Movie Box Review

How is it that no one has yet produced a 3D found-footage movie?  You'd think the combination of the most (usually) mind-numbing gimmicks of the past decade would be a commercially sure bet, but so far it's an untapped market.

Meanwhile we have PROJECT X, which advances the found-footage genre in a particularly banal way.  The original concept of the "found-footage" movie (which, in a sense, dates all the way back to epistolary novels that purported to be mere reprints of actual letters) was that it increased the "reality" of the stories it was telling, and thus it's mostly been used to make the supernatural more convincing:  in horror movies like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, and more recently with the science-fiction Chronicle.  Project X, though, is just a dumb teen party movie, rife with cliches and completely unremarkable other than its bare nod to being "filmed" by a couple of the participants.

The very basic set-up is that Thomas (Thomas Mann--several of the characters bear the same names as the actors who play them, presumably to boost verisimiltude) will be alone for his birthday weekend in his family's big North Pasadena house, because his parents are out of town.  Thomas is too much of a bland nice guy who do anything illicit on his own, but that's what troublemaking best friends in movies are for, and here that's Costa (Oliver Cooper), who likes to wax nostalgically about the glamor of his old life in Queens (has anyone associated with this movie ever been to Queens?) and who talks Thomas into a birthday party for the ages.  Also along for the ride is JB (Jonathan Daniel Brown), whose character consists of being fat, and we occasionally glimpse Dax (Dax Flame), who's theoretically recording all this on video.

One of Project X's selling points is that its producer is Hangover director Todd Phillips, but the promise of shocking  scandal or genuine envelope-pushing is unrealized.  This party goes out of control in all the most predictable ways--drugs, drinking, topless girls, bodily functions--until the last 10 minutes, when things go ludicrously over the top thanks to a crazy character who reappears from earlier in the story.  Even though the picture is a "hard R," it's notable--and characteristic of American movies--that our 3 protagonists are only seen drinking to excess, their drug use limited to a comic interlude and none of them managing to get laid.  In fact, Thomas is such a good, sweet guy, and the movie is so devoted to cliches, that although he supposedly wanted the party to have sex with hot girls, and has the chance to do so with the school's official Babe, in the end he realizes that the (equally gorgeous) girl he's known since childhood (Kirby Bliss Blanton as "Kirby") and since ignored, even though she banters with him while casting cow-eye glances his way, is really the girl of his heart.  In other words, we know the writers have seen Some Kind of Wonderful. 

There's nothing dramatically interesting or even mildly subversive in Project X, and it's certainly not worth seeing for the quality of the filmmaking.  The "found-footage" genre permits less talented directors to have an excuse for letting their movies look like crap, and first-timer Nima Nourizadeh makes ample use of that license, resulting in 88 amateurish minutes of shaky footage, periodically interrupted by music video montages that resemble outtakes.  While many found-footage pictures are, or at least try to appear to be, heavily improvised, Project X is clearly shot from a full script by Matt Drake and Michael Bacall; their dialogue makes improv look good. 

If Project X were shot in a conventional way, it would probably go straight to homevideo.  Filmed with what still, to some audiences, seems like a new "cool" style, it's likely to make millions this weekend (it's already grossed over $1M in midnight shows on Thursday) and turn a decent profit on its low $12M budget.  There may not be one born every minute, but there's certainly one buying a movie ticket.

Over the past decade, audience hunger for "reality"--the word very much in quotation marks--has engulfed much of popular cultture, from YouTube videos to self-produced songs, from tweets to television series and even cable networks built around people playing manipulated versions of "themselves."  In movies, the trend has led to an increase in heavily improvised indie comedies and dramas, and also to the genre of "found footage," films that are basically scripted, but which present themselves as being shot by the amateur participants themselves.  The latter have existed mostly in the field of horror, kicked off by the giant hit The Blair Witch Project, and followed by, among others, Cloverdale, the Paranormal Activity franchise and this year's The Devil Inside.  (The genre reaches a meta level with the found footage compendium V/H/S, which premiered at Sundance.)

The new CHRONICLE, while playing even more fast and loose with any logical rules of "real" footage, at least provides a new twist on the form, since it inhabits the superpower genre rather than horror.  The brisk 83-minute story (including credits), directed by Josh Trank and written by Max Landis (from a story by him and Trank), is very basic:  3 teens--high-strung loner Andrew (Dane DeHaan), his nice-guy cousin Matt (Alex Russell) and popular Steve (Michael B. Jordan)--explore a hole in the ground one night after a party, and after they've touched some unexplained glowing thing down there, they find that they've acquired the ability to move objects with their minds and, before long, that they can fly.  

The center of the tale is Andrew, who has a horrific homelife (dying mother, abusive father)--he's the one supposedly carrying the camera through almost all of the movie (along the way he upgrades to incongruously high-quality equipment and learns how to make it all levitate, at which point the shots become far smoother and more professional).  At first, their powers are a pure thrill for the guys, who use their telekinesis for pranks and take joy rides in the sky.  But then Andrew starts wielding them to express his anger and frustration, and before long he's turned into an adolescent super-villain, tearing up the streets of Seattle. 

Chronicle's story doesn't offer much, and the found footage genre makes serious characterization all but impossible.  But this is one case where the conceit really works to the movie's benefit.  Even though we've seen all these stunts and CG effects before in massive franchise movies, watching them seemingly tossed off in this casual, supposedly "amateur" way makes them feel new.  (The reported $12M budget, while tiny compared to a comic-book epic, also isn't the $1M spent on Paranormal Activity and its ilk, and the actual cinematography is by veteran John Bailey.)

Trank and Landis make a lot of smart decisions in Chronicle:  the movie doesn't overstay its welcome, and  aside from a couple of chatty references to Schopenhauer, Plato, and the concept of free will, it doesn't try to be more than the modest thriller it is.  It delivers a compact, original take on a familiar story, and it holds together just about as long as it needs to.

V/H/S, which screened as part of Sundance's Park City At Midnight series, is a gimmick piled upon a gimmick.

First is the horror anthology itself, familiar from the Twilight Zone movie and Rod Serling's Night Gallery TV show, among many others.  In this case, half a dozen unrelated short films, each from a different director, are presented as an omnibus film.  The additional gimmick is that all the stories are variations of the "found footage" horror subgenre that kicked off with The Blair Witch Project and became a franchise with Paranormal Activity.  The connective tissue (so to speak) of the movie is a loose story (directed by Adam Wingard) about a group of thieves hired to steal a mysterious VHS tape from a house; to no one's surprise except theirs, as various members of the gang settle down to watch the videos, they're slaughtered one by one. 

There was a fair amount of imagination put to finding different excuses for the "found footage" to exist.  In one story, directed by David Bruckner, the camera is embedded in a pair of spy eyeglasses worn by one of a trio of frat-boy idiots who are on the hunt for sex--and we all know how well that ends in movies like this.  Another mini-movie (direcred by Joe Swanberg and Simon Barrett), is entirely in the form of Skype chats.  Another, set in the 1990s, and directed by Ti West (House of the Dead), the closest thing to a "name" director in the group, is composed of "home movies" from a second honeymoon that goes wrong.  There is, of course, a slasher-in-the-woods story, directed by Glenn McQuaid.  And in what is probably the most elaborate of the chapters, directed by the collective known as Radio Silence (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Chad Villella, Justin Martinez, Tyler Gillett), another group of morons is unwise enough to spend Halloween night at a "haunted house" party that lives up to its name. 

There are certainly some shocks and enjoyably gruesome violence to be had along the way (the picture will probably have to go out unrated or be edited to avoid an NC-17 in its current form), but the project inevitably suffers from a serious case of diminishing returns.  Because of the stylistic homogeneity imposed on the anthology, chapter after chapter features the same mannerisms:  shaky hand-held (or head-held, in the case of the eyeglass camera) visuals, sudden cuts to blue when the "VHS" picture goes out, staticky interference as supernatural events are captured on tape.  The most controlled chapters are West's and Swanberg/Barrett's, but theirs also have the dumbest stories with the worst endings; the rest are mostly just exercises in watching people wander around for 10 minutes or so and then get hacked apart.  

There are no characters to speak of in any of this, little of what one would call "acting," and certainly no memorable dialogue.  By definition the production values are low-rent.  So V/H/S just exists as a vehicle for gore and creatures jumping out of the shaky, hand-held dark, and 116 minutes of that is far more than anyone who isn't an obsessive could need.