4/12/15 (Part Two): Framed to Fit Your Screen

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auteur theory, Bernat Vilaplana, cinema, cyber-terrorism, Elijah Wood, fame, fans, Film auteurs, films, films reviews, hackers, Jon D. Dominguez, Jorge Magaz, modern technology, Movies, Nacho Vigalondo, Neil Maskell, Open Windows, Sasha Grey, stalkers, stylish films, suspense, techno-thrillers, thrillers, Timecrimes, writer-director

As technology advances, so, too, has the way that we consume films. Gone are the days when “going to the movies” meant, literally, going out to see a movie: these days, audiences are just as likely to head into the living room and fire up the Roku as they are to drive to the multiplex when it comes to seeing new, first-run films. With video-on-demand offerings now equaling (and sometimes exceeding) what’s available in the theaters, to paraphrase the Bard, all the world’s on our computer screens and our Playstations are no longer merely players.

Few films have embraced this new era quite as ably, enthusiastically and downright entertainingly as Spanish auteur Nacho Vigalondo’s Open Windows (2014). Combining a complex, Hitchcockian plot with an appropriately glossy, techno-babble sheen, Vigalondo’s film takes place entirely within a series of on-screen computer windows. The result? One of the few films tailor-made for the way that many people will probably wind up watching it: an open window on their computer screen.

Wasting no time, we meet our erstwhile protagonist, Nick Chambers (Elijah Wood). He’s the earnest, clean-cut and rather nerdy webmaster of a fan site devoted to hot, young Hollywood “it-girl” Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey). Jill’s in the middle of a press junket for her newest soon-to-be-blockbuster, Dark Sky, a glowing-eyed-mutant epic that probably wouldn’t be out-of-place on a real-life multiplex marquee. Nick is pleased as punch because he’s just won a dinner date with Jill, a bit of happenstance that pretty much validates the entirety of his life.

Sweet turns to shit, however, when Nick gets a phone call from Chord (Neil Maskell), an employee with the company sponsoring Nick’s contest. Turns out that Jill has unceremoniously cancelled the event at the last minute, giving no reason and leaving Nick stranded without so much as a “how do ya do.” Nick is crushed but Chord offers him a bit of a band-aid: he hacks Nick into Jill’s personal electronic devices, giving the super-fan unprecedented access to entire life.

Declining to give in to Chord’s baser urging, Nick soon finds himself embroiled in a complex plan that seems to be spiraling ever faster and faster out of control. As Chord reveals himself to be less of a helpful perv and more of an evil genius, Nick must do everything he can to clear his own name, protect his beloved Jill and get to the bottom of the intricate game. He’ll have to be smart, however: Chord is brutal, ruthless and five steps ahead of him…one wrong move and it’s game over.

Despite coming off the rails in the final half hour, Open Windows is one of the most exhilarating, ingenious and flat-out fun films to come down the pike in quite some time. When the film is really firing on all cylinders, which is quite often, there’s a relentless sense of forward momentum that makes it all but impossible to blink, lest you miss some sort of background detail or bit of action. At times, the action is split between as many as 16 separate windows, making for the kind of dizzying “split-screen” action that ’60s cop shows could only dream about. It all works spectacularly well, maintaining a sense of cohesion that tiptoes the line between chaos and order but never slips into the abyss.

As someone who absolutely loved Vigalondo’s brilliant feature debut, Timecrimes (2007), I’ve eagerly awaited each new film with the kind of zeal normally reserved for children and cake. For my money, the writer-director is one of the smartest, freshest talents currently operating, a filmmaker who’s just one, big break away from becoming the next del Toro. While Open Windows isn’t quite that film, it is the kind of break-neck thriller that should move Nacho closer to that ever-present world domination.

Open Windows is a tricky film: similar to the way in which one might be rushed through a haunted house attraction, the audience is rushed through Vigalondo’s film, jerking to a halt only long enough to give the carriage a change to climb the rise and plummet down the next heart-stopping fall. It’s a setpiece-based film in that we are, essentially, watching bite-sized chunks of narrative played out before us in a multitude of various formats, each segment the equivalent of a video vignette we might peruse on Youtube. That the whole thing manages to come together into a complete whole (final thirty notwithstanding) is nothing short of a minor miracle. By its very nature, Open Windows is a film that should have been way too chaotic, disjointed, contrived and gimmicky to ever work: Vigalondo spins the various elements into pure gold.

While the film’s technical prowess and editing is duly impressive (cinematographer Jon D. Dominguez and editor Bernat Vilaplana deserve special mention for keeping everything as clear as they do), none of it would work without a sympathetic lead and Elijah Wood is more than up for the task. In the same way that Hitchcock had Stewart, Vigalondo uses Wood’s natural charisma and boyish Everymanism to keep our interest and sympathy fully on his side, even as the film twists and turns into some suitably dark places. Over the last few years, Wood has quietly become one of my very favorite actors, the kind of chameleonic performer who’s equally at home with the monstrosity of Maniac (2012) and the traditional heroism of Grand Piano. He’s the kind of performer who can draw me to a production on name alone and his work, here, is easily on par with his best. Between his work in genre films (I eagerly await his upcoming killer-kids film Cooties (2015)) and his production company, Elijah Wood is a bit of a modern genre hero and I, for one, salute him.

While Neil Maskell (incredibly fun as Banksy in Doghouse (2009)) makes a suitably sleazy villain, the real surprise is porn star-turned actress Grey. After making her “legitimate” film debut in Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience (2009), Grey would pop up in other film, from time to time, although Open Windows marks her biggest role since her debut. She’s quite good here: her fiery interview segment is an easy highlight and she manages to imbue Jill with the perfect mixture of aloof and vulnerable, an impossibly famous person who just wants to be invisible. While the majority of the film’s heavy lifting falls on Wood’s shoulders, Grey proves that she deserves more chances to show her dramatic chops.

For all of its numerous charms and positives, Open Windows is certainly not a perfect film: to be honest, it’s not even a better film than Vigalondo’s debut. Due to the necessary complexity of the storyline, credibility is eventually strained to the point where plot-holes became to rip through the surface with alarming frequency. There’s one point where Chord guides Nick from a hotel room into a car and onto the open road: it’s decidedly kickass but think about any one bit of it too long and the whole thing falls like bad souffle. The film also picks up speed to the point where plot elements blow by in the rearview mirror faster than one can register them.

When all is said and done, however, Open Windows is an undeniably good film. With astute observations on everything from the nature of modern fandom to the vagaries of internet fame to the difficulties of going “off the grid” in a world that’s perpetually connected, Vigalondo has plenty to say and this ends up being the perfect platform for him to say it. While I doubt that I’ll see another take quite as good as Vigalondo’s anytime soon (done poorly, I can only imagine that Open Windows would have been a kitschy, glitchy, head-inducing nightmare), this has definitely made me more receptive to this kind of thing in the future. While I’ll always be a fan of huge, sweeping cinema, Open Windows is proof that, sometimes, it’s just fine to watch something sized to fit your screen.

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10/18/14 (Part Four): Like a Hole in the Head

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31 Days of Halloween, Adam Christie, Ana Alic, Antisocial, Canadian films, Chad Archibald, Charlie Hamilton, cinema, co-writers, Cody Calahan, Cody Thompson, college friends, cyber-bullying, Facebook, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, horror, horror movies, Michelle Mylett, modern technology, Movies, online chat rooms, rage virus, Romaine Waite, Ry Barrett, social media, writer-director

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: as a small group of friends gather for a party, the outside world erupts into chaos, thanks to a mysterious virus that causes the infected to attack and kill others while possessed by an uncontrollable rage. As the social order breaks down outside, it also begins to show signs of strain inside: thanks to betrayals, revelations of past issues and power struggles, the struggle for survival becomes more and more desperate. In time, the survivors will learn that the lucky ones were actually the first to die: they are all about to enter a true “new world order” ruled by irrational violence and sudden death. Is there any hope for humanity or is this the “extinction-level event” that will finally close the curtain on this grand human comedy of ours?

And, in a nutshell, that’s pretty much all there is to writer-director Cody Calahan’s debut feature, Antisocial (2013). Sure, there’s a minor concession to innovation by making the cause of the rage virus our collective addiction to social media outlets like Facebook (I knew it!). Other than that speed-bump, however, everything else here is strictly by the numbers: generic, young protagonists; generic “party” scene, including slo-mo EDM-dancing; generic unrequited loves…the whole production has a “been there, done that” feel that’s only momentarily upended when one of the characters resorts to self-administered amateur brain surgery. When the only way to get the audience’s attention is to drill into someone’s skull, it might be a case of too little, too late.

For the most part, Antisocial is competently made, with decent performances from the cast, most notably newcomer Michelle Mylett as erstwhile protagonist Sam. The effects scenes, while infrequent, are well-staged, focusing on the increasingly disturbing hallucinations of the infected as they think they’re pulling weird, fibrous tendril-things out of their bodies, while the violence can be quite bracing (brain surgery tends to be…well…kinda goopy). The emphasis on social media, however, tends to date the film pretty quickly (would anyone even care about this in five years, much less twenty?) and the ultimate revelation of the true nature of the evil (Facebook as Blofeld? Really, Mr. Bond…that’s just too…stupid) is a real head-shaker. The ending is also needlessly open-ended, which made no sense after my first viewing (it’s a pretty simple story, to be honest) but makes complete sense after I discovered that Calahan’s next feature is going to be Antisocial 2: looks like this is getting the franchise treatment, as bizarre as that sounds.

Ultimately, there are much, much worse films out there than Antisocial but that’s sort of damning with faint praise: there are also plenty of much better films out there, too. Despite coming off as thoroughly middle-of-the-road, Antisocial has several things going for it: the moody atmosphere, reminiscent of indie UK horror flicks, is often quite effective and the filmmaking is consistently polished, if much less than revelatory. The biggest problem with Antisocial, similar to the scads of anonymous zombie films that litter the indie horror industry, is that it has so little of its own identity that it easily blends into the background. Perhaps Calahan and company have something truly interesting up their sleeves for the future (all signs point to some pretty decent talent behind the scenes) but Antisocial definitely seems like a dry run for (hopefully) better things to come.

10/18/14 (Part Three): It Always Feels Like…Someone Is Watching Me

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1st person POV, 31 Days of Halloween, Adam Shapiro, Anna Margaret Hollyman, cinema, co-writers, computers, David Schlachtenhaufen, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, found-footage films, horror, horror movies, Hostel, Katija Pevec, Lauren Thompson, Melanie Papalia, modern technology, Movies, online chat rooms, online stalking, Saidah Arrika Ekulona, serial killer, The Den, torture porn, twist ending, video blogging, video chatting, webcams, writer-director, Zachary Donohue

Just about the time that it seems as if all found-footage/1st-person POV horror films will consist of riffs on The Blair Witch Project (1999) ad infinitum, along comes Zachary Donohue’s fairly original and rather disturbing feature-film debut, The Den (2013). Functioning as a cautionary tale, of sorts, about the ways in which our increasingly inter-connected world can end up connecting us to some pretty terrible shit, The Den expands the traditional notion of the 1st-person POV film to include instant messages, email, Google searches, website visits, video chats: in essence, we find ourselves interacting with the same sort of computer desktop interface that most audience members will probably be all to familiar with. Life as art? For our sake, let’s hope the parallels end there.

Our plucky young protagonist, Elizabeth (Melanie Papalia), is a college student who has just received a plum grant in order to study the online socialization habits of our modern world, focusing on the users of a social chatting site known as The Den. As part of her research, Elizabeth is determined to spend as much time on the site as possible and vows to accept any video-chat request she receives. As one can imagine, this leads to the usual variety of bored/horny/strange/naked encounters that one might have on something like ChatRoulette (is that even still around?), along with something a bit more unsettling: while hanging out with her best friend, Jenni (Katija Pevec), Elizabeth happens to stumble upon the user “PyaGrl16,” who’s chat screen consists of nothing more than a smiling still photo of a young woman. After a short, odd conversation, Elizabeth continues about her exploration, thinking nothing more about it.

Over the next few days, Elizabeth continues to have short, strange conversations with PyaGrl16, conversations which seem to vacillate between childlike curiosity and sinister bullying. The situation reaches a frightening, new level when the website appears to develop a mind of its own: Elizabeth’s laptop powers up on its own and PyaGrl16’s smiling avatar becomes an omnipresent force. One night, while Elizabeth is paid a visit by her randy boyfriend, Damien (David Schlachtenhaufen), the website powers up and appears to record their romp through the sheets, a video of which is later emailed to the faculty members responsible for her grant. Soon, Elizabeth finds herself needing to defend her character, all while PyaGrl16 becomes more and more aggressive. When Damien appears to be abducted from his vehicle while chatting with her, however, Elizabeth realizes that the situation may be more dire than she originally thought. She’s right, of course, as we soon see when everything spirals into a hideous web of abduction, torture, deceit and the cruelest of all forms of entertainment. As Elizabeth will come to learn, the dead eye of the webcam never really sleeps and we all might be horrified to realize just who’s hanging out on the other end.

Right off the bat, The Den’s structure and format ends up working wonders, breathing a fresh bit of air into a decidedly stagnant subgenre. The film clips along at a pretty breakneck pace, aided immeasurably by the constant flow of new information on the screen: while the various computer screens, instant messages, pictures-within-pictures, etc…start to feel overwhelming, at times, the narrative never feels clogged or unnecessarily convoluted. While I’m probably one of the least technologically savvy folks out there, I never felt lost in all of the discussions of social networking apps, catch-phrases, etc…it’s all integrated in a pretty seamless fashion and hooked me fairly easily.

One of the single most important aspects of a horror film, of course, should be the ability of said film to induce fear and it’s here that The Den finds its greatest strength: the film is genuinely scary, particularly for anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time online. There’s something inherently creepy about that eternally smiling picture of the young girl and Donohue uses it in a similar fashion to the creepy doll from the Saw series, as a harbinger of ill things to come. While parts of the film tend to devolve rather quickly into torture-porn nastiness, much of it is still more concerned with developing a claustrophobic sense of paranoia than forcing viewers to play chicken with the images on the screen: one of the most heart-stopping moments is the one where Elizabeth’s laptop suddenly turns on, right to that damn, smiling picture. It’s a great, subtle moment, one which, thankfully, isn’t a one-time occurence.

In fact, one of the single greatest strengths of The Den is the way in which its format effectively pulls the viewer into the film. In an era when more and more people are watching feature films on computer screens, The Den is one of the first films that practically demands to be seen this way: watch the movie on a laptop, in the dark, and see how often you end up looking over your shoulder. It’s a film that, like the best and most prevalent urban legends, preys on all of our worst fears and assumptions regarding the Internet: despite what we’re “told” we all “know” that there’s an army of faceless, anonymous predatory monsters just lurking on the other side of our computer monitors, waiting to drag us away into the shadows.

While the acting varies in effectiveness, ranging from pleasingly underplayed to obviously amateurish, Melanie Papalia is consistently likable as our inquisitive heroine, so much so that her inevitable fate feels more impactful than similar plot devices in similar films. Elizabeth never comes across as overbearing or obnoxious, character traits which can certainly be attributed to other found-footage protagonists: suffice to say that she’s a much better person to be lost in the woods with than Heather Donahue and we’ll leave it at that.

While The Den has a lot going for it, it’s also exceedingly unpleasant and, as mentioned above, more than a little torture-porny. The atmosphere is consistently grim and oppressive but it can almost be a bit too much, at times: there really isn’t anything here to lighten the mood (unless one counts Elizabeth’s silly, throw-away encounter with one of those “Nigerian prince” scammers, that is). That being said, this particular aspect is also what makes the film so effective as a horror movie: it’s utterly relentless, especially once the ground rules are established, and plunges at breakneck pace towards its effective (if slightly familiar) twist ending.

In a day and age when most found-footage/1st-person POV horror films seem content to take the lowest road possible, The Den bucks the trend and goes for something a little more ambitious. While the film probably won’t be considered a modern classic (it’s ultimately just a little too narrow-focused to be as effective as it could be), it’s a thoroughly effective, chilling and thought-provoking film and one that certainly bodes well for Donohue and co-writer Lauren Thompson’s future projects. If nothing else, The Den will surely give viewers something to think about the next time they get a friend request from some anonymous person and wonder just who might be on the other end of the ones and zeroes.