous by the movie's handheld camera work. That the film was released during the height of the postmodern horror subgenre (e.g. Scream) didn't help matters. Blair Witch's unconventional, un-ironic style made it ripe for cheap, easy satire, as in 2000's Scary Movie.

But perhaps the most basic reason for the film's waning popularity is the cyclical nature of the genre itself. Horror has a loyal fan base, but particular subgenres go in and out of fashion. The mini-wave of Blair Witch-inspired doc-style horror soon gave way to more elegant chillers, inspired by summer 1999's other horror sleeper, The Sixth Sense, which boasted not only a buzz-friendly twist but also didn't supposedly cause some audience members to vomit. The Blair Witch brand name had lost most of its luster by release of the 2000 sequel, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (more on this later).

Does Blair Witch still work?: Oh my, yes, although not quite as originally advertised. It's certainly scary, but most of its scares are psychological rather than visceral. Much of the film's effect comes from the fear that we may one day suddenly find ourselves lost, far from civilization, and ill-equipped to make our way home. In the film, the characters find themselves in precisely this situation, and their minds have already begun to unravel by the time the scares come. It might not contain many popcorn-spilling shocks, but long after more conventional horror movies fade from the memory, the slow-burn fright of Blair Witch lingers. It's a tough movie to shake.

In addition, Blair Witch's filming was ingenious. To begin with, Sanchez and Myrick didn't employ a full screenplay, instead mapping out a 35-page outline of Blair Witch lore for actors Heather Donohue, Michael Williams, and Joshua Leonard to use as background, then trusting them to improvise on camera. The actors — all portraying aspiring filmmakers — were also tasked to operate the cameras and sound equipment themselves, giving their footage an un-polished feel that works to the film's advantage.

By the time the cast went to shoot their scenes in the woods, the filmmakers had almost completely left them to their own devices. As the cast wandered through the woods shooting footage, the filmmakers followed at a distance, approaching their cast only at night while they slept, to leave fresh food and filming supplies, set up the film's memorably vague fright objects — stick figures, rock piles, a bundle of sticks of sticks containing a nasty surprise — for the next day's shoot, and to provide the scares that would awaken the cast from their slumber. By giving so much of the control of the film over to the cast, The Blair Witch Project has a verisimilitude that has yet to be surpassed in the faux-documentary genre.

Sundance Roundup: Day 7

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Not surprisingly, the news of Heath Ledger’s death has put something of a damper on the Sundance fun over the past twenty-four hours. Ledger’s former paramour Naomi Watts cancelled all press appearances today in advance of the midnight screening of Funny Games, Michael Haneke’s American remake of his own 1997 film. Meanwhile, some knucklehead decided a post-screening Q&A would be the appropriate time to ask Josh Hartnett for his thoughts on the tragedy. Goodness knows we were all waiting on the word from Hartnett; now we have closure.

In other Funny Games news, the Salt Lake Tribune notes an unusual guerrilla marketing campaign on the streets of Park City. Is it really a good idea to supply potential audience members with eggs before a screening? Why not pass out rotten tomatoes while you’re at it?

Audiences are on a Sugar buzz, says the L.A. Times, crowding into screenings of the latest effort from Half Nelson filmmakers Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden. It’s the story of a Dominican baseball player “recruited to play for a Kansas City farm team, but his overwhelming excitement is soon muted when he finds himself far from home in all-white Bridgetown, Iowa, with no English skills and a naivete about U.S. culture.”

Over at Slamdance, the hot ticket is Paranormal Activity, which is either the next Blair Witch Project, the next Cloverfield, or the next Slamdance movie you’ll never hear about again. According to New York magazine, the audience “screamed at all the right places, then chain-smoked cigarettes outside Slamdance’s ramshackle Main Street HQ in order to decompress.” With any luck, no one interrupted them to ask about Heath Ledger.

Selling the "Cloverfield" Monster

Phil Nugent — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In anticipation of the arrival on Friday of Cloverfield, S. James Snyder reviews the marketing of the movie, which started last summer with a trailer strategically attached to the release of Transformers. (If you're going to try to coax people out to see a new movie in the misbegotten month of January, you can't start too early.) "By the end of the weekend, that cryptic preview — which purported to show the home video of a New York house party at the moment it erupts into chaos, as something gigantic, but never seen, attacks the city with huge explosives — had spawned its own universe of online traffic. Initially, people simply tried to find the title of the film, but as word spread that this was, in fact, the new unlabeled disaster film by producer J.J. Abrams, fans of Mr. Abrams's secret-filled TV serial "Lost" quickly scoured the trailer for clues. It didn't take long for Mr. Abrams himself to add fuel to the fire, identifying www.1-18-08.com as one of the film's Web sites, but ensuring fans there were others out there, waiting to be found."

The simulated-home-movie technique of the Cloverfield footage immediately calls up memories of The Blair Witch Project, as does the whole idea of selling a movie through hints and teases located on-line. But part of the brilliance of the Blair Witch campaign was the way the website and other paraphernalia attached the movie, such as a fake "documentary" that aired on the Sci-Fi Channel, created an instant urban myth; some viewers enjoyed being able to pretend that the movie was "real", while some other, less canny viewers actually thought that it was based on something real and felt outraged about being hoaxed when they saw the stars on TV next to Jay Leno. That option isn't really open here; there can't be too many people who've seen the TV commercials showing a mysterious, bellowing something decapitating the Statue of Liberty and generally wreaking havoc on Manhattan who thought that it was really happening, though if there are any such people, they're probably planning to vote for Mitt Romney. Another point of comparison is Snakes on a Plane, the viral-marketed B-movie whose title and catch phrase were all but decreed by Internet feedback. That movie whipped up a firestorm of on-line interest that didn't carry over to the box office; the lesson that the makers of Cloverfield may have taken from it is that if you give the geeks too much control of the pre-release party, then everyone may have started fishing for their car keys by the time the picture opens. (Incidentally, "Cloverfield" was originally supposed to be a temporary code name for the movie, taken from a street address of the Bad Robot company offices, but it's become so identified with the project that now they're stuck with it.)

The Cloverfield marketing team has risen to the challenge of this brave new marketing world with an intricate set of interlocking come-ons, including one surprising tie-in: "In a recent episode of the NBC series Heroes, fans took note of the name and logo of a soft drink that also appeared on the T-shirt of a character in the trailer for Cloverfield — 'Slusho' — which led them to the Web site (www.slusho.jp) and a bizarre online commercial (viewable at YouTube.com) that seemed to have nothing to do with the New York disaster in the Cloverfield trailer. But that was until a new series of fake news reports was released online, all detailing the destruction of a drilling platform out in the middle of the ocean, supposedly owned by Tagruato, the fictional Japanese company that owns the fictional Slusho." In an effort to mix up all this Internet activity with a little real-world buzz, Paramount has also invited a couple hundred of the movie's close, personal "MySpace friends" to " 'Rob's surprise party' — the fictional party interrupted by rumbling explosions in the trailers — on January 17, the night before the film opens." Ultimately, though, an online marketer named Adam Paul insists that, "The key is that the movie has to actually live up to what you've promised in the hype," which sounds very old-school. We don't know any more about what's actually going to be on those screens come January 18 than you do, but we do know this: if audiences get their first clear look at the Cloverfield monster, whatever it is, and respond with laughter or snores, this surprise party is going to wrap itself up very quickly.

Trailer Roundup: Cloverfield, Definitely Maybe, The Other Boleyn Girl

Peter Smith — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Cloverfield

While the 1.18.08 teaser that played before Transformers this past summer appeared to simply be a brilliant piece of viral marketing, it now appears that the project, now titled Cloverfield, will actually be shot largely by characters wielding personal camcorders and camera phones, instead of in a conventional style. Frankly, I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I think it's a good idea in theory to make a kind of Godzilla for the YouTube generation. But a movie like this is tricky to pull off. The Blair Witch Project worked because you always got a sense that there were really three people lost in the forest and beset by forces they couldn't explain, but it'll be much harder to get that same vibe with a project this large-scale and effects-intensive. I'm not sure the director of the 1996 David Schwimmer vehicle The Pallbearer is the man for the job. Regardless, I'm curious to find out.

Definitely, Maybe

About the best thing I can say about this trailer is that Ryan Reynolds doesn't look to be as insufferable as he usually is. Plus his three romantic partners — Elizabeth Banks, Rachel Weisz, and Isla Fisher — are all pretty smokin'. But otherwise, gag me. Much of the blame can be placed on little Abigail Breslin, who has taken over the mantle of Hollywood's go-to moppet from Dakota Fanning. Or maybe it's just that the character feels less like a precocious kid than a screenwriter's conception of same, a little girl who gives voice to all the clever, self-aware ideas on the scribe's oh-so-clever mind. How else to explain lines like "what's the male word for slut?" This is the kind of crappy Valentine's Day release that makes me glad to be single. And who signed off on that title?

The Other Boleyn Girl

Okay, who cast this thing? When your least problematic lead is Aussie Eric Bana (Henry the Eighth he ain't, he ain't), you know there's trouble. I'm not sure who's more ill-fitting in this story, emo pixie Natalie Portman as the defiant Anne Boleyn, or princess of pout Scarlett Johansson as her sister Mary. Based on her ignominious work in previous period films, I'm inclined to lean toward Johansson here, but it's a tough call. Either way, couldn't they find two English actresses who (a) suited their roles, and (b) were more convincing as sisters? With Elizabeth: The Golden Age and now this, Hollywood might want to consider laying off the British history for a while, lest our friends across the pond think we've got it in for them.

— Paul Clark