5/05/2012

"Great power means great responsibility"

Title: Chronicle
Year: 2012
Genre: Drama, C. Ficción, Thriller
Director: Josh Trank
Writer: Max Landis (screenplay), Max Landis and Josh Trank (story)
Runtime: 84min
Cast: Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell, Michael B. Jordan, Michael Kelly, Ashley Hinshaw
Produc.: Davis Entertainment, Adam Schroeder Productions, Film Afrika Worldwide
Budget: $12 million approx.
 
In Chronicle, three friends are exposed to a strange substance found in a forest. From that moment they begin to experience the power of telekinesis. 
Andrew Detmer (Dane DeHann) and Matt Garetty (Alex Russell) are cousins. However, the relationship of intimate friendship that they held in their childhood, no longer exists. Meanwhile, Andrew is a young shy man, unpopular, and who manages to feel comfortable at a party by carring a video camera, which also brings him problems. Andrew ends up leaving the party, beaten, and sitting in the open air. 
Soon, another boy, his name Steve Montgomery (Michael B. Jordan), goes to Andrew for a favor. He and Matt have found something and want Andrew to register it. Andrew follows Steve to the scene of the events, which could be described as a curious hole in the ground. Within it, they find something inexplicable, a substance never seen before, that makes noises and emits very sharp colors, and which endows them with a power that is perhaps too large for them to control. Later, the two cousins enxperience together, shortening their distance again. 
Chronicle is one of the first novelties of 2012, in the line of The Blair Witch Project (1999), Paranormal Activity (2007), Trollhunter (2010) or Grave Encounters (2011), in a time when the sugenre of movies on the type of "fake documentary" or "found footage" has become the new fashion. 
Here we have, obviously, the typical guy who carries his camera everywhere and no matter what happens, which is an excuse for us to see, almost at first hand, all that happens. The largest differences compared to similar products is that, while in Grave Encounters or The Blair Witch Project we were expectant to the appearance of ghosts, monsters or demons, the focus here are the main protagonists, of whom we are always expecting to see move or break something, or do something that surprises us. Each scene is another occasion for discovering how far they can go, from having fun doing harmless pranks, up to comiting almost fatal mistakes. The latter, which leads Matt to see a need to establish certain rules. 
It is possible that some see a resemblance to Brian de Palma´s Carrie (1976). On this, I can only say that Chronicle is far from being a copy of the classic of the 70s, as evidenced by its starting point, which is another completely different, or for the approach given to the characters, along with the sort of staging. 
From time to time, the different paranormal circumstances are set aside for addressing Matt´s complicated family situation. The boy lives under the same roof with his ailing mother, who is always in bed, and with his disabled father, a former firefighter, and a man terrified by his wife´s illness and who only knows how to express himself through reprimand. 
The film leads us through this world full of possibilities, which involves being able to manipulate objects, almost regardless of the number or sizes and without having to lift a finger. From playing with the pieces of a Lego, to tow a car or even fly like Peter Pan, through the clouds. However, something that these guys should have never forgotten is of the enormous responsibility that means having something so huge. Because Matt is an intelligent and lucid guy, the same can be said about Steve, but not, about Andrew. 
Andrew is not a bad boy and has no bad feelings, but not even the greates of the powers has been able to evade him from the weight of a dying mother, or of a father who can only yell or question him what he does and who he hangs out with. 
Fortunately, Chronicle have been able to offer us a concept that went beyond the flying and moving stuff. It deals with the problematic of a boy who, unable to stop to reason, is forced to go to the extreme, to distrust of all, seeing them as enemies and feeling that they should be punished. Andrew ends up becoming a sort of male version of Carrie, only that his possibilities of action and destruction are much larger and more catastrophic. 
With the wanderings of these guys is revealed to us how each one enjoys his superhuman ability, to then see, in the ending, the actual deployment of visual effects. That's where the action fills the screen with extras, vehicles and glassess flying everywhere, because of a disturbed kid. All we see constitutes the sum of a work of pyrotechnics, extensive use of chrome (green screen) and large variety of digital additions. In this very same ending is where the film loses part of its dramatic dimension, so that everything becomes something purely entertaining, similar to the battle between superheroes and vllains. Out of that, this new successor to The Blair Witch Project is certainly worth it, and is not, just another one of the pile.

My rating: 7/10


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4/30/2012

"Scorsese in the birthplace of cinema"

Title: Hugo
Year: 2011
Genre: Adventure, Drama, Family
Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer: John Logan (written by), Brian Selznick (book)
Runtime: 126min
Cast: Asa Butterfield, Chloë Grace Moretz, Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ray Winston
Produc.: Paramount Pictures, GK Films, Infinitum Nihil 
Budget: $170 million approx.

In Hugo we are located in the Paris of the 30's, where Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan who lives hidden in a train station and whose specialty is to repair appliances. Hugo leads a solitary existence, with an absent guardian, his alcoholic uncle Claud (Ray Winston), a good for nothing, unable to care for him or to fix the clocks in the terminal, work that does his nephew. 
Among his belongings Hugo has an automaton, a machine that mimics the shape and movements of a living being and that constitutes the greates legacy left by his father. He knows that this device has been designed to express something on paper, either a phrase, a drawing or some kind of message. However, his automaton is not complete and Hugo must find certain items to facilitate the functioning of its mechanism. Thus, one day that Hugo is active doing his stuff, he meets Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley), a toy salesman from the station, who has no sympathy towards him, in addition to calling him a thief. Furious, Méliès takes away another of his most prized possessions: a book, to the child, of crucial importance, and without which he will be lost. To make matters worse, his very presence at the station is not well seen, where in the eyes of the inspector, he is nothing but a fugitive. This means that Hugo has to approach Méliès business to recover what is his, but without being arrested in the act. A little bit later Hugo will meet Isabelle, a girl, goddaughter of Méliès, whom he will ask for help to retrieve his book and who, along with him, will discover a wonderful secret. 
After many years telling us of tough guys (1990 GoodFellas, Casino 1995, Gangs of New York 2002 or The Departed 2006), Martin Scorsese has decided to go into a story that finally children and adults can enjoy the same, and where we do not hear a single insult along the entire film. Scorsese leaves the world of corruption and violence to try and provide his signature to Brian Selznick´s book, granting himself the possibility of doing homage to one of the key moments of the emergence of this entertainment world, that opened its doors to him once. 
Brian Selznick previously addressed this history, showing the circumstances that surrounded Georges Méliès, illusionist, and later, filmmaker. Méliès was a man who in a fair, after meeting the Lumiere brothers and their intriguing movie projector, had been fascinated and wanted then to buy it to them. But the brothers had refused to sell it and in the end Méliès had designed his own version of the device. 
In the book, on the other hand Selznick invented Hugo, a child, skillful with his hands and who would link us to Mr. Méliès. 
Concerning the film, Scorsese shows us who Hugo is and what he seeks, using flashbacks to explain it better. The kid lives entirely by his own and in a reality that is alien to the rest. Now, when Hugo sees how injustice or bad luck accompany him again, it becomes very difficult to feel his suffering from the outside, because at all times he is seen with the exact same expression on his face, which speaks of a not very good job at directing actors. If one put the film, looked closely at Hugo in three or four scenes and then speeded up the tape about forty minutes, would be surprised to find the exact same gestures, ineffective at the moment of conveying what the child feels or thinks. Being then a film which subject is indeed interesting, easy to understand, very well photographed and superbly recreated in terms of historical reconstruction, the perfect finishing touch would have been a more convincing and heart-breaking performance, that we certainly never see. 
On the other hand, it should be emphasized Scorsese´s quality to make a brief review of the history of cinema, whose origin was precisely in France. Drawing on Georges Méliès as a motor trigger, the director gives us a glimpse of the primitive cinema, and where we are pointed out how did all began and how did the special effects appeared, from the first few hundred meters of celluloid. 
I think the worst that could happen at this point would be that the audience was oblivious to these circumstances. Those who know the more basic historical details about the beginnings of this art may be excited and feel the hair on the back of their neks stand up against this segment. Those who, however, do not know nothing about it, will probably believe that this is a very entertaining little story, but invented. To those of this second group I recommend Forgotten Silver (1995) by Peter Jackson. 

My rating: 7/10


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