Movie Box Review

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.

Here's what's wrong with BBCAmerica.

Don't get me wrong:  it's marvelous that BBCA exists to bring us shows like Luther, the original (and superior) Torchwood, the also original (and even more superior) Being Human, and now THE HOUR.  The problem is that a BBC "1-hour" show actually does run for almost a full hour, unlike the 40-45 minutes that US networks (other than pay-cable) call an "hour" once commercials are removed.  If, like BBCA, you're a network that airs commercials and also wants to rebroadcast these series, you have 3 choices, none of them ideal:  you can edit 10-15 minutes from each episode, put them in awkward 75-minute timeslots, or pad 90-minute slots with "extras" to fill out the surplus of time. 

BBCA's solution is an odd compromise.  The initial 2 airings of each episode (east coast and west coast on the same night) run 75 minutes and are uncut, but all repeats after that are brutally edited down to fit a 1-hour slot.  So when I tell you that The Hour is the best new show to hit the air since Game of Thrones, and that you should catch up with the first episode on Saturday and get yourself hooked before next Wednesday's chapter, all you'll be able to watch is the truncated version.  (You may want to check your cable or satellite system to see if the longer cut is available On Demand.)  This is too bad, because The Hour hardly has lulls that would lend themselves to editing.  One of the show's pleasures is its crackling pace of Abi Morgan's script (she has 2 major films upcoming, the Margaret Thatcher biography The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep, and the Michael Fassbinder/Carey Mulligan drama Shame). Still, better to live with a subpar version of the first episode than to miss The Hour entirely.

People seem determined to compare The Hour to Mad Men, but a better way of describing it is Broadcast News as a period murder mystery.  The time is the mid-1950s, and the place is the BBC itself, which is ready to launch itself out of stodgy airings of newsreel footage and start reporting the news seriously.  The vehicle for this new commitment to news is a series called "The Hour," and our protagonists square up nicely with James L. Brooks' main characters.  The Albert Brooks figure is Freddie Lyon, a brilliant, passionately committed newsman who unfortunately lacks camera-ready charisma and tact; he has an unrequited love for Bel Rowley (Romola Garai), the equally brilliant but also beautiful and politic producer of "The Hour," and the show's stand-in for Holly Hunter.  She, of course, finds herself falling for the piece's William Hurt, in this case Hector Madden (Dominic West), the endlessly charming, somewhat superficial and very married anchor ("presenter" in BBC parlance) of the new show.    Freddie and Bel have effortless best-friend banter--even when they're furious with each other, they can't bear to be apart--but Hector has star quality.

Meanwhile, there's been a mysterious murder in a London tube station, and MI:6 is all too interested in the corpse; the death has something to do with Freddie's socialite friend Ruth, who's torn apart by it even as she's announcing her engagement.  Freddie, of course, is determined to get to the bottom of the crime even if no one else cares, and much intrigue is clearly on the way.

The Hour is a thriller, a romantic comedy and a drama about politics and the news business, at a time when most TV series would be happy to succeed at any one of those.  The three leads are terrific:  Whishaw is much more grounded and likable than he's been in indie pictures like I'm Not There, Perfume and Bright Star; Garai (she was the older version of Saoirse Ronan's character in Atonement) has the air of a Hollywood screwball comedy star; and West, well, West was McNulty on The Wire, and consequently will never have to prove anything ever again.  And naturally there's an A-level British ensemble cast behind them, with people like Anton Lesser, Juliet Stevenson, Anna Chancellor and Burn Gorman (late of Torchwood) everywhere you look.  The production design is impeccable, and the first episode's direction by Coky Giedroyc is fleet and tense.