Don McManus – Through the Shattered Lens

Ryan and Emily Fleege (played by Chris J. Murray and Brit Shaw) have just moved into a new home with their six-year-old daughter, Leila (Ivy George). They are being visited by both Ryan’s brother, Mike (Dan Gill), and Emily’s best friend, Skyler (Olivia Dudley). While cleaning out the garage, Mike and Ryan come across an old video camera and several VHS tapes featuring young Katie and Kristi from the previous Paranormal Activity films. It turns out that their house has been built over the remains of Katie and Kristi’s old house and that the old video camera can pick up and record traces of ghosts and evil spirits.

That last bit is exactly why this installment of Paranormal Activity doesn’t work. The previous films were scary because the characters could hear and sometimes feel the spirits but they couldn’t actually see them. That always left open the possibility that they were just imagining things. In this one, everyone can actually see the evidence of the house being haunted but they still don’t leave! This is the first Paranormal Activity to make heavy use of CGI, which goes against the whole idea of the films being found footage.

The other problem is that, six films in, the Paranormal Activity series finally fell victim to its own increasingly complex mythology. The first two films worked because they kept things simple. Things started to get more complicated during the third film. By the time Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension was released, the story had grown to include a coven of witches, a family curse, a demon named Toby, and now a camera that can film otherwise invisible spirits. The more elements that are added, the harder it is to ignore the holes in the plot and illogical actions of the characters.

I would have ended things with the second film, but I also would have lost out on all the money made by the third, fourth, and fifth films. Even this installment, which was the weakest box office performer of all of the films, still made a profit. That shows how much I know.

In this HBO movie, Alan Alda plays the biggest asshole in the world.

Alda is cast as Dan Cutler, an ad exec who books a corporate retreat to Canada’s White Mile. He tells the nine men who accompany him, some of whom are clients and some of whom work for him, that it’s going to be a weekend of fishing and male bonding. What he doesn’t reveal is that the trip is also going to require whitewater rafting. Despite the fact that the majority of the men are out-of-shape and hardly any of them have any rafting experience, Dan insists that they all take part. When their guide says that they’re going to need to take two boats, Dan refuses. He wants everyone in one boat, the better so they can all work together to prove their manhood by conquering the river.

The trip starts out well but, when the raft hits a rock and turns over, five of the men end up dead. Despite injuring his leg, Dan survives and, when he returns to work, he’s hailed as a hero. However, one of the widows of the men who didn’t survive is now suing the company. While Dan tries to cover his own ass, one of the survivors — Jack Robbins (Peter Gallagher) — is faced with a dilemma of his own. As one of the few people who knows that Dan demanded that the guide only use one boat, will Jack testify to the truth at the trial or will he follow Dan’s orders and keep quiet about what really happened?

Based on a true story, White Mile features some brief but exciting (and harrowing) rafting scenes but the film is less about what happened in the wilderness and instead about what’s happening behind the closed doors of corporate America. White Mile does a good job of taking Alda’s sensitive male persona and pushing it through the looking glass. As played by Alda, Dan is the type of tyrannical boss who we’ve all had to deal with. His friendly smile barely disguises a bullying streak. Even after the accident leaves five of his colleagues dead, Dan is still convinced that the trip was a good idea and that everyone was having the best day of their lives until they hit that rock. When the river guide initially finds Dan stranded on a rock, Dan makes a show of telling the guide to come back for him later and to find the others. When Dan later comes across one of the dead men, he says, “He must have had a bad heart,” as he grasps at any way to avoid taking responsibility. Though White Mile is dominated by Alda’s villainy, it also features good performances from Gallagher, Robert Loggia, Bruce Altman, and Jack Gilipin. When Gilpin demands to know if anyone at the ad agency has shown any true remorse for what happened, he is speaking for the entire audience.

White Mile was an early HBO film and, because it was released before HBO became known for its original programming, it’s often unfairly overlooked. When it was released on DVD, it was advertised as being an action-adventure film, which it definitely is not. Instead, it’s a look at the type of head games that far too often act as a substitute for responsible and ethical management in corporate America. It’s a good movie and you’ll never look at Alan Alda the same way again.