AA-Ooooooooooooooooooo! (Or, whatever.)

My quick and dirty thoughts after seeing Where the Wild Things Are:

Really, who hasn't, in some fit of rage or other such tantrum, ripped the arm off his or her favorite stuffed animal and later tried to repair it with a stick, or a sock, or something else stupid like that. But it's never the same, and no matter what we do it's like that forever, and it just goes into the bin with all the other things that, one day when we're sifting through old trash, reminds us of some moment in life we can't have back.

For everything that Where the Wild Things Are does well--visually, tonally, the constant apt manifestation of everything that goes on inside a kid's psyche, and the incoherent hodgepodge of what they've managed to internalize from a world they don't understand--what works best for me is this looming motif of the sun burning out. Because, really, childhood is always a world in some sort of constant state of dying; after all there's not one state of 'childhood' but endless iterations that are constantly fading away and developing into something new. And that's good, I guess, but it also necessitates constant loss. No fort ever quite lives up to the grand visions we had for it, so we have no choice but to tear it down, because what the hell is the point of reality if it can't mirror our imaginations. But then, our imaginations can't live up to our imaginations, and our fantastical escapes wither along with everything else.

It's telling that the only time we see a wild thing apart from Max is Carol rooting through the cave before running to see Max off at the beach, since obviously he IS Max (well, they all are, but Carol is clearly who Max identifies himself with), and embodies what Max's return home is supposed to be. At the end Max, smiling at his mother, isn't some touched child who has learned a valuable lesson by a literal experience with wise, mystical creatures, he's just a regular kid who got upset and had to spend some time inside his own mind until he got over it. Like any kid, he depends on fantasy to get him through his childhood, but it's still just fantasy, and clearly the viewer experiences this film as something far more depressing than Max himself does. Years later he may think back in some nostalgic reverie about the imaginary worlds of his childhood he can't get back, but for the time being it's just something that played its part, and now he gets to eat cake.

It came in the night, it came in the night, it came in the ni-i-ight

Grievances and faint praise for Paranormal Activity, from the October 22 issue of SEE Magazine. The best thing about this movie, probably, was that it reminded of the incredibly catchy "It Came in the Night" by A Raincoat. That song can be found on one of the versions of Kenneth Anger's "Rabbit's Moon" or, more accessibly, here. But on with the review:

Paranormal Activity is the sort of movie you talk about making with your friends upon realizing your hallway is kind of creepy. Familiarity is this film’s watchword, from conception to casting to execution.

Micah (Micah Sloat), a day trader and totally average douchebag, shares a San Diego home with his girlfriend Katie (Katie Featherston), who has been haunted, off and on, by unexplained phenomena ever since the age of eight. As the film opens, Micah has purchased a fancy camera to document the activity, which have recently started up again. Much to Katie’s chagrin, Micah begins filming everything, including their bedroom at night.

This is a mockumentary along the lines of The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, wherein all the footage has supposedly been filmed by the characters themselves. The entirety of this micro-budget film takes place inside the couples’ house, and it relies on the claustrophobia of the space and the banality of the setting to creep out viewers, though it’s only moderately successful at doing so.

Relying on hyperrealism for scares, Paranormal Activity plays on audiences’ fears of something alien entering the supposedly safe haven of their home and bedroom. But without creating a fully imagined cinematic world, the film must rely primarily on the viewer’s belief in demons, ghosts, and things that go bump in the night. If your belief is nil, you probably won’t find Paranormal Activity very scary. It seems to play solely to the fears of people sitting in a dark theatre rather than anything larger, which is what better horror films tend to do.

The most successfully creepy moments are the ones that aren’t necessarily paranormal. One of the more unsettling things that the couple captures on video during the night is Katie rising in a sleepwalker’s trance and standing at the side of the bed for several hours, facing Micah’s sleeping body. By playing this scene in fast-forward, an eerie, otherworldly time-lapse effect is created. It’s far more effective than the scenes which involve slamming doors and footsteps, for example — those bits are startling, sure, but they don’t do much except make you jump.

First-time filmmaker Oren Peli has a good grasp on how to escalate tension, and the pacing is excellent. Without anything meaningful to ground the scares, though, the film ends up being mostly a collection of tense moments. The conclusion is fairly satisfying (more so than, say, The Blair Witch Project) and gives the story a satisfying sense of completion. Paranormal Activitydoesn’t live up to its hype as one of the scariest films ever made, but if you go in with moderate expectations, it will probably work as an entertainingly frightening night at the movies.

Proof that I still write.

Some quick house cleaning, hopefully more interesting posts to come.

Thoughts on The Cove, District 9, The Stoning of Soraya M., Three Monkeys, You, The Living, and The Boys Are Back.

I should have a piece on the new Mad Men up on The House Next Door later tonight, so I'll be posting a link to that shortly.

Also, here is an Inglourious Basterds piece I co-wrote with Paul Matwychuk, which is probably what you should read if I bore you too much to click on more than one of these links.