Film

Stupor powers

Chronicle

There’s a good movie and a great idea buried in the stagey muck that clogs up Chronicle, the latest entry in the “found footage” craze. There are so many of these found footage movies now, I feel like I’m writing about them every week. Amovie about three high school kids finding some kind of meteor and absorbing a strange energy that gives them super telekinetic powers is a magnificent idea. But hampering the movie with the idiotic premise that everything is filmed by the characters in an attempt for a new twist on the tiresome fake documentary gimmick is a terrible mistake. That’s not to say there aren’t moments of brilliance. The potential for goodness is actually achieved multiple times in the movie, especially in its slam-bang finale. But seeing a movie strain for originality in showing how many different ways people can film each other is a slog to watch. It’s a major distraction and, in this case, completely unnecessary. The three Seattle teens who get a little more than drunk at a high school rave are Andrew (Dane DeHaan), his cousin Matt (Alex Russell) and class president candidate Steve (Michael B. Jordan). Andrew has a new camera, and he’s chronicling the violence inflicted on him by his lousy father (Michael Kelly) and making a record of his mother’s dying days. Of course, like all high school kids do, he brings his rather large and cumbersome camera to the rave party. Matt and Steve find a big hole in a field making ominous sounds. They invite Andrew along to investigate with his camera and, even though the hole looks and sounds dangerous,

they dive in, because that’s what crazy high school kids do. They spy a large glowing object, get a little too close, and start spouting blood from their noses. Cut to days later, as Andrew’s footage reveals that the trio has gained superpowers. They can crush things, stop things in midair and even fly. And they got it all on video! Even the part where blood was spouting out of their noses, where Andrew didn’t even bother by to drop the camera and assist his friends orBob Grimm apply a hankie to his own nose. bgrimm@ Andrew is the main focus of the film as his newsreview.com character becomes the strongest of the three. This lends to trouble because Andrew also has the most teen angst due to bullying from his 2 dad and kids at school. So he starts pushing cars off roads with the drivers still in them and yanking out bully teeth with his mind. His ability to manipulate things also allows for him to let his camera hover around him, without a hands-on operator, while he’s doing all this stuff. So, on top of being a budding super-villain, Andrew can now frame a shot without even touching a camera or looking through the lens. Another student has one of those crazy video blogs that all the teens are doing these days, so she’s conveniently shooting video as well. Everybody has video on their phone, so all of the material they manage to shoot makes it into the final edit. Director Josh Trank finds every conceivable way for somebody to be caught on video and incorporates it. Something about Andrew also had me feeling a bit of a sulky Twilight vibe, and I figured out that DeHaan has a slight resemblance to Kristen Stewart. Actually he looks to be a combination of Stewart, Justin Bieber, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ray Wise of Twin Peaks fame. There’s a little bit of Leland Palmer in his evil grin. It’s time to stop this moviemaking trend. It’s just a way for studios to take a $100 million dollar budget and turn it into $10 million. Granted, Chronicle looks better than most found footage films (the recent The Devil Inside was a visual mess), but it still has that sloppy element going on. It’s a lot cheaper to look sloppy than pretty. Ω

Teenage mutant nincompoop.

1

POOR

2

FAIR

3

GOOD

4

VERY GOOD

5

EXCELLENT 4The Artist An homage to silent films that’s actually a silent film, this is a funny, touching and innovative piece of work with a fun performance from Jean Dujardin. He plays a silent movie star at the dawning of the sound age, much like Charlie Chaplin, who either must make the leap to sound or slip away. Berenice Bejo plays Peppy Miller, a star on the rise. After sharing a scene in a film, their two careers go in separate directions. They’re wonderfully expressive performers, which suits Michel Hazanavicius’s film perfectly. One of last year’s biggest surprises, and they’ll be watching this one a hundred years from now.

1Contraband Mark Wahlberg can be cool in a movie. In fact, he’s cool in most of his movies, and the right director can make the man look like a pro. But, oh boy, when Mark Wahlberg stinks, he stinks real bad. Like, The Happeningbad. Wahlberg looks clueless and tired in this movie, and who can blame him? Director Baltasar Kormakur packs this silly actioner full of so many garbage subplots and locales that most actors would probably grow weary. Chris Farraday (Wahlberg) has gone legit after a career as a smuggler. Life is good due to beautiful wife Kate (Kate Beckinsale) and his alarm system business. But when his brother-in-law gets into trouble, Chris goes back into the criminal world, which inexplicably involves long boat trips and gunfights with Panamanians while his wife is terrorized back home by a drug dealer (Giovanni Ribisi). This is an overstuffed mess.

4A Dangerous Method Keira Knightley is just brilliant as a temporarily insane woman who has an affair with her psychiatrist, and that psychiatrist just happens to be Carl Jung (masterfully played by Michael Fassbender). Viggo Mortensen does an impressive turn as Sigmund Freud in this spellbinder from director David Cronenberg. Knightley delivers one of those high-wire performances that go right to the edge of physical and emotional cohesion at all times. When her character is more “ill” in the film’s early stages, her tics and fits are so real, I was actually concerned for her. Watching Fassbender’s Jung and Mortensen’s Freud having intellectual battles over sex and the psyche is one of last year’s great acting feats. This is without a doubt the best thing Knightley has ever done.

4The Descendants George Clooney delivers another great performance as Matt King, a rich land tycoon living a modest life in Hawaii, trying to get along with his two daughters while his wife is in a coma. Matt finds out some stuff about the wife, and his life takes some interesting turns. Shailene Woodley is excellent here as Matt’s older daughter, as is Amara Miller as the younger one. Robert Forster is both funny and sad as Matt’s bitter fatherin-law, while Matthew Lillard gets a good role as a real estate agent with a secret. Written and directed by Alexander Payne (About Schmidt, Election, Sideways), it’s characteristic of his films. There are lots of good laughs to go with the heavy stuff.

1Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close The latest 9/11 movie is the worst one yet, focusing on an obnoxious kid (Thomas Horn) on a quest to find the lock for a key his father (Tom Hanks) left behind after dying on 9/11. Horn is just impossible to watch, and the plotting is deplorable. Yes, the kid is making his acting debut here, and it’s a demanding role. I’m sorry—he just drove me crazy. Max von Sydow shows up in a silent role and has some fun with it. That’s about the most positive thing I can say about this trash. It wastes decent performances from Hanks and Sandra Bullock. 5The Grey Liam Neeson battles nature and puts up a good fight in director Joe Carnahan’s totally absorbing and devastating survival pic. The Grey tells the scary and surprisingly emotional tale of some Alaskan oil drillers who find themselves stranded in the middle of frozen tundra after their plane crashes. There’s scant chance of survival due to lack of food, lack of shelter and lack of time before temperatures drop and people freeze. There’s also the little matter of nasty, evil wolves trying to dismember them as they fight to stay warm and find food. The animals in The Greyhave very little in common with White Fang. Actually, they make the werewolf from An American Werewolf in Londonlook like an elderly pug. Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney and Joe Anderson all shine in supporting roles, but this is Neeson’s movie, containing some of his best work.

4The Iron Lady Meryl Streep is my pick for 2011’s Best Actress for her incredible, uncanny work as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in director Phyllida Lloyd’s engaging biopic. Streep disappears into her role. Yes, it’s partly due to excellent makeup work, but it’s mostly due to Streep’s beautifully nuanced performance. She plays Thatcher at many ages, including her recent declining years, and she’s spot on. Her accent is natural, her physicality is perfection. Yes, the film glosses over a lot of the political aspects that made Thatcher controversial. It focuses mainly on Thatcher’s relationship with her husband (played in later years by Jim Broadbent), and her psychological and emotional difficulties in her elder years. This is all about Streep and seeing an actress showing the world how this sort of thing is done right.

1One for the Money Katherine Heigl is Stephanie Plum, a former Macy’s employee who goes into the bail-bond business. Her first gig is to go after a cop in trouble, Joe Morelli (Jason O’Mara), a guy she lost her virginity to and tried to run over with a car. It’s all based on the first of a popular string of novels by Janet Evanovich, and my guess is that director Julie Anne Robinson missed something in the translation from book to film. The movie is a dull dud. O’Mara is an actor who has a talent for making every line irritating. He’s just so intense. This is a guy who visits the catering table for coffee a lot during the shoot. Heigl does her best with lazy material, and Debbie Reynolds shows up in the kooky grandma role. This isn’t the movie that will take Heigl to the next level. Actually, I see direct-to-video movies in her future.

3The Woman in Black This is an old-fashioned haunted house movie from Hammer Films that takes some time to get going but gets some good scares in the end. Daniel Radcliffe plays a lawyer who goes to a village in the middle of nowhere and, quite illogically, spends a couple of nights in a haunted house. While there, he sees multiple ghosts, not the least of which is the ghost of a deranged woman angry about the death of her son. Director James Watkins sets the film in a place where it’s impossible for Radcliffe’s character to escape, adding to the dread. There are some interesting sequences—I especially like when a mudcovered young boy makes a visit in the rain—and Radcliffe makes his character somebody we can root for, even if he is dumber than a box of hammers for entering the house in the first place. This one is committed to darkness, so those looking for a good time might want to go play skee ball instead.

Reno

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