Categories
Reviews

Paranormal Activity (2)

Paranormal Activity 2, the sequel to Paranormal Activity, has been grabbing top spots across movie theatres in the world already – and this is just the opening weekend. Once again, Paramount has engaged in clever viral marketing tactics for the sequel that is bound to see this become a box office hit.

The original Paranormal Activity is a one-of-a-kind film that showed audiences can be spooked with mere whispers. Comparisons were made its soul predecessor, The Blair Witch Project, drawing on similarities such as mock documentary style adopted by both the films. However, I found Paranormal Activity to be scarier (the first time I watched it) because of how subtly it tried to convey the horror at points in the narrative – the slightest change of speech intonations, merest hint of a sinister smile. The Blair Witch Project on steroids, if you will.

Look at that slightest hint of a smile. Innocent, almost cherubic, yet with sinister undertones.
Look at that slightest hint of a smile. Almost cherubic, yet, with sinister undertones.

That’s what I found fascinating – the use of understated actions and emotions to scare. The earnestness of the psychic the couple in the film seek help from, the genuine frustration of Katie as she tries not antagonize whatever is possessing her, and the macho-posturing of Micah Sloat trying to deal with demonic possession with the same strategy he would walk into a bar brawl – add quirks that make the characters come real. Yet, in typical Hollywood fashion, the studio executives at Paramount forced changes to ‘make the film popular with mass audiences’. Now, you may have a contrasting opinion (read a summary of changes in the last link), but I think changes were for the worse. The ‘Paramount cut’ set the stage for this sequel by changing the ending; it also changed the tone and that’s a relevant factor when watching the latest release. Compare the theatrical release ending and the original cut ending for yourself.

My rating of Paranormal Activity: 4.5 / 5 (the original cut)

What was originally a scary tragedy was turned into a scary run-of-the-mill horror film by that single twist at the end. Paranormal Activity 2 – which as technically a prequel, not a sequel – continues in the same vein. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing – banking on the name of its predecessor to masquerade as horror film that is ‘better than others’ for adopting a mock documentary look. While that is true, the similarity runs only skin-deep. Out of its 90-minute running time, half of it is totally worthless. A slow pace at the start is forgivable IF it builds up to something; that’s not the case in this movie as the ‘spooky occurrences’ can be shifted around anywhere in the storyline without anyone noticing. Paranormal Activity 2 scares by popping a “boo!” every now and then. For the amount of money you’re paying to watch this movie, you could hire someone to jump out of a corner in a scary outfit – and it would have the same effect.

What is dumbfounding is the ambivalence of the (wooden) characters in this movie is using the ‘security camera’ footage – sometimes, they routinely check the footage to validate their fears, and yet at as the movie creeps to the climax everyone just seems to ‘forget’ that the cameras are there to corroborate and investigate what’s happening in their little haunted mansion.

The half of the story that isn’t worthless will still scare you – just not for the same reasons as the first film. Rather than teasing your primordial sense of fear, it milks interchangeable jack-in-the-box “boo!” moments for all their worth. Last I heard, that was supposed to be refuge of lazy filmmakers a la the ones behind this year’s A Nightmare On Elm Street remake. To be fair, Oren Peli didn’t reprise his role as director for the sequel. If the reason Paramount execs wanted to change the original was to shed excess fat from script, then this one should have had a runtime little more than a TV special!

No, the simple answer is that the studio is greedy and Paranormal Activity 2 is a manifestation of their greed with only a hastily tacked on back-story to add to the canon. No doubt the fat cats cackling at the take from the box office and already planning a second sequel.

Still, it’s a film that will make you wonder whether the movie theatre turned up the air conditioning a notch when you watch it.

My rating of Paranormal Activity 2: 2.5 / 5

Categories
Personal Reflections

Catching The Dragon

I have been blogging for little over six years now. In those six years, I have known (mostly online) and followed a host of school and college based bloggers. You could say I’m a lurker on most blogs, as I don’t usually leave comments until I feel I have at least a modicum of understanding who the person writing is – at least their online persona. I say online persona because I know that even after reading hundreds of pages written by a blogger over many years, it’s still not enough to know who that person is until the time you meet that person and have an actual, real conversation. Bloggers write about what they want to say and not who they are. (That is certainly true for me. There are huge chunks of my life I don’t talk about or ever will on my blog; this is not the place for it.)

But I digress. Having followed a considerable number of school and college bloggers, I can’t help but notice how…inconsistent, shall we say, most of them are in posting new content. I often get the feeling that I don’t know enough about the person to engage in conversation through comments simply because I haven’t got much content to go on. This is inevitable at some level; after all, many who take up blogging are often only experimenting with the medium. There’s a vast sea of ‘dead’ blogs in the blogosphere at all age levels, and since youngsters are more willing to experiment with digital mediums it’s no surprise that a there’s a larger number of dead blogs started by school / college kids.

(On a side note: the number of blogs with ‘thoughts’, ‘ramblings’, ‘musings’, ‘random’ is quite astonishing. Practically all of them, come to think of it.)

No, what I’m referring to the sharp nosedives in posting frequency of hitherto active blogs when school students join college. I’ve seen this happen year after year with near infallible inevitability. I would attribute this to the transition from school-life, where many hours are dictated by school schedule, to college life where there’s relatively complete freedom. The number of hours in a day suddenly seem to shrink and there just doesn’t seem to enough ‘free time’. You never get to catch the dragon.

I’m making this blog post after a gap of three weeks. The irony. But I realize how this situation sets in, having faced it myself. Even when you put thought to planning your day, procrastination is easy in university / college life. Unless you’re facing coursework deadlines, nothing seems truly earth-shattering that it can’t be de-prioritized. The crucial tipping point comes when you put off a blog post you meant to write for too long – by then, too much time may have passed for the post to be relevant, or more importantly feel relevant to the writer – and yet it remains as a niggle in the back of your mind. You don’t want to start another blog post until this one in your head is finished. And thus, you never really catch the dragon.

I’ve a simple way of dealing with this – cut your ‘losses’, and move on. Don’t guilt-trip yourself on overshooting deadlines; if you’ve missed window of opportunity to make a post, then forget it. There are countless posts that even I have stashed away as drafts that are long past their expiry date, but I don’t let that impede me from working on newer content. For me, this feeling is strongest when I’m trying to write a ‘daunting’ blog post – one that I really want to get ‘right’. Editing rough drafts is good. Editing half-finished rough drafts while time just slips by, on the other hand, leads to a story that is doomed to live in your drafts folder. More importantly, if you haven’t written anything for a long while, you must not suppress the urge when you do feel like writing. It helps overcoming the dread of sitting down write that one blog post you really want to work on if you’ve written something else recently.

And if you have stuck with me this far, surely you realize now that this has been nothing but a ruse for me keep the juices flowing while I form the structure of my next blog post?