Movies as imitations

I don't like true crime very much. 

I had been thinking about this on the very morning I watched Joel Anderson's Lake Mungo (2008), which is not a true crime story but is told like one, with interviews, old photos, old videos stopped into freeze frame, and a central mystery. It's actually more like part of the ghost hunters genre than the true crime drama, but you'll agree those have a lot of overlap in their basic structure.

Anyway, I'd been thinking, with no small amount of superiority -- and my apologies if this offends you personally, dear reader -- that loving true crime means you are not a very interesting person. You are much more interesting if you spend multiple hours each day obsessing over the professional performances of a bunch of men who hit a tiny ball around a field, because you assembled them into an imaginary team that competes against other imaginary teams all season long. (The point is, we all have our comfort food.)

But a movie that imitates the true crime format? Hell yeah, I like that a lot. Maybe even love it.

Lake Mungo is in the broader found footage/mockumentary genre that had plenty of life back in 2008, but it feels like a more sophisticated effort than many of the things you would typically find in that genre. More sophisticated for how it looks, but not because it looks slick or visually dynamic in the ways we usually aspire to see in motion pictures. No, it's more sophisticated because it looks and feels exactly like real true crime, with actors giving performances that mimic the rhythms of real people so closely, you'd swear these were actually Australians living in regional Victoria circa 2008.

In fact, I was surprised to discover that the movie is set in the town of Ararat, surprised because I had never been to that town until a week ago. I can't actually say I've been to it, because we decided against stopping there to charge our car on the way back from camping last weekend, opting to continue on through to the larger Ballarat about 45 minutes later. But I've driven through it, and only a week ago. A week later, I randomly watched this. (It's been a week of quite a lot of movie coincidences. I also saw, but have chosen not to write about, two different movies set partially on the Italian island of Capri, which were Contempt on Monday night, which I wrote about for other reasons, and Another Simple Favor, which I saw Thursday.)

Anyway, it's about a teenage girl who drowned -- not actually in the titular lake, which is not actually a lake but an arid desert-like climate -- and about her family trying to piece together what led up to it, and also what came after it. The latter being that they may still be seeing her around as a ghost. 

It's one of those ghost stories that you'd think would be less chilling because of the documentary-style format surrounding the spooky details. But it's pretty damn chilling. It put me in mind of the scariest real documentary I've ever seen, The Nightmare, in that the talking head interview format not only doesn't sap the movie of its scares, but might actually increase them in some conterintuitive way.

But back to what I really came here to talk about.

One of the core reasons we like movie is because they imitate. One of the highest pieces of praise we can give a movie, albeit a somewhat broad and simplistic piece of praise, is to call it "realistic." The closer something on screen seems to resemble something we can actually recognize, the more successful we think a movie has been.

Of course, there are obvious exceptions to that. Sometimes you want a movie to be fanciful, to purposefully explore the artificial. But even in wild fantasies or experimental films, we want to connect to something that is emotionally true or observant about whatever it is the movie is exploring.

I don't suppose this is a surprising revelation, or that it is even a revelation. All art attempts to communicate emotion truth to the observer, something we can relate to our own lives or experiences, even if the art contains subject matter that is vastly different from our own experiences. 

But a movie like Lake Mungo can reveal things that may be obvious to us in new ways. Specifically, that there is something in the very act of imitation that is, in itself, fascinating, and that, in itself, elevates the material even beyond our own particular preferences.

I have no particular preference for true crime/ghost hunter material, in fact, quite the opposite. But I have peripherally caught enough of it to understand the basic narrative details of the genre. And Lake Mungo certainly appeals to me for two reasons: 1) because it scared me, which may be the most important part; 2) because it is so good at reproducing the core narrative building blocks of a familiar genre that this act of reproducing is itself an engrossing fascination, leading me to spend 90 minutes watching a thing I might not care to watch if it were a documentary. Since it's only an imitation of a documentary, I love it.

Found footage vs. the aesthetic of found footage

I used to whinge about found footage all the time on this blog, the whingeing that can only be born of loving something and then living long enough to see it become corrupted and sapped of its essential life force. (And "to whinge" is the British/Australian equivalent of "to whine," only used in a more dismissive and crueler fashion.)

But I haven't had a lot of occasion to talk about it lately, as found footage has, without me even really noticing it, seemed to have sort of had its moment and gone away. Surely we are not far removed from the last major found footage film that's been released, but the fact that I can't remember what that would be is certainly telling.

So it seems like a good time for me to be confronted with a movie that does the genre, if you want to call it a genre, correctly. A movie that, in fact, helps clarify my own conflicted opinion on found footage movies.

That movie is Matt Johnson's The Dirties, a movie I thought was connected with Kevin Smith in some way, but I'm having a very hard time determining what that way is. (Wait, just found it -- he helped distribute it.)

Because of the Smith connection, and because I've turned on Smith a bit lately (only since Yoga Hosers, but that was enough), I hadn't really prioritized The Dirties when it came out a few years ago, having heard middling things about it (though I don't remember what exactly). But then I saw it at the library the other day and said "Huh, I was always curious about that."

With good reason. It helped me relocate those positive feelings toward found footage.

It helped me do that because it's a found footage movie in aesthetic only.

If you think about it, found footage has two defining characteristics: 1) A herky jerky, hyper-realistic style that's supposed to come from the fact that it's actually being shot by the real people involved with the story, and 2) The fact that it is meant literally to be footage found from their video camera, in its purest form because the people who shot it are missing, dead or otherwise indisposed.

I like one of these two defining characteristics.

I used to like both, I think. I mean, if you go back to The Blair Witch Project, it was all about the fact that this was actually the footage they had abandoned. I mean, it wasn't, and we knew it wasn't. But it was easy to dream ourselves away into that narrative, and there was just that small smidgen of doubt that it wasn't real.

But over time, I became hyper critical of the way the found footage genre got bastardized. Although pretty much all the footage in a film like Blair Witch could genuinely have been shot by the three intrepid/stupid filmmakers that trundled off into the Maryland woods, that standard quickly evaporated from the genre. Pretty soon found footage movies that wanted to capitalize on the popularity of Blair Witch -- as in, pretend it could have all been really shot with one camera that was recovered after some horrible event -- began playing fast and loose with the rules. How physically someone could have shot something, how it all could have been shot with one camera, how they would have known to have the camera on at some certain particular time, how they would be able to maintain battery life for the duration ... all these practical considerations that were considered in a movie like Blair Witch were tossed out the window. Who cares as long as it looks right.

That's fine. But then just don't pretend it's actually someone's found footage.

That's what I like about The Dirties. It doesn't go out of its way to call attention to the fact that there's a camera following around these two disaffected high school students, who are even aware of the camera and occasionally make reference to it. There's something artificial about the construct, but artificial in the way that any film is artificial -- it's a recreation of life being captured. The Dirties doesn't want us to believe that "this is the last testimony of so and so" or "we caught it all on film when x happened." It just wants to capture a compelling story in the highly realistic style of a found footage movie, a style which itself confers a certain truth and believability on the proceedings.

I should probably give you a little insight into what that compelling story is at this point. The Dirties follows Matt Johnson (also the film's director) and Owen Williams, actors playing high school characters named Matt Johnson and Owen Williams, as they shoot a short film for a class project. In this stylized project they imagine they are badasses coming to rid the school of its criminal element, also played by them, but highly analogous to a real scourge of bullies at their school, who regularly target the two. Matt, the idealogue, is constantly imagining his real life as scenes from movies he either knows or is imagining filming, while Owen, who was once a willing conspirator, has started to drift toward the non-bullied mainstream, through no real fault of anything but his own maturation. As the bullying toward Matt continues, he humorously develops plans to "really" shoot the bullies at the school, though this too he frames as a bit of ironic, self-reflexive text with a big pair of quotation marks around it. But he might not just be being ironic.

The Dirties is found footage in the way that The Office was found footage. The conceit of The Office is, of course, that a documentary crew is capturing the day-to-day happenings at a paper company, and it took pains to maintain that conceit for a while. But the showrunners quickly realized that to remain enslaved to that concept would either severely limit what they could do, or severely limit their ability to remain faithful to it. They smartly realized that they had really good characters that we wanted to watch and get to know better, and that was much more important. The style they had established was part of the aesthetic now, but we liked it because the hyper-real nature of it gave us the impression we were eavesdropping on the lives of real people, not sitcom creations. They still made occasional references to the existence of a camera crew, and the characters continued to give the testimonials that are now a staple of reality television, but they knew that the more often they reminded us of the original conceit, the more we'd be likely to pick away at it. So the original conceit just happily faded into the background.

The Dirties does basically the same thing, as the characters sometimes ask something of the cameraperson or make some other acknowledgement that they are being filmed. But the person doing the filming is not a character in the story, and in fact, is present in situations where he (or she, I suppose) never would be. In found footage as it was originally envisioned, this would be a cardinal sin. But The Dirties is not trying to follow those rules; it doesn't even pretend to. It says "The aesthetic is what we really like about found footage, and that's something we can give you while still telling the story we want to tell in the way we want to tell it."

There are meta elements to The Dirties that kind of confuse the whole thing, but in a good way. As Matt is always imagining his life as a movie -- a specific bone of contention between them as Owen starts to withdraw -- indeed that's kind of what's actually going on here. Matt's life is a movie -- someone is actually filming it. And because the movie also openly questions whether Matt might be a psychopath -- he's actually the one that poses the question -- it could be that only Matt is aware of this camera, and that indeed the whole thing is in his head.

So while we don't believe this movie could be "found footage" in the traditional sense, we do believe it could be real life. We do believe that the found footage conceit could be revealing something true about the fragile psyche of a guy who has been hiding his own pain behind a veil of humor, but is steadily detaching from reality.

This is what I want found footage to do. This is what I want any film to do.

I was concerned it might not have been appreciated, but it turns out, it sort of was. The film has a very respectable 65 on Metacritic, including one score of 100 and three others in the 90s. We won't worry too much about the two 20 Metascores.

And it turns out Matt Johnson has gotten to make another film in presumably the same style, as it also stars him and Owen Williams as guys named Matt Johnson and Owen Williams. This seems a bit more high concept as it involves the possible faking of the moon landing, but after The Dirties I'm giving Johnson the benefit of the doubt that he pulled it off. It's called Operation Avalanche and it came out in 2016. I'll be on the lookout for it.

When I knew I was solid on that 4.5-star rating was when the film ended, probably five minutes shy of what you would think it's actual conclusion would be, but all the better for that fact. It ends on a perfect note, actually, one that underscores the intermingling of comedy and possible tragedy that underpins the whole movie. The ending is also just ambiguous enough to have several possible interpretations, which is always a good thing. Most importantly of all, it's not heavy handed, allowing us to take in many implied messages while not being suffocated by any direct ones.

I guess because of its title, and because I know the way Kevin Smith's mind works sometimes, I thought this would be a movie with a lot of unsophisticated stoner or bro humor, with possibly a touch of homophobia and a decent amount of scatalogy. This is not to suggest that Smith is homophobic -- I think he's probably just the opposite. However, I also think that his comedy sometimes has an "anything for a laugh" quality to it that clouds his judgments.

But The Dirties has not only redeemed found footage for me, it's reminded me of the sound judgments Smith is also capable of making.

The Dirties is sound, and then some.

Found is sound. Who knew.

Mysteries of the internet

If we take the position that found footage is an oversaturated genre -- and I do take that position -- then it should stand to reason that subsections of this genre are feeling the overall strain even more acutely. While you could argue that variations on standard found footage are a way of breathing new life into it, what seems to be the case is that the variations box themselves even more into the corners that tend to suffocate the already flimsy credibility of this genre.

Found footage movies set on computer screens should be a prime example of that apparent struggle between breathing new life and fatally losing credibility. If the last one I saw -- Nacho Vigalondo's Open Windows -- was any indication, having a movie occur in real-time with web cams and instant chats only makes it seem all the more absurd. If you recall what I wrote about Open Windows back in March, the ridiculous decision to have all the internet-connected characters be constantly on the move -- while always maintaining a network connection and somehow always knowing what each other is up to -- took the film beyond laughable to just plain awful.

Unfriended certainly could have -- should have -- fallen into the same traps. It is, on the surface, the same type of movie. You'd wonder, then, why I picked it to watch while I was carving my jack-o-lantern on Wednesday night. Well, I did hear good things, and besides, better to watch a movie while carving that you don't need to give your full attention.

Unfriended did not turn out to be such a movie.

The fact that none of the characters leave their bedrooms is a good start on making it better than Open Windows. Every other creative decision works to remove the credibility stumbling blocks that typically trip up movies like this ... and also makes it all the more creepy.

I'll give you the plot in broad strokes before getting into the topic I teased in my subject line. It's the year anniversary since a teen who was cyber-bullied took her own life. She wasn't the "it gets better after high school" type, one who was chronically picked on. Rather, this was a popular girl, even a mean girl, who couldn't handle it when a video anonymously materialized on the web, showing her drunk, nearly passed out, and not having reached a toilet in time. The video of her shooting herself on school grounds is also seen. It's all seen from the computer screen of Blaire, who was her friend but also possibly her frenemy -- this movie contends, and it seems as though it may actually be the case, that many popular kids these days are stuck in that limbo between friend and enemy that is so accurately distilled by that portmanteau that joins the two words. Blaire first does a little Skype flirting with her boyfriend before ultimately being joined on a group Skype chat by four other friends -- and one mysterious, generic user they can't identify, who looks like this:

Chillingly minimalist in the context of what's about to happen, right? And what's about to happen is that all the friends are about to start getting tormented by this mystery entity. They can't hang up on this entity, they can't remove "him," and in an interesting commentary on internet trolls, they continue referring to this troublemaker as "him" even as the evidence begins mounting that it is somehow, impossibly, the spirit of their dead friend invading their computers. They start getting messages on Facebook from the dead girl (Laura Barns), and she begins posting damning videos and pictures of the friends, many of which involve them stabbing each other in the back, that they can't delete -- they literally don't have the functionality to remove them, as in delete buttons have been excised and X's no longer appear in the upper right-hand corners of screens. And I bet you can guess what starts happening, one by one, to the friends.

So that last paragraph starts to get into what I'm talking about when I refer to "the mysteries of the internet." What I found so chilling about Unfriended was not necessarily the slasher stuff, which is pretty ordinary, in the end, and is all stuff we've seen before. Rather, it's the inability to know what's going on with someone you can't fully see who is doing something, somewhere, on the web.

Let me try to describe that a little better. You know how when you are chatting with someone on Facebook, and it says "Bill Smith is typing ..." And then: Nothing. Bill Smith was writing something, but for some reason, Bill Smith never hit send. Or Bill Smith was writing something for a very long time, and ultimately, all he said was "Yeah." What was Bill Smith originally typing, before he thought better of it? Why did Bill Smith inexplicably stop responding?

Unfriended captures these things perfectly. Most likely, Bill Smith got a phone call, or was distracted by something else he was reading on the web, or even had someone come up to him and start talking to him. There was nothing nefarious or mysterious about why Bill Smith started typing you a response and never sent it. But when you are dealing with an angry ghost, and it starts typing but doesn't send anything ... that's scary.

Then there's just the stark failure of technology to operate as designed. Why does this email that was sent by Laura have no option to forward? Why is the option to unfriend her on Facebook grayed out? A character in Unfriended says she has weird computer stuff happen to her all the time, and we all have that. But when you refresh the page or reopen the browser, it usually fixes whatever glitch was happening. These are unfixable glitches, and when the movie makes its regularly exquisite use of silence -- a choice that would seem to belie the loud and busy online environment of the modern teen -- it just makes these moments of basic functionality breakdown all the more disquieting.

In the end, Unfriended was actually about the worst movie I could have chosen to watch while carving a pumpkin, because so much of its information is conveyed visually. There's so much reading of emails and chats and instant messages that it was almost like choosing to carve a pumpkin while watching a film with subtitles. Then of course you also need to watch for flickers of disturbing imagery in the background of various web cams, or windows popping up in the background that are not completely visible, but contribute to our understanding of these characters and what's happening to them.

So I was less than halfway done with my jack-o-lantern at the end of Unfriended's 83 minutes, with almost all the detail work still to go. But other than my slow progress requiring me to stay up until well after midnight, I'll make that trade any day. A good movie is always worth the "inconvenience" of having to actually watch it.

In order to finish my work, I just threw on an episode of Survivor, and barely needed to look at the screen at all.

I once was Night, but now I'm Found

Found footage, that is.

Some people may be willing to go with the "once lost, now found" narrative for M. Night Shyamalan's career in terms of The Visit, but I'll only go as far as "found" in terms of found footage.

The Visit is almost certainly Shyamalan's best movie since Signs, but given the string of turkeys on his resume, that's pretty faint praise.

Still, it looks good and is genuinely creepy in parts, which means that it has already surpassed two-thirds of his filmography. (Most of those others looked good, but most of them made us laugh at the times they were supposed to be creeping us out.)

The "looks good" part is one of the causes for concern, though, because this is supposed to be a found footage movie. I mean, it is a found footage movie -- the "supposed to be" part relates to the fact that it's meant to look like it was shot by an amateur. Or two amateurs, in this case a teenage brother and sister. That it does not, and that's part of the problem.

Another problem is that there's something basically depressing about someone like Shyamalan having to try to find his groove in a genre as dessicated as found footage. There have actually been a number of found footage movies I've really liked in the past few years, such as Ti West's The Sacrament and Adam Robitel's The Taking of Deborah Logan, which actually covers thematically similar territory to The Visit. Still, it feels like a desperate refuge for someone like Shyamalan, who made his initial reputation on a tightly controlled type of compositional formalism. Then again, if there was anyone more desperate for something new than Shyamalan, I don't know who it would be.

Only the subgenre of found footage is new, though, really. There's a getting back to his basics element of The Visit that is surely causing those who are praising the movie to praise it. (I am not one of those who praises it, though I do marginally recommend it.)

In fact, it's kind of funny how many of Shyamalan's previous concerns are represented here in one way or another. And I'll be including a couple Visit spoilers here, so if that's a concern for you, you can stop reading now.

One of the most effective moments in The Sixth Sense, the one that still gives me a chill as I'm typing it now, is when that sick girl, the one whose mother is poisoning her, emerges vomiting from under that blanket. Well wouldn't you know it, vomiting factors prominently into the first night the kids detect there's anything wrong with their grandmother. The girl sees her walking straight forward downstairs and spewing up her dinner. The impact is significantly less in this film.

When the boy rises up and attacks his "grandfather" (not really his grandfather) at the end, it's very reminiscent of the "swing away" ending to Signs. Both involve a character who had been stunted in an athletic competition in their past, which had been eating away at them. Both moments involve that character taking action and atoning for their previous inaction, in order to save the day. This moment actually even has a bit of the ending of After Earth in it, as that also involved a boy who had to rise up and conquer his fears in a kill or be killed scenario.

Then there are little things that call back to his other films. The general affect of these grandparents is reminiscent of how the people in The Happening behave before they kill themselves. The stark appearance of the trees and other environment reminds a person a bit of The Village. And that part where the boy magically conjures a wall of ice to defeat an army of soldiers arriving by sea is straight out of The Last Airbender.

Wait, scratch that last one.

But despite the fact that he has made a blatantly unbelievable version of a found footage movie, and also is blatantly ripping off his own filmography, and also is blatantly ripping off other tired horror tropes (some of the way the grandmother is visualized owes a lot to Ringu and other Asian horror in which the hair obscures the character's eyes), The Visit is still quite watchable and has some enjoyable moments.

It also has likely bought Shyamalan, who already seemed to owe the longevity of his career to a deal with the devil, another couple movies.

Perhaps enough time to truly be found.

The year found footage found me again

Just when you think an obnoxious trend might be dying, it roars back with renewed vigor.

And sometimes, you're surprised to find yourself kind of welcoming it.

I watched Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones on Friday night, on what happened to be the year anniversary of its U.S. release. I hadn't planned to make it one of the movies I'm cramming for my 2014 list, but it's funny how the availability of a particular movie on Netflix -- plus an 84-minute running time -- can really change your mind about that.

It was one of two found footage movies I watched that night, which gives you some idea how this detestable genre has found its way back on to my radar in 2014.

Into the Storm, which I watched after The Marked Ones, surprised me by also being a found footage movie, though in this case they stuck to the gimmick only when it suited them -- a major problem with films in this genre that I've complained about before.

But the interesting thing about the five found footage movies I've seen in 2014 is that I liked three of them, and liked parts of the other two. In fact, I liked three of them quite a bit, awarding them four stars out of five. Including the fifth entry into the Paranormal Activity series, which should have been no better than a cash grab.

Tops among my 2014 found footage movies is The Sacrament, Ti West's bold decision to stage the Jonestown Massacre -- or something very similar to it -- as a found footage movie. West has been big into rejuvenating and reinventing since he came on the scene, most notably with The House of the Devil (The Innkeepers disappointed me a bit), and The Sacrament is no different. Three guys from a TMZ-type show travel to a remote cult compound to extract one of their sisters, only to discover that the seemingly contented flock of a charlatan cult leader are on the verge of something potentially tragic. What makes the movie so striking, other than the events that eventually get depicted, is that it's the rare found footage horror that does not use nighttime scenes as a crutch to create fear. Most of the fucked up stuff that happens here happens in broad daylight, making for an unconventional horror film indeed.

Then there was the slightly more traditional The Taking of Deborah Logan, which details the possession of a human being by evil spirits. Again it's filmmakers setting out to make a documentary and capturing a lot more disturbing material than they ever expected to capture. The twist here, though, is that the possessed woman of the title is being filmed because the filmmakers are trying to chronicle the progression of her Alzheimer's disease, in exchange for a nice sum of money the family will truly need to cope with the disease. This shrewd decision means that Deborah Logan's erratic behavior, at least initially, can be mistaken for just for the side effects of her dementia. The film then becomes a metaphor for how someone suffering from that disease truly turns into someone else as they ride out its ravages.

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones is another clever twist on "your typical found footage horror." You wouldn't expect anything about the fifth movie in a series to be remotely original, but The Marked Ones makes an invigorating creative decision that just so happens also to be inspired by a possibly cynical focus on one particular demographic of the viewing public. Apparently, the Paranormal Activity movies are big with Latinos, so this movie shifts from upper middle class white suburbia to lower middle class Latino apartment buildings. You'd call that pandering to that audience if the characters weren't created with such loving care and resistance of stereotypes -- and when some stereotypes do rear their heads (some Latino gangbangers and their large weapons are recruited to get involved with the supernatural disturbance), they have the effect of being fun rather than cruel. Credit goes to the cast for breathing such distinct life into the characters, and some genuinely spooky moments along the way.

The two I didn't like so much must now share the same paragraph, in part because I already wrote a bunch about Willow Creek last week. Even though that was a fairly naked theft of an earlier property (I won't get into it here so I don't have to issue a spoiler alert), it did use some of the techniques of found footage to maximize the fear inherent in the setup. And then we come to Into the Storm, which basically just did not need to be a found footage movie at all. The effects, which are the main reason to see it, are not particularly enhanced by the fact that they are being viewed by someone's camera -- and in fact, the filmmakers just pull away to a completely omniscient camera angle whenever they feel like it, just so we won't miss anything. That's a big cheat, but I did enjoy the effects well enough to feel like I could recommend it as a rainy day movie. The mostly no-name cast also seems pretty committed.

Whether the fact that they were found footage contributed to me liking these movies is not certain. And that has helped me arrive at a fairly basic, but nonetheless kind of revelatory realization: Found footage is just a tool. It's just a means to an end. If a story is good and you want to follow the characters on their journey, that's more important than whether it's realistic that they are all holding cameras. Or that it's supposed to be God holding the camera in some shots.

So one New Year's resolution might be for me not to automatically hate on found footage. If it can give me the kind of creeps that The Sacrament, The Taking of Deborah Logan and Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones gave me, then it is the proper tool to do the job.

Ten terrible trademarks of found footage films

Okay, it's finally time for me to say it:

I think I hate found footage movies.

This was not always the case. Awhile ago, I absolutely loved them, and as recently as a few months ago, I still found them fresh. But like any cinematic trend that gets overworked, this genre has grown tiresome.

I loved the twist at the end of The Sixth Sense just as much as the next guy. But when three dozen high profile releases that came out in the next five years also had a big twist, it broke me. You can say the same thing about the origins of found footage -- or at least the origins of its current popularity -- in The Blair Witch Project. A decade later, I'd be fine if I never saw another one. (The fact that both The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project came out in the same year is just another indicator that 1999 was the best year for film in the last 20 years.)

After Chronicle, I have officially had enough. (And what a shame -- that's such a great poster.) This genre has become bastardized within an inch of its life. And yeah, I can also blame disappointments from last year such as Trollhunter, Apollo 18 and Megan is Missing for the current state of affairs. But it's Chronicle that's going to bear the brunt of my "chronic" fatigue.

In part because the movie is getting such praise. It's got a 69 Metascore. But what really alarms me is what you get if you parse that 69 score. Metacritic shows you the number of positive, mixed and negative reviews it uses to arrive at this score, and according to the Metacritic metrics, Chronicle has only one negative review.

One.

Did they see the same movie I saw?

If you want to go into Chronicle with an open mind, well, I should have given you this spoiler warning earlier. Get out now, because I'll probably spoil some actual plot details later on.

The thing about found footage movies is that they are making a contract with the viewer that they will obey certain rules. There are a number of these rules, but the most important one, the one they simply must obey, is that all the footage has to be captured by a cameraman who is in some way part of the story, or an unmanned camera that is witnessing it. There should be no "omniscient camera."

Like most of the weaker found footage movies, Chronicle violates this rule a couple times. But that doesn't bother me as much as the lame ways it tries to obey certain other rules, which are really more like stylistic trademarks of the genre. And it got me thinking about the frustrating aesthetic characteristics many of these films have in common, which become all the more annoying once you identify them.

So let's just get started ... the following list is kind of a mishmash of cliched techniques and pet peeves. But if you've seen enough of these movies, you'll know what I'm talking about.

10. Found footage films are always trying to explain away the presence of the camera. Even if they violate the rules of their genre, found footage movies are usually at least aware of those rules, and know the viewer is naturally suspicious of their commitment to them. So there's almost always a significant percentage of the dialogue devoted to talking about how and why a person is able to film/choosing to film what they're filming. In Chronicle, the characters are so conscious of the camera that their discussion of it becomes a distraction. Which makes it all the more absurd when the rules are violated, most notably in the film's climax.

9. Found footage films want to mimic a human's randomness about when to start and stop filming. The next found footage movie you see, watch for this effect: A line of dialogue is cut short because the cameraman randomly stopped filming before a natural pause in the conversation. It happens at least once in every found footage movie, and it always happens when something unimportant is happening. I can think of a couple clear instances of this in Chronicle, and it's a purely aesthetic effect designed to remind you that you're not seeing everything that happens. Except, in most found footage movies, you see precisely every piece of exposition you need to see, any and everything needed to move the narrative forward in a basically conventional way. Apparently, itchy video fingers only strike in banal moments.

8. Found footage movies want to remind you that a distracted human does not always hold a camera perfectly. Another pernicious trick to remind you of the video medium is to have the cameraman shoot the action off center. In a scene that otherwise doesn't matter, you see the subject wandering toward the side of the frame, meaning that the cameraman is not training the lens perfectly on what he/she is shooting. This is again trying to ram the video aesthetic down our throats. But again, wait until an important moment comes up in the narrative. That camera is miraculously trained perfectly on whatever the audience needs to see, no matter how improbable it would be that the cameraman would have the presence of mind to capture it. A terrific example of this in Chronicle occurs when the characters drop out of the clouds, where they've been throwing around a football after learning to fly. The camera lands (unharmed) on the ground in exactly the spot it needs to be to catch the other three characters all hitting the ground, less than ten feet away. Improbable at best.

7. Found footage films make small jumps forward in time that don't make any sense. It's a stylized but occasionally effective form of fiction filmmaking to have the same shot jump forward in small bursts, which have the effect of cutting an otherwise straightforward scene into slices. I may not be describing this effect perfectly, but you should be familiar with it -- the camera angle isn't changing, but there are abrupt little cuts that give off the effect of a pastiche of moments rather than a single uninterrupted take. This happens in Chronicle during several scenes in which a camera is not being operated by anyone, but has been set on a tripod. Think about that for a moment. In the context of a found footage movie, the only explanation for this is that a cameraman didn't film the whole scene straight through, but pressed stop and start repeatedly. Without the cameraman doing that, we can only assume that the cuts were added in the editing room. Which means that it's purely stylistic and not based on the limitations of video as a recording medium, which is what the film is overtly trying to suggest.

6. Found footage films don't actually have to be "found." And speaking of the editing room, most found footage films don't seem to care that the images we're seeing are a lot more than a succession of consecutively recorded video files being shown in chronological order. Only a few examples, like Blair Witch, are truly "found footage" in the original way that term was imagined. Most modern found footage films suggest a huge number of video files, few of them shown in their entirety, edited together in cinematically accessible narrative order -- often from many disparate sources, including security cameras and other devices to which the editor would need access. In Chronicle, this approach also violates the first-person filming perspective that had been dominant modality of the whole movie, as the big climax includes security camera footage just to up the "wow" factor of the final fight. The use of security camera footage and other third-party footage also begs the question: How did the person who theoretically assembled all this footage into a movie get access to all the footage he/she needed? The reason people can't make a "found footage" film in real life, out of actual found footage, is that they can't cobble together enough real footage from all those sources to imitate the structure and rhythms of a feature film. Most found footage films suggest a kind of omniscient filmmaker who has unlimited access to all existing footage about the subject at hand, regardless of who shot it and whether they were likely to make it available. And frankly that just makes the whole thing seem stupid.

5. Found footage films frequently overlook the fact that someone needs to press start and stop. How often do you see a character in a found footage film, while videoing him or herself, start from behind the camera and return to behind the camera in order to stop filming? It's like they're pressing the record button with their mind. (Which I suppose could happen in a movie like Chronicle -- but if so, happens in Chronicle before the characters realize they might have that ability.) There are many moments in Chronicle when the three main characters all appear in front of the camera together, without anyone emerging from behind the camera or returning to that spot to press stop. You could argue that the person editing the film together just cut out those distracting logistical details, considering them clunky. If that's the case, why go to such great lengths elsewhere in the film to suggest that the footage is undoctored? Like cutting off the aforementioned line of dialogue mid-sentence? You can't have it both ways -- you either want to prove this is real and undoctored footage, or you want to make it seem like a smooth narrative. You can't pick and choose.

4. Found footage films are supposed to look like they're shot on video. This one really gets me. The reason to make found footage movies about otherworldly phenomena, such as telekinesis, is that the video imagery is supposed to make the special effects look all the more authentic. If you're seeing a videotaped image of a guy flying through the sky, it must "really be happening," right? The video image is supposed to look raw and undoctored, lending the special effects their greatest possible credibility. Yet in a number of key scenes in Chronicle, it's clearly film stock you're seeing, not video. In fact, the aesthetic of the image changes so totally that only an inept filmmaker wouldn't have recognized the jarring effect it has on the viewer.

3. Found footage films need really good actors. In addition to making special effects seem more like they're "really happening," found video footage is also supposed to lend a greater authenticity to the performances of the actors -- and in return require a more credible performance from them. The pseudo documentary style requires that the actors be even more believable than in most films, because there's not supposed to be any artifice at play. If you don't believe these are real people doing real things, the jig is up. For me, this is one of Chronicle's greatest weaknesses. The actors are generally not believable, and the dialogue they speak is ham-fisted and atrocious. Take particular note of the scenes involving the domestic strife with the main character's father. I've rarely seen an abusive relationship ring this false, and that's even in fiction films, where the relationship can be exaggerated or stylized for effect. Here, it's supposed to be straight-up reality recorded by a video camera.

2. Found footage films frequently involve outdated equipment. There are two key characters in Chronicle you see holding video cameras -- the lead, and the romantic interest of one of the lead's friends. Both characters have large, clunky video cameras, the kind that would have been used regularly in the 1990s. This film clearly takes place in 2012 -- at a school talent show, one character addresses the Class of 2012 -- so the use of those old-school style video cameras is another knock against the film's much-prized realism. And the entire purpose seems to be to give us some iconographic representation of what a video camera should look like. If you want me to really believe a found footage movie set in 2012, have the characters use cell phones, Flip videos or even normal cameras whose primary function is photography. Really small cameras can get really good footage these days -- and are a lot easier to carry when you're trying to capture every single detail of your entire life, even the embarrassing moments no one would ever film, as the characters are in Chronicle.

1. Found footage films always want to make some comment about society. Many found footage films are obsessed with what it says about our culture that we always want to record everything. It's supposed to represent our narcissism, or perhaps our latent belief that we could all be filmmakers. It's supposed to indicate that the barriers to our privacy have been willfully broken down. The bad things that happen to these characters, then, are usually some form of punishment for these shallow obsessions with fame and image. As on-the-nose as that can be, it's even more dispiriting when a found footage movie does not have any such convictions. In Chronicle, there is never any reason given why the main character wants to film everything in his life. And it's discussed so damn much that there should be a reason. In the climax, this character has become so consumed by his powers that he's transformed himself into a supervillain. While floating near the top of the skyscrapers in Seattle's downtown, he gathers a group of recording devices around him, floating in the air, filming him. Any thematic meaning of his obsession with "chronicling" his life is utterly indiscernible.

But, by all means, go see it if you want to. ;-)

How much footage is there left to find?

I have been excited to see Apollo 18 ever since I first got a glimpse of this poster and first got a hint what it was about.

This, despite the fact that the found footage genre has steadily been wearing thin with me, to the point that it culminated in a really disappointing experience earlier this week.

In order to account for how I went from excitement to wariness regarding found footage, let's start at the beginning. Not the beginning of the genre -- if I'm not careful, someone will tell me in my comments section about how the first found footage movie was made in 1959. The beginning for me, which was about a dozen years ago. (And thank goodness wikipedia has a comprehensive page on the found footage genre, which should make this easy for me.) Since we're starting at the beginning for me, these films are not listed in the order of their release, but rather, the order that I saw them -- which makes more sense as a way of documenting my own personal experiences with found footage.

The Blair Witch Project (1999, Daniel Myrick & Edward Sanchez). How you reacted to Blair Witch was a function of when you saw it within the hype cycle. Since I saw it more than a week before its release date, you better bet I was trumpeting its greatness to the skies. I clearly remember, as we left the theater, my friend saying to me "That's the scariest movie I've ever seen." I wasn't willing to go that far, though it had definitely disturbed me -- in part because it felt so fresh. I loved the conceit that a video camera had just been found containing this footage. I don't think they went so far as to say that the people in it hadn't been identified -- but that wasn't necessary. The people had been identified, they were missing, and this is the only footage that gave any clue what happened to them. And it ends when the last person is no longer able to push the record button on the camera. Simple, beautiful, frightening. And a seemingly insatiable appetite for found footage is born.

The Last Broadcast (1998, Lance Weiler & Stefan Avalos). While I was still in the dizzy spell of Blair Witch, I saw a movie directed by a couple guys who claimed that Blair Witch had ripped them off. I know this not only because of what they said publicly, but because I interviewed Lance Weiler and Stefan Avalos (actually, just one of them, but I can't remember which -- I think it was Weiler) for a piece I wrote in Time Out New York. Their story involves filmmakers getting lost in the New Jersey Pine Barrens while searching for the Jersey Devil. There are similarities to Blair Witch, sure, but the main reason I'm including it here is because wikipedia's found footage page reminded me of its existence. It's not strictly a found footage film because it also includes interviews taped after the fact, giving it the structure of a more traditional documentary (albeit a fake one). Also, it's not very good -- the main reason I didn't buy it when these guys said Blair Witch ripped them off. It's kind of like those persistent accusations that J.K. Rowling ripped off the idea for Harry Potter. Okay, but who came through with the execution to make it a worldwide phenomenon?

Cloverfield (2008, Matt Reeves). Given the phenomenal success of Blair Witch, it's kind of hard to believe that found footage kind of went into hibernation for almost a decade. According to wikipedia, there were movies made in this genre, but you tell me if you've heard of any of them: The St. Francisville Experiment (2000), The Collingswood Story (2002), August Underground's Mordum (2003), September Tapes (2004), The Zombie Diaries (2006). No? Me neither. But found footage came roaring back, somewhat literally, with Cloverfield in 2008. What I appreciated so much about Cloverfield was not only that it did what Blair Witch did -- giving us a bunch of footage that, while amazing, seemed like something somebody could have actually shot with one video camera -- but it seamlessly introduced special effects into the equation, giving the monster an undeniable verisimilitude. I loved it so much that I saw it twice in the theater -- which I also did for Blair Witch.

Quarantine (2008, John Erick Dowdle). I was still high on Cloverfield when I saw Quarantine, and liked it so much that I wasn't sure, while I was watching it, which film was better. Since then it has become crystal clear, as I've seen Cloverfield a third time and given Quarantine less and less of a thought with each passing year. Still, the found footage genre was honored quite well with this entry, which I didn't even know at the time was a remake of the Spanish film REC. To my great shame, I still have not seen REC or its sequel, otherwise those would certainly be discussed here. (Wikipedia actually shows REC as having two more sequels scheduled for the future, so you could probably write a diminishing returns post about just the REC series.) Anyway, I thought the zombie movie was a good next place to go with the found footage genre ... even though it had already been there with several entries that I hadn't seen.

Diary of the Dead (2008, George A. Romero). Such as Diary of the Dead, George Romero's requisite dalliance with found footage, released earlier in the year and seen by me a couple months after Quarantine. This film was an almost unqualified disappointment for me. A key ingredient in selling us a found footage film is that the actors can make us believe they are real people -- the video camera medium has an extremely exacting standard when it comes to acting. The actors just didn't pull it off here, and moreover, I found the zombie stuff to be unexciting. Diary of the Dead is not terrible, but neither is it worthy.

Paranormal Activity (2009, Oren Peli). Remember what I said about the Blair Witch hype cycle? I saw Paranormal Activity after it had been the theaters for a couple weeks, and after they'd already started showing footage of Micah Sloat's body being hurled at the camera in the TV commercials. (Talk about spoiling a movie in the ads -- that's one of the last things to happen in the narrative.) I was occasionally impressed and a bit scared, but ultimately disappointed in Paranormal Activity. I wouldn't say that my wariness with found footage was increasing, although it could have been ... but my next two experiences were quite good ones.

The Last Exorcism (2010, Daniel Stamm). Quite simply, I loved this movie. It didn't get lots of love from critics, but I loved the idea of a charlatan exorcist setting out to make a movie to debunk his own scam -- and then happening upon a real case of devil possession. The effects were very credible in this film, and it chilled me. Plus, Stamm gets a really charismatic lead performance from Patrick Fabian. I guess the ending left a little to be desired, but until then, this movie completely had me. Although the subject matter is somewhat similar to Paranormal Activity, the approach is entirely different and it worked a lot better for me.

Paranormal Activity 2 (2010, Tod Williams). Even though I'd been somewhat non-plussed by Paranormal Activity, I knew I would eventually be seeing its sequel, and that eventuality arrived sooner rather than later, only a couple months after it arrived on DVD. And for reasons I can't entirely articulate here, I liked it a lot better than the first. Maybe there was less hype and maybe they spoiled less in the ads, but I was really on board with this movie the whole time. And liked the way it ultimately tied into the narrative of the original. Doesn't mean I'm going to be lining up for PA3 this Halloween.

Trollhunter (2010, Andre Ovredal). I've seen this title also written as The Troll Hunter and Trollhunters, but I'm going with one word and singular. And I guess I might have been that much more excited about Apollo 18 if I hadn't just seen Trollhunter on Sunday and Monday nights. (We had to continue it to the next night because it was putting us to sleep). I feel very uncharitable saying this, because Trollhunter should have been great, and I really want to champion a little underdog Norwegian film that uses believable CG trolls to convince us of the authentic nature of the footage. But Trollhunter helped me recognize two other crucial elements of the found footage genre beyond those I've already discussed: 1) There has to be a story; 2) You have to care about the characters. It's kind of odd to say this, because in theory, a bunch of found video tape footage only contained whatever the cameraman happened to record during the days and weeks of time from the first bit of footage to the last. All the character development could be occurring off camera and we're just not seeing it. But found footage films need to be clever enough to get the character development on camera, as well as including enough of a narrative arc to make us want to know what happens next. As much as I enjoyed the idea of three intrepid film students following around a mysterious man who's posing as a bear poacher, but is actually killing trolls with giant concentrated beams of UV light, it just didn't play out on screen the way I wanted it to. We never got to know the characters any better and their interactions with the trolls were not building toward any kind of climax -- except for the fact that you know they have to disappear eventually, else their footage would not have been "found." I so wanted to like Trollhunter better -- instead it left me feeling a bit despondent about found footage as a genre.

And so that's where the release of Apollo 18 finds me. On the one hand, I'm excited to see a found footage movie set in space, because to my knowledge, that hasn't happened yet. (You could set a found footage movie in the future, but that would take away from its sense of immediacy, which is key to the effect it's supposed to have on us.) On the other, I'm freshly wary of this type of movie and sort of doubt that the surprises it contains will knock my socks off. In movies like this, it helps to see what the studio thinks of it -- and the fact that they're releasing it on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, the same day that the hilariously titled Shark Night 3D is also being released, gives me plenty of doubt. Besides, how was this footage "found," anyway -- did some other astronaut stumble across a video camera half-submerged in moon sand? (Kidding -- "found footage" is not quite so literal as that.)

In a way, it seems a little unkind to the found footage genre to have written this post. As I've gone through writing about the nine films mentioned above, I realize that I have quite positive things to say about five of those nine, and two of the last three. Not great proof of a downward trend, ultimately. However, it's not always possible to tell in advance when your saturation point will be reached on something. You may think you're fine with a particular cinematic trend, then one day you just decide you've had enough. Like, I didn't realize I was over Zooey Deschanel until I started seeing ads for her new Fox show, New Girl. Then I decided instantly that she was played out.

I'm probably going to see a movie this afternoon, after I've been on baby duty for a couple hours following my anticipated early release from work. I could see Apollo 18 -- I could easily see it. But maybe I'll wait. Maybe today I'll let a different "gimmick" -- although I hesitate to call it that -- get me in theater, as I see Circumstance, the drama about Iranian lesbians.

I'm worried they'll disappear at the end of the film for an entirely different reason -- one that's sadly based on the realities of our world, rather than fantasy.