Weak Stream: MAGIC CAMP and PROJECT POWER

The latest Disney+ original is Magic Camp, a long-on-the-shelf theatrical castoff that was filmed three years ago, but plays more like ten. The thing would’ve been stale and behind-the-times even if it came out when it first was made. It stars Adam DeVine, from back when some thought he might turn a moderately appealing supporting turn in a couple Pitch Perfects, and starring role in an irritating Comedy Central show, into something like a leading man career. This was right before most big screen comedy stopped existing in any significant way, and also before his Jexi bombed hard. You can tell it’s a musty project is what I’m saying. Here he’s doing a milquetoast impression of the kind of role Jack Black would've turned down as a down-on-his-luck magician who agrees to be a counselor at a magic camp. (Think School of Rock if that was a bad movie.) He takes the job in order to compete with his much-more-successful rival, played with disinterest by Gillian Jacobs. There’s a lot of material about the campers that plays like mild sub-Disney Channel shenanigans and believe-in-yourself sentiment, and the stuff between the adults is the kind of half-amusing-at-best sitcom antics you might tolerate in syndication if you turned in a few minutes too early for the rerun you really wanted to see. (Remember that?) There’s a vague sense of low-key dissatisfaction radiating off screen, including Jeffrey Tambor, seen here pre-#MeToo allegations, who appears to be contemplating anything but the scene he’s in. No one really cares. It’s all flatly lit and sluggishly paced, with nothing engaging even threatening to happen at any point. The director is Mark Waters, whose good work on the Lohan classics Mean Girls and Freaky Friday shows he’s capable of more, but he’s clearly at the mercy of an undercooked, formulaic screenplay. (Anyone who’s seen Vampire Academy, a more recent effort, will understand how he’s not an elevator of subpar material.) The result is a big whiff. No wonder Disney held it back to quietly slip out into the streaming library of originals instead of making a big deal about it.

A little better, but not by much, is Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman’s Project Power over on Netflix. It has a good premise. There’s a new designer drug flooding the black market in New Orleans. The little glowing pills give the user five minutes of a random superpower. We get early action scenes like one in which a glowering Jamie Foxx alternately flees and fights a desperate dealer who turns himself into a Human Torch. A little later, cop-on-the-edge Joseph Gordon-Levitt (in his second straight-to-streaming high-concept thriller of the summer, after several years away from movies—it’s good to see him) chases a naked bank robber who has turned himself invisible. Luckily the puff of paint from the cash bag keeps him somewhat noticeable. These are fun ideas. The movie bounces between its lead characters for the longest time—and quickly includes a third, an imperiled teenager (Dominique Fishback)—who are all on the hunt for something. It has a fine where’s-this-all-going? interest for a while. And the filmmakers tackle the project with a stylish approach much like their superior Nerve, the entertaining social-media truth-or-dare thriller from a few years back. There are canted angles and vibrant colors and hip-hop interludes—a pounding back beat and a saturated neon look freely mixing with a graffiti and wet-concrete local color. It’s a delight to see for a bit. But the movie gets slower and slower as it goes, each subsequent ten minutes feeling like twenty, then thirty. I checked the time counter thinking surely I’d been watching for hours and saw it’d been barely 50 minutes. Not even half done. The characters grow less interesting as it goes, and the intriguing concept is drained of interest by formulaic moves. It’s never as clever or appealing as it should be. By the end, Mattson Tomlin's screenplay has drawn together its various plot strands for increasingly boring action sequences with lots of hectic cutting and loud noises failing to gin up additional interest. What begins with a colorful blast ends with the typical blurry genre nothing.

Game On: NERVE

A teen thriller with mostly proper proportions of coolness and ridiculousness, Nerve has timely techie tension. It’s about an underground app that’s a secret viral game allowing paying watchers to vote on dares for live-streamed players to do for quick cash payouts. That’s scary enough as, given the Internet’s capacity for mob mentality cruelty and weaponized peer pressure, it’s not hard to imagine all the ways this game can go very wrong very fast. And you only have to look as far as this summer’s smart phone sensation Pokémon Go to see how the right reward structure can send hundreds or thousands of gamers out into public places for their own digital glory. The game in the movie, also called Nerve, is like a combination Periscope and cam site, filled with amateurs doing things for anonymous crowds who drool and banter in the comments section and happily fork over money for the privilege of voyeurism. The stunts grow increasingly dangerous, and our protagonist is progressively more vulnerable to the game’s clutches. The movie gets broader and flimsier as it goes along, but remains unnervingly plugged into ambivalent paranoia about our current technological moment.

Emma Roberts stars as Vee, a high school senior meekly pining over a football player and feeling down about her inability to afford moving across country for college. (It’d also mean leaving her single mother (Juliette Lewis) behind, and she feels responsible for keeping her happy.) When her wild best friend (Emily Meade), an avid Nerve player who just scored a payment by mooning a pep rally, embarrasses Vee for her timidity and indecisiveness, that’s the last straw. She decides to prove her bravery by signing up to play. In a scary moment, there’s a quick-cut montage of the app building her player profile by hoovering up data across other services: her Facebook likes, Amazon receipts, bank account information, and more. That’s not just part of the movie’s logic, getting her inextricably held hostage in this terrifying situation of escalating dares, but something we do every day when clicking “Agree” without reading the fine print. Who knows how much companies know? The movie is both smart and obvious about tech, like when her other best friend (Miles Heizer) answers a question about his coding knowledge with the tossed-off admission, “I spend a lot of time on the Dark Web.”

Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, of Catfish and Paranormal Activity 3 (the best of that series), create a convincing world of connectivity, threading Unfriended-style screen-eye-view shots with a mood of neon glow and pulsating pop score, t then throwing superimposed comments, texts, and screen names onto frames. There’s cool clutter to its vision of modern communication. Vee heads out into the New York City night, where Nerve’s dares lead her to team up with Ian (Dave Franco), another player. He’s a motorcycle-riding, leather-jacket-wearing, sensitive smart guy, the better to somewhat neutralize the threat of zipping off with a stranger. (Besides, a low angle on them astride his blue-glow bike under aquamarine fluorescent lights is just about as cool as movies get.) This isn’t about real life stranger danger; it’s about the Internet’s dopamine hits of fleeting fame-iness overriding good judgment and common sense. Who doesn’t want likes, hearts, page views, hits, faves, views, and retweets? Vee and Ian shoplift, drive recklessly, hang from deadly heights, and more, all in the name of the attention, and the cash. The whole thing’s shady, but who cares? It’s fun for her, a live-on-the-edge coming-of-age, right up until it isn’t.

Eventually our leads discover the anonymous deviants behind Nerve’s coding have a stranglehold on players’ personal information. They could drain bank accounts. They could ruin reputations. The only way out is to win. The back half of the movie grows increasingly paranoid. American Horror Story writer Jeanne Ryan, adapting the book by Jessica Sharzer, generates tension like a YA version of The Game, albeit with a different twist. Everyone they meet – and everyone on the street, or in the background, or mingling in a crowd – might be a watcher or a player. The one-crazy-night After Hours set up grows creepier and more threatening, mining the disjunction between online speech and real world action as totally unaccountable watchers coax risky, even illegal, behavior out of players who can’t help themselves. (Most intense is Colson Baker as a player eagerly taking dares that lead him to, say, lie flat on the subway tracks.) In the end, Nerve’s conclusions are a bit easier and sillier than what the premise could’ve found, with a climax not nearly as tight as the opening acts, but the movie is filled with energetic and empathetic performers carried along by the filmmaker’s total commitment to a slick, scary, groove. This is a nervy, well-timed, cool pop thriller confection.

New Boo: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Paranormal Activity, the very scary and wildly successful 2009 low-budget horror movie about a haunted house and the young couple living in it who decided to set up cameras to capture the evidence, has turned into an annual event. After two sequels, which in fact served as prequels that backed further and further away from the original haunting to find different vulnerable characters filming their homes at all hours, we’ve arrived at Paranormal Activity 4, the first since the first to take place in roughly present day and move the whole – at this point nearly lumbering – thing forward. Now, the narrative can has been kicked down the road a tiny bit.

What’s most surprising is how little that seems necessary at this point. After faltering with the mildly disappointing Paranormal Activity 2, producer-creator Oren Peli handed the reigns of the franchise to Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. Their Paranormal Activity 3 is quite possibly the best movie that this concept can sustain, a movie of big scares and shocking, seamless effects, with sharp performances of sympathetic characters and inventive, playful maneuvering of the franchise’s tropes. With 4, Joost and Schulman return, but somehow in the interim their handling of the premise has grown irritating and played-out. Instead of using the locked-down camera angles and quietly accumulating dread for a good mix of suspense, humor, and scares, the movie feels tired, at once too much and not enough.

In typical P.A. fashion, the movie introduces us to a normal suburban family, living in a house that’s suddenly filled with things that go bump in the night. A little boy (Aiden Lovekamp), his teenage sister (Kathryn Newton) and her boyfriend from across the street (Matt Shively) are the ones who notice weird noises and strange movements and decide to set up cameras to capture the action. (This family has, rather conveniently, something like a half-dozen MacBooks around the house.) This time we get Skype chats and iPhones added to the mix of video sources, as well as a novel use of an Xbox’s Kinect motion sensors that somehow works to both reveal creepy disembodied movement and make it all seem so depressingly tangible. Instead of real innovation, these new sources of footage merely recycle the techniques of the preceding films to lesser effect.

All of this allows for the typical long-stretches-of-still-silence that is so familiar from the series, but unlike the third film, which put objects like an oscillating fan or a sheet to great visual effect, this film grows static in ways that feel like missed opportunities. I was ready for a big scare, or at least a bit of visual trickery, when a refrigerator door blocks most of the frame on several occasions, but no such luck. Rather than building creative illusions and eerie how’d-they-do-that freakouts around likable characters, we’ve got a generic bunch of mildly curious people wondering why sometimes they hear footsteps in an empty house or why the creepy kid (Brady Allen) across the street is so insistent that his imaginary friend has it out for his neighbors. There’s no sense of build or connection between the low-functioning scares.

After something like 70 minutes of sporadic sudden noises and quick movements, any one of which would be just about the least scary thing in any of the previous Paranormal Activity movies, there’s the typical climactic explosion of malevolent psychic energy, only this time it’s pushed so far that it’s loud, sustained, and over-the-top. This is clearly an attempt to fold large pieces of the narrative of the previous three together – the brief return of the possessed Katie (Katie Featherston) makes that intent more than clear – but it’s a nice try that falls flat. It’s an attempt to hint at explanations and provide big splashy shocks with people flung this way and that, sudden deaths, and all manner of abrupt appearances and rapid movements. But it’s such an overwhelming pile-up of nonsense that it’s underwhelming. The final image is most shocking for how completely miscalculated it feels, expanding the scope of it all to a comical extent. I still have a great deal of affection for this series, so the good news is that this fourth installment is not irreparably, franchise-killing bad. It’s simply the least effective of its kind, functional without working up the energy or imagination to really entertain.

Night Fright: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 3

The reason why Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity was so scary was the way the conceit – a man and a woman are concerned with strange things that go bump in the night, buy a camera and set it up to film while they sleep – played with the way we watch movies, specifically horror movies. With a long, locked-down shot as the crux of the film, it’s a horror movie that can’t rely on the standard technique of moving the camera to reveal a sudden blast of the unexpected or to give us supernatural point-of-view shots. Here, the deceptively simple low-tech effects of the scares more often than not happen creepily in front of a still camera while the characters are sleeping. A door swings. A sheet rustles. A light turns on, then off. My eyes scanned the frame, looking for, but kind of hoping not to find, clues to confirm the feeling of creeping dread. It’s all about the sound design, about what’s inside the frame and outside of it. The film builds to its scariest point and then drops immediately away into the end credits. Only the screams remained lodged in my brain, rattling around while I tried to sleep.

The sequel, from director Tod Williams, mistook more cameras (from a security system) and more editing for better scares. It followed the family of the woman’s sister as they experience some paranormal activity of their own in a story that turns out to be mostly prequel with a climax that lines up on the timeline with the first film’s. It was thinner and lighter, without the same lingering fright. The formula had already grown a bit too predictable. That’s the trick with any franchise. The filmmakers have to know that we think we know what we’re going to be shown, then tease us with the expected in order to startle with what new surprises they have in store. In Paranormal Activity 3, co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, with writer Christopher Landon, continue backing up the franchise’s story, this time to 1988, and there they have found just the right balance between predictability and novelty. They’ve made a scary movie, a quite possibly my favorite of the three.

Katie, from the first movie, and her sister Kristi, from the second, are little girls in 1988. Their stepfather Dennis (Christopher Nicholas Smith) is a wedding videographer, so he has plenty of access to bulky VHS camcorders and tapes. It’s through these tapes that the story unfolds. (Luckily, the look of the film is slightly clearer than that format.) Like the others, the film starts with a happy family. The mother (Lauren Bittner) and the girls (Chloe Csengery and Jessica Tyler Brown) alternately mug for the camera, are annoyed by its presence, and sometimes forget it’s even there, in the style of home videos everywhere. But once Dennis starts hearing strange noises, he decides to set up some cameras to monitor the house.

Directors Joost and Schulman co-directed the documentary Catfish from last year, a creepy/sad first-person account of a flirtatious situation escalating in an unexpected, though not entirely unsurprising direction. Here, they bring the same sense of a well-intentioned videographer slowly but surely getting in over his head. The cameras reveal startling sights. Dennis shows them to a coworker (Dustin Ingram). They debate what to do. Little Kristi is caught on tape getting up in the middle of the night to talk with her large, invisible imaginary friend, Toby. When confronted about it, she seems frightened. If she tells Toby’s secrets, she says, she “won’t be safe.”

You wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the cameras record more and more strange sights, strange enough to convince Dennis to set up a few more cameras, which in turn record more strange sights. But what’s surprising, or at least gratifying, is the way Joost and Schulman play visually with the film’s form. We get three vantage points: first, a camera on a tripod in the master bedroom looking over the sleeping couple, reminiscent of the first film, and is reflected in their closet mirror; second, a camera in the girls’ room looking over their beds and toys but with the closet and the bathroom permanently, agonizingly out of the frame; third, a camera attached to an oscillating fan that slowly turns to give us alternating views into the kitchen and living room. We cut between these three predictable, repetitive shots, punctuated only by moments when someone moves the cameras for some reason.

This is all we need to see the story, all we need to constantly scan to find the scare. At night, in the girls’ room, we hear a closet door creak. In the master bedroom, we hear a thump in the hall. Downstairs, the camera slowly pans back and forth, so that a sudden appearance in one room inexorably is pulled out of sight leaving a tension in its place. Did I just see what I thought I saw? Like the first film but cleverly expanded and multiplied, the scares come from what we can and can’t see. It’s the scariness of hearing a strange noise in the middle of the night without the instant release of being able to leap up and investigate.

We are literally frozen with fear. This makes it all the more startling when suddenly, over as quickly as it began, something happens. A Lite-Brite turns itself on (the scariest Lite-Brite of all time). A door slams shut. A sheet moves across a room. A light falls. A piece of furniture flips over. Paranormal Activity 3 expertly teases the audience, withholding information, causing whispered speculations, until swiftly and forcefully, the fright becomes real and present within the frame. It’s fun to hear waves of fear ripple through the audience as different people see things in the still, quiet shots that startle them, and then abruptly we are all united in one big jolt. Just like the first film, it’s a movie made by people who know how to find a good visual gimmick and put it to work pulling an audience into a hushed and nervous sense of anxiety and fear.

Status Update: CATFISH

Catfish is like one of those Magic Eye pictures that require you to stare at a meaningless pattern until the real picture hidden within pops out. The film opens with a lengthy introduction to Nev Schulman, a professional photographer living in New York City. One day he gets a message from a little girl in Michigan who asks for permission to paint one of his published pictures. He agrees and a few days later he receives a painting in the mail. He soon strikes up an online friendship with the girl, her mother, her father, her brother, and her stepsister. He calls them the Facebook family, since that’s the only way he knows them.

The stepsister is a gorgeous dancer, an animal-lover, a talented singer, and an artist. He starts an online flirtation with her. She has a crush on him. Does it develop into a romance? You could say that. Nev’s brother, Ariel Schulman, and their colleague Henry Joost decide to film this developing relationship, thinking that it will make a good documentary.

If the film had continued along their original idea, this would be a terrible movie. As it is, the first half of the film is of mild interest. The three twenty-something guys are more or less watchable. After all, they’re constantly smiling. The concept of getting in touch with complete strangers and developing relationships with them has some soft appeal and is adequately presented. This is material that would make a perfectly likable human-interest story that would take up all of ten minutes on the nightly news.

As fate would have it, the guys lucked into having great material for a documentary when they decided to drive to Michigan and meet these people in person. It’s a shame that the advertising campaign for Catfish prepares the audience for a thriller with a secret. True, the film is best seen without any knowledge of the second half, but it’s not scary or frightening. This is no snuff film or sideshow freakout. This is, above all, a study in empathy. The surprise is not shocking, nor is it even totally surprising. People on the Internet are not always honest in representing their identities? I, for one, am not taken aback by that concept.

What they find is tenderly depicted with great sympathy for the real people involved. What these guys discover upon meeting the flesh-and-blood versions of the profile pictures goes much deeper than merely reconciling the truth with what they expected. This is not a movie about three New Yorkers who go to rural Michigan and feel betrayed. It’s better than that.

There’s little condescension to be found in the film’s second half. The directors wisely present the “secret” with sympathy and care, making the film less about what they find than about whom they find. What makes these people do what they do and say what they say? What is the nature of art and reality, fiction and fantasy? These aren’t easy questions to answer, and the filmmakers don’t try to answer them. Instead, they ask them in compelling ways. While the first half errs on the side of navel-gazing, the second half is memorable and affecting.