Being unem­ployed, I can go to the cinema on a Tuesday morning and see three pictures in a row. This is precisely what I did this week. I saw three films. The theater was also playing Michael Moore’s latest barf-​​fest, but I decided that I’ve had nothing to say about Michael Moore for years now and wouldn’t want to ruin a good thing.

Zombieland

I’ve never liked zombie films much, mostly because they are within the post-​​apocalyptic survival genre I could never get into, since they invariably involve some self-​​sacrificing dipshit who gets himself killed in order to save the others, or “hero­ically” gets himself infected so he’s got to be shot before he goes all zombified. Ugh. So it might not sound suffi­ciently impressive when I say that I had more fun in this zombie film than I’ve ever had in any other zombie film. In fact, it was extremely enter­taining. It wasn’t very deep, but it did manage to make it all the way through itself without a single sacrifice. That’s a bit of a spoiler, but you should know by now that when I review movies here, they contain spoilers.

Paranormal Activity

This was made in 2006 and even­tually made its way to Steven Spielberg who, after viewing it, returned his copy in a trash bag declaring it to be haunted and claiming to have had to call a locksmith after he was myste­ri­ously locked in his viewing room while it was running. I think this is one of those stories distrib­utors put about to increase interest in low-​​budget spooky movies, rather than something that, in reality, actually happened. And I think that’s part of the problem with rational people going to see movies that rely on the viewer’s irra­tional fears for most of their impact: we see through them and thereby miss out on a lot of the enter­tainment factor. That’s what happened for me with The Blair Witch Project, with which this film shares many features. Blair Witch, aside from having too many char­acters and being shot mostly in nause­ating Franco-​​Soviet ShakyCam, had no substance left to it after one stripped away all the irra­tional nonsense. Paranormal Activity, on the other hand, is better, though still short on much meat for those of us who aren’t capti­vated by the prospect of demonic possession. For one thing, Paranormal Activity has only two signif­icant char­acters, so both are much more developed and inter­esting than the Blair Witch gaggle. Additionally, most of Paranormal Activity was shot from a tripod. There is quite a bit of handheld still, but overall the image is much more controlled and comprehensible.

The best part of Paranormal Activity was the disin­te­gration of the rela­tionship between the two char­acters. They started in what I think is a fairly typical boyfriend/​girlfriend rela­tionship: she is a cute but not beautiful emotionally and finan­cially needy student, and he is a hunka­li­cious but flaky profes­sional day-​​trader who works from home. Everything they have– the big house, the expensive TV, the fancy video camera– is his. Her only source of income appears to be making and selling jewelry with a friend. She is wholly dependent on him, which allows him to take advantage of her over the course of the film. He thinks he knows more than she does, but she’s been living with her demon for her whole life. Nevertheless, he refuses to yield to her superior expe­rience. He refuses to listen to her pleas for restraint. He latches on to how “cool” the whole thing is and completely neglects her emotions– something I think he has probably been doing since the beginning of the rela­tionship. Instead he insists that he can control it if she will just let him. This is a man who must control every­thing and everyone around him– even his day-​​trading suggests a refusal to allow anyone else to control any part of his life for more than a few hours. Consequently he has a serious problem with letting his girl­friend into his life except in a super­ficial way. A way that works only until they encounter something beyond his control.

Watching this movie made me think of many couples that I know who fall into this sort of rela­tionship framework, where one partner is emotionally dependent on the other, who uses that depen­dence for control. It males me wonder if the movie isn’t so much about demonic possession as it is about domestic abuse. So it rates as highly as it does because I believe that there is some richness there under­neath the demonic possession schlock.

The Informant!

This movie was inter­esting, but unre­markable. Melanie Lynskey gave a very nice perfor­mance as Ginger Whitacre, and was probably the second most memorable part of the film, despite her limited screen time. The most memorable part of the film was the absolutely gorgeous Nagra SNST. The title sequence is pretty much Nagra porn. I’m defi­nitely looking around on eBay for one of these babies.

Photo by Matt Blaze, 2008.