Paranormal Activity Film Review

Watched Paranormal Activity last night. I came to it with high expectations, based on a review I had read in the Guardian, recommending it highly for its subtlety. It is a film very much in the Blair Witch tradition - the unfolding action viewed through a camera set up by the protagonists.

Without spoiling too much, I think I can say that the basic premise was that a young couple, bothered by possible paranormal activity at night in their home have set up a camera in the hope of capturing concrete evidence. At first they are light hearted, perhaps only a little self-consciously displaying their affection for each other in front of the camera and before others. The intrusion of the camera is an amusing novelty in their lives. Inevitably things turn darker and escalate. I was left speculating how far the dark force that haunted them came from within or without, how far was it nourished or engendered by the tensions simmering beneath the surface of their happy relationship?

I must say I found  some of the action a little slow and repetitive, even inconsequential; perhaps the refusal to deliver resolution offers more in the way of verisimilitude than tidy plot development but half way through, I found myself becoming impatient. Yes there is something in the house and it moves things around, no, wandering around in your underwear shouting at it won't help.

The exorcism reference (cut from some versions of the film) was absurd with its hints about unfortunates chewing off their own arms.

On the other hand I was clearly sufficiently influenced by the film to be just a little disturbed when my laptop started inexplicably making noises on its own in the middle of the night...

Dorian Grey

Last night I went to see the film adaptation of Dorian Grey. My reactions were largely positive. The film stayed true enough to the book, keeping intact the characters of Henry Wotten and Basil Hallward while using the license of the visual media and the benefit of hindsight to expand upon the implications of the tale. As might be expected, unlike the text the film left little to the imagination as to what terrible depravities Dorian might have got up to. The scenes of debauchery lent the late 1890s quite a 1960s air with young people dancing excitibly to drumming in a respectable drawing room. I tend to think that the demystifying of depravities in texts such as Jekyl and Hyde or Dorian Grey can only be disappointing and banal.

Unless one is going to summon the shadow of the Ripper, what can one say a depraved gentleman has been up to in the East End of London save smoking opium, drinking gin and having sex with the socio-economically deprived?

One thing the film did do particularly well I thought was illustrate the shocking nature of Dorian's failure to age. Having wrought his worst for the time being on the Capital, he decides to go on a lengthy sojourn around the world, there doubtless to engage in further unspeakable actions. Months turn into years and we see Dorian return to a London in which carriages have been replaced by ponderous motor cars, in which young ladies now wear straight unfussy skirts and have a straight, unfussy manner of address. Dorian has returned in the middle of the first world war and the unfussy and staight talking young lady is Sir Henry's daughter who appears to be the same age as Dorian himself. There is a stunned silence as he walks into the drawing room and we see all his old acquaintence very visibly aged while he of course remains the same.

One major objection I did have to the film was that the Portrait made horrible noises which seems entirely wrong.