IRateFilms

It's almost always a pleasant experience when I sit down at a screening, and know absolutely nothing about the movie I'm about to watch. So, walking into the screening of Paranormal Activity was a total treat, seeing that I had absolutely zero knowledge about the movie. As the movie began I was a little disappointed thinking I was watching Quarantine, or the early parts of Cloverfield. For some reason every hand-held, no budget, cheap thrills movie has to spend loads and loads of time developing the characters and establishing the fact that you're going to be on a very "bumpy" ride for the duration. We meet Micah and Katie in the first shot of movie, as Micah explains why he bought the camera, for the purpose of catching something "paranormal" on it. Katie has been seeing and feeling something out of ordinary since she was a little girl, and it seems to have followed her to their new house. Micah spends most of the homemade movie ridiculing her notions of being "haunted", and just laughs off most of her claims until something is caught on his camera overnight. I'm sure the producers would like a critics to keep the plot and surprises in this film to a minimum, so I will be short with the plot. Basically, a lot of nothing happens right up until the last 5 minutes of the movie. This is a good exercise in storytelling, proving that we must about the protagonists, before we can start to care about them. The cheap tricks and thrills that we get at the end (startling the entire movie theater as they shrieked and screamed) would have had completely different effects on everyone had the movie been way shorter. That was the only criticism I could give this movie, its length. Many impatient viewers will become tired of the daily, diary like style Paranormal Activity plays in, but the juice is certainly worth the squeeze in this case.

During the late 70's Hollywood laid down a series of sophisticated films tackling the controversy surrounding the presidential administration at the time. Movies like All the President's Men and Marathon Man involved one man taking on the government after accidentally being exposed to sensitive life-threatening information. That era of Hollywood is clearly over, and despite the controversy that surrounds the current administration, documentaries are the only genre of film that seem to cleverly bring attention to these matters. Shooter is weighed down heavily with its own political agenda, that in this case seems to be the major priority, making the action a sort of obligatory addition. This is why Shooter is heavily flawed, and also why the action is heavily distracting , being that it makes little sense much of the time. There is a sniper stand-off in the snow, on top of a mountain for no reason whatsoever, other than to have the snipers themselves dressed in white instead of the usual camouflage we have become so bored of seeing them in. Mark Wahlburg, one of my favorite actors in recent years(coming off of this years best picture The Departed) is the vehicle for this homage to Rambo, making his resume slightly less attractive. Action junkies will be happy to see plenty of explosions, car chases(an insult to the French Connection), and a slew more one-liners that even Schwarzenegger would envy. All in all Shooter is exactly what it looks like, the only surprise was that none of the cast have shot themselves after seeing the final product.