Category: movies

Ghostwatch is a 90-minute mockumentary TV film first broadcast on BBC1 in 1992. It is presented as a live show that aims to investigate paranormal phenomena. The Ghostwatch team goes to Fox Hill Drive and investigates a house belonging to the Early family, and which is said to be haunted by a malevolent spirit. Two girls and their divorced mother talk about hearing strange sounds, a hand knocking on the walls, and invisible cats yowling around the house. One of the girls is photographed with scratches that mysteriously appear all over her face. Her sister calls the spirit “Mr Pipes”. To find out if the Early family’s stories indeed are true, Ghostwatch sends a team of three – cameraman, boom operator, and reporter – to stay in the house for Halloween.

It’s complete fiction of course, but Ghostwatch lends it veracity by hiring actual BBC personalities to conduct the interviews and take phone calls. If I were a British child seeing this for the first time in 1992, I would have been completely thrilled and traumatized. It will be one of those Halloween specials that I will remember for many years to come. It is a slow burn. It starts off slow to lull you into submission, until all hell breaks loose.  Because it is “live” TV it has no reenactments, just a narration of events, which I like. Sometimes reenactments just ruin the story for you; sometimes what you imagine is worse than anything a film crew can ever show you. This is why I love hearing ghost stories from other people. No reenactments there, but the goosebumps still appear.

If you’re the kind of viewer who wants to see things happen, then don’t fret. There is payoff after the wait. And what a payoff. I slept with the lights on.

Before I saw this film I was getting ready to hate it. Then something weird happened: Young Adult turned out to be one gem of a film.

This is directed by Jason Reitman and written by Diablo Cody. Diablo Cody, you say! Do I love Juno? I enjoyed it, but it gave me too much slang. Jennifer’s Body is a parody of teenage horror films, and it worked perfectly. 

Young Adult is about failure and sadness, and it is spot-on.

Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) writes young adult novels. She looks perpetually disheveled and miserable, gulping Coke like a thirsty sailor first thing in the morning. One day, while trying to work on the last book in the series, she receives an email from an old flame. He is now married, with child. Mavis, in her depression, gets this brilliant idea: What if I steal my ex-boyfriend from his wife?

Unlike in Cody’s previous films, characters here do not talk constantly (most of the time we are forced to simply observe Mavis – as she puts on make-up, as she stares at herself, as she turns her back to us to gorge on KFC), and when they do, they are more blunt than witty.

I love this film. That is all I am going to say. Watch it.

Casey Affleck plays Lou Ford, a deputy sheriff in a small West Texas town, whose latent sexual aggression and violence is awakened by a masochistic prostitute (Joyce, played by Jessica Alba). This awakening leads to Ford committing several murders, and to his eventual doom.

The first thing I heard about this film, which premiered in Sundance, is that it is an “example of Hollywood’s pornographic glorification of violence against women“. I have to say that I had to look elsewhere while Lou Ford pummeled Joyce to death onscreen, but the violence portrayed in The Killer Inside Me, in my opinion, pales in comparison to the acts shown in Irreversible, or Oldboy. Sometimes story necessitates an unflinching look at murder, and I get it.

Nope, the violence is not my problem. The story is my problem. This I think is the reason why viewers zoomed in on the violence, because coming from such a flimsy narrative, it feels forced, out of place.

Affleck gives such a wonderful performance as a baby-faced sociopath, so it’s a shame that the film didn’t give us much of a back story. There is subtlety, and there is not-enough-damn-information. The film, of course, is based on a novel by Jim Thompson. In an interview, Affleck said playing the character broke his heart, but he was talking about the character as portrayed in the book. In the film, Lou Ford is a fascinating character, but he did not break my heart, the way Robert Ford (in Jesse James) broke my heart. I did not root for him, or wish him dead. I didn’t really care, which is the worst you can feel for a character in any medium.

This won’t really be a review. I don’t think this will be coherent – the way most fans are hardly coherent.

But briefly: I loved it to bits. Joss Whedon wrote and directed the film, and his characters’ comedic timing is pitch perfect. Sure you can clearly tell which of the lines are Joss’d-up and which are comic book motherhood statements (there was, in fact, a Thor and Loki exchange that consisted mostly of motherhood statements), but Whedon is able to strike a balance between silly and serious. As we stepped out of the cinema, most of the things we remember are: “He’s adopted”/”His first name is Agent”/”I’m listening”/”So that’s what it does” and all the other quips that just made us laugh.

Tom Hiddleston (Loki) shone in Thor, but here he was just the maniacal villain. Who I think shone in this film were Chris Evans (Captain America) with his crotchety old man quips and eternally frustrated facial expression, and Mark Ruffalo (Hulk), who surprisingly did not make me pine for Edward Norton (and I love Edward Norton). It also helped that Joss Whedon made Hulk scary again. Hallelujah! Robert Downey, Jr. (Iron Man) is hilarious here, but that’s a given.

This is one of the few action films with fight scenes that are actually engaging instead of serving as screen fodder. It’s two and half hours long, but I did not feel impatient or distracted at all. To quote J: “I just wanted it to keep going.” And to quote J again: “If I saw this when I was in grade school I would have jizzed in my pants.”