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Lunopolis

★★★★★

Directed by: Matthew Avant

Written by: Matthew Avant

The alternate title for this movie could have been, “Paul’s Perfect Movie.” Let’s see: Conspiracy theory? Check. SciFi action? Check. Cerebral thriller? Check. Scientology-like religious cults? Check. Documentary style? Check. Reasonable time travel? Check. Elaborate alternate history? Check? Speculative pseudo-scientific postulating? Check. Gritty, DIY style? Check. I loved almost everything about this film.

Okay, let’s back up a sec. Lunopolis is framed as a documentary that follows a pair of amateur filmmakers looking into a lead picked up from a phone call to an Art Bell-like radio host (very reminiscent of this). After the call, the radio show receives a packet of material which includes a strange polaroid and some GPS coordinates. The fimmakers track the coordinates to a remote watery area and find a hatch in a houseboat leading down into a strange chamber where they find a very unusual backpack-like device. Soon enough they are introduced to the Church of Lunology, a strange shadowy organization that is hauntingly similar to Scientology who begin hounding the duo and their intrepid film crew.

As the fate of the filmmakers unfolds in their handheld style, we are treated to interspersions from the “real” documentary makers who perform contextual interviews and follow-ups, providing supporting details for the scheme and revelations that come at first slowly and then with an increasingly frantic pace until there is a swirl of intricate history and wild speculation about immortality, rational consequences of time travel, dissections of Mayan calendar prophecies (particularly timely what with the calendar’s end late next year) and a whole host of other bits and pieces of conspiracy lore, fantasy elements and science fiction tropes. By the end, the questions are both answered and unanswered, and there is enough of a hint of plausibility that this could actually be a real documentary to give it that spooky X-Files creep-out factor.

The brilliance of Lunopolis is that Matthew Avant throws the kitchen sink at this plot and it almost all works. He works hard to cover the plot-hole seekers, inserting them into the dialogue and narrative by making his prinicpals as skeptical and nerdy as the people who are prone to enjoy a film like this. There is one concession he isn’t quite able to make fit neatly, which is the bit about polaroids and films (you can see this chagrined bit of deus ex machina happening during an exchange that marks the point where the movie truly descends into its delirious madness of a finale), but I’ll forgive the one bit of storyteller stumble for the rest of this remarkable work.

What I love the most is that because this film’s backstory is so incredibly complex and intertwined, I’m not sure how else this tale could effectively been told. Using the documentary style, Avant is able to spend considerable time discussing the revelations in the narrative in a very scholarly way without it feeling preachy or AYKB-ish. I don’t think a novel would have been able to have this visceral immediacy, and I don’t think a strictly narrative (even long-form like a TV show) film could have managed to explain all the intricacies of the time travel system, the fictional cult or the ramifications of any of it without losing the pacing. This is a movie that needed to be a movie—and maybe most significantly, needed to be this movie—and there’s something incredibly pure about that.

A couple of very tiny quibbles are that, because of the passion-project vibe, some of the acting is a little rough, although I was surprised at how much managed to be nuanced and believable. This may have something to do with the direction or perhaps the improvisational screenplay or even just that most of the cast are undiscovered gems in the acting world. The good news is, it isn’t bad very often, only glaring in context when it is. The other minor concern I had involves the status of the film’s macguffin, which seems sometimes to be lost from the perspective of the Church of Lunology and at other times I got the impression they knew where it was (both prior to the events depicted in the movie, and during). I wasn’t always sure what antagonists were doing or why, a failing that one can only ever really get away with in Men In Black type characters whose motivations are supposed to be mysterious. This is why it’s a quibble and not a legitimate gripe, but it skirts on a technicality.

Even with a couple of little head-scratchers, I still love Lunopolis. It’s not original in the sense that a lot of the stuff is drawn from source materials that I was already familiar with, but it’s blindingly original in that it was all reassembled and refactored into something that is fresh and accessible and awesome and makes me scream my ultimate compliment: “Why didn’t I think of that?” It’s genius.

Go see Lunopolis. That’s my recommendation: The sooner, the better.

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — December 19, 2011 at 11:25AM

@ironsoap — December 19, 2011 at 10:08AM

@ironsoap — December 19, 2011 at 09:28AM

The Virgin Suicides

★★★☆☆

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Written by: Sofia Coppola

Based on the novel by: Jeffrey Eugenides

Sofia Coppola’s late-90s, pre-Lost in Translation meditation on teenage angst and repression, which I gather is broadened into a social critique in Jeffery Eugenides’s novel, is mesmerizing though not, perhaps, as powerful as its cult of fans seems to believe. I haven’t read the book so this has to be a discussion of the film on its own merits, although I am led to believe it is a very faithful adaptation of the former.

That said, The Virgin Suicides chronicles the lives of the Lisbon sisters, ranging from ages 17 to 13, as seen through the eyes of a group of boys roughly the same age who admire them from afar. The girls are raised in a repressive, uptight family with an over-protective mother (played with a weird, non-commital sort of dreamy insistence by Kathleen Turner) and a rather-look-away father (played in an incongruously breezy fashion by James Woods). The youngest daughter, Cecilia, attempts suicide by cutting her wrists and then finishes the job shortly after, with the bandages still adorning her wrists, by leaping from her upstairs bedroom window onto a spiked iron fence.

The film tries to build a mystique around the girls, attempting through a variety of means to display them as might be seen from the outside and/or from the small glimpses gained by the few intrusions from neighborhood boys into the Lisbon’s lives and home. I think one small problem the movie has is that it gives the audience more insight into the girls than the boys themselves have which kind of spoils the illusion.

Much of the story revolves around 14 year-old Lux (played with edgy, flirty energy by Kirsten Dunst), who is the wild child in the family (and cause for the deception of the title) and whose actions during and after a pivotal homecoming dance—that the mother reluctantly lets her guard down for—results in a functional house arrest for all four remaining girls. This casting is a bit of a problem because Dunst gives a stand-up performance but she comes across not as a high school freshman but as a junior or senior (17 or 18) in part because that’s how old Dunst actually is here but also because there is a world of difference between a sheltered freshman and a once-sheltered senior. It’s especially weird when the actresses playing her older sisters often look and act younger than her and the whole thing gets into this bizarre sort of time-warping mishmash where age is fluid and relative and, when it serves the plot, they all seem to be functionally the same age (this includes the pesudo-anonymous cast of boys that include the collective third person of the narrator).

A couple of key directorial and screenplay decisions seem to impact the final quality of the film. First is that a lot of time is devoted to Lux and lady-killer Trip Fontaine (played with stoned vacancy by Josh Hartnett), who orchestrates the group date to the homecoming dance. As a set-up device this is perfectly acceptable but it leads the post-dance aftermath and alluring distance-only relationship between the voyeuristic boy’s club and the Lisbon sisters into a hurried, abbreviated-feeling tumble toward the film’s grim climax. To me, this is the meat of the story, the part that has the most to say about all the characters involved and yet it takes up maybe a quarter of the movie’s relatively brief running time. Second is that Coppola blends a kind of throwback, 8mm sensibility to her direction with a dreamy, palate-oriented method of mood evocation which creates a mentally discordant style that is both ethereal and retro-realistic. Combined with the—I presume—intentionally vague characterization of the Lisbon girls, possibly excepting Lux, it gives the suicides referenced in the title a sort of magical air that I didn’t find all that comfortable.

I get that the motivation for the girls’ actions is intentionally left vague; the point of the story is that the boy’s club can never quite figure out what was really going on in the girls’ heads or why they chose to involve the neighborhood the way that they did. But there is enough loving attention given to the Lisbons and enough clear blame laid at the feet of their well-intentioned but perhaps reactionary parents to make the sisters seem like martyrs, almost noble or somehow courageous. It’s frustrating also to feel like, lacking any depth of attention to the aftermath, the film seems to write off the whole incident as being shrug-worthy, sort of a cautionary tale of being too religious. Yeah, man, that’s a head-scratcher. A little Jesus goes a long way, but too much and your smart, vibrant, fairly well-adjusted teenage daughters will stage a Jonestown-like armageddon.

I guess the problem is that, in the end, I don’t know what The Virgin Suicides is trying to say. Is it telling parents to loosen the reigns or they’ll lose their children for good? Is it suggesting girls are the most interesting when they’re unknowable victims, viewed from afar? Perhaps the message is that nostalgia is all we ever really want or care about. I’m not entirely sure. In a way, I’m fine with movies that require a bit of personal application and interpretation; the film-based poem of American Beauty was like that. But this movie is maddeningly free of even implied intent: It is not a meditation on sadness or the experience of being a teenage girl or of predatory influences on innocent lives or the deconstruction of a family. It could have been about any of those things, but the fact that it ends up being about none gives it a sense of smugness I found a little distasteful.

It is a beautiful movie, and definitely the kind of film you’d like to watch with someone and then spend some time over large cups of coffee, discussing and dissecting, but on its own merits it struggles a bit and, I think, ends up feeling kind of like an extended teaser/trailer for the book. As an adaptation, that’s usually a good thing but in this case it’s kind of to the detriment of the film as a whole which I can’t help feel left something—dare I go there?—lost in translation.

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — December 18, 2011 at 10:15AM

@ironsoap — December 18, 2011 at 03:39PM

Paranormal Activity 2

★★★☆☆

Directed by: Tod Williams

Written by: Michael Perry, Christopher Landon and Tom Pabst

Based on characters created by: Oren Peli

Once upon a time, horror movies were my primarily trafficked genre flicks. This is during my death-don’t-scare-me late teenage years, during my rebellion against the fearfulness that defined a large chunk of my youth. Then in early adulthood horror films took a sharp turn from supernatural slasher pics (Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Hellraiser) to the grim and gruesome real-world terrors (Final Destination, Hostel, Saw). I discussed my distaste for this kind of fear in my Scream 4 review but the point is, I grew out of horror movies in part because they changed but also because I no longer needed to prove I wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore, especially since I am now fully aware that sometimes there are genuinely bad things lurking in dimly lit places.

But there is a part of me that still appreciates that seat-gripping tension from a tautly executed scary movie. It’s hard to find ones that work for me anymore and frankly I don’t look for them too often, but I did like 2007’s Paranormal Activity enough to know that the unique supernatural realism angle works well and I was intrigued that they could work up some sequels.

Here’s the conceit that you have to cope with via your suspension of disbelief mechanism in both Paranormal Activity and the sequel: That occasionally when super intense and highly stressful things are happening, or even when subtle shared moments occur, someone will pick up a handheld video camera and capture it for posterity. The original tried to get around this by building into the plot Micah’s relentless obsession with capturing the strange occurrences on film and having Katie fight with him about it, which only sort of worked. Paranormal Activity 2 does a bit better with the concept by giving the family (in this case Katie’s sister Kristi and her husband, step-daughter and baby son) means, such that after an early incident at the start of the film, they install high-end low-light cameras inside and outside the house.

Of course, this introduces some issues as well since there are points at which it’s pretty obvious that the editing was done for dramatic effect when a different camera would necessarily have captured a more revealing shot of something but that vantage point is not shown. Additionally, a hand-held camera is still in use and there are a few captured conversations and moments involving this camera that don’t really make a lot of sense to be on tape (Kristi and Katie’s conversation about their childhood for example, is very relevant to the film’s progression but unlikely to have been captured on film). In any case, as I said this is something you have to deal with to enjoy these movies because as much as the films work on the basis of their simplicity and their ability to convince you of their plausibility, it’s clear how difficult it would be to build a cohesive narrative using only a handful of fixed cameras.

The best part about Paranormal Activity is the way the movie watching experience can be so visceral. These are, in essence, movies about non-action. There is an extraordinary amount of film time spent in both (though considerably less in the sequel than the original) where, quite intentionally, there is nothing happening on screen. The camera points at an empty room in the dead of night. And the audience waits. That’s it. It sounds incredibly boring but the effect is precisely the opposite because once the movie gets going whenever those dead space sequences pop up, you start scanning the scene frantically, looking for where the titular activity is going to come in. Your body tenses up, and the whole experience of watching the film is somehow wonderfully exhausting.

A few points of comparison with the first film: The same “how’d they do that?” effects wizardry is on display here and, as with the first, the filmmakers make good choices in not returning to any wells, no matter how impressive a scene is. With the exception of one effect cribbed from the first movie (which works to tie the two together a bit) there is no instance of a set-piece effect that is re-created later on just because it looked cool in the first place. A good example is a shocking scene that takes place with Kristi alone in the kitchen and another instance of an encounter featuring the step-daughter Ali as she lies sleeping on the couch. To PA2’s credit, it never quite dips into the quasi-cheeseball territory the first one did (something about hoofprints?) although late in the film the line between supernatural and paranormal gets blurred quite a bit. And while there are still a few too many “wait, why don’t they just…” moments, there are at least fewer for them than in the original.

Which leaves the real question as, “How does this work as a sequel?” The answer is surprisingly great. Paranormal Activity 2 is kind of a wrapper picture and the story takes place in roughly the same time frame as the original (the sequence of events in the original takes place within the confines of this picture though they are only alluded to and not shown much) which works then as both a prequel and a sequel, providing a greater context to the whole thing. It’s a lot better, story-wise, than I really would have expected.

There are some things that hold PA2 back a bit: Ali’s character is never really given a resolution; Daniel, the husband, reacts pretty consistently throughout but his insistence on ignoring the fact that they have taped evidence of everything strains credibility; the ending feels so rushed as to be almost anticlimactic. The biggest fault in Paranormal Activity 2, though, is that it really depends on having seen the first for it to work. Technically the film gives you all the information you need, but lacking the part about Micah and Katie, a key component of the conclusion is simply missing, which is a shame because it wouldn’t have taken much to have included at the very least the last sequence from the first movie again. It’s all the more baffling when you note that they include the first sequence from the original, just to prove how they tie together. Which almost makes me want to give this movie two ratings: Two stars if you haven’t see Paranormal Activity and four stars if you have because as a companion to the first, it’s quite well done. As a stand alone film, though, I’ll have to split the difference and say maybe it will work for you, maybe it won’t. Take my advice though and watch the first one then this—or, better yet, watch this one up until it cuts to Katie and Micah, then pop in PA1 watch to the end and come back to view the finale, treating them both as one unbroken film. Which is, in fact, what they really are.

from No Thief Like a Bad Movie — December 18, 2011 at 09:04AM

@ironsoap — December 17, 2011 at 11:32AM

Some people do go a little mad around the holidays.

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from Like a Detuned Radio — December 17, 2011 at 10:39AM

The brain requires glucose, a carbohydrate, to function. The way I see it, this is just cutting out the middle man.

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from Like a Detuned Radio — December 17, 2011 at 10:35AM

@ironsoap — December 16, 2011 at 02:38PM