Paranormal Activity

Mmmm…sleepy.

‘Scuse me, sorry, just having a wee stretch and a yawn here…

Just back from Paranormal Activity, a film that spends an inordinate amount of time in the bedroom of a haunted house (although, actually, it’s one of the house’s inhabitants who is haunted) and, I have to say, I’m feeling a little snoozy.

The current low budget/big box office smash hit, all filmed – of course it was – for $15,000 and being touted as the ’scariest movie of all time’ (don’t start sighing, you’ll set me off yawning again), arrives in the UK with a mighty reputation and a lot of serious business behind it. It comes over all Blair Witch-y but only really has the handheld aspect in common with that much better movie.

This time, we’re in a suburban house in San Diego, with irritating young couple Katie (Katie Featherstone) and Micah (Micah Sloat), owners of the largest television on the Western seaboard. No, seriously. It’s huge. Anyway, Katie has been having sleepless nights since she was 8 due to bad dreams and indistinct manifestations of, well, let’s say it, paranormal activity, stuff that affects her wherever she lives.

When these events seem to increase in frequency, her significant other decides to video them. This means not only a static camera in the bedroom, which I guess is fair enough, but also, as with Cloverfield, that same camera picked up and run with, even at moments where everyone else in the world would simply not give a stuff about getting this shit down on tape.

So, despite (or is it because of, in horror movies?) protestations and warnings to the contrary, Micah decides to up the ante with the ‘presence’ and cajoles and provokes it via ouija boards and exorcism threats. Things escalate and, hey ho, a conclusion, mostly seen in the trailer, occurs.

All of this, all of it, even the very very very end, is pretty tedious, and at no point do you have any of the tension or unpredicatbility of The Blair Witch Project, or the sheer pandemonium and horrified chaos of, say, [●REC]. Our protagonists don’t really help, although Katie Featherstone is jolly convincing, simply because it’s actually pretty difficult to care; the shocks aren’t particularly shocking, and the pay-off, if you’ve seen any Japanese or Korean ghost stories, is fairly standard fayre.

Although quite a nice idea in many ways, Paranormal Activity shows its hand way too early and the it-could-all-be-in-Katie’s-mind psychological theory is frustratingly sent packing with quite a long stretch still left on the clock. The bedroom scenes are OK, but too similar, and there are way too many unintentional giggles – and one great guffaw – to label this anything but an interesting failure.

Trawling around for info, I came across a review by Chicago Now where the correspondent observed that afterwards some people were “physically shaking”. It may have been laughter. And were folks really, “looking to each other for therapy”? I can’t imagine so. If this is the film that scared America, then I need to check the provenance of a lot of movies that are way, way more frightening.

Now. Bed. Who stole all the covers?

An Education

In 1961, the year in which An Education is for the most part set, Philip Larkin wrote that in cobble-close families / In mill-towns on dark mornings / Life is slow dying.

Like Larkin, An Education concerns itself with Autumns and Winters spent drawing the curtains against the dark and mysterious world, suburban lives running carefully down trammeled lines, the ‘cut-price crowd’ hiding away in their living rooms and dining rooms. Part of this crowd is Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a 16 year old school girl, fiercely bright and sparky, but moulded with fear and dedication by her kindly despotic father (Alfred Molina), as he attempts to provide her with the means to escape to an Oxbridge education.

It is symbolic then, that while queuing for a bus in the pouring rain, she is charmed into the car of David (Peter Sarsgaard), a worldly playboy figure whom she sees as living forever in sunshine. David represents everything that her life is not, fun; carefree adventure, Paris, jazz, drinks parties and frivolity. And he comes into her life at a time when she is stalling in her studies and eager for distraction (“Studying is hard and boring, teaching is hard and boring, so what you’re telling me is to be bored, and then bored, and finally bored again but this time for the rest of my life?”).

An Education follows Jenny’s infatuation with David, watches her skip over the danger signs that he’s a bit of a bad ‘un, and then finally sits back and takes in her inevitable fall from grace as he lets her down in the worst possible way.

It would be wrong to say that this is painful to watch, but there are spikes of real emotion. In her memoir upon which the film is based, Lynn Barber is very candid about her relationship with the older man. “Was [he] a con-man? Well, he was a liar and a thief who used charm as his jemmy to break into my parents’ house and steal their most treasured possession, which was me.” This theft is most arrestingly felt by Molina who, apologising to his daughter through a slammed-shut bedroom door, evokes, with the tiniest changes in tone, a man whose heart is breaking wide open.

The acting all around is exemplary. Sarsgaard plays David two or three steps removed from being knowable (we might like to think we know enough about his sort any way) but that’s because he’s a clever actor who’s aware that David doesn’t even know himself. But it’s not about him, or Molina, as good as they are; it’s about Carey Mulligan, and she is nothing short of wonderful. There is a heartbreaking vulnerability to her, and yet there are no pyrotechnics here, no thrown teacups or huge crying fits. She plays everything with a deft and light touch, but crucially, she is wonderfully likable, and has you on her side straight away. At no point, regardless of the decisions she makes do you want to judge or criticise, you just want to watch her and watch her and watch her and hope that eventually she will come to rest somewhere that deserves all she has to offer.

9

I’ve been looking forward to 9 for a while now. The terrific high res trailer seems to have been around forever and the simple “what’s that all about?” intrigue of it’s central premise (a post apocalyptic world inhabited by oddly mechanised ragdolls) fascinating enough to keep me eyeing the release date eagerly.

What a shame, then, that the entire enterprise is suffused with an almost overwhelming sense of disappointment.

Well, maybe not in the first few moments, which do rather pin you down, shut you up and insist you take notice. In that opening, we see the close-up creation of the dolls, hand-sized automata, seemingly made of hessian, but filled with magically vitalised wood and metal, lovingly assembled by a mysterious Geppetto-like inventor. This gentle and enigmatic sequence is the highlight of the movie; it’s quiet care and simply beauty really hold you. Unfortunately, it is over way too soon and afterward we are thrown into an unsatisfying mess.

At less than 80 minutes, 9 seems indecently hasty in its pace, and after introducing its world (a wasted landscape redolent of war-torn Northern France), we are soon learning of the ravages of a recent conflict where man has lost a war to a fascistic machine-driven foe. Only the dolls are left as a reminder of what went before to, er, well, I don’t know what they’re expected to achieve exactly. The purposes of any of the creatures in this ruined set-up seem elusive and unknowable. They don’t know why they’re there, and we don’t either.

They only really define themselves by battling The Beast, a vast many-tentacled mechanical creature who, if it manages to catch the dolls, sucks out a green lifeforce from their bodies. Encounters with the monster are spectacularly choreographed and soullessly boring. And they are almost entirely constant. This is a bang bang bang movie with very little let up.

At one point we get to a breather, where the dolls discover a recording of Judy Garland singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow, and the reflective sequence we have craved is thus undermined by the niggling feeling that this Universe, surely then, isn’t as smartly Alternative as we had been led to believe.

I feel churlish criticising 9 this much. It is clearly a visual treat in many ways, and in every way a labour of great love (it is adapted and expanded from director Shane Acker’s 2004 Oscar-nominated short of the same name) but I’d feel much happier channeling you towards that earlier work, which is pretty wonderful. Does expanding a smaller piece ever really work? They have added big names into the process (Timur Bekmambetov and Tim Burton as producers) and, I’m afraid, have managed to lose a lot along the way.

And the loss comes by adding; too much action. Go back to that beginning. The inventor with his invention. It is fabulous.

I like dark, I like bleak, I am all for a grimly determinist sense of the weight of prior actions composing your fate, and that’s all here…but it is drowned in pyrotechnics and absurd set-pieces.

In any other year, too, 9 may have grabbed the attention effortlessly, but I saw this in an empty 600 seater screen. Next door, the crowd for Up was jostling for space, and therein lies a huge problem. Pixar’s triumph says more about our humanity, about personal resilience, and is darker and yet also more vibrant than anything 9 manages, and so why would you want to see one when the other delivers so much and so consistently?

Two further bugbears of mine are included that I mention simply as a personal irritation; and that is that menace is defined by a horde of scuttling robotic spiders (no more of this, ever again, please), and – in a rather mawkish touch – that returning souls offer a chance for a sentimental valediction. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Please.

Thanks.