Charke Movie Review: Project Almanac (2015)

 

Project Almanac

Dean Israelite directs a refreshingly different found footage movie. While he must push through the regular tropes of the genre, he does so quickly, and with every cast main member eventually wearing a GoPro, he can justify just any camera angle, high quality shots and the audience is not stuck in one frame. What makes this movie work is that the characters are believable. They succeed in a believable fashion, everything progressing in logical stages. The director avoids the slew of lucky co-incidences to keep the story going, characters shrugging off near-fatal wounds and the inevitable cast turning on each other. The ending is more satisfying than I expected but I still wanted a little more.

 

[Minor Spoiler Warning]

 

David, Jessie, Quinn, Adam and Kathy are typical high school students that might have been plucked straight out of the Archie comics until they get their hands on time travel. They do pretty much what any normal person would do, and set out fixing the minor problems with their lives and then win the lottery. It's slow and it takes a long time but the ramifications of what they are doing start rolling in and their problems escalate quickly. Respecting the audience enough not to spoon feed them, Israelite includes classical scenes where the police are arriving but does not waste time explaining why or how they knew to be there. In a movie this complicated, it simply wouldn't matter anyway.

 

A combination of nerds vs. jocks movie, guy gets the girl, found footage, party movie and time travel, this movie deserves an Oscar for simply avoiding the pages to cliché's and pit falls common to each of these genres. Just some examples, in order; No one grabs a main cast member by the shirt and shoves them up against a locker. The girl isn't oblivious to her love interest and only interested in the quarterback. No one is addicted to filming everything because they are afraid of the "real" world. No one throws up on someone. And time travel I'll get back to.

 

If you can tolerate a little shaky cam action, this movie is a must see, and even that vanishes for long periods. The cast just seems so human that it's hard to remember that these people are acting. No one does anything that is clearly just to advance the plot, while at the same time the tension builds and builds as things drift slowly and then finally spiral completely out of control before the final. It reaches a point where you want to demand the other shoe drop and you realize that you've been watching them undo the laces the whole time.

 

[Complete Spoiler Warning]

 

I can not talk about the time travel in this movie without ruining the ending. Please consider yourself warned!

 

 Project Almanac does something unusual. It reveals early on that the past can be altered without incredibly negative consequences. The characters meet themselves and one draws on the back of the neck of his sleeping self and it appears on his own neck at the same time. The time space continuum is not destroyed and the world does not end. Even as things get worse and worse, the net impact of their travels are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things cumulating in a plane crash. That's it. One plane crashed. And you know what? The main characters feel guilty, as they should.

 

 

THE RULES

 

The movie establishes ground rules and sticks with them throughout, which is fantastic; Time can be re-written. The results of these changes are instantaneous, regardless of when you are. If you caused the changes, you keep your old memories. Changing history has a ripple effect which can cause other events to change in unpredictable ways. These are very logical rules. We are even given little hints about the ripple effect as early as the first time travel!

 

I would label this Instantaneous Flexible Paradox Time and include a note about the memory retention. (I wrote a book about time travel: Chronomancer: Time Travel for Everyone. http://www.rpgnow.com/product/58717/Chronomancer-Time-Travel-for-Everyone. It's a roleplaying manual but represents 7 years of thought about time travel.)

 

These rules are great, unfortunately they break them. They mixed Determinism and Free Will. Either going back in time can't change the present because that's what always happened (Determinism) or going back in time can change the present (Free Will).

 

FREE WILL AND DETERMISM

 

With Free Will you can't see the results of something you have not done yet. The main characters can not see the results of anything they do later in the movie, with one glaring exception. The whole plot is predicated on David Raskin seeing his adult self in the background of a birthday video of his child self. I find this discrepancy annoying but out of respect for a real descent movie, let's try justify this using the set of rules they spend the rest of the movie establishing: You can't see the results of something you haven't done yet.

 

Fortunately the end of the movie provides an easy solution. They created a loop. The most famous loop is the infinite loop caused by going back and killing your parents (you are never born so you don't go back and kill them so they are alive so you do go back and kill them - and repeat). Loops don't have to be infinite though. This movie shows several loops where they try something several times until they succeed and then stop. This is another thing that keeps the movie down-to-Earth and realistic and it's setting up the solution to it's own problem. I hope that is deliberate. At this point the movie you watched is the first loop, and we see the beginning of the second loop start at the end.

 

At the beginning of the movie, David Raskin finds a Camcorder with footage of his childhood birthday on it including his adult self in the background. At the end of the movie David Raskin goes back in time to that birthday party as an adult, gets filmed, and destroys his father's time machine. This creates a plot-happy paradox. David is erased and vanishes, but his Camcorder is magically left behind. We jump back to the start of the movie and see David find TWO Camcorders instead of one. One has the movie we just watched on it, presumably. Now armed with foreknowledge of everything he is about to do, the movie ends at the start, implying that he's going to try time travel again.

 

This creates an interesting situation. David is both the main character, and the audience.

 

So what about the first video and the fact you can't see something you haven't done yet? The solution is that, at the beginning of the movie, David has already done this all before. The movie is actually his SECOND try at time travel which ends with him erasing himself and all the time travel he did. We don't need to see the third attempt and can just assume that he is successful at winning Jessie Pierce's heart with the massive amount of foreknowledge the videos give him. We will quietly ignore the fact he should not have the GoPro footage unless, since he is a genius, he upgraded the chips in the Camcorder and copied all the footage over. At this point the movie is three loops, one before, the movie, and the one that will happen after.

 

FOUR LOOPS?

 

There is a clue that suggests two loops previous to the movie. When the Camcorder is picked up, the director pointedly zooms in on it. I strongly suspect the Camcorder was made after the time period in which is was used. I suspect David brought the camcorder back in an earlier loop. That means he looped once to bring the camcorder back, then a second time to get shot by that camcorder. However this is predicated on the camcorder being in the wrong year.

 

 

 

LOOPER AND OTHER HOMAGE'S

 

The movie makes an homage to Looper which has a similar plot. Used a few minutes before the time travel starts this will help anyone who has seen Looper understand what is about to happen. I would have loved a reference to Back to the Future, but more and more people will not have seen it and it was considerably more complicated. The Doctor Who reference is also appreciated but it's so casual you can almost see the lawyers waving their fingers. I actually missed the Ground Hog Day reference when he un-fails the chemistry test "I'm going to Groundhog this", which again was to help explain looping.

 

REPLACEMENT TIME TRAVEL

 

This is perhaps the weakest part of the movie but only because it isn't explained. If you go back to the same time and place, you can replace yourself as if you had never done a trip and try again. The movie does feel like some scenes are missing and perhaps the explanation is on the cutting room floor somewhere. But there is a very logical explanation. If you think in Star Trek terms of beaming or teleporting, it makes sense that you could divert an old beam with a new one, cancelling the old one out. Perhaps it's best that Israelite didn't burden his movie trying to explain that without a Vulcan. The beaming analogy also explains why they were replacing their previous younger selves - they didn't want to. The replacement was deliberate and only worked when they wanted it to  - handy.

 

TECHNOLOGY

 

I really enjoyed the short discussion about the fact that an IPhone could power the space shuttle and had no trouble running the time machine. This is true. The space shuttle had a computer on board with the power of a 386 computer and the lunar missions had far less than that to work with. A 386 typically had 2 MB of ram memory and an IPhone 5 has 1 GB of ram memory (1000 MB).

 

 

 

Mark Charke

www.Charke.ca

Writing that Makes you Think

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Project Zombiod (Video Game, 2014)

Project Zomboid

 A survival RPG from Indie Stone, Project Zomboid is still in it's Alpha state and it's already an intriguing game. The first thing you've got to understand is that; YOU'RE GOING TO DIE. Once we have that out of the way you can set about trying to survive as long as possible, before you die, build a new character, hunt down and kill the shambling corpse of your old character and steal their gear. It can be a bit depressing at first until you realize you can build on the progress of the last character, and as you learn the game, it becomes much more survivable, at least for a while.

You have a steep learning curve for this game. For it's simple graphics and slow, stuttering and moaning antagonists, this game is really complicated. Unfortunately your characters are so anal retentive that they refuse to sleep anywhere but in a bed, and much to my relief I discovered later, in chairs. The game is simple, try to survive, and it's pretty easy until you go to far, get injured and can't find a safe place for a breather. The problems compound fast and when a hoard of zombies is chasing your down and you've got 6 angry red status indicators, get ready to start your next character.

 

If this happens, you are already dead.

 

Disaster starts off simply. You are looking for an Axe so that you can build walls and it starts to rain and you get cold. You decide to search for a Sweater rather than staying indoors. You break a window and cut your arm. Cold, bleeding and the sound attracted some zombies. You easily outrun them but you didn't get to search and you keep running into more. The tired icon appears, dusk settles in. Tired, cold, bleeding and falling asleep on your feet, your vision is so bad, zombies are vanishing in front of you. You make a mad dash for the next house, open a window, remember to close it and finally you have time to rip some bandages, eat some food and sleep. The last thing you hear before drifting off is the window breaking and wonder if you remembered to close the bedroom door?

 

There are four modes of play, Survival, Sandbox and Last Stand for single player plus an Online Multiplayer Mode. Last Stand is the most bizarre and cuts straight to the heart of the game. You wake up in a cabin with a few supplies and must endure a never-ending assault of zombies. You can't survive and it's bragging rights to see who can last the longest before their brains become dinner. You can adjust the environmental and zombie settings for each mode, making the game easier or much, much harder.

 

Home sweet fortress.

 

Crafting in Project Zomboid is logical and very satisfying. Your chances of survival increase dramatically when you learn to make the Rain Barrel and start walling off areas to keep the zombies out. Once you have a secure perimeter you can safely starting thinking about farming. You can only survive of ramen noodles for so long, simply because after about 2 months you would probably have eaten all the available food on the map.

 

With a source of water, a garden and a safe house you could just wall yourself in and call it a good life. However the Project Zomboid maps are huge and there is a temptation to explore it all. I decided I wanted to see the Movie Theater on the other side of the map. After several characters died exhausted in the dark, I gave up. Instead I'm trying to collect all the components to build a tent, so I can sleep anywhere I want. I have actually built several chairs in warehouses and other buildings, as emergency sleep locations.

 

You can get into deep trouble and survive. Injured, exhausted, swarmed and starving, I have lucked into houses, found something to eat, the time to bandage up and sleep. It is the greatest feeling to watch all those angry indicators vanish. You also have emotional problems with boredom and stress which can be alleviated by reading and certain foods. But one thing remains. If you see that word SCRATCHED, well for all your best efforts your time might be up. My second attempt to the theaters, my poor character got scratched and come morning he was turning.

 

I love the soundtrack to Project Zomboid. It really sets the tone for the game, depressing, bleak and doomed. The game keeps getting upgraded and there is already a community of mod'ers if you want to change your game further. There is already a Katana mod, a weapon not found in the original game. I can say, I only look forward to developments as this game progresses. It's got a few bugs but some of them vanish with each patch.

 

Indie Stone is not without a sense of humor.

 

 

Charke Reviews Anaconda (1997 Film)

Anaconda - 1997

 

 When you can't breathe, you can't scream.

(....also if your eyes are closed, you can't see.)

 

Director Luis Llosa creates one of the worst movies I've ever seen. Some people have said this movie is so bad, it's good. I think it's just bad. Jennifer Lopez, Owen Wilson, Jon Voight, Frank Welker and Ice Cube drag themselves and their careers through the mud, literally at some points, in this Apocalypse Now meets Roger Rabbit train wreck. The actors spend a lot of time travelling down river on a boat, the CGI snakes move faster than physics could possibly allow and the acting is so corny that it hurts.


Basically a film crew goes looking for the worlds biggest snakes. They find them and are eaten by them. There are explosions and something of a contest to see who can die in the most ridiculous fashion. Some of them survive and we're ready for the sequel.

With such an all-star cast, you've got to wonder what went wrong. Unfortunately I am left blaming some combination of script, directing and the terrible special effects. IMDb calls Anaconda the 14th worst movie of all time. Unfortunately they label Armageddon as number 12, so I take that list with a grain of salt. I consider Armageddon to be absurd at times but overall an excellent flick.

I only reviewed this movie so I could set the standard and score for what I feel is one of the worst. I accept the fact that many people will go see this just to see how bad it is and I suppose there is a certain enjoyment to be had from that. With every movie, there is always a least a few fans who fall in love with the movie for whatever reason but I haven't met anyone who thinks this isn't a bad movie.

www.Charke.ca

Charke Reviews Doctor Who - Listen (2014 TV Serries)

Doctor Who: Listen

S08E04 13 Sept 2014

The Doctor Who television show is famous for playing with words, starting with the title. His name is not 'Doctor Who', it's unknown but everyone calls him 'Doctor'. This leads to a wonderful play-on-words that occur when you are not watching the show. Easily every time someone asks "who" you might think about the show and if you a whovian, you'll be wearing a smile. Listen is a brilliant episode and one of my all time favorites. It shows many different aspects of Doctor Who, adds to the character of the new Doctor and touches on some of his most important history.

Knock Knock?

Who's there?

Doctor.

Doctor Who?

Exactly.

[Whovian Spoilers Ahead!] Listen follows this trend. Like the silence, don't blink and run; listen will be a new catchword once you finish this episode. They manage to sneak this little gem in at least three times with profound meaning.

Directed by Douglas Mackinnon and written by the amazing Steven Moffat, Listen opens with a unique shot which exemplifies this new Doctor, Peter Capaldi, as being both different, new and original, but still the same old Madman with a Box. There is a frantic energy he brings to the role like he is a man running out of time, although that's certainly unlikely the case for this Timelord. Starting during Matt Smith's reign the show has become distinctly more Elizabethan and Steampunk. Capaldi's use of chalk boards in the TARDIS is both critical to the episode and takes this theme to the next level.

Listen is actually two stories that blend, perhaps crash, together by the conclusion. On one hand we have Clara, played by Jenna Coleman, just trying to have a date with Danny, played by Samuel Anderson. On the other we have the Doctor, obsessed with a hypothesis which drives this episode about as far as one can travel. He practically abducts Clara to come along but shows his caring side when she asks for help with her date.

Previous Doctors have seemed almost omniscient in their ability to understand things but each has had a blind spot. Capaldi's blind spot is people. He's not trying to be normal, to fit in and understand them. When Clara lies to him, it's hard to be sure if he knows, or he's just lying. In the past he has often later admitted that he knew everything, but even that could be a lie.

"Rule one: the Doctor lies." -Matt Smith, Let's Kill Hitler.

Yeah, and then this happened. Yes, in this episode.

While Clara's life gives a human story to this episode, I find myself far more fascinated with the creature that the Doctor is hunting through the episode. He believes there may be a creature whose primary evolutionary trait is hiding and he goes looking for it. And Moffat refuses to tell the audience if there is a creature there or not! Go. Watch it again. Look more carefully.

Look at the chalk scene at the beginning. Did Capaldi write 'Listen' on the chalk board, just off camera and throw the chalk on the ground and forget, or did something else? The way the shot is done, it could go either way. Who was under the sheet? Who opened the door. What did Doctor Who see? Maybe nothing at all? I doubt it.

"And I know things, secrets that must never be told and knowledge that must never be spoken. " - Matt Smith, The Rings of Akhatan.

Doctor Who is a man of secrets that must never be told. He learns one in this episode, possibly, and the audience doesn't get to know what it is! We are often told of these great secrets and here we get to see the crafting of one. Like the Weeping Angels, I have to suspect this will come back as a more in depth sequel but I hope it doesn't at the same time. This is such a brilliant episode, perhaps it could be just left alone on display, perfect, a piece of art finished.

Listen

What’s that in the mirror, or the corner of your eye?

What’s that footstep following, but never passing by?

Perhaps they’re not just waiting.

Perhaps when we’re all dead,

out they’ll come a-slithering from underneath the bed.

(What's that in the mirror? Well, it's Sister of Mine from the Family of Blood because you put her there Doctor! Unless perhaps you've finally forgiven her.)

" ...what if we are never really alone?" - Peter Capaldi, Listen

 www.Charke.ca

Charke Reviews Annabelle (2014 Film)

 

Director John Leonetti and writer Gary Dauberman have put together a very surprising doll-movie. With Child's Play jumping the shark to land on 2013's Curse of Chucky one expects to see a sassy, knife wielding murderous little doll running around in this movie as well but predictable just isn't scary and Annabelle is scary. A lot of horror movie clichés are being broken these days. I thank and blame YouTube for pointing them out on a relentless basis but it leads to some new movies like this one. While Annabelle tries to break the mold with new and original scares, unfortunately it is mostly achieved by borrowing other clichéd scares not typically associated with haunted dolls. Still, for the new horror fan, it's got plenty of thrills and for the old and jaded viewer, it's changed things up plenty to keep you guessing.

 

Thought that was a little generic? It was. This movie is all about surprise and it's just impossible to review much about it without MAJOR SPOILERS. Please be warned.

 

This is the second movie I've reviewed set in a pre-cell phone era. Terrors have trouble with being on YouTube and their victims summoning help quickly and easily but I can forgive them. It creates isolation. The movie opens in a bloody and violent fashion which mirrors Chucky's origin a little too obviously, but everyone knew the doll was haunted coming in, and they move on quickly.

 

My fear of the story dwelling on the 'helpless pregnant wife' vanishes with a puff smoke when the story jumps ahead and we see Mia, played by Annabelle Wallis (yes, the star's name is Annabelle) dominating her painfully subservient doctor husband, played by Ward Horton. The meat of the story is Mia  protecting her daughter from the supernatural. It smacks heavily of both Ghostbusters and Poltergeist. They run through the classic 'you're crazy - no I'm not' but quickly blow away all that noise with some horrific events clearing Mia's name.

 

The story drags Mia through satanic cult worship, deals with demons and lands smack dab on the worn duo of disorientation and illusion. Leaving the audience unsure as to what is real, the director could excuse any failing as illusion but only pulls that trick once. It is very refreshing that, while they are reusing a lot of material, they have enough to avoid using anything too often, and a lot of it just once. The movie winds down by nearly killing someone and then pulling a switch on who dies at the end, even reminding the viewer that there were clues that this would happen all along.

 

In a completely original event, we have a serious fire, in a horror movie, that doesn't manage to kill anyone or even burn the house down. Leonetti and Dauberman are borrowing stuff, but when they do it like this, and put their own spin on it, it becomes a gem. They try hard to be this creative with the rest of the movie and there are some other gems hidden in this one.

 

Set up for a sequel, I'm desperately curious to see what they would do. Would they try borrowing all sorts of new material? Would they look at this movie, see what new things worked and keep using them? I would only hope they don't copy the same tricks over again, because that defined the 80's and 90's horror genre sequels.

 

 

www.Charke.ca

 

 

 

Walk Among the Tombstones (2014 Film)

 

 

Director Scott Frank brings us a very dry and gritty private investigator tale staring Liam Neeson, who always walks tall even if the rest of the movie is bad, and this one isn't bad at all. In Walk Among the Tombstones, Liam Neeson is truly in his element, backed up by a fantastic cast and story. Set in 1999, the movie has the feel of the classic 70's private investigator films. Nothing about the story is over-the-top or makes you feel like it could not have actually happened. The moral compass takes a serious beating as Neeson's character, Mathew Scudder, is torn between doing the right thing and doing the murderously satisfying thing.

[Spoilers!] No one in this movie is without sin, except perhaps TJ played by Astro (Brian Bradley) and there is a wonderful scene where he tries. The story opens with Scudder in a shootout before he is employed by a drug dealer to investigate a murder and naturally almost everyone he talks to or questions is a part of the criminal underworld. Director Scott Frank manages to narrate a pair of villains however, that are so awful you can't help but feel sorry for everyone whose lives they touch. Despite an R rating, the most horrific of the violence is tastefully left off-camera keeping this from being a gorefest horror instead of a crime drama.

The violence, the fights, in this movie are realistic and unpredictable, and there are plenty of them. However, the hero doesn't kick down the door and mow down everyone in the room. You certainly get the feeling he knows what he is doing but he isn't always the victor in every situation. Scudder doesn't walk around armed all the time but there aren't rooms filled with machine gun toting goons prepared to die pretending they have a chance to kill the hero. Perhaps the most brilliant confrontation is the one with no violence at all.

Isolating a hero and justifying all the law breaking heroes do is difficult, even back in 1999 when a phone call can summon the police relatively quickly. Scott Frank does not shy away from the police in his movie and like everything else, Scudder ends up in a love-hate relationship with them. As the movie draws to a close we see what may be the most level-headed prisoner exchange ever. When everything goes pear shaped, as it almost must, it is in a far less clichéd manor than is typical. It was incredibly refreshing not to be able to guess the result. The movie closes with a series of bate-and-switch tactics which tries to leave the audience guessing how the final ending will pan out, but leaves too many telegraphing clues to what is still a solid finish and a brilliant aftermath.

As a final nod, the brilliance of this movie is in the details. Scudder bluffs that he knows the boss of a suspect Scudder is questioning. Neeson doesn't run, or look away or apologize. He just smiles and speaks with that slow tone he is famous for. "Ah, you're too smart for me." The interview is over, and ruined, but Scudder just soldiers on.

 

Mark Charke

www.Charke.ca

The Maze Runner (2014 Film)

 

Director Wes Ball's interpretation of the Maze Runner novel trilogy by James Dashner opens with Thomas (Dylan O'Brien) thrust into an enclave of boys, whose memories have been erased, in the center of a giant maze. With walls several hundred feet high, changing patterns, night monsters and stressed leadership, we have all the makings of a good Science Fiction take on Lord of the Flies sure to interest Trekkies and Scouts alike. It's a decent movie, not perfect, but worth a good Friday night. If you stop here you can avoid the SPOILERs.

The confined space of it's 113 minute run time is felt early. Characters explain to Thomas that "things are changing" and "you'll have to learn fast". It's as if the other characters know, or are apologizing for, the script being crammed into three days. This is classical of movies these days. We watch Thomas perform what feels like weeks or months of social interaction, work, exploration and learning and we are reminded that he has only been there three days. It would have been less stressful, but more logical not to explain how many days passed.

It is implied that Thomas is special, stronger or faster, than the other boys but this is never explored further. There are some water tank flashbacks that are very Wolverine Origins or Matrix in appearance and suggest more but are not expanded on. There are a lot of these elements, half touched and left alone, throughout the movie that beg further explanation that never materializes.  It very much demands I rush out and read the novel, and I intend to.

 

 

On to the Elephant in the room. While it later becomes obvious that one faction of the boys doesn't want to leave, the obvious escape route is glossed over with a single statement. "The ivy does not reach the top of the walls." Immediately after this statement the camera pans over to a wall covered from top to bottom in ivy. Further the boys clearly have all the tools and supplies necessary to build a ladder or tower able to reach the top. Later one can see that getting on top would have made an easy exit. Traps, the maze monsters or more scrutiny from the CGI department could have fixed this. Perhaps it will appear in the Director's Cut.

Once we get into the maze the action is intense with a combination of high speed chases, claustrophobic traps, perilous pit falls and crushing doors reminiscent of Raider of the Lost Ark. Its an excellent race through a dangerous outdoor and indoor dungeon and the clock is always counting down for the protagonists. The boys learn some valuable lessons about teamwork, solve puzzles and narrowly escape death over and over. The race through the maze, battling the monsters and the ultimate finale are very satisfying.

A half hearted attempt to explain the purpose of the trillion dollar maze has a very weak logical connector between being in the maze and becoming immune to a disease. It feels very Underpants Gnomes; A: Steal underpants. B: Unknown. C: Profit. It just need a little more explanation. The final looks and feels like it was lifted from the pages of the Wolverine Origins (the comic book this time) with the villain performing the very same trick.

The acting is well done. Even the normally awkward exposition is mostly well delivered and at least an attempt is made at explaining everything the audience needs to know. Except for one glaring show down at the end, the characters are all believable. The normal panicked assortment of high strung characters one jump scare from completely loosing it are refreshingly absent. The appearance of Thomas and his breaking of the rules is met with mixed reactions which feels genuine rather than immediately being ostracized so he can be the lone hero.

I would like to see the directors cut. I would have liked some more critters in the maze. I want to know more about the background of this setting. However, I very much enjoyed the movie and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in a Science Fiction action/horror.