Update: “Chronicle”
So apparently there’s some sort of significant football game going on this weekend. And per conventional wisdom, the presence of said football game is supposed to squash the weekend box office. Someone didn’t tell that to one surprising key demographic. Per THR:
Fueled by younger moviegoers, who have been largely AWOL, 20th Century Fox’s high school superpower pic Chronicle and CBS Films’ horror-thriller The Woman in Black are doing far better than expected.
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For more than a year, movies have been skewing noticeably older, worrying the film business and contributing to diminished revenues. That trend reversed itself on Friday — 61 percent of those buying tickets for Chronicle were under the age of 25, while 57 percent of Woman in Black’s audience was under the age of 25.
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Fox only spent $12 million to produce Chronicle, about a group of high school friends who acquire superpowers and use them to make mischief until one of them begins using them for darker purposes. The film was direced by 25-year-old Josh Trank and stars Dane DeHaan, Michael B. Jordan and Michael Kelly.
While I would very much like to discuss the question why young people flocked to see Chronice this weekend, I am distracted by the article as yet another example of the goddammed press mentioning the director and the actors, but neglecting to note the screenwriter.
HIS NAME IS MAX LANDIS!
Here is his IMDB page.
Here is his Twitter page [@Uptomyknees].
Here is his Wikipedia page.
Here is a photograph of Mr. Landis:
Dude’s script made the 2010 Black List, he has Hollywood DNA, and is one of the hottest scribes in town, so you’d think Mr. Landis would get a little respect from the press, but evidently it won’t be until the next millennium when members of the so-called ‘fourth estate’ find a cure for their persistent case of ‘screenwriter blindness.’
Moving on, here is the trailer for Chronicle:
Those of you who have not seen the movie may be interested to discover it’s yet another Found Footage film.
For some analysis about that narrative element and the overall movie, click through.
Christopher Campbell at Movies.com provides some thoughts on the found footage aspect of Chronicle:
I’m not sure if I should like the “found footage” gimmick more or less as a documentary fan. But as someone generally interested in narrative perspective and filmmaking structure I’m still fascinated by the concept, even if I don’t love each film that employs this style. Chronicle is one that I do appreciate for the ways it plays with the format and gets around many of its usual limitations while also unfortunately creating other issues. I recognize the silliness of adding an inessential character who also has her own camera and of the supplementing police investigation camera that “has to be one” for barely explained reasons. This isn’t a movie to be believed so much as enjoyed on different levels, though, and I like that the filmmakers seem to acknowledge the artifices for what they are and put them forward as a means rather than a plausible or logical element. It’s a very reflexive movie, no more apparent than when a super-powered self-documenter begins floating his camera away from himself as a way of joining in the frame. I could name a number of first-person nonfiction filmmakers who would love to have that ability.
Some people seem to agree with me that Chronicle does excellent new things with the gimmick, while many others see it as a major drawback in an otherwise fun new superhero movie. I just want to address some of the criticisms against it before rounding them up. The issue with the film opening up to include other perspectives and cameras of all kinds is actually something I like about the film. Not only does it play with the idea of people with cameras using them as both shield and as a form of power (the protagonist and the inessential blogger girl note that it’s a way of capturing and exposing injustices) but also deals with the increasing fact that we live in a world constantly being documented from all sides. The question of “who found all this footage and compiled it” is moot. Maybe God did it. Maybe a superpowered teen did it (grabbing footage from different legs of perspective as easily as ripping off the legs of a spider). Just because it’s all “filmed” from cameras within the world we’re watching doesn’t mean it has to wholly be any different than the omniscience of most movies. After all, we’re watching it all in a “real time” chronology so it’s not so much about found footage as found lenses with which to view the action. I bet some crowd-sourcing collaborative documentary producers would love that ability.
Campbell also scrolled through the web to gather other reactions to the movie, a pretty even divide between people who love the found footage element and others who don’t. To read the rest of the article, go here.
Those of you who saw Chronicle this weekend, what was your reaction?
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