Chronicle

Directed by Josh Trank

Screenplay by Max Landis

2012, UK / USA

Director Josh Trank and screenwriter Max Landis (son of filmmaker John Landis), put a fresh, invigorating spin on the superhero origin story, with Chronicle, a movie so sleek and incredibly ultra-portable, it suggests better things to come from the duo. The two display enough raw talent and ingenuity in their feature debut that this jolt to the found-footage genre transcends its gimmicks with a clever script, fast-paced direction, and engaging performances from its young cast. In many ways less a superhero movie than a coming-of-age story, Chronicle manages to outdo other mega-budget comic book spectacles by deconstructing the conventional superhero narrative and reassembling it as an artful dialogue on the troubled teen psyche.

Chronicle is familiar, and yet unique, in the way it treats the so-called origin story. Trank and Landis imagine what ordinary kids might do when coming into contact with a mysterious rock that gives them superpowers. Their challenge is to find a way to cope with their new found gifts, control their impulses and avoid the temptation of using their powers in the public eye. There’s a savvy naturalism to what is essentially a sci-fi fairy tale, a story that places these otherwise average high schoolers in an extraordinary position. Yet the trio isn’t concerned with joining some elite mutant squad, or saving planet earth from an egomaniac, homicidal super powered villain – in this case, these characters simply have to cope with the challenge of teenage youth – hormones, peer pressure, parental issues, bullying, and so forth – while coming to terms that their newfound powers cannot and will not change their fundamental identities. There is no great call to adventure or heroism in these boys who spend the majority of the pic’s running time testing their abilities by playing pranks – attempting Jackass-style stunts and entering talent shows to impress girls. But there is a great bit of dark comedy, tragedy, levity and sadness; the movie, against all odds, becomes a darkly perverse revenge story for the high-school outsider. With references to Plato and Schopenhauer, Chronicle is best described as a horrifying look at supernatural powers, high school cruelty, and teen angst, a film that gives the superhero genre its best crack at naturalism yet.

“unquestionably endowed with the best special effects this low-budget shaky-cam movie could afford…

First time director Josh Trank’s best asset is also his greatest challenge: The first-person narrative style, once viewed as a gimmicky variant for low-budget productions, wrestles with the logic of having characters constantly filming events with good reason. While the found footage approach has become an increasingly popular conceit, it can at times feel awkward and artificial. Yet with Chronicle, the seemingly low-tech approach makes the teens and their powers all the more believable and invests us in the characters with a surprising economy of screen time. Despite the limitations, Chronicle gains in intimacy and immediacy like no previous superhero movie has achieved.

Chronicle will never be mistaken for an artistic breakthrough, but it is unquestionably endowed with the best special effects this low-budget shaky-cam movie could afford. The effects here (handled by Simon Hansen, second unit director on District 9) are terrific – both seamless and as realistic as can be. Most notable is the climax revolving around Seattle’s Space Needle, a remarkably economical urban view of widespread panic obviously done on a small budget yet rivalling that of any superhero movie of 2011. Shot for a reported $15 million, director Trank wisely strips down the pic – the compositions are visually clutter free, the shots usually static or steady – and the result is pure movie magic.

“The combination of pathos, shocks, and the visceral, visually impressive effects is orchestrated with jaw-dropping precision…

The cast is comprised of professional actors (if unfamiliar faces), which enhances the pseudo-reality of the pic’s style, and allowing audiences to accept their roles with ease. All three characters are designed to illustrate the positive and negative uses of exceptional power. The principals – Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, and Michael B. Jordan – represent teen archetypes, but it is DeHaan’s Andrew who steals the show. His intriguing blend of sensitivity and anger makes him highly sympathetic, a peevish Seattle misfit whose authenticity sells the film with an emotionally riveting downward spiral. The fierce sympathy it extends to its unfashionable central character puts the film a million miles above the generic Marvel flick. The best moments come when Andrew uses his powers to vent his neurotic aggression – there’s a brilliantly staged moment of foreboding involving a spider. What happens next is pure poetry.

With a brief 83-minute running time, Chronicle moves along with a brisk pace, while always aware of it’s strengths and limitations. The combination of pathos, shocks, and the visceral, visually impressive effects is orchestrated with jaw-dropping precision by a young filmmaker with a very bright future ahead.

Ricky D

Chronicle

Directed by Josh Trank

Screenplay by Max Landis

2012, UK / USA

There’s no more horrifying an idea than one film being both a super hero and found footage vehicle. On their own, they are blights on the release schedule; putting them together in one picture is unutterably disheartening. The unlucky product of this collation is Josh Trank’s debut Chronicle. The issue with any film that uses the character-carried camera as a mode of storytelling needs justification for the tired format to relevant rather than a means to sell a picture which lacks distinction otherwise. Chronicle is one of the only examples of this type of cinema that fully justifies that aspect and is not betrayed by a shot or a scene which shatters the illusion of reality that the form strives for.

The set-up for the camera as a character is disclosed in the opening scene where Andrew (Dane DeHaan) is hiding from his drunk and abusive father and says “I’m filming everything now,” and he means everything. The camera is an emotional crutch for his lack of friends and social isolation. The only friend, Andrew, has his cousin Matt (Alex Russell), who has a fair share of neuroses of his own. After school one day, Matt and Andrew go to a high school party, still with the camera in tow. Tossed from the party for filming something he shouldn’t have, he sits outside alone only to be met by the super-popular Steve (Michael B. Jordan). Steve urges Andrew to come with him because he and Matt have discovered something unbelievable, and without going into detail further, they end up with telekinetic superpowers.

“Chronicle makes for an interesting counterpoint to Kick-Ass, Super and even Batman as artefacts which celebrate the idea of the everyman as a superhero…

Whether the camera is used as an emotional crutch or personality substitute, the found footage sub-genre always undoes itself by trying to achieve too much under the banner of realism. Chronicle is the best use of the camera as a character rather than as a tool voyeuristically gazing from the outside to date. The camera is passed around from character to character, and it’s not just the one camera that the footage is taken from; eventually it’s taken from other cameramen, CCTV footage, police car footage, and other sources to make one seamless loop of footage. Unfortunately, though the camera is implemented more seamlessly than ever before, there is still no distinct reason for it to be shot this way rather than through traditional means.

Chronicle makes for an interesting counterpoint to Kick-Ass, Super and even Batman as artefacts which celebrate the idea of the everyman as a superhero by having these three teenagers use their powers in Jackass-style pranks and as a one-up in the perpetual battle for high school popularity. That playful sense of discovery is what elevates Trank’s debut above the atypical superhero origins story, using their power to indulge irresponsibly and generally behave like a normal person would if this kind of greatness was thrust upon them when they are blank canvases in the gap between childhood and adulthood. The performances support this; they might be arrogant or hard to like but they never stray from the film’s self-imposed reality.

“At 26 years old, writer Max Landis and director Josh Trank have to be credited for being accomplished beyond their years…

The lack of motivation to be heroic leaves it open for the three leads to ultimately lean alternately good or evil, and the catalyst for this shift comes midway in, when a car is pushed into a reservoir. From there it mutates from something playful into a surprisingly violent showcase for the young director. The translation might not be seamless and the use of Andrew’s father (Michael Kelly) as an abusive figure is over-exaggerated, showing a lack of humanity in a film whose cast is fully formed and three-dimensional. Otherwise, the jump from discovery to destruction is engaging, exciting and thrilling. The final twenty minutes unfold like a more grounded version of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, throwing in a couple of visual references for good measure.

At 26 years old, writer Max Landis and director Josh Trank have to be credited for being accomplished beyond their years. There might be problems here and there, such as some unfortunate CGI, but for a debut feature with a budget of $15 million, Chronicle embarrasses directors that have attempted to achieve a similar end with budgets stretching into the hundreds of millions. It gets around its self-imposed stylistic limitations with guile and intelligence by presenting the most interesting and watchable superhero origin since Batman Begins.

Robert Simpson

The Innkeepers

Directed and Written by Ti West

USA, 2011

Fantasia
imdb

Chuck Jones directed a trilogy of horror cartoons (Scaredy Cat, 1948, Claws for Alarm, 1954 and Jumpin’ Jupiter, 1955) featuring Porky Pig blissfully unaware that his life is in danger, while his pet cat, – Sylvester, naturally – only too aware of the danger, does his best to protect both his own skin and that of his master, Porky, from killer mice, ghosts and aliens.

The Inkeepers is not a film for the Porky’s of this world, those easily distracted, immune to menace, insensitive to fear. It is a film for the sensitive, hyper-vigilant Sylvester’s, the fraidy-cats amongst us.

In the case of The Innkeepers, our Porky and Sylvester are Luke (Pat Healy) and Claire (the amazing Sara Paxton). They are the only staff left supervising the Yankee Pedlar Inn on its last weekend of operation. Fortunately, the hotel only has a handful of guests, most memorably including Kelly McGillis as a former actress turned spiritualist. Since Luke and Claire have ample free time and are amateur ghost-hunters, they devote most of their time trying to find evidence of the inn’s ghost.

“The craftmanship of this film, in support of building that atmosphere of fear, is outstanding,..

There is a sense in which Ti West is a man (wonderfully) out of step with time. He makes films using techniques and methods seemingly long abandoned. His films build menace and threat slowly, almost imperceptibly. Each isolated moment is easily dismissed, but for those paying attention the dread mounts drop by drop, until you are drowning in fear and the slightest, most miniscule thing: a piano key being played, a beer can falling down a flight of stairs, is enough to send you clawing the ceiling in fright.

If we say that West achieves the most scares with the least, by least we don’t mean least effort. The craftmanship of this film, in support of building that atmosphere of fear, is outstanding, especially the layered and creepy sound design.

There would be a temptation to arm the ghosthunters with video cameras and employ the modern arsenal of shaky-cam techniques to elicit fear. Instead, West arms Luke and Claire with headphones and a sound recorder, forcing both them and the audience to listen for the ghost. West’s work has been described as atmospheric and West does his best in The Innkeepers to film that atmosphere, to film what can be sensed but not seen.

“Ti West is a singular genius, and The Innkeepers is his best film to date…

West’s camera does not shake. It is in fact, slow, steady and silky smooth, almost as if West is consciously declaring that it is the audience that should shake and not the camera. The well-framed shots leave the sensitive in the audience studying every inch, deperately searching for traces of the invisible.

Let the Porky’s of this world sneer that The Innkeepers did not scare them. We Sylvester’s understand that this spooky ghost film is nothing less than a test of our evolutionary fight or flight response. When the inevitable Zombie holocaust hits, there will be a word for the Sylvester’s amongst us: survivors, while the blasé, no attention-span, sneeringly unafraid Porky Pig mother-fuckers will be so much Zombie chow.

For those with the patience for his slow-build cinematic magic, Ti West is a singular genius, and The Innkeepers is his best film to date.

- Michael Ryan

The Grey

Man vs. nature may be a narrative as old as time, but Joe Carnahan’s The Grey would probably have been most at home in the 1970s. Clocking in at a hefty, patient 117 minutes, boasting as bare-bones a plot as a mainstream feature possibly can, and with a minimum of dramatic showboating or audience-friendly dramatic signposting. The Grey is pleasantly and excitingly out of time.

Liam Neeson, who previously starred in Carnahan’s version of The A-Team, stars here in a very different capacity as Ottway, a sadly adrift figure working in self-exile, as a wolf hunter for an oil company in Alaska. Since the death of his wife, he is entirely without purpose, even entertaining notions of suicide. He doesn’t get that far, though, as his routine is cut short when he and an assorted band of industry workers find themselves utterly stranded in the frigid wilderness following a plane crash. Seven, including Ottway, remain alive once the debris is cleared, but the real threat to their survival is two-fold: the weather itself, unforgiving and unrelenting; and the taunting, almost spectral presence of a roving pack of timber wolves.

Where The Grey diverges from survival thrillers past is in its pronounced existentialist streak. Ottway and his fellow survivors (including Dermot Mulroney and Dallas Roberts) struggle with individual crises of faith (or lack thereof) while simultaneously battling the elements and their own failing bodies. Carnahan keeps a close watch of the film’s tone and intensity level throughout; long periods of pensive observation actually serve to ratchet up the tension, since the creatures have a tendency to emerge suddenly and viciously. What’s more, the more philosophically inclined portions of the film rarely feel heavy-handed or too highfalutin’ for the surrounding chaos; Carnahan and Ian Mackenzie Jeffers’ carefully calibrated screenplay only throws out enough of these moments to lend a pleasing ambiguity to Ottway’s journey, making sure that the film works equally well as straight-up thrill ride as well as allegorically loaded fiction.

And yes, there actually are thrills to be had, especially in the first 45 minutes or so following the crash; if the sight of the barely-torchlit blackness gleaming with a dozen pairs of fearsome eyes isn’t enough, the near-constant sense of dread generated by the tentativeness of the group’s shelter and the general uncertainty of how to deal with the predators (despite Ottway’s expertise) makes for a genuinely nail-biting run. That tension eases up a bit throughout the second half, both thanks to deliberate slowdown and one cliffside sequence that suffers from less-than-convincing green-screen effects, but rallies admirably in the last reel, which culminates in the gutsiest ending to a Hollywood feature in recent memory.

Where the film’s considerable (by contemporary standards) runtime would normally result in significant pacing issues, the drawn-out feel actually serves the material, so that by the time Ottway and the rest are crossing the umpteenth windswept hellscape, the chill has had time to truly set in. While the film does have a few moments of excess sentimentality (perhaps owing to a few too many shots of Ottway’s departed wife), it still manages to feel like a relic from an era when Hollywood films were allowed to meander and to elide cozy resolutions from time to time.

Simon Howell