Documenting Unreality

Although The Blair Witch Project made it famous in the mid-nineties, the ‘found footage’ genre can actually be traced even further back to films like the grim, animal chop-em-up Cannibal Holocaust. Presumably it was originally conceived to hide the bugger-all budget and, to be fair, in those early movies it did a pretty good job. The problem with it though is that these days you can't get away from the fucking concept with it having now successfully evolved from an ingenious novelty into an annoying gimmick. I'm presuming that the intent of utilising this form is to add to the sense of realism but having now seen it so many times, I think there are two constant problems which keep ballsing the believability up. The first problem is the obvious- why doesn't the cameraman stop fucking filming? And the second is.. who edited that fucking footage?

Take Cloverfield for example, which is a film I do love but suffers from these problems immensely. There's a scene in that movie in which they are running through a subway whilst being chased by some little monsters that have fallen off a bigger beastie's underside and even then the camera continues to film. I'm sorry, but if I was in a small corridor being chased by Godzilla's angry pubic-lice, I'd be ripping off my own fucking arms just so that I could lose a little weight and run a tiny bit faster. As for the second problem, well... by the end of the film all of the main characters are- spoiler alert- dead. This is the same for so many films in the genre from The Blair Witch Project to Paranormal Activity. With this in mind, I always wonder which sick turd-monger found an extended snuff film and decided to edit a fucking narrative out of it? I mean, it really bothers me. Take the footage of Gaddafi being killed for example which is five minutes long and features nothing but his execution. Now imagine if he'd recorded a video diary whilst on the run which was found, edited into a film and released in cinemas! Not only would you have to question the sanity of whoever thought that would be a good idea but you'd also probably be left with the most morally reprehensible and cynical film since 2003's Love Actually.

Another movie that has recently fallen into this genre is 2012's Chronicle which right from the start managed to do something a little different. Most releases that claim to feature homemade footage tend to either be horror films or stolen porn, however this rather differently opted to be about superheroes instead. Actually, to give the film credit, it's not even about superheroes really, with it spending more time investigating what normal high schoolers would do if given amazing super-human gifts. Personally, I think if any of us developed powers then it wouldn't take long for us to use them for either thieving or perving. However, although Chronicle doesn't quite go down this route, it does spend a good while showing the main characters enjoying a fair bit of mischief before things go wrong and the shit hits the fan.

"Who's got a touch of the mad-cunt about them?"

Just to quickly summarise the set-up for anybody who’s not yet seen it, there are three friends who get blasted by radiation from some big blue rock thing that they find underground. From then on they become telekinetic, meaning that they can move inanimate objects using just their mind. One of the lads however is suffering a slightly turbulent home life with his father being an abusive alcoholic and his mother dying from a disease that leaves her bed ridden and mumbling. Not to ruin what happens but this guy also has a touch of the mad-cunt about him and so probably isn't the best creepy critter to be given magical abilities that allow him to kill. It's also this slightly odd chap who has decided to film every single thing that he does and so by default I guess is the main character. I suppose this movie is a bit like Carrie but for the YouTube generation in which any old twat with a pulse feels the urge to dramatise their own life and share it with the world for likes and hits. If Kick-Ass is a film about heroes without powers then on the flipside, Chronicle is a film about powers without heroes.

So I guess at first we should discuss the films good points of which there are more than plenty. The acting for a start is really very good with each actor managing to convey the various complexities required of them in a completely naturalistic way. As mentioned at the start, the handheld style is often used to make up for a shitty budget and so in past films there's also been a slightly shitty cast to go with it. That's not the case here though, with lead actor Dane Dehaan managing to retain the audiences sympathy (or at least our understanding) even when he starts to slip into the unhinged land of the psychotic vengeful prick. According to the ever reliable IMDb, Chronicle's budget was allegedly around $12,000,000 which is next to nothing in terms of funding a film of this scale. Obviously the average human could lead a happy life of cocaine and whores with that amount of cash but for a superhero film it does seem fairly ambitious. Although some of the flying scenes in the film kind of look a little green-screened, it's not really that obvious and so the film should be proud that it accomplished something of such scale with so little resources. To put things in perspective, you could fund around sixteen films at this cost for the same budget as the diabolically fuck-awful Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon. On top of that there'd probably still be enough change left over to have that life of drug filled orgies as well.

As with every found-footage film though, Chronicle once again falls victim to those two issues of ‘why film It?’ And, ‘who edited it?’ In regards to the first point, I can understand why you might want to film yourself if you've just learnt how to fly. There's millions of people uploading footage of themselves shaking their fat arses to music online right now and so I have no issue with some gifted fucker wanting evidence of his ability to defy gravity. However there's a female character walking about without any powers and she never puts her bloody camera down. There's one scene at a rave in fact where she's filming one of the main characters whilst he films her and they have a conversation with each other. In terms of character development, the conversation is completely relevant but in terms of reality, it's just kind of boring. I guess within the context of the story, this chat is important but the characters can't see the bigger picture and so as a small conversation, you'd turn the fucking camera off and save its battery. Also, as somebody who tits about with cameras from time to time I'd really love to know how they got such clear sound from their conversation amongst all of the much louder background music. I think that for those school kids to have such a phenomenal microphone at an affordable price is the moment that this film really makes its roots in sci-fi particularly obvious. Oh and yes I can hear the 'Pedantic Arsehole Alarm', going off here too...

"So who do you think will be fucked to edit our film?"

As for the second question of who edited the footage- well, in this case I really haven't got a fucking clue. Near the end of the film there is a huge fight across the city which, although visually brilliant, in reality would be a massive bitch of a sequence to put together. This is a task made harder by the fact that at this point the main characters camera has buggered off and so all the footage we see is seamlessly pieced together from images captured on CCTV, news reports and the public’s various mobile phones. So if we're to watch this film under the belief that it is found footage then we're also to believe that some randomer did a region wide collection of video material. In fact there's a shot at the very end in a random place, in a random country that proves that their collection was not only very thorough but that their obsession and interest was probably kind of unhealthy. The kind of person with the patience to collect all that footage would probably also be the kind to have newspaper cuttings of a celebrity on his damp walls that have their eyes scratched out and are coated in semen.

The thing is though that the film really doesn't need the found-footage stuff at all. Like I said, in that final battle the images are coming from so many various cameras that the purpose for it being handheld becomes seriously unclear. Instead of just being able to appreciate the nice looking shots, you end up wondering how they got it and where it was from. Early on too, the film gets around the issue of never having the cameraman on screen by having the camera follow the main character via his telekinesis. I mean, don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the inventiveness of that but it still makes the concept of them filming it themselves seem fairly redundant. Two films that get around this problem are both District 9 and Monsters and perhaps Chronicle should have looked to them for inspiration. District 9 claimed to be found footage until the action started at which point it just fucked off that idea and filmed everything as normal. Monsters was a low budget film that had a handheld feel but still managed to look beautiful and avoided the problems of each shot demanding the scrutiny of its logistics. Look, I know I'm coming across like a proper nitpicking bastard but these things bother me. I dunno... maybe I have low-level autism or something. It's just that for me, the found footage style makes the claim of increasing the realism that with film you take for granted anyway and in doing so ironically raises more questions about its believability.

That aside though, I did love the film- a lot.. not only does it feature interesting characters but it slightly subverts the superhero genre by having it follow someone who really isn't a hero at all. The film itself was directed by Josh Trank whose next movie will be the re-booted Fantastic Four which, based on this, I'm genuinely excited to see. It's also interesting to note that every director who has made a successful deconstruction of the superhero genre has gone on to do something official for Marvel as their very next project. So that's Trank, Matthew Vaughn, James Gunn and Jeff Wadlow I guess. I have nowhere to go with that point, it's just something that I'd noticed and I'm at a point where I could do with any readers letting me know if it is in fact autism or perhaps OCD that I'm suffering from. Max Landis is also worthy of praise in regards to Chronicle considering he wrote the script that it's based on. If his surname sounds familiar then that's because he is the son of legendary film director John Landis. Hollywood is a hard place to break into and so I can't help but wonder who young Landis had to suck off to get in…

Anyway so the film is very good- it's just such a shame that in my humble opinion, the gimmick of found footage is a fundamentally flawed one. Having said that, Chronicle is a well written, well directed, well acted mixture of Carrie, Grizzly Man and Akira. Even if the found-footage thing is a distracting pain in the arse, you're still left with a pretty good ninety minutes of inventive, cult shit to enjoy so really, I shouldn't complain.

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Mighty Joe Young And Old

If I had a chance to chat to my younger self, I would most probably warn him about certain events that have unfolded since my birth. One of the more prominent, easily-avoidable memories occurred at the local swimming pool. This one time I had goggles on and so could see everything under the water when I noticed a pound coin at the bottom. Excited, I swam down to grab it, dodging loose verrucas and mouldy plasters as I went. When it was within reach, I picked it up and then proudly examined my winnings. As I glanced at my newly gained loot I was surprised and disappointed to witness the coin completely dissolve away. It was at that point that I realised that it wasn't money that I'd had in my hand but was in fact a little tiny lump of shit. Somebody around me had taken a crap, shook out their shorts and then left it for me to find.

If I did have a time machine, not only would I stop myself from reaching for the abandoned turd but I'd stop myself going into the pool altogether. A second after that, I noticed a middle-aged woman in a white swimming costume. For a start I could clearly see the silhouette of her wiry, black pubes but worst of all was the obvious outline of her sanitary towel. Being male, I deliberately don't know too much about periods however, if I am sure of one thing it's that I don't want to be swimming around in a pool of lady-clot soup. What a disgusting fucking species we are.

The film Looper was released in 2012 and depicts a different use of time machines to my above suggestion. Beginning in 2044 the world has predictably turned to shit with the streets being full of tramps and whores. I don't actually think I saw any whores walking about but that's probably just because they were off working, quite rightly. Considering hobos and prostitutes are like the ‘his and hers’ of murder victims, no future dystopia could be without the complete set. At this point, time travel hasn't been invented yet which is fair enough... They currently can't make a fully working cock for trannies, so time travel in thirty-two years seems unlikely. However, in around 2077 the mob are using time machines to send people back three decades to be murdered by somebody waiting for them in the past. So the basic set-up is a bit like being driven blindfolded to Manchester and then stabbed to death in a grotty pub car-park.

Joseph Gorden-Levitt plays one of the assassins who waits for a victim to be beamed back from the future. He then shoots them, takes some silver strapped to their back and burns the body. If it wasn't for the chap getting his head turned inside out by a shotgun blast to the face, it would basically be a victimless crime. The assassins themselves are known as Loopers and live a comfortable lifestyle amongst the widespread poverty. Joseph Gorden-Levitt uses his money to drive fast cars, take drugs and chill with strippers, meaning that he's basically living the “Charlie Sheen lifestyle”. Oh and just for the sake of clarity, I can't be bothered typing out Joseph Gorden-Levitt anymore so from this point on he'll be known as 'JGL'. For other examples of celebrity short-hand, Robert Downey Jr is 'RDJ', Daniel Day Lewis is 'DDL' and Piers Morgan is 'that smug, slimy cunt with the punchable face'. I know that last one isn't shorter but it just makes me feel less sick than typing his actual name.

Anyway, JGL is a Looper living the highlife but with one big downside... He had to kill his older self but instead let him get away. People say that going to jail is brilliant with its free gym membership, room-service and en-suite shit-can. They make the place sound great until you get there and suddenly find yourself being arse-fucked into oblivion by an angry, gay, murderer. My point is that there's always a catch, and being a Looper is no exception. One day somebody will get sent back in time for you to kill and as usual you'll put a bullet in their fucking head. Instead of silver however their back will this time be lined with gold. This means your contract has been terminated, you've just killed your future self and now have thirty years left to enjoy your life. I guess that would sort of count as probably the second weirdest suicide since David Carradine tied up his own cock and then wanked himself to death in a wardrobe.

I should also mention that at some point between now and 2044 certain humans have begun to develop minor telekinetic powers. There's no explanation as to how this has happened but I reckon it's got to be a result of all our wireless technology slowly fucking with our brains. I spend so long with a laptop resting over my balls that if I'm not infertile by now then any child of mine will definitely be born with some sort of genetic mutation. I'm hoping that my offspring will have powers to save the world but knowing my luck it'll probably just end up with four arms and autism.

Looper is directed by Rian Johnson whose first feature film, Brick, is probably one of my all time favourites. Beyond his ability to tell a complicated story in an entertaining way, that movie deserves to get him credit for simply making school-life look pretty interesting. I think I was in education for about seventeen years and the only time that I was less than completely bored was the day a teacher came in having had botched botox injections in her lips. I don't know why she did it but if her aim was to make her mouth look like King Kong's arse hole then the operation was a great success. With this in mind, another movie by Rian Johnson was therefore something that I was particularly excited about.

Anyway so I guess the first thing that should be said about Looper is just how phenomenal JGL's performance is. It's a credit to his acting that despite him being the main character, it feels a lot more like a Bruce Willis film. Not because Willis steals his scenes particularly but because JGL's replication of his mannerisms are absolutely spot on. In fact, JGL is genuinely as believable here as the young Bruce Willis as the current Pope is with his portrayal of the young Emperor Palpatine. There's a cool scene in which JGL meets Willis in a cafe and we get to see the two performances brilliantly match up for the first time. It's during this encounter that JGL angrily tells his older self that his, “face is on backwards”. Bruce may be looking old but that's clearly an insult written for Mickey Rourke. The first time I watched The Wrestler it took me ten minutes to realise the mouldy, tenderised bit of beef on screen was the main character.

I've always thought that Willis plays two different types of character which is either 'himself' or 'not himself'. Meaning that he basically either plays a variation of John McClane or he plays the complete opposite of it. I guess 12 Monkeys would be an example of the complete opposite in which he spends half the film dribbling like John Travolta's arse-hole at a massage parlour, allegedly. However, interestingly, in Looper, we kind of get a mixture of both performances. For the most part, Willis's character is understandably subdued. Not only is his younger self trying to kill him but he's also been sent back in time after the death of his future wife. I guess that must be as confusing as waking up the next morning and realising you've just started a restaurant chain with Arnie and Stallone. I've never owned a restaurant but if I did, I'd hope my business partners weren't a giant Austrian pervert and a down-syndrome chimp with a plastic forehead.

This mellow performance led me to question why it was they decided Bruce Willis should play the older character. It's not that he wasn't good but I just wondered what he was bringing to the table that any other actor of his age couldn't. About three quarters in, I got my answer when Willis temporarily becomes John McClane again and massacres about twenty people in ten seconds. The only other two actors with the baggage to believably do that are ironically Willis's Planet Hollywood colleagues. However despite Arnie and Stallone's action background, the one minor thing that Willis has over them is his ability to perform language. I do love Arnie but there's no denying that at times his voice does sound like a gay lion having an orgasm. Whereas Willis here exudes a combination of masculinity and vulnerability, the best Stallone could have brought to the table is an ability to grunt audibly through his odd face, which is like the backend of a misshapen ball-sack.

In terms of inspiration, Looper appears to borrow from a wide range of movie influences. JGL swaggers around like a character from A Bout De Souffle and Willis starts massacring children like a cross between The Terminator and a slightly late Vera Drake. For a film set in the near future, it could easily slip into the world of Blade Runner so it was interesting to see that the second half of the movie  takes place almost entirely on a farm. There was this one time I tried to Google the character 'Beast' from X-men and found a link to a bestiality website by mistake. I didn't want to click on it but it felt too wrong not to and so I ended up watching several tense seconds of a woman in a stable sucking off a horse. It's a credit to the originality of Looper that prominent farmyard movies are so rare, the only other example of one that I could think of involved a slut deep-throating Seabiscuit. As odd as I found that animal porno to be, just think how weird it must be for Sarah Jessica Parker to know her parents filmed her conception.

It's on this farm that Looper appears to change influence again and starts to become a sort of rural Akira. I don't want to give too much away but there's a child here who is the definitive definition of, 'a tiny little bastard'. According to SuperNanny, a child should spend one minute on a naughty step for every year of their life to punish them for misbehaving. However here I think I'd recommend that the stroppy, toddling turd should be held face down in a swamp for ten minutes and repeatedly kicked up the arse until it dies. After the film, both me and a friend argued the toss about whether or not we'd have murdered the little twat given the opportunity. You know a film is good when its conclusion results in a casual discussion about the merits of infanticide.

There's always a risk with time travel movies that they won't make sense, will contain too many paradoxes or will point to distractingly obvious plot holes. A huge one for me would be The Butterfly Effect in which Ashton Kutcher time travels by reading a diary. Beyond the obvious stupidity of that plot, I just don't find it believable that Kutcher would own any literature more advanced than a pop up book, let alone write something. After seeing Looper, the good news is that here it doesn't really matter- Jeff Daniels tells us not to dwell on such things and ever since he got his tongue stuck to some ice in Dumb and Dumber, I've been a sucker for his wisdom and philosophies. I do have certain questions about Looper’s logic, but that just makes me want to go back and re-watch it to discover the answers.

If there is any issue then for me it would be regarding JGL's actions at the end. I won't ruin it but for me he did something which seemed a little out of character. However I've only seen it once and so it's probably my own fault for not picking up on certain signs or hints. This reminds me of a video I saw online in which you're asked to count how many times a group pass a ball between each other. Afterwards, the video then asks if you saw the gorilla that casually wondered into shot and gave a little wave. Most people are so busy counting, the ape goes past completely unnoticed. It's an interesting experiment with the bloke in the gorilla suit giving a far superior performance to anything Danny Dyer could even dream of. My point is that Looper is such a layered, brilliant film, I'm sure JGL's character acts perfectly appropriately. Though, because there's so much to take in on first viewing, I'll just have to find out how it does all completely work together next time. Either way, it makes a nice change to see an intelligent blockbuster that requires repeat viewing to fully get to grips with it. I saw The Fifth Element once and the only question I was left with was; ‘what the fuck is Chris Tucker’ and ‘why is it allowed to live?’

Anyway, so obviously I was quite a fan of the film Looper. I've been waffling for a while now and not even mentioned everything from the great script to the performance by Emily Blunt. There are too few decent roles for women in cinema at the minute and so Blunt's complex but sympathetic character was also a refreshing change. I always find it odd that good female roles are rare as not only can women act but I prefer looking at the boobs on them to those on most male actors. Although having said that, I've noticed Val Kilmer has a cracking pair of titties on him these days so I guess it's all just swings and roundabouts. Either way I can't recommend this film enough to anybody. As movies go, it’s definitely one for the brain and contains the only bit of advice you'll ever need to know to survive the future; “Go to China”. Whilst I've got the chance, I'd like to pledge my allegiance to the Chinese government and ask them to simply show me mercy when they eventually decide to strike. So Zài Jiàn and Xie xie motherfuckers!

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