RATTER, dir. Branden Kramer
It’s crazy to think that only 15 years ago, most of us had one camera in our house, and that that camera would only be able to take 35mm snaps that we’d then have to go get developed at a MotoPhoto or somewhere. Now, we got cameras everywhere. We got phones, tablets, XBOX Kinect or PS4 (depending on your fancy), not to mention straight-up Canons and GoPros. Hell, as I’m typing this my Macbook camera is staring at me right in the face, maybe or maybe not transmitting the data of my unshaven shagginess to some hidden government datafarm (I am Iranian, after all). This has obviously led to a massive decrease of privacy, both warranted and otherwise; you don’t have to be a frequenter of 4chan to know that pretty much any celeb who’s ever snapped a pic of their privates has had their photos stolen and posted for all to see, and the investigations into the NSA and FBI’s surveillance methods is perturbing at best. When Bugs Bunny asked, “You ever get da feelin’ yer bein’ watched?”, he couldn’t have known that the answer would eventually be, “Yeah, obviously.”
That paranoia is at the heart of Brenden Kramer’s RATTER, a thriller completely told through the perspective of its protagonist’s home cameras. Emma has just moved to NYC from the midwest, and has scored a nice two-story one-bedroom with a ton of space. She’s in grad school, she’s dumped her controlling ex back home, and she’s got something going with a charming young guy named Mike. All would be well, if it weren’t for the unshakable feeling that she’s constantly being watched by someone or something.
We know better. We’re seeing her life from the vantage of the cameras in her various home devices, including her phone, her computer, and her video game console of choice, and we’re catching some shady business that she’s not privy to. As she sleeps in front of a picture of herself on her laptop, we see that the image on her screen keeps zooming in on her eye, which reflects off of her own bespectacled eye (a striking, early utilization of the format). When her phone peeks out of her purse and gets an “oops!” beaver shot from under Emma’s skirt, we hear the sound of the camera snapping. And later, when her phone on her bedstand shows her asleep, we see a dark, shadowy figure creeping around in the background. Needless to say, shit eventually starts getting undeniably crazy, and Emma has to figure out two things: 1. who the hell is stalking her, deleting pics/video from her devices, and sending threatening e-mails to Mike, and 2. what the hell she should do about this.
Kramer adapted the script from his own short, WEBCAM (which you can see below), but what it reminded me most of were the VHS films, particularly the Joe Swanberg segment in the first film (which was completely comprised of picture-in-picture video chats). However, expanding the premise into a feature film does the opposite of one might expect. Expanding on the character’s personal life and allowing the creepy stuff to happen in deliberately doled out moments actually makes the whole thing scarier and more real, as the scares are juxtaposed against what is a pretty normal life. We spend much more time seeing how vulnerable Emma is than we do actually watching her in real danger, and that is one of the two main advantages of this film over its shorter-form predecessors.
The second crucial component is the central performance by Ashley Benson (SPRING BREAKERS, TV’s PRETTY LITTLE LIARS). Benson is in every scene of the film, and she’s not playing your traditional horror victim or a tough, resourceful “final girl”. Benson’s main task is to sell Emma as a believable, normal young lady who wants nothing more than to settle into the big city without getting swallowed up by it. It’s an age-old plotline, used in stuff from THE MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW and John Carpenter’s SOMEONE’S WATCHING ME all the way to THE UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT, and Benson has to portray that premise in 2015 without any irony, and does so successfully. We see Emma in a score of intimate, private moments; yes, we see her having sex and cavorting in her underwear, but we also see her dancing goofily around her apartment, managing multiple current and ex-lovers, and casually hanging out with her bestie. The scenes never feel like “scenes”, but rather moments from this girl’s life, and Benson plays it so naturally and unrefined that I had to remind myself that she was a fairly well-known actress and not an amateur.
Benson’s also credited as camera op, due to the device-based nature of the photography, and she deserves extra credit (in the school sense) for her efforts. She makes the phone/tablet chat scenes feel unrehearsed and spur-of-the-moment while still clearly showing everything we need to see. It makes us feel even closer to the character, and all the more concerned when we see something or hear something that she doesn’t.
The deliberate pacing lets you wonder what’s going on for a long time before finally answering the question of, “Just what the fuck is going on?” The film ends on an abrupt, frightening note, with a great post-credit tease that reminds me of THE GREY in that it gives you more info without definitively answering your pressing questions.
I have some quibbles, like the distracting lack of brand recognition (the film goes way out of its way not to say things like “iPhone,” “Facebook,” or “Xbox”) and the sometimes sketchy supporting characters (Mike’s bro-ed out roommate feels ripped from a collegiate’s Youtube comedy sketch), but as a quick-bite horror flick, it won me over. It doesn’t have the “grabs you by the balls (or what have you) and never lets go” quality of the original [REC], or the “oh shit, oh shit, oh shit” panic of the best V/H/S segments, but it does sustain its momentum for its runtime, popping it off with moments of sheer tension that had me staring, frozen and unblinking, at the screen. The film feels timely; there are clearly young women (and men) experiencing this sort of displacement every day, and with the privacy issues becoming more prevalent than ever in the media, it doesn’t seem out of the question to be scared of the kind of stuff that happens in RATTER.
Kramer knows how to lull the audience, and how to drag suspense for as long as it can go. Now I’m curious to see what he does with a more traditional horror/thriller, without the webcam format.
FAN GIRL, dir. Paul Jarret
It must have been when our protagonist was walking down the halls of her high school narrating her own life story while titles popped up over everyone’s head signifying what cliques they belonged to that inspired my first significant eye roll. That’s about five minutes in. It wouldn’t be the last one either.
Now, I should preface whatever you’re about to read by saying that this is decidedly not for me. Our lead character is a high school underclassman, and I cannot tell you whether the world it portrays has any basis in reality, or whether children of a certain age will find it relatable and endearing. But to me, in my mid-20’s eyes, a lot of this teen comedy rubbed me completely the wrong way.
The story revolves around teenage Telulah Farrow (MAD MEN’s Kiernan Shipka), a girl way more popular among fan circles of her favorite band, All Time Low, than she is in her own school. Her filmmaking teacher (Scott Adsit) tasks her with creating a short film that, if successful, will play at a local talent contest (judged by Tina Fey, no less). Telulah thinks of the most practical thing she can shoot and edit really quickly; a breakdown of high school life, as she sees it. She breaks down her post-millennial high school social structure scene clique by clique; the “Insty” hos constantly taking snaps of themselves and their classmates for social media, the looooong out-of-touch, insular “Myspace” losers, etc. Meanwhile, she hears that All Time Low will be performing nearby, and she sees this as a dual opportunity; she can use the performance as the finale of her film, and, if she’s resilient enough, maybe even score some face time with the band.
Perhaps my Jersey roots gave me a radically different experience of the emo/scene wave, but that aspect of this film struck me completely wrong. Granted, it’s not like I’d expect high school to be exactly the same as it was in those confused, angry post-9/11 years, but from what I remember, those kids (myself fleetingly included) were somewhat darker and angrier than the snappy, occasionally downright cheery Telulah. I wouldn’t say she’s a poser; worse, the movie itself is a poser, trying to endear itself to younger people by attempting to speak in their language the same way Telulah’s mom (Meg Ryan) is trying to stay relevant by getting on Facebook. The requisite stoner character is named “Hashtag,” and the characters inevitably comment on his various misdoings with things like, “Hashtag-gross,” or “Hashtag-lame”; if you don’t already think that saying “hashtag-something” out loud is played out, you will after this film. Again, it’s really hard for me to say what contemporary kids will think of this film, but I’m almost a decade out of high school and I found it condescending and phony, so it’s not a stretch that the younger, hipper kids will think so as well.
This doesn’t really impress as a female-led high school comedy either. In one of the film’s more offensive throughlines, we see Telulah continually crush after a hunky, but taken white boy, and inexplicably uses an English accent every time she speaks to him, despite speaking in her natural American dialect with everyone else. Forget the idea that “No way anyone in the school will tell so-and-so that Telulah’s not from England!”, but to say that it’s possible for two people older than 8 to be friends, and presumably linked on social media, in 2015 without being able to deduce that the other’s faux-DOWNTON ABBEY garble is COMPLETE BULLSHIT is wayyy too far-fetched for this writer. Worse than that is the fact that this love interest never really figures into the story in any meaningful way, and just occasionally pops up to make googly eyes and flirt with Telulah. Contrast this with the way more energetic and charming Darvan (Joshua Boon); Darvan’s not only her loyal partner on the film she’s working on, but he also goes out of his way and even risks his life to get her in a room with her beloved band. But Darvan’s black, and even though they conveniently age him out of contention (he’s a senior who’s been held back, another racist touch, thus probably making his coupling with Telulah illegal), it feels like a PRETTY IN PINK situation where it clearly doesn’t seem like she’s supposed to end up with the guy planting one on her in the final reel (spoiler alert). This is generally a very white film, and all the ethnic characters (including Darvan and two of Shipka’s friends, but obviously not her bestie) are played as full-volume caricatures.
There’s one crucial redeeming factor of FAN GIRL, and that’s Shipka’s lead performance. Telulah’s a character that, like many teenagers, is so aggressively naiive and self-centered that she could easily border on the unwatchable, but Shipka’s always in tune with the likable and funny side of her personality. Even if it doesn’t necessarily jibe with the music and scene her character is allegedly part of, her positivity and energy make it easier for us to go through this narrative with her, and she manages to inject humanity into forced quirks like her character’s repeated use of the expression “Throw up!” as an interjection. The supporting cast isn’t as lucky: Adsit, Bill Sage (as a handsome suitor for Telulah’s mom), and even unfortunately Ryan don’t have much to work with (it sorta hurts watching one-time superstar Ryan relegated to playing the trying-to-be-cool, selfie-obsessed mama bear), and all the high schoolers aside from Telulah are screechy and one-note. But despite the film’s flaws, Shipka’s talent shines through, and she shows an appealing, likable personality that hopefully will persist as she ages out of these teen roles.
I hate to trash this film, especially since I was told beforehand that it would be an ideal fit for AICN’s readers. I can only presume that the person who said that assumed so because of Telulah’s aspirations to be a filmmaker, but that side of her (and Adsit’s corny, “IMDB me, everybody!” teacher) feels like an afterthought tacked on to give the film extra shading. But the title FAN GIRL only applies to her love for this specific scene band, and it shows an experience I’m not sure will resonate with anyone with a personal experience of anything the film portrays. I have to repeat that this is a PG-13 teen film aimed at kids who maybe weren’t even born when I entered adolescence, so it’s easy for me to sit here with my beard and college degree and shittalk it from my high horse without being able to empathize with the target audience. All I can tell is you is that there was nothing there for me, except for the knowledge that Shipka’s a talent to keep an eye on in the future.
FAN GIRL is encoring at L.A. Film Festival tomorrow at 3:30 P.M. at Regal L.A. Live
BAND OF ROBBERS, dirs. Aaron and Adam Nee
Imagine if Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn lived today and grew up to be a cop and an ex-con, respectively. That’s essentially the premise of BAND OF ROBBERS, a comedy by brothers Aaron and Adam Nee that takes Mark Twain’s characters and updates them for 2015. And while using Tom and Huck for this indie-crime-comedy may seem like mere opportunism, the kind of cashing in on name value that we’ve been seeing in our multiplexes all summer, the love for Twain shines through in the quirkiness and hyper-specific tone of the film. The Nees have dusted off a property no one was really dying to see, and did something with it that was creative, original, and still faithful to the original text; no small feat.
We open with a little backstory, showing Tom (co-director Adam Nee) and Huck (Kyle Gallner) as kids repeatedly getting into trouble before Huck finally takes a serious rap for their misadventures. Now they’re grown men on both sides of the law, with Huck getting out of the joint and Tom as rookie cop struggling in the shadow of his detective brother, Sid (Eric Christian Olsen). Despite his badge, wannabe-alpha Tom shows no signs of reformation, and he immediately assembles their other two friends (played by Hannibal Burress and Matthew Gray Gubler) to form a “Band of Robbers,” a sort of take on Robin Hood’s Merry Men where they steal, but with righteous intentions (of course, those intentions are quite vague). Huck has no desire to go back to jail, but Tom’s snake-charming abilities take hold, and before they know it, the group is planning to rob a local pawn shop in search of a mythical treasure from their youth. Of course, nothing goes as planned, and Tom and Huck have to contend with Tom’s new partner, Becky Thatcher (Melissa Benoist), the menacing Injun Joe (Stephen Lang), and actually finding and making away with the elusive treasure.
The film is built around Tom and his alleged charisma, and Nee manages to render the pompous, manipulative, fast-talking Sawyer into a character that’s sort of likable and sincere, if blissfully ignorant. Sure, he’s narcissistic, selfish, and morally ambiguous at best, but you see the childish sense of energy and wonder in his eyes, so Huck and their buddies don’t seem like complete saps for following him. In perfect contrast, Gallner plays Huck much straighter, and with real honesty; he serves as the heart of the film, and he comes off like a young Jeremy Renner as he broods about his attempts to reform himself and his fear of going back inside. The pair’s interplay is crucial, but surprisingly subdued; Huck isn’t quite as susceptible to Tom’s wiles and he knows it, and his enabling is key to its effect on others, so when Huck gets out, Tom’s allowed to be himself again, and he couldn’t be happier about it. The supporting characters are told in broader sketches, though Burress, Gubler, Benoist, and Lang each get moments to shine. Beth Grant pops up as the uptight Widow Douglas, Daniel Mora steals scenes as a Mexican immigrant named Jorge (who serves as the crew’s getaway driver), and Creed Bratton has a bit part as the owner of the pawn shop.
The Brothers Nee clearly knew what they were going for here, and that’s a big part of the film’s charm; even at its goofiest, this doesn’t feel like a stupid movie, and they’re just as good at getting laughs in quiet, awkward moments as they are with slapstick and big set pieces. The tone is playful, but the stakes seem real, especially for Gallner’s Huck. There are scenes where serious violence is inflicted on major characters, and we genuinely fear for them, unlike something like A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST or an Adam Sandler movie where you know they won’t actually kill anyone likable. The dialogue and humor aren’t really Twain-level, but the film constantly pays homage to the author with overlapping character names, plot points, and even jokes. You can tell these guys dig the old stories, and wanted to do them justice, so by the time these grown men are creepin’ around looking for buried treasure and eluding Injun Joe, it feels like it’s coming from the right place.
Not all movies about a mischievous group of guys are as good-natured and heartfelt as this one, and it’s refreshing to see their underlying decency peek through their adolescent stupidity in a way that doesn’t feel forced or arbitrary. These aren’t bad guys, just dummies, including Tom. The core friendship is a relationship that’s been part of American culture for almost a century and a half, and Gallner and Nee depict it in a way that feels new, but also like the Tom and Huck from Twain’s original tales. While the tone flip-flops aggressively at points, it never quite teeters off the edge, and the sentimental, RAISING ARIZONA-esque ending somehow fits with the dumbo humor and shotgun shootouts that came before it. This probably isn’t for everyone, but it has a unique sense of humor and a couple of really charming performances at its center that make it worth checking out.
BAND OF ROBBERS is encoring at the L.A. Film Festival tonight at 7:30 at Regal L.A. Live.
