Paranormal Frativity

Last week, I joined some friends at the Arclight for a preview screening of "Kick Ass" which looks fantastic. We wound up being late enough that the theater had just filled, so we were given tickets to see any other movie we wanted.  This first reason this was awesome: I got a ticket labeled "KICK ASS OVERFLOW", which all things considered, would be a better movie name. Secondly, this meant I could finally see Paranormal Activity in a theater.

I'd been avoiding Paranormal Activity, mostly because my viewing opportunities had been friends with screeners or downloaded copies, and I refused to watch a movie like this in someone's living room.

Loved the movie. It kept me up all night. Not from being frightened by the subject matter, but because if that's what you can do with $15k, then we are all huge failures. It's made $100 million in the U.S. and Canada alone. The math on that works out that they've made 6666.66 times their initial investment. Great. Now even the math of the film is terrifying.

Unlike "Blair Witch Project", I think the actors from this film have a shot at strong future careers. They absolutely carried it, and no matter what you thought of the overall film, they were two of the most interesting and "real" characters I've seen in a long time. Pretty good for two kids responding to a Craiglist post. They lucked out that Micah had work history as a camera man. Katie has a film coming out called "Walking Distance", although the European release title has been changed by the distributor to "Experimental Activity".

Director/writer Oren Peli has become the writer on the movie "Area 51", which was originally scripted by comic juggernaut Grant Morrison. Seems a strange move to replace an established writer with one that "retroscripted" his only movie. Will be fascinated to see how that plays out.

The most disturbing part of the movie for me was its commentary on modern masculinity. Hopefully without giving too much away, I'll tell you this couple is haunted by paranormal activity. Spoiler alert? Anyway, a big part of what brings this upon them is the boyfriend (Micah), whose attitude matches any dude-bro you know who thinks he can fix his household plumbing because he has access to the internet. Of course this doesn't go as planned, but Micah plows ahead anyway, denying outside help, because he has to prove he's a man.

Early on, this made me hate the character, until everything boiled to a head in a scene where Micah shouts at Katie about how he's the man of the house, and nothing is going to come into "my house and fuck with my girl". Around this point, I realized Micah was every third fraternity guy I've ever known, and it all made sense. Clearly he wasn't afraid of ghosts, because he too had gone through Hell Week, where an older frat brother had "ironically" smoked crack for the first time before hazing the pledges. Once you've seen the look in the crazed eyes of that blood-stained Polo wearing senior, you know you can handle anything.

While waiting in the line for the movie, I ran into an old fraternity brother from Chicago who I hadn't seen in two years. Doubtful this was coincidence.