Apparently the 66 people in Logan, Utah demanding Paranormal Activity come to our town isn’t quite enough to warrant the poop-your-pants scarefest to Cache Valley. Nope, instead the movie expands to 20 new cities, all of which are not named Logan. But if you live in the likes of Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore, San Diego, San Francisco or Las Vegas, you’re in luck (for the full list of expanded cities, click here).
And again, if you want this The Blair Witch Project meets Poltergeist meets The Exorcist to come to Salt Lake City or Logan, visit the movie’s website and demand it come to your town! To me that’s like demanding you get diarrhea or a punch to the soft parts, but hey, whatever floats your boat. This movie is proving to be the biggest “scary” buzz since The Blair Witch stormed theaters in 1999. In fact, as of last weekend it was only on 12 screens nationwide and averaging nearly $6,500 per screen. That’s way above what Surrogates and Fame averaged and both films were splayed across 3,000 plus screens.
At any rate, if you’ve seen this, let us know if the hype is true. If you haven’t, is this something you’ll run out to see because of the buzz. Inquiring minds want to know.
First, a confession: Open a film with a vast expanse of stars and you’ve instantly grabbed my inner geek by vice grip right where it counts. Put a knobby starship plowing through that expanse of stars to regions unknown and you’ve won my goodwill.
Despite its ad campaign emphasis on posters alluding to icky space body horror, Pandorum isn’t that (in fact, the “skin” of the poster is more a shrink-wrapped freezer bag for cold storage “cryo-sleep”). Set completely aboard a spindly, spyrographic starship christened Elysium–the kind of starship where tight corridors lead to massive open spaces that jettison compact practicality for cavernous, art-directed impracticality–, Pandorum instead turns out to be mystery and creature horror/action. Coupled with a mild dose of underlying psychosis, Pandorum loosely packages its genre-faithful elements into a surprisingly smart film, but one that gets lost and fragmented in a hyper-edited pursuit of its fringe plot-points.
Somewhere between the Oscar-winning geneses of 1980’s Fame and its 2009 remake, technology changed fame’s definition. Once the reward for hard work and craft refinement, fame has become the reward for cheaply hawking the three B’s (belly, breasts and butt). Where fame and the title of “celebrity” (IE- an individual worthy of celebration) were once purchased in the currency of dedicated sweat, it’s now easily traded via the narcissistically shallow efforts to amass a legion of social network followers with an end-goal of headlining a self-titled reality show or an US magazine tell-all.
Fame introduces an overflowing classroom full of promising young students as they audition for–and subsequently attend–four years of learning at a New York High School for the Performing Arts (based on New York’s real-life Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts). There’s the dancer(s), the director, the pianist, the actor(s) and the singer(s), all nurtured by a stalwart but criminally underused cast of more interesting adult teachers as played by you-know-‘em-from-TV’s Kelsey Grammar (Frasier), Charles C. Dutton (Roc), Megan Mullally* (Will & Grace) and Bebe Neuwirth (Cheers). The students, played by young up and comers who mirror their on-screen characters –and honestly, there are too many to name– are all busting tail to achieve their respective dreams.
Not a lot of posting this week at AATM.com and for good reason. Well, sorta. You see on Tuesday, Bungie and Microsoft released the fourth game in the Halo franchise, Halo 3: ODST, and, well, I’ve been a little busy killing jackals, brutes, grunts, hunters and traversing the Las Vegas-like streets of New Mombassa. I offer no apologies. I am a Halo nerd.
For the most part, I don’t hate holidays. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Memorial Day and their brethren are all good. They mean days off from work, sleeping in and general de-stressing from the daily grind. In fact, if we really want to shift the morale of the United States citizenry from crap to springtime, we should add more time-off-from-work holidays to the calendar.
A few years ago a movie was made by Oren Peli called Paranormal Activity, sort of like The Blair Witch Project sans the trees and the witch. The movie follows a couple living in San Diego who buy some video equipment to film the spooks and specters they believe are haunting their house. Obviously not a smart move because, really, who in the hell wants to know what kind of mysterious shenanigans are happening whilst they sleep? Not me.
The winds of change sweep into every avenue of our lives without regard to time or place. It can be the passing of a dear friend, a change in ideology religiously or politically, marriage, a new baby, a new job, or something seemingly inconsequential, such as hairstyles, fashion and music. But one thing will never change as long as Father Time keeps tick-tocking away: High school sucks.
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