Movie Box Review

According to Deadline, ACT OF VALOR (Relativity) is reporting a mild 5% Saturday bump.  That's modest, but still less frontloaded than The Expendables' 10% drop on its 2d day, and if the number holds, could mean a $24M+ weekend.  GOOD DEEDS (Lionsgate/Summit) is looking better with around a 30% Saturday increase, comparing favorably with the 15% bump The Family That Preys (Tyler Perry's previous low opener) had on its first Saturday, and suggesting a $17M weekend.

After that, it doesn't matter much.  Percentage-wise, WANDERLUST (Universal) had a good 43% Saturday increase, but that still only brought it to $3M for the day, on its way to a irretrievable $7M opening.  And even that looks good compared to GONE (Summit/Lionsgate), which could only manage $2M on Saturday on its way to a weekend that might not hit $5M.

Among holdovers, JOURNEY 2 (Warners) and THE SECRET WORLD OF ARRIETTY (Disney) both took full advantage of the Saturday matinee audience, doubling their Friday numbers.  So did GHOST RIDER 2 (Sony), although its Friday was so dismal that the 2d weekend gross will still be down 60%.  The movies aimed at adults--SAFE HOUSE (Universal), THE VOW (Screen Gems/Sony) and THIS MEANS WAR (20th)--had 50-60% Saturday bumps, as per the norm.  Patterns suggest that Oscar Sunday will bring a larger-than-usual 40-50% drop for most pictures, regardless of genre, as people make plans for the big night.  (Of course, the size of this particular Oscar night is open to question, so that may moderate the declines.)

If there were a genuine national military crisis, and a small group of expert soldiers were needed to protect the interests of the country, would you want George Clooney or Brad Pitt behind the triggers of those guns?  Not really.  As they'd be the first to tell you, they're better off sticking to their day jobs.  The same is true in reverse, and the gimmicky action movie ACT OF VALOR demonstrates that Navy SEALs should let Clooney, Pitt and their ilk handle the acting.

Valor famously began as a Pentagon recruitment documentary project, and mutated into a scripted feature film directed by Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh (the first feature for each) and written--to the extent that word is appropriate (you've never heard such terrible, or incessant, voice-over)--by 300's Kurt Johnstad.  Calling it a "bad idea" is a matter of definition, since it seems as though it's going to make plenty of money, but it's certainly far from a good movie.  

Although technically Valor is about a  Moslem Chechen terrorist and his plot to smuggle Filipino Moslems into the US wearing non-metal suicide bomb vests, that's just a pretext on which action sequences can be hung. The gimmick at the center of Valor is the casting of real-life, active-duty Navy SEALs as the movie's heroes.  (An ancillary part of the stunt is that none of the "actors" are identified by their full names for purported security reasons, although apparently revealing their faces on worldwide movie screens won't compromise their anonymity in any way, and no one involved with the movie had the novel concept of giving the characters made-up names.)  We know almost nothing about any of them except for the contrivance that one has a pregnant wife and hopes to get back to her in time for the birth--this being the script's only piece of characterization, it's referred to approximately 2 thousand times in the course of the movie's 111 minutes.  

The casting is intended to bring verisimilitude to the picture, but the flat line-readings and lack of camera presence actually makes everything seem more fake than a movie with actors would feel.  Ironically enough, the villains, who are played by professional actors, have more substance than any of the soldiers.  (Let's not even speculate about the bizarre decision to specifically identify the main Moslem terrorist's wealthy, yacht-owning accomplice as Jewish, and to cast the role with an actor who has an enormous hooked nose.)

The truth is that no one will go to see Act of Valor for scintillating dialogue or the depth of its performances.  The picture is being marketed for its action sequences, and there really is a dazzling one in the movie's first half, as the SEALs have to rescue a captured CIA agent (Rosalyn Sanchez) from the bad guys.  Things don't go as planned, and the entire sequence has the rousing, convincing feel of a Tom Clancy novel come to life.  Unfortunately, that's the high point.  The directors make far too much use of helmet-cams in the remaining battle scenes, resulting in confusing, muddled,, jaggedly edited set-pieces that resemble the visuals from first-person videogames and make no spatial sense.  (The much-vaunted use of "live ammunition" at times is also meaningless to the viewer--obviously none of the injuries or killings in the film are real, so the major parts of these sequences are certainly faked, and Hollywood does a perfectly good job of simulating a reality that looks as good as anything seen here.)

Act of Valor, in the end, is more a piece of marketing than it is a movie:  the Navy SEAL brand name is used much like a celebrity endorsement for a particular brand of sneakers or cosmetics, to make its claims seem cooler and more effectively "true".  Action Movie, now with more Real Soldiers!  At a theatre near you.

The new WANDERLUST demonstrates the strengths and limitations of amiability in movies.  Its stars, Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd, have made very profitable careers out of being professionally likable.  Unlike, say, Tom Hanks, who also began his career in light comedy but proved himself a very serious and varied talent, in the nearly 2 decades since Aniston and Rudd emerged with Friends and Clueless, it's hard to find a single title in their credits that's genuinely dark or even emotionally complicated (Aniston came closest with The Good Girl in 2002).  Their work is--with some exceptions--fairly reliably successful, but looked at in the aggregate, there's a bland professionalism to both their filmographies.

In Wanderlust, they play a New York couple who think they're about to hit new financial peaks:  Linda (Aniston) is pitching a new documentary to HBO, while George (Rudd) is in line for a big promotion.  Of course, they instead find themselves suddenly facing ruin, and have to leave their "micro-loft" in Manhattan and try something else.  Initially they head for Atlanta, where George will force himself to take a job with the porta-potty company owned by his obnoxious, nouveau riche brother Rick (Ken Marino, also co-writer of the script).  But when they rediscover just how awful Rick and his wife Marissa (Michaela Watkins) are, George and Linda remember their brief, idyllic pit-stop at a commune called Elysium, and decide to try the simple life.

This first section of Wanderlust isn't bad:  the script by director David Wain and Marino--longtime writing partners with pictures like Wet Hot American Summer and Role Models to their credit--has some satiric bite (Linda's epically terrible HBO pitch is particularly funny), and there are plenty of laughs as George and Linda seem to be on their own road to hell.  Once the story arrives (and stays) at Elysium, though, it all gets very tired.  Free love!  Naked penises!  Hallucinogenics!  Natural food!  Back in the 1960s, there was a spate of terrible comedies about how silly hippies were, movies like Skidoo and The Happening, and while Wanderlust is far superior to those bombs, it's not in a very different genre.   George and Linda will be shocked and charmed by the quaint spirits who surround them (the group includes Alan Alda, Kathryn Hahn, Joe Lo Truglio and Lauren Ambrose).  Then they'll be tempted by the possibility of opening their marriage (the main threats to fidelity are supplied by Malin Akerman and Justin Theroux).  They'll both go a little overboard (originally, in the version of the film shown to early audiences, Linda's devotion to Elysium's environmental cause included a protest that featured Aniston's first on-screen nude scene in all its mammary glory, but that's been digitally covered up and and editorially removed, reportedly because of Aniston's concerns about real-life boyfriend Theroux's feelings.)  Eventually, though, the couple realizes that this life just isn't for them, and they'll have to find a saner alternative.

Predictability in comedy isn't a fatal flaw (if it were, rom-coms as a genre wouldn't exist), but Wanderlust only intermittently has anything distinctive to add to its cliches.  And Aniston and Rudd, while certainly pleasant company, have such similar appeal that they're like the Witness Protection versions of themselves, unable to draw anything out of each other besides seemingly endless reserves of good-natured likability.  (I can't believe I'm writing this, but Aniston had more comic chemistry with Adam Sandler in last year's Just Go With It.)

Wanderlust is painless, and when it turns up on an airplane or cable network, you won't suffer while watching it.  But if you get interrupted halfway through and never catch the rest, you won't feel like you're missing anything, either.  Increasingly, the movies Aniston and Rudd make feel like that old line about buses:  miss one, and another just like it will be along soon enough.

When was the last time you saw a non-ironic, non-parody movie where someone was sneaking around in a room belonging to a possible villain, searching in almost total silence for evidence in the recesses of a dark closet, when--literally!--a cat came jumping out of nowhere, yowling with an ear-splitting screech?  Not just a generic fake-shock, but an actual leaping cat?

Welcome to GONE.

It's understandable that Amanda Seyfried wants to prove that she can handle a Hollywood lead outside of the rom-com and soap genres where her anime eyes and girl-next-door beauty would so easily pigeonhole her.  But Red Riding Hood didn't work, and while In Time was surprisingly successful overseas, Seyfried was just "the girl" to Justin Timberlake's lead.  Gone is her attempt to establish herself as a youthful Ashley Judd action heroine, which wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea--Judd had a lot of successful years riding those vehicles--if the movie itself weren't so terrible.

Jill (Seyfried) was abducted by a madman a year ago, and thrown into a pit among the body parts of earlier, less fortunate victims while she waited to die.  She managed to escape, but could produce no evidence that she'd ever been taken, and combined with some pre-existing psychological issues, that was enough for the police, in the person of Detective Powers (Daniel Sunjata) to completely dismiss her story and instead have her committed to a mental institution.  She came out paranoid and anxiety-ridden, a control freak for herself and her roommate younger sister Molly (Emily Wickersham).  When Molly herself goes missing one night, Jill is absolutely positive that her own attacker is the one who's taken her sister.  And since Molly is an alcoholic and the police give Jill no credence whatsoever, they're more interested in putting her back in the loony bin than investigating the situation.  So Jill, armed with a pistol and some ability to fabricate stories when needed, has to track him down on her own.

As potboiler premises go, this is reasonably serviceable stuff.  Allison Burnett's script, though (her recent credits include the Diane Lane thriller Untraceable, the Fame remake and this year's Underworld Awakening) is far more idiotic than necessary, with the police presented as portraits of cardboard insensitivity and incompetence, and a set of increasingly far-fetched clues for Jill to follow.  The third act veers into a full-fledged revamp of the classic Dutch thriller The Vanishing--except, y'know, completely stupid--until it reaches an anti-climactic conclusion that almost feels like it's being played for laughs. 

Seyfried remains an appealing young actress, but Gone doesn't give her much to work with, as she alternately widens her eyes with shock and squints them in determination.  Talented actors in support like Sunjata, Jennifer Carpenter (very briefly, as Jill's only friend), Nick Searcy and Katherine Moenig have little opportunity to show even traces of their talent.   Director Heitor Dhalia, making his Hollywood debut, does nothing to elevate this beyond the level of a TV procedural.

Gone, fittingly, won't be around long, and unlike--to pick a name at random--Katherine Heigl, Seyfried seems to have more people rooting for her than against her, so a few missteps won't cause her too much damage.  Next up, and far more important to her career, is her Look-At-Me-I'm-Acting indie showcase as the lead of the already much-hyped biography of Linda Lovelace.  Maybe Gone was all part of her research into surviving the most rudimentary of scripts...

   

STAR WARS EPISODE I:  THE PHANTOM MENACE 3D, to give it its fully identifying title, has the distinction of being the most successful movie ever made that is generally agreed to be terrible.  Over $900M in tickets have been sold for Phantom Menace since its opening in 1999 (that number will go over $1B when the current re-release is taken into account), which doesn't even begin to include revenues from homevideo, merchandising, television licenses, etc.--and aside from admiration for the film's special effects, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything good that's been said about it.

The dreadfulness of Phantom Menace didn't stop anyone from going.  It was a colossal pop culture event when it opened, bigger even than Harry Potter or Twilight or Lord of the Rings chapters, because it was the first new entry in 16 years in what was, title for title, the most successful motion picture franchise in history.  One simply couldn't fail to see it.  I attended a 3:30AM show--that is not a typo--at Grauman's Chinese on opening day, and we got in the ticketholders' line almost 3 hours early just to get good seats (there were hundreds of people already there ahead of us).  When the movie ended and we exited, rosy-fingered dawn was just beginning to touch the sky above Hollywood Boulevard, and the only real question was how we'd managed to stay awake.   

And now it's back.  George Lucas, the Scrooge McDuck of American cinema, fondled and squeezed his stupendously valuable intellectual property until he realized there was more revenue to be shaken out of the pockets of moviegoers, and Phantom Menace is just the first of what will be re-releases of all 6 Star Wars films in 3D.  (The Phantom Menace 3D is reasonably high-quality, as transfers go, but since the movie was never conceived for the technology when it was made, it has none of the imagination or visual excitement of recent 3D movies like Avatar, The Adventures of Tintin or Hugo.  Plus the glasses inevitably make the images darker and more grayish, resulting in a visual experience that's overall less enjoyable than the original version.)

This compels us, 13 years after the fact, to take another look at The Phantom Menace and how it stands up as a movie.  

It's instructive to glance at George Lucas' filmography.  He is, depending on how one cuts the numbers, one of the most--if not the single most--successful men ever to work in motion pictures.  But it's impossible to think of another filmmaker with a 40+ year-long career whose work is limited by such a narrow set of boundaries.  In the past 35 years, Lucas' only films as a director are the Star Wars features.  And as a producer, only twice in the past 2 decades has he stepped away from the Star Wars or Indiana Jones franchises, with the forgettable Radioland Murders in 1994 and this year's unimpressive Red Tails.  (Lucas periodically claims that he's going to devote the rest of his career to low-budget "indie" projects, but he doesn't have a lot of credibility on the point.)  Despite having the financial resources and clout to create literally anything he might have wanted to on film, Lucas has chosen to do... more of the same.  It's actually sad, in a way.  Lucas, unlike fantasy filmmakers such as Peter Jackson, Christopher Nolan, Alfonso Cuaron or Sam Raimi, to name just a few, made his life's work the richest McDonalds ever.

Also sad are Lucas' shortcomings as a director and writer, and nowhere is that clearer than in Phantom Menace, which was his first piece of direction since the original Star Wars 22 years earlier.  For those who've lived in a cave since 1999,  Phantom Menace begins the Star Wars saga by introducing the 8-year old Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd), who in the course of the movie meets Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), R2-D2, C-3PO, Yoda and Pademe (Natalie Portman) who will become the love of his life and the mother of Luke and Leia.  While one can see in the later movies the seeds Lucas was planting in the saga with this view of Anakin as a child, he would have been better off sticking with adults.

The Phantom Menace script, for which Lucas takes sole credit, is a tedious and often all-but-incomprehensible hash of taxation issues, blockades and mysticism, conveyed with dialogue that was either dreadfully expositional, childish (as opposed to believably child-like) or flat-out embarrassing (the latter would include every word out of the mouth of Jar-Jar Binks).  Sadly, although Lucas has been known to tinker with his movies prior to re-release, he hasn't seen fit to remove the messianic undertones from Phantom Menace:  hints of Anakin Skywalker's possible virgin birth and discussion of his genetic superiority.  (These plot points were toned down considerably in the later prequel chapters.)  The somewhat queasy pre-romance between Padme and the 8-year old Anakin also remains.  (This from the filmmaker who also gave us what turned out to be a semi-incestuous brother-sister undercurrent in the initial movies.)  

It can't be a coincidence that Portman, Liam Neeson (as Obi-Wan's mentor), Ewan McGregor and Samuel L. Jackson (as a senior Jedi), all of whom have more than proven their great talent elsewhere, give utterly wooden performances under Lucas' direction.  (Let's speak only in passing of Jake Lloyd, who never had a career post-Phantom Menace, and thus can only be remembered for one of the worst child performances ever put on film.) It's also not a coincidence that the only sequence in the movie that really worked in 1999 and still does now is the pod race, because it involves no dialogue and almost no acting.

What Phantom Menace did have in 1999 was a then-revolutionary expansion of the role of digital special effects.  Lucas had re-invented special effects with the first Star Wars, and he all but did it again here, with settings, sets, spacecraft and entire characters like the loathed Jar-Jar residing in computers.  It was all quite extraordinary, an entirely new palette for filmmakers to use in creating cinematic worlds, and whatever else one can say about Lucas, he deserves full credit for his visionary development of the technology.  Unfortunately, in 2012 these effects have come a long way from their 1999 standard, and these days--through no fault of their own--many of the Phantom Menace effects look rudimentary and old-fashioned.

There's no question that Phantom Menace will continue to make money on this go-round, and so will the subsequent Star Wars re-releases.  Lucas has the ultimate good thing, and the movies, along with the innumerable spin-offs, prequels, games, products and additional ancillaries, will sell forever.  In the case of Phantom Menace, however, that didn't--and doesn't--make it any good.

SAFE HOUSE feels like a remake, even though technically it's not.  It's a little bit Training Day, a little Bourne, a little Man On Fire (and everything else Tony Scott has ever done), with almost nothing added of its own, an exercise in craft and professionalism that fades into a "People Who Liked This Also Liked..." IMDB list.

The setting is South Africa, where the (young, naive, untested) keeper of the local CIA safe house, Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds), is finally going to get some excitement in his life:  rogue ex-agent Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) has turned himself in after years on the run, and is being brought to the safe house for interrogation. No sooner has the waterboarding begun than the safe house itself is under assault, and Matt has to escape with his prisoner, who instantly turns the tables and proves himself--he's Denzel Washington, for god's sake--in complete control of the situation.  Matt, reluctantly or not, is aboard for the ride.

Safe House purportedly wants us, and Matt, to ponder whether Tobin Frost is really a good guy gone bad, a bad guy gone good again, or some combination thereof, but don't spend too much time worrying about it:  the script by David Guggenheim never really makes the situation clear, and serves more as an excuse to run through the paces of contemporary post-Bourne action movies.  There's the flurry of combat at close quarters, the squeal of chase scene auto tires, and the incessant reversals and double-crosses that come with such clockwork predictability that they're never very surprising.

There are, meanwhile, regular cuts to senior Agency professionals in Washington (Sam Shepard, Vera Farmiga, Brendan Gleeson), who stare at video screens and computer graphics and bark out orders with crisp urgency.  At least one of these people--spoiler alert!--turns out to be a traitor, and if you can't figure out who that's going to be 15 minutes into the story, you need to see more movies.   Along the way, Matt has his CIA agent bar-mitzvah, becoming a man and presented with knowledge of the way the world really works instead of a fountain pen.  

Safe House is directed with efficiency rather than inspiration by Daniel Espinosa, a Swedish director making his US debut.  Espinosa has seen all the movies that went into this screenwriting-class compendium of a script, and he's borrowed the pungently overexposed cinematography from Tony Scott and the lucid fast cutting from Paul Greengrass (both cinematographer Oliver Wood and editor Richard Pearson are veterans of the Bourne franchise).  The movie jumps through its familiar hoops with great professionalism and zero substance.

Washington, himself a veteran of 5 Tony Scott thrillers, is completely in his comfort zone here.  He delivers every ambiguous shade of Tobin Frost, every character reverse and shifting tone of craftiness, cynicism, weariness and dry humor, with precision and star power.  Even when his character is enacting cliches, Washington is riveting.  Reynolds, though, is becoming oddly more bland with every role he takes.  Reynolds, at 36, feels too old to be playing a neophyte agent--with him in the part, Matt feels like a loser rather than a newbie--and Reynolds doesn't find anything in the role to make Matt distinctive or interesting.  After a while, you become aware that it's Washington outmatching Reynolds at every turn, not just Tobin outmatching Matt, and that's not so much fun to watch.   Shepard, Gleeson and Farmiga grimly earn the paychecks that pay for their more substantial indie work.

If movie theaters still ran double features, Safe House would be the perfect picture to run as the bottom half of one.  It's an acceptable--and yes, safe--piece of undemanding entertainment that doesn't exert itself in any way to attempt something more.

This year has brought us a far-fetched, but ultimately moving and deeply romantic story about a couple who have finally gotten together and married after a great deal of turmoil and who then face their greatest challenge of all:  a fluke accident deprives the wife of any memory of her beloved, and when, despite all his desperate efforts, he's unable to make her remember their past, he sets out, with equal parts tenderness and determination, to make her fall in love with him all over again.

I speak, of course, of the final season of Chuck.

As it happens, the new movie THE VOW tells much the same story, only without the chase scenes and machine gun battles.  Unfortunately the filmmakers also left out the emotional depth and snappy dialogue that Chuck provided.  In their stead, we get much sappiness and almost nothing that's convincing.  

In The Vow's version, Paige (Rachel McAdams) and Leo (Channing Tatum) are 4 years married, and share a marital bliss that only movie couples about to suffer tragedy are permitted.  She's a sculptor and he owns a struggling recording studio; their combined incomes allow them to own a house and studio roughly the size of a city block.  One night a truck rear-ends their car, and Paige is propelled through the windshield in slow-motion (miraculously without shedding a drop of blood).  When she comes out of her coma, she's fine... except that she's entirely forgotten the events of the last 5 years, which includes her entire relationship with Leo.  As much as he lovingly leads her through their things and prompts her with memories, he remains a complete stranger to her.

The people she does remember are those from earlier in her life, and conveniently for the movie's sake, it turns out that this was just about the time she completely changed everything in her lifestyle, leaving law school, the suburbs, her parents (Sam Neill and Jessica Lange) and her then-fiancee Jeremy (Scott Speedman) for reasons that aren't revealed until the end of the story.  Since she doesn't remember the reason she left them, those are the people she now feels comfortable with, and she goes back to her former pre-marriage life.

This is where The Vow almost threatens to become interesting, because the old Paige was very nearly a Mean Girl, a rich, closed-off law student whose friends might as well be named Muffy and Heather.  A movie about a free spirit who retreats to the world of snobbery and creature comforts might have something on its mind, but this isn't that movie.  The script, credited to the team of Abby Kohn & Marc Silverstein (responsible for He's Just Not That Into You and Valentine's Day) and shockingly to the great Jason Katims, of Friday Night Lights and Parenthood (one would like to think his contribution was limited to Leo's recording studio, since it echoes a plotline on Parenthood), makes Paige's parents cartoons of well-off arrogance, and the ex-fiancee is of course an insensitive villain who ultimately has to be punched by Leo.  So Paige's desire to re-enter their clearly inferior world just makes her seem like an idiot, and the explanation of why she moved away in the first place is a silly plot revelation.

Tatum and McAdams are both likable, charismatic performers, and they're all The Vow has going for it (aside from one decent scene for Jessica Lange in the last reel), but they don't have the tools to create characters that aren't on the page.  Tatum mostly looks doggedly puppydogish (taking off his shirt at every opportunity), while McAdams alternates between "puzzled" and "troubled".

The direction of Michael Sucsy, who made the HBO Grey Gardens, is slick and completely lacking in personality, as are the technical credits.  You know a romantic movie is in trouble when the central couple temporarily break up and you find yourself thinking that maybe they really are better off apart; The Vow accomplishes the truly difficult feat of making Nicholas Sparks adaptations look nuanced and convincing.

Based on the preliminary numbers at Deadline, the race between CHRONICLE (20th) and THE WOMAN IN BLACK (CBS) is still too close to call at $21-22M each.  No matter who claims victory on Sunday morning, the final weekend result will depend on how the films are each treated by Super Bowl Sunday, and may not be settled until the release of actual numbers on Monday afternoon.

The preliminary figures have Chronicle on top by less than $1M through Saturday night, with a handsome 20% day-to-day increase claimed for Saturday.  Woman In Black is on its heels with a reported 18% Saturday increase.  The best Saturday bump actually belonged to BIG MIRACLE (Universal), not surprising since it caters to the family matinee audience--even with an 80% increase, though, its weekend total will only be around $8.5M.

There don't look to be any surprises in the holdovers among the Top 10, with UNDERWORLD AWAKENING (Screen Gems/Sony) leading those at around $5.5-6M for the weekend, and the rest clustered in the $4.5-5M neighborhood.

According to Deadline's preliminary numbers, it's going to be a stronger than expected weekend for both CHRONICLE (20th) and THE WOMAN IN BLACK (CBS).  Keeping in mind that Sunday will be a very slow day at the boxoffice due to the Super Bowl (especially for movies aimed at a male audience), it seems as though Woman In Black may take the lead and establish itself as CBS Films's first significant success (not to mention proof for Daniel Radcliffe that there's life beyond Harry Potter), with a $8-9M Friday that should mean around $20M for the weekend.  Chronicle's Friday may be equal to or better than Woman's, but it's likely to feel the brunt of Super Bowl Sunday and could end up a bit below $20M for the weekend--still an excellent number for a relatively low-budget, no-star project.  BIG MIRACLE (Universal), with a $2-2.5M Friday, is looking like a weaker $8M or so by Sunday.

THE GREY (Open Road) will lead the holdovers with a 50-55% weekend drop to around $9-10M.  ONE FOR THE MONEY (Lionsgate/Summit) is heading for a more serious 60+% fall to $4.5M, which is also where RED TAILS (20th/Lucasfilm) and MAN ON A LEDGE (Summit/Lionsgate) are likely to be.

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.