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.