Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire

I saw the film Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire under unusual circumstances. My school was hosting a screening of Precious with an inferior copy of the film: the aspect ratio had been pan and scanned, the image quality was blurred and indistinct, and the volume was left at an earshatteringly loud level throughout the whole screening. Bizarrely though, I think all these setbacks might have ultimately benefited the movie. In reviews of Precious, I've seen the movie accused of overt sentimentality, melodrama, and a purposeful desire to warm hearts and elicit tears. If these accusations have some truth to them, that truth was all but nonexistent in the low quality copy of Precious that I saw. Precious, in the format screened by my college, is as emotionally draining a film as Requiem for a Dream or Grave of the Fireflies. The bleary and cropped video presentation stripped away the film's intended cinematic gloss and replaced it with a visual presence akin to old home video recordings. The inadvertently created effect was an almost uncomfortable intimacy with the proceedings onscreen, and its spell was only broken when the film occasionally veered into fantasy. Further enhancing the stiflingly close atmosphere that the screening's video unintentionally begat was the screening's loudness which was so piercing and intense that any sentimentality the film might have provoked was wiped away and replaced with a deep-seated, jittery unease in the audience. I would have to view the film again in its intended format before I passed final judgment on it, but grading solely the copy of the movie I saw, Precious is as disturbing and moving a film as they come, and is one of 2009's best movies.

Paranormal Activity

After the much-hyped Cloverfield fizzed out at the box office in just two weekends, it seemed like the found footage genre was fated for a long period of dormancy. One year after Cloverfield's
release, however, Paranormal Activity came seemingly out of nowhere and generated over the course of a few weeks as much hype as Cloverfield's massively complex marketing campaign took months to accrue. Making over six thousand times its production budget at the box office, Paranormal Activity proved that found footage films are well and alive, and we can surely expect to see more than a few “shaky-cam” movies rolling out this very year. (Rumor has it that Paranormal director Oren Peli has already completed filming on his next project, called Area 51, and it should be released this fall.)

One of the marks of a great horror film is its ability to successfully imbue an ordinary object with an aura of evil. The Ring had its VHS tape, Poltergeist had its toy clown, and now Paranormal Activity has its bedroom. Given the monetary constraints of the filmmakers, virtually none of the scares in Paranormal depend on CGI or graphic violence. This restraint actually works to the film’s benefit, however, as it forces Paranormal Activity to adapt a style reminiscent of horror classics like Robert Wise’s The Haunting. Every creaking floorboard raises hairs, and the film’s biggest jumps come from slamming doors rather than perverse sadism. The movie also neatly sidesteps the problem most found footage films run into, which is why exactly a character in the film continues to record the madness around him. Rather than largely ignoring this problem as Cloverfield did, Paranormal Activity makes the insistence of its documentarian to continue filming a dramatic key point of the movie, as it drives its two leads further and further apart. The growing distance between Paranormal’s protagonists coalesces with the rising presence in the film of the supernatural, and the two themes meet in the movie’s emotionally draining final scene.* Although the ending is a gut punch, it’s not a heavy enough blow to make us forget how much fun we had during the rest of the movie. On old school scares, Paranormal Activity delivers.

*On the dvd of Paranormal Activity, one can choose to watch the film with its new or with its original ending. I chose the former and after completing the movie, I went back and watched the
original ending as well. The theatrical ending, I believe, is the superior one. The entire film has been building to a manifestation of the supernatural, and the original ending doesn’t provide this closure nearly as well as the movie’s new ending does. Either ending is overwhelmingly bleak though, a trend amongst recent horror films (The Mist, Drag Me to Hell, Open Water, Cloverfield, etc) that I am growing rather tired of.