Chronicle

Saw a sneak peak of it yesterday and it was great. The writer of the film Max Landis, wrote one of my shorts.
 
I saw it today. It was indeed really good. Probably the best "found footage" film since Cloverfield. Also probably the best superhero origin story i've ever seen in a movie.
 
It was a good movie and mostly well-executed. The stuff with the father seemed a bit clumsy toward the end. I was expecting that to be resolved a bit differently. The use of the found footage conceit was cleverly executed. The film went by QUICK. The story just kept moving along. I think that's because of the visceral nature of "believing" that this is all home video footage. The ending was a tiny bit anticlimactic for me, but maybe that's just because I wanted more. I wanted a graphic novel. This was a "#1". Looking forward to seeing how the superhero genre evolves now. I appreciate original takes like this ("Unbreakable") a lot more than licensed properties.
 
SPOILERS!!!
1. The lead actor is going to be a star. He reminds me of Leo Dicaprio, you can tell there's a lot of depth to him.
2. What I most liked was that the movie is unpredictable, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the am... not better.
3. Had some very cool sequences. The one where our main guy puts on the fireman suit and screws up the neigbourhood baddies was ssaaawweeet!

If you're at all interested in it I'd say go see it.

Kind of a hard one to score, I'm giving it an enjoyable 2.99/5
 
DeHaan's already going to be in The Place Beyond the Pines and Wettest County. Neither are starring roles (far from), but I agree: he's definitely got something.
 
This sums it up for me: A regular movie. I gotta say, when even the characters are tired of the movie’s gimmick, maybe it’s time to retire the gimmick.

And here are my thoughts from another thread on another forum:

Kholi said:
Preface: people should do exactly what they want to do. I'm only commenting because the thread was opened for that, and the subject is of interest to me. AT the end of the day, it's just that: commentary.



Of course, as you can tell, I disagree but that's all well n'good. To me, found footage is exactly what it delineates: someone found this footage and they are now presenting it to an audience.

A mockumentary has specific guidelines that classify it as such. So does a documentary. In my eyes (take it or leave it of course), it's not found footage. It's just told in what's supposed to be a linear timeline from the POV of several different cameras. If you took out the acknowledgement of cameras by characters in the world OR removed them altogether, but covered everything the exact same way you would still have the same exact movie.

Do the same with Paranormal Activity or Cloverfield, not the same movies.



Eye of the beholder. One person sees awesome, another sees sloppy; either way works.

You do see my points, though. Especially the hospital scene.



Actually, the hospital scene alone was at least five minutes. Accounting for the rest, I'd wager that all three of those scenes take up 10-12 minutes of runtime. When it's out on video, we can revisit that and see just how long they do run.



Here's where we definitely split paths, though. Traditional narrative is completely different (or is supposed to be) from this. To me, that you're considering this production and a normal production so close means that they didn't own the "gimmick" or aesthetic, method.

The entire mockumentary, found footage, handycam presentation is supposed to feel like real events, even if they are not. Troll Hunter did a better job of doing this than Chronicle did by far. So did THE LAST EXORCISM, to a degree before it too began to break its own world in favor of conversation.

Literally, TLE would cut between non-existant cameras to cover the same conversation. Cross-coverage. By the end of the movie it had all fallen apart, sadly.

The implausibilities of a traditional narrative work because you go in knowing that it's not real, that things are setup to present a surreal or faux reality. Circumstance and happenstance are both just part of that method.

Not sure if I'm saying that right, but basically they're two different things if both are committed to their presentations fully. One is supposed to feel and seem like real events, the other is supposed to be a third person perspective on events.



I would've much preferred she stay out. From the moment she showed up, it was obvious why she was there: love interest, another camera to fill in time on a story that hadn't enough meat to really push a 75-78 minute RT. She never does a single thing to deserve any attention (which is a huge annoyance to me in movies anyway), and she's completely flat.

So, yeah, would've taken something more compelling than that. Things like that made the high seventies runtime seem a lot longer to me.



That's really all that matters. I didn't get the applause here, but a lot of people were laughing when it obviously called for laughs, jumped when it called for jumps, and ooh-aah'd when they were looking for those; it worked, that's all that matters when we're talking about money.

Even if I didn't really enjoy it all that much, the mass that I sat with did, and that's enough to spurn me forward into trying one.



Depends on how much you're adhering to the presentation. And, of course, to each their own! Everyone's gotta be different or we'll get the same stuff all the time. No problem by me.
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I suppose for me, mocku/found footage is more of a style than a narrative device. In the original UK version of The Office, for the third season Christmas special, they retroactively made the "camera crew" a narrative device (in that, this was a few years after the supposed documentary had aired, and now life is changed for the people involved, etc.). In the US version, the mythical camera crew is almost never used as a narrative device, save for a few gimmicks.

In Ed Burns' "Newlyweds," I don't think it ever mentions why there appears to be a camera crew following ordinary people around, etc. But it works, because it's just a style.

For Chronicle, yeah they used it as a bit of a narrative device, but I think they did that more to make it feel organic, which I thought it did (though I too was lost as to why we needed the chick, but I thought it kind of worked cutting to different cameras, even if it was a bit distracting). The reason I was so impressed with the mocku style in Chronicle wasn't because of how it was written into the film, but because of the specifics of Josh Trank's direction and more importantly, the editing. It cut out at points which felt like people would really hit the stop recording button.

-JMT
 
The title is apropos. This is yet another film that further chronicles the declassyfying of storytelling (and, in turn, to a generation’s entertainment taste)…

However, the director would be giddy to know that I am just as excited for Chronicle as I am for The Avengers
until, that is, he realizes my Avengers stoked scale has a "this one goes to -1" meter.
 
The more reviews I read about this movie that are good, the more disconnected I feel.

Just don't understand it. This must be how the people who disliked Inception felt.
 
Kholi said:
Just don't understand it. This must be how the people who disliked Inception felt.
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Ha ha, I never thought Inception was great. I didn't 'get' why so many people loved it.

I wouldn't say this is a brilliant movie but I still enjoyed it.
 
I finally watched the film. It's really great. Very well done story. Kind of like how I imagine the end of Akira would be like, if alot less budget.

The camera point of view was alright. It did seem gimmicky at first, especially because it seemed to be an egotistical guy watching himself. But then as more camera point of views kept popping in (CCTV, Crash cams, hospital cameras, phone cameras, cameras that aren't even actually recording) - it all made sense.

The story can easily have been told via omniscient God camera, but I liked the literal camera device. For anyone finding nitpicks about mockumentary formats or point of views... that's silly. It's simply showing the view of the camera chronicling the story as it unfolds. No crew(within the film) is editing it, just - us, or an alien, or god, or whatever.
 
After finally seeing this, I would have to say that my initial thoughts based on the trailer were fairly accurate. Not entirely, but close enough. It was a VFX show with little substance.

This movie started out with so much potential! It had an abusive father and a dying mother storyline that was crucial to the lead character but they barely touched on it. Especially the mother. She was just there when needed for a moment. Her character felt tacked on. The Father was just there to show that he was abused. Barely saw his face or had a real conversation with him the entire movie.

Most of the film was a bunch of guys playing with their powers, followed by a final act filled with destruction and chaos. I really should have cared for the abused kid, but in the end, I didn't give a rat's ass about him. Yeah, he becomes the villain, but he's been through so much that you're supposed to care about him. I didn't.

And bringing in the love interest with the camera just to make her the damsel in distress was pretty lame.
This movie really did have some wow moments for me though. It wasnt all bad, especially early on. But by the end I was bored with their antics and just wanted it to be over. And it's not that long of a running time to begin with.

I won't be buying this one.
 
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