Category Archives: Film Review

Quickie Review: Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (dir. by Neveldine/Taylor)

Posted on by Arleigh

Ghost Rider has always been a niche character for Marvel Comics. The character was born out of an earlier Marvel character named Night Rider. After Marvel writers Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich and artist Mike Ploog had rein-visioned the character into Ghost Rider during the early 70’s it has always remained on the extreme fringes of the Marvel Comics universe. This wouldn’t stop Sony (which owned the film rights to the character) to go ahead and adapt it for the big-screen. 2007’s Ghost Rider by Mark Johnson was the first and failed attempt to turn the character into a film franchise. It still made enough money despite a near-universal panning of the film by critics and audiences alike. This turn of profit is why Sony once again dipped into the Ghost Rider well and come up with 2012’s Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance.

This “sort of” sequel ditches Mark Johnson and brings in the dynamic (and I’d say somewhat insane) directing duo of Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor to helm the film. It brings back Nicolas Cage for the role of Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider. Working from a script by Scott Gimple, Seth Hoffman and David S. Goyer one would think the film had nowhere else to go but up especially with the wacky and frenetic filming style by Neveldine/Taylor. To say that this sequel failed to do anything but finally give this film franchise a final nail in it coffin would be an understatement.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance ditches pretty much most of what transpired with the first film and tries to retcon things for the sequel. I’d say this would’ve been a good idea seeing the first film was truly awful, but what the sequel ended up doing was confuse things even more. The film tries to turn the Ghost Rider persona from just a spirit of vengeance but an angelic being called the spirit of justice which had become corrupted. We get the Devil in the form of Roarke (played by Irish actor Ciaran Hinds) searching for the young boy Danny who is to be his perfect vessel.  Johnny Blaze comes into the picture after being recruited by a drunk French warrior-monk by the name of Moreau (Idris Elba whose performance was one of the lone highlights of the film) who promises to exorcise the demon from Blaze in exchange for finding and saving Danny.

This would’ve been a good premise if it had several more drafts of it worked on. Though there’s still a chance the film would’ve still sucked in the end. Even the direction from Neveldine/Taylor (Crank, Crank: High Voltage, Gamer) failed to add any heat to the proceedings. They come up with some unique camera angles and action sequences, but gone was the hyper-realistic and frenetic style they’ve become known for. Their previous films were not stuff to write to one’s film critic circles about but they at least had a sense of fun built into them even if their stories defied any sort of logic.

Even the performances by the cast seemed to be something that barely reached the level of one-dimensional. Nicolas Cage tries to channel his inner crazy by way of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, but it’s too little too late to save the film which never found any sort of footing on the side of competent. Really, the only good thing worth of note was my previous mention of Idris Elba as Moreau who chews the scenery every time he shows up on the screen like it was his last meal. This performance alone wasn’t enough to save the film or even make it somewhat entertaining.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance was not worth seeing in the theater (especially in 3D though that part of the film was actually quite well done despite being a post conversion) and I’d be willing to admit that it’s still not worth seeing on video unless it was for free. What could’ve been a restart to the series with the inclusion of Neveldine/Taylor instead gives this franchise it’s death-knell and most likely help Marvel get the rights back from Sony. Here’s to hoping that the flaming skull rider stays on the fringes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for decades to come.

6 Trailers of the Dead

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Hi and welcome to the latest edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation trailers!  To be honest, I’m usually way too ADD to come up with (let alone maintain) any sort of theme with my trailer posts but this weekend — almost by pure chance — a theme has emerged!  So, without further hold up, let us consider 6 Trailers of the Dead!

1) Night of the Living Dead (1968)

How have I done nearly a 100 of these posts without featuring the trailer for George Romero’s landmark Night of the Living Dead?

2) The Astro-Zombies (1968)

Apparently, 1968 was a big year for the dead returning to life.

3) The Majorettes (1986)

The Majorettes was directed by the late Bill Hinzman, the guy who played the Cemetary Zombie in Night of the Living Dead.

4) Dawn of the Dead (1978)

To be honest, I think I’ve already featured this trailer in an earlier post.  However, there’s no way that you can start a post with Night of the Living Dead and then end it with Day of the Dead without finding some room for Dawn of the Dead in the middle.

5) Dead Heat (1988)

Wow, this looks really, really, really … not good.  However, according to Wikipedia, it’s about zombies and it’s got the word “dead” in the title so it works theme-wise.

6) Day of the Dead (1985)

I’ve watched this trailer several times and those arms still make me jump every time!

What Lisa Marie Watched Last Night: Trader Horn (dir. by W.S. Van Dyke)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, as I attempted to drift off to sleep, I switched over to TCM and watched the 1931 film Trader Horn.

Why Was I Watching It?

I’m on a mission to see every film ever nominated for best picture and Trader Horn was nominated back in 1931.  (It lost to the first western ever to win best picture, Cimarron.)  Trader Horn is a bit of an oddity among Oscar contenders in that it received no other nominations save for best picture and it has never been released on DVD.  When I saw it on TCM’s schedule last night, I figured that might very well be my only chance to see this forgotten best picture nominee.

What’s It About?

So Trader Horn (Harry Carey) is a heroic ivory hunter.  Yes, this film was made a long time ago. He makes his living in Africa where he spends his time killing animals and explaining how, whenever the natives start playing their drums, it means that “every black devil is in the bush.”  Again, this film was made a very loooooooong time ago.

Anyway, at the start of the film, Trader Horn is introducing his apprentice (Duncan Renaldo) to the facts of life in Africa.  Eventually, they meet a missionary (Olive Golden) who is looking for daughter who was kidnapped by a tribe years ago.  When Golden is killed, Trader Horn takes it upon himself to find her daughter (played by Edwina Booth) and bring her back to civilization.

What Worked?

Trader Horn was the first non-documentary to be filmed on location in Africa and, as you watch the movie, it quickly becomes apparent that the film’s plot is really just an excuse to show off all the nature footage that director W.S. Van Dyke managed to capture.  Countless time the film’s story comes to a complete halt while Carey and Renaldo simply stop to watch a grazing giraffe or to watch a leopard hunt a wildebeest.  Normally, this is the sort of thing I would complain about but, in this case, the story was so predictable and silly that I was happy for the interruption.  It helps that the 80 year-old nature footage is still visually impressive and exciting to watch.   According to the research I did on the Internet after seeing the film, Trader Horn’s footage was used as a stock footage in countless “jungle” films over the next three decades in much the same way that the same old distressing mondo footage tends to show up in every single Italian cannibal film.

There’s a scene were Renaldo finds a lion cub and oh my God, it’s just the most adorable little kitty ever!

Trader Horn actually has an interesting production history and I enjoyed reading about it after I watched the movie.  Apparently, Van Dyke spent seven months in Africa making this film and almost the entire crew ended up falling ill.  At least two cameramen were killed while filming the wild animals and Edwina Booth returned so sick that her film career was pretty much ended. 

On one final note, there was apparently a pornographic remake of this film in the late 60s.  Its title?  Trader Hornee.

What Didn’t Work?

Did I mention this film was made a really looooooong time ago?  Because, seriously, it was.  On occasion, I’ve heard an old film described as being “creaky.”  I never really understood what that meant until I saw Trader Horn because, quite frankly, this film is amazingly creaky.   It moves slowly, the performers are rather melodramatic (though Harry Carey does a good job), and. while the cultural attitudes may have been acceptable in 1931, they now come across as extremely racist and its hard not to feel really uncomfortable with scenes where Renaldo ogles the bare-breasted native women and says, “Why, they’re not savages at all!  They’re like little children!”

Bleh.

“Oh My God!  Just Like Me!” Moments:

I would have wanted to adopt that lion cub too.

Lessons Learned:

1931 was a long, long time ago.

Review: The Shawshank Redemption (dir. by Frank Darabont)

Posted on by Arleigh

“Remember, Red. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” — Andy Dufresne

1994 was the year that men finally got their version of Fried Green Tomatoes and Beaches. We men we’re always perplexed why so many women liked those two films. Even when it was explained to us that the film was about the bond of sisterhood between female friends and how the march of time could never break it we were still scratching out heads. In comes Frank Darabont’s film adaptation of the Stephen King novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.

Using a script written by Darabont himself, the film just takes the latter half of the novella’s title and focuses most of the film’s story on the relationship between the lead character of Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins) who gets sent to Shawshank Penitentiary for the crime of killing his wife and her lover and that of another inmate played by Morgan Freeman. The film doesn’t try to prove that Andy is innocent even though we hear him tell it to the convicts he ends up hanging around that he is. The relationship between Andy and Red becomes a great example of the very same bond of sisterhood, but this time a brotherhood who are stuck in a situation where their freedom has been taken away and hope itself becomes a rare and dangerous commodity.

Darabont has always been a filmmaker known for his love of Stephen King stories and has adapted several more since The Shawshank Redemption, but it would be this film which has become his signature work. It’s a film that’s almost elegiac in its pacing yet with hints of hope threaded in-between scenes of men clinging to sanity and normalcy in a place that looks to break them down and make them less human. It’s nothing new to see prison guards abusive towards inmates in films set in prisons, but in this film these scenes of abuse have a banality to them that shows how even the hardened criminal lives and breathes upon the mercy and generosity provided by the very people who were suppose to rehabilitate them.

While the film’s pacing could be called slow by some it does allow for the characters in the film, from the leads played by Robbins and Freeman to the large supporting cast to become fully formed characters. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Clancy Brown playing the sadistic Capt. Byron Hadley to James Whitmore as Brooks Hatlen the inmate who has spent most of his life in Shawshank and whose sudden parole begins one of the most heartbreaking sequences in the film. The whole cast did a great job in whatever role they had been chosen to play. Freeman and Robbins as Red and Andy have a chemistry together on-screen that makes their fraternal love for each other very believable that the final scenes in the film doesn’t feel too melodramatic or overly sentimental.

The Shawshank Redemption was a film that lost out to Forrest Gump for Best Picture, but was a film that would’ve been very deserving if it had won the top prize at the Academy Awards. It was a film that spoke of hope even at the most degrading setting and how it’s the very concept of hope and brotherhood that allows for those not free to have a sense of freedom and camaraderie. Darabont’s first feature-length film remains his best work to date and one of the best Stephen King adaptations which is a rarity considering how many of his stories have been adapted. So, while the fairer sex may have their Fried Green Tomatoes, Beaches and the like, we men will have ours in the fine film we call The Shawshank Redemption.

A Quickie With Lisa Marie: The Ox-Bow Incident (directed by William A. Wellman)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

As part of my continuing mission of see every single movie ever nominated for best picture, I’ve been watching a lot of TCM this month.  Last week, I caught the 1943 best picture nominee, The Ox-Bow Incident.

Taking place in Nevada in the 1880s, The Ox-Bow Incident is a western that examines both the mob mentality and takes on the issue of lynching.  (It should be remembered that when the Ox-Bow Incident was first released, lynchings were still a regular occurrence.)  Henry Fonda and Henry Morgan play two prospectors who ride into town one day and discover that everyone is on edge because there are apparently cattle rustlers about.  When it’s reported that a rancher has been murdered, the townspeople form a posse and go searching for the rustlers.  Realizing that until the real rustlers are caught they’ll be considered prime suspects, Fonda and Morgan join the posse.  Led by Major Tetley (Frank Conroy), who falsely claims to be a Confederate veteran, the posse comes across a camp with three men.  Though it quickly becomes obvious that the three men are probably innocent, the posse immediately makes plans to lynch the men.  Fonda and Morgan find themselves forced to either side with the bloodthirsty posse or to stand up to the mob.

To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of Westerns.  On a personal note, Some of that is because whenever anyone from up north finds out that I’m from Texas, they always ask me if I’ve ever ridden a horse.  (For the record, I do not own a horse, I do not ride horses, and I’m pretty sure I’m allergic to them.)  On another note, Westerns often strike me as being predictable.  All of the dark strangers and the old maid school teachers and the tight-lipped gunslingers spitting tobacco all over the place — it all just makes me want to go, “Bleh!” 

However, I was surprised to discover that I really enjoyed The Ox-Bow Incident.  While the film’s well-intentioned message was a bit heavy-handed, director William Wellman emphasizes the psychological aspects of the story and the movie itself was well-acted by a large cast who brought a surprising amount of depth to characters who, in lesser hands, could have easily just been stereotypes.  Henry Fonda and Henry Morgan were both excellent and sympathetic leads while Jane Darwell dominated the film as one of the more bloodthirsty members of the lynching party.  A very young and very suave Anthony Quinn also shows up as one of the accused men.  Five decades before either Quentin Tarantino or the Coen Brothers, Wellman and his cast use the standard tropes of the western genre to comment on some very real issues and the end result is a fast-paced film that succeeds in making a moral debate just as exciting as any gunfight or stampede.

Released in 1943, The Ox-Bow Incident was nominated for best picture but, ultimately, it lost to Casablanca.  It’s hard to complain about any film losing to Casablanca but taken on its own terms, the Ox-Bow Incident remains an entertaining and intelligent film and one that I’m thankful that TCM gave me a chance to discover.

6 Trailers for Valentine’s Day Weekend

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Happy St. Valentine's Day

I’m running a little bit late on getting this Valentine’s weekend edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Trailers up and running and for that, I apologize.  Last night, around midnight, I found myself at Target waiting for them to start selling the latest Twilight movie…well, let’s just not go into it, okay?  Instead, here’s 6 trailers for your Valentine’s weekend.

1) Valentine (2001)

Oh.  My.  God.  This is such a bad movie!  Seriously terrible.  However, it is Valentine’s Day weekend…

2) My Bloody Valentine (1981)

The original. 

3) My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009)

The remake, which is a lot better than Avatar.

4) Emmanuelle (1974)

Valentine’s weekend is all about either celebrating romance or being alone and bitter.  I’ve been told that Emmanuelle can be used for both of those purposes.  “This movie will be shown only in special theaters.”

5) Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals (1977)

Not surprisingly, Italian director Joe D’Amato put his own individual spin on Emmanuelle (or Emanuelle as he spelled it, in order to get around copyright laws).  This is probably one of the more explicit trailers I’ve ever posted so keep that in mind before you watch it. 

6) Superfly (1972)

This trailer isn’t connected to Valentine’s Day at all but it’s got a lot of style.

Finally, let me just say, regardless of whether you’re in love, in lust, or mired in lonely bitterness, Happy Valentine’s Day!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Quickie Review: Field of Dreams (dir. by Phil Alden Robinson)

Posted on by Arleigh

“The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.” — Terence Mann

I have always been a fan of baseball. I would say that baseball has been the one thing which has always remained constant for me throughout the years. Other sports may be flashier, faster and more violent, but baseball I’ve always equated as part of America’s national identity. This is why 1989’s Field Of Dreams by Phil Alden Robinson continues to resonate for me and for legions of baseball fans everywhere.

The film is based off of the W.P. Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe, and tells the story of one Ray Kinsella and his titular field of dreams. It’s a film which sees Ray not just building a baseball field in his field of corn despite financial problems bringing him and his family closer to losing everything, but it also sees him traveling across the country to find a reclusive writer in Terence Mann (J.D. Salinger in the novel). It’s afilm which offers an insight to what makes baseball and the American identity so intertwined as the film finally offers Ray a chance to finally realize that the very baseball field he has built in his cornfield has granted many a second chance to realize their dream. For this film that dream is to be able to play baseball once more and this second chance becomes important to the ghosts of baseball’s past who have fallen from baseball’s grace through a scandal which had them banned from the game they love.

I’ve never been a big Kevin Costner fan, but his work in this film as Ray Kinsella showed me why people saw in him talent as an actor and not just a pretty face up on the screen. His real-life love for baseball shows in his performance as Ray whose own love for baseball becomes a personal journey for redemption and reunion with a father who also shared his love for the sport. The performances by Amy Madigan as Ray’s supportive wife was quite good and allowed the character not to be eclipsed by Costner’s excellent work as Ray. Even James Earl Jones as the writer Terence Mann gives the film a level of gravitas which just added to the film’s intimate yet epic nature. But it’s the breakout performance by Ray Liotta as the ghost of baseball great Shoeless Joe Jackson. Liotta’s screentime was limited to mostly in the latter part of the film, but his presence dominated every moment he was on the screen.

Field of Dreams has been called just a good baseball film by some, but for many people who have seen and loved it see it as more than just a film about baseball. It’s a film that shows Americana at it’s best and most nostalgic. Shows how one sport has become such a positive influence on the relationship between children and their fathers. It’s a film that dares to show genuine affection and love to the idea of letting someone follow their dream despite many outside influences and obstacles trying to get in their way. There’s a reason the film was nominated for an Oscar Best Picture. Even voters who are so used to rewarding films that look at the darker and more depressing side of the human condition could see the inherent quality in a film which looks at the brighter and more hopeful side of the equation.

Lisa Considers The Great Dictator (dir. by Charles Chaplin)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I recently discovered that Uverse has select films from the Criterion Collection available OnDemand.  Last night, I took advantage of this service and watched 1940’s The Great Dictator.  Along with being Charlie Chaplin’s first all-sound film, the Great Dictator was also a best picture nominee.  (It lost to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca.)

The Great Dictator is a broad comedy that, ultimately, has a very serious message.  Made at a time when the second world war was looking more and more inevitable, The Great Dictator features Charlie Chaplin in two roles.  As the film opens at end of World War I, Chaplin plays a meek but well-meaning Jewish barber who has found himself serving in the army of Tomania.  Though the barber manages to survive the war, he also loses his memory and ends up spending the next 20 years in a mental hospital.  When his memory finally does return, the barber returns to his barber shop and quickly discovers that things have changed.  His shop has been boarded up and the word “JEW” has been painted over the windows.  Thugs wearing military uniforms now patrol the streets and continually threaten to send people to concentration camps.  Tomania is now ruled by a dictator named Adenoid Hynkel.

Hynkel, who happens to look just like the barber (and who is, of course, also played by Chaplin) is quickly established as being a crazy and rather simple-minded buffoon.  As played by Chaplin, Hynkel gives long speeches in a harsh gibberish language that is designed to sound German without actually being German (fortunately, Hynkel has a translator on hand to tell us, after he has just spent two minutes harshly ranting, “Hynkel just explained his position on the Jews.”) and he continually runs throughout his palace in an attempt to prove that he’s capable of doing a hundred more things than the average person.  In his private time, he does a child-like dance with a big inflatable globe, speculates on how glorious it will be to be the “brunette dictator of the Aryan people,” and tries to maintain a shaky alliance with his fellow dictator Benzino Napaloni (Jack Oakie).  Playing a character that was the polar opposite of his usual persona, Chaplin’s performance manages to be both comedic and disturbing.  You laugh at Hynkel’s buffoonish behavior but you never forget that he’s a very dangerous man.  (Admittedly, I say that with a hindsight that was not possessed by either Chaplin or the audiences of 1940.)

The film proceeds to follow these two characters in two separate storylines that finally come together at the end of the movie with (SPOILER) Chaplin giving a nearly 5-minute plea for world peace.  While Hynkel schemes to conquer the world one country at a time, the barber attempts to adjust to his new life while sweetly romancing the outspoken Hanna (Paulette Goddard),  While the film is probably best known for Chaplin’s performance as Hynkel, I found the barber and Hannah’s relationship to be sweetly poignant.  Their relationship gives this film a heart to go along with its biting satire.

For me (and admittedly, I’m a secret history nerd), it’s interesting to watch The Great Dictator today and try to imagine how audiences first reacted to it in 1940.  According to Wikipedia, the Great Dictator was Chaplin’s most financially succesful film and Chaplin was even invited to the White House to recite the film’s climatic speech for President Roosevelt. And, of course, The Great Dictator also scored Oscar nominations for best picture, actor (Chaplin), supporting actor (Jack Oakie), screenplay, and original score.  Chaplin also said, in his later years, that if he had known what was truly being done by Hitler and the Nazis, he would never have made a comedy like The Great Dictator.

I think that would have been a mistake on his part because if The Great Dictator proves anything, it proves that satire and humor is often the most powerful weapon against the forces of evil.  Though Chaplin makes no secret of the fact that Hynkel is meant to be Hitler and Oakie is meant to be playing Mussolini, they could also serve as stand-ins for just about any dictator who has seized power through exploiting prejudice and hatred.  The sight of Hynkel dancing with that globe is actually a far more effective anti-totalitarian statement than the heartfelt and undeniably sincere speech that ends the film.

Lisa Marie Bowman Does Michael Clayton (dir. by Tony Gilroy)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

As part of my continuing mission to see and review every single film ever nominated for best picture, I recently rewatched the 2007 Best Picture nominee Michael Clayton. 

The title character (as played by George Clooney) is a sleazy attorney who “fixes” problems for one of the biggest law firms in New York.  When Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), one of the firm’s partners and Michael’s mentor, has a nervous breakdown while at a deposition in Minnesota and ends up in jail, Michael is sent to retrieve him.  Michael soon discovers that Arthur’s mental collapse was due to a class action law suit involving an evil, faceless corporation.  Before he reveals any more details, Arthur flees and is subsequently murdered by two assassins.  With the police calling Arthur’s death a suicide, Michael soon finds himself being pursued by the same assassins.

Though I’ve owned the DVD for a couple of years, this was only the second time that I had ever actually sat down and watched this film.  (The first time was during its initial theatrical run.)  There have been many insomnia-filled nights when I’ve gone to my DVD collection, fully intending on grabbing Michael Clayton and allowing the images of an unshaven George Clooney to flicker in my dark bedroom.  However, every time, I always ended up suddenly remembering a film that I wanted to see more. 

That’s the thing with Michael Clayton.  Having seen the film a second time, I can say that it remains a well-made film and an entertaining film and I can also say that I noticed a whole lot of small details that I had either missed the first time or had subsequently forgotten about.  Like a lot of best picture nominees, Michael Clayton is a good film.  It’s just not a very memorable one.  Seriously, is anyone surprised when business executives and attorneys turn out to be the villains in these type of films?  And if you couldn’t guess that Tom Wilkinson was going to end up dead from the minute he turned up on-screen then you may need to surrender your filmgoer card.

That said, Michael Clayton remains a fun little film and I enjoyed watching it even if it was predictable.  In fact, I may have enjoyed it even more the second time around because I currently work for an attorney so I was able to spend the whole movie playing the “What would my boss do in this situation?” game.  (Hopefully, the first thing he would do would be to send his loyal and capable red-headed assistant on a nice, long, all-expense paid vacation Italy.)  Beyond that, Tony Gilroy’s direction is efficient and fast-paced, George Clooney gives one of his less-smug performances (It can be argued that Michael Clayton — along with Up In The Air and The Descendants — forms Clooney’s Mediocre White Man Trilogy) and Tilda Swinton deserved the Oscar she won for playing a villain who isn’t so much evil as just really insecure.   However, for me, the best performances in this film come from two unheralded actors by the name of Robert Prescott and Terry Serpico.  Playing the two assassins who pursue both Wilkinson and Clooney, Serpico and Prescott play their roles with a nonchalant sort of respectability that is both compelling and genuinely frightening.  During those brief moments when Serpico and Prescott are on-screen, Michael Clayton actually becomes the film that it is obviously trying so hard to be.

Review: Chronicle (by Josh Trank)

Posted on by Arleigh

“Found footage” films have become all the rage of late. Many attribute this to the extreme popularity of the Paranormal Activity films of the last couple years, but I like to think it goes even farther than that. Even before the aforementioned horror series we got the found footage horror of both the Spanish horror series [Rec] and it’s Americanized version with Quarantine. One thing which we haven’t gotten to see use this style of storytelling is the superhero genre which still continues to go strong. Filmmaker Josh Trank and screenwriter Max Landis (Masters of Horror: Deer Woman) solve this lack of superhero/found footage film with their surprisingly well-made Chronicle.

The film begins with one of three high school seniors, the shy and troubled Andrew (played by Dane DeHaan), testing out his new video camera. We learn through this first ten or so minutes of the film that his only friend in school is his own cousin Matt (Alex Russell) and that his plans for the new camera is to videotape everything that goes on through his day at school and at home. We learn much about Andrew during these first minutes of the film. We see that his home life consists of him worrying about his very sick mother and trying to avoid the wrath of his drunken, abusive father. School life is not any much better as he’s bullied by other classmates and seen as a non-entity by the rest outside of his cousin Matt. It is his cousin who invites him to a rave party in one scene which will lead up to the two meeting up with a third high school senior, the very popular Steven (payed by Michael B. Jordan), and their discovery of something strange in deep in the woods.

We never get any full explanation as to the origin of the mysterious object the three teens find underground, but all we know afterwards is how it’s given Andrew, Matt and Steven the ability to move things with their minds. This new found ability is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg as all three learn more about their new found powers. Matt figures out that their power is like a muscle and constant use just strengthens and enhances what they’re able to do. All three react to having superpowers as all high school teenagers would when confronted with such a situation: they become giddy boys behaving badly.

They test out their powers on the unsuspecting public at the local mall parking lot and stores. It’s all pretty much harmless, teenage fun until an accident caused by Andrew shows all three the inherent dangers in their new abilities. Matt wants ground rules in how they use their powers with Steven following suit, but Andrew doesn’t understand why the need for them even though he’s remorseful of what he had caused. It’s the beginning of small cracks in the relationship between the three teens that would widen as the film moves into it’s second half with less joy and lighthearted fun and more darkness as one of the three begins to act out on his troubles both at home and in school.

Chronicle could almost be a coming-of-age story in addition to being an origins story that superhero films seem required to do. We see Matt, the cousin, grow from being the wannabe intellectual into someone genuinely caring about what is happening to his introverted cousin Andrew. Steven, the popular football captain and student body president, learns more about Andrew and how he his new friend’s troubled upbringing concerns him enough to try and bring Andrew out from his protective shell and make him more confident about himself. With Andrew we see a teenager who many would feel much sympathy for. He’s the kid who symbolizes the turmoil a growing teen must go through both emotionally and psychologically. Whether it’s rebelling from familial authority or trying to survive the dangerous waters of high school life. We can see ourselves in Andrew’s shoes and his reaction to finally having the ability to fight back against those who have made his life a living hell feed our own fantasies as teenagers to be able to do the same.

All of this would be moot if the film ended up being uninteresting, bland and boring. Fortunately the film doesn’t end up being any of those three. What we get is a fun and thrilling film which takes both the superhero genre and the found footage gimmick and adds some new wrinkles that combines towards a fresh new take on both. Found footage films have the unenviable task of convincing the audience that we’d believe someone would be lugging around a camera all the time and find ways to videotape every moment to create a believable narrative. It’s a leap in logic that will sink or swim these types of films. With Chronicle we see how their new abilities solves this particular dilemma in found footage stories. Being able to move things with one’s mind should make it easy to film yourself without having to hold the camera and instead have it floating and following one around.

The film also does a great job in building up these characters into believable ones with their own back stories and motivations. We’re not left with basic cutouts of what we think teenagers are in films. Max Landis’ screenplay goes a long way in turning these three into real teenagers and their reactions in their new powers were quite believable. How else would teen boys react to finding out they’re now superheroes, but behave badly and use them not for the benefit of others but to have fun.

The film could easily have gone the route of making them want to start helping others (though in Steven’s case he does try to help Andrew become more outgoing through the use of his abilities), but that would’ve felt disingenuous and unrealistic. Even the film’s dialogue seemed to flow naturally without having to resort to witty teen-speak that some writers think teen conversations are full of. It helps that the performances of the three actors playing the three teens came off as well-done. Dane DeHaan as the troubled Andrew comes off looking best of all three with his reactions to his own personal troubles coming off as real and not as some young actor trying too hard to try and impress.

For a found footage film Chronicle does a great job in recreating the look and feel of the three teens superpowers. Whether it’s moving things around with their mind or flying through the sky, the film makes each and every act look like something that could happen for real. The scenes of destruction which encompasses the climactic sequence of the film look very realistic and on the small-budget (when compared to most superhero films) come off as very impressive. The technique of each scene being part of video camera footage (whether they’re handheld HD cameras or smartphone footages) allowed for whatever CGI-effect used to look seemless and not artificial looking.

January and February have always been the dumping ground for films the studios either have little faith in or think don’t deserve the much more lucrative summer blockbuster and holiday season months. Chronicle manages to make its case that this would’ve been one film that could’ve done well playing around with the mega-budgeted blockbusters this summer and hold it’s own. It’s a film that takes a simple premise and creates something not just fun and exciting, but also takes a delve into the psyche of the teenage mind and all the pitfalls and dangers one can find themselves in navigating through it. Chronicle is one of the better films in these early months of the 2012 film season and overall probably one of the better one’s by year’s end.