Obviously there are severe limitations in the Paranormal Activity-videocam mode of moviemaking, and I wish never to see a picture made in this mode again.  In Chronicle (2012), however, for all the severe limitations, it’s fairly free of hokiness.

Written by Max Landis, the son of John, and directed by Josh Trank, the film centers on three teens who unexpectedly receive a talent for moving things with their minds–telekinesis–and proceed to have a lot of fun with it.  The top dog with this power is Andrew (Dane DeHaan), a friendless boy with a horrid home life, who nevertheless decides to stick a camcorder in other people’s faces (whether he knows them or not) and who finds it offensive that his nice cousin used to consider Andrew hard to talk to.  Presented without pathos, the lad becomes desperate and hostile.  Telekinesis gets very dangerous;  it’s now a weapon.

The film avoids all blandness and predictability, and is somewhat more than a middlebrow indie curio.  Like so many other entertainment movies these days, it finally exhibits way too much destruction and mayhem, but it’s not without smarts and thrills.  It’s recommendable–more so, I think, than Paranormal Activity.

Now, no more camcorders.

Image via Wikipedia

I decided to watch I Know Who Killed Me (2007) on DVD because a critic, Jim Ridley, at the Village Voice liked it and opined that moviegoers shouldn’t have overlooked it. 

He’s nearly right.  For over an hour this horror film by Scott Sivertson, starring Lindsay Lohan, is an intriguing bundle of nasty realism, and it does have the damaged Lohan’s magnetism.  It’s unfortunate, then, that this flick which Ridley says was “sold as torture porn” ends up as weak as contemporary torture porn.  The last one-third is rushed and ludicrous, with Sivertson’s flashy, gimmicky style always present.  It could have achieved a gory marriage of Hitchcock and David Lynch, but no.  I know what killed it.

I Know Who Killed Me (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

The heroes of Western novels sure have a lot of problems.  Martin Kelso, for example, is buried in difficulties and turmoil in Lewis B. Patten’s The Tarnished Star (1963), another sapid oater by the author of A Killing in Kiowa.

But . . . no problems, no drama.  Once again, a conflict between homesteaders and cattlemen proceeds apace, but Patten usually avoids predictable action and even boring, tiresome characterization.  E.g., Kelso’s father is a sheriff and a legendary man, but Kelso has to painstakingly push him to enforce the law against the hostile cattlemen.

Star is short and not actually conclusive, but it’s likable.  Just as fun as Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. 

Image via Wikipedia

The French director Robert Bresson, whose 13 films are currently being shown in a New York City retrospective, was a Christian artist without being a Christian man, i.e. a bona fide Christian believer.  His cinematic style usually leaves me cold, although not in two great pictures he released during the 1950s:  Diary of a Country Priest (from the Bernanos novel) and A Man Escaped.  Here, the man who was raised a Catholic presents protagonists who receive significant mercy from God, in films as spiritual as they are austere.  After that, however, works appear in which some spirituality arises, but mostly there is wan despair over the world’s violation of innocence–expressed through a flat, eccentric style.  Even the very interesting and compelling Au hasard Balthazar (1966) is not quite what it ought to be.  The “automatic, affectless performances” (Nick Pinterton, The Village Voice) Bresson demanded of his cast do the film no favors.

All the same, the two masterpieces I mentioned above–and 1945’s The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne–prove the level of brilliance in Bresson before he took what I believe to be a regrettable turn for a Christian artist.

(The photo is of Robert Bresson.)  

Image via Wikipedia

On Little Children (2007):

Kate Winslet is commanding but never hammy.  All the anxiety, ambivalence, femininity, and intelligence of the character of Sarah in this Todd Field movie Winslet supplies.  She’s the best thing in it.  An adaptation of a Tom Perrotta novel (which I’ve never read), Little Children doesn’t make the grade, though.  Winslet’s suburban wife becomes an adulterer in this almost dated tale of unhappy suburban sinners, and what ensues, I’m sorry to say, is a forced, uneasy denouement in addition to an uneven tone.  The film is inferior to the same director’s flawed but worthwhile In the Bedroom (2001).  I disagree with critic Dana Stevens that Perrotta, who co-wrote the screenplay, “is a natural match” for Field.

Field has an artistic eye, after all–he uses depth of field as though he invented it–and his scene creation is better than the script.  No doubt LC was not the novel he should have filmed.

Cover of Little Children