And Another

I guess The Asylum was done with it.

Paranormal Activity cleared its $15,000 production budget in the first few hours of its theatrical run, so sequel details were just a matter of time. Paramount recently signed a director for the next installment: Kevin Greutert, editor of the first five Saw films and director of the sixth. Almost as quickly as Greutert was assigned, he was removed — Lionsgate exercised a contractual option obliging him to direct Saw VII 3-D. It’s more than just a conflict of shooting schedules; it’s something of a conflict of interests: Paramount has Paranormal Activity 2 set for an October 22nd release. Lionsgate will drop Saw VII the same day.

Strictly speaking, Paranormal Activity has already had a sequel. Paranormal Activity: The Search for Katie [A Case Study by Dr. Johann Averys, DMN], a comic for the iPhone, was released by IDW (30 Days of Night) in early December. The comic’s written by Scott Lobdell, who wrote Uncanny X-Men for a pretty considerable stretch of the 1990s, starting right about when I stopped reading it, almost down to the issue. In any case I don’t have an iPhone.

Back to Paranormal Activity 2. Greutert was forthcoming with his displeasure on his blog (it’s long since deleted):

I just had the task of telling my 83 year old mother that no, I’m not going to be allowed to direct the movie we were all so excited about when my family last got together, and that I’m being forced to leave town before getting a chance to see her again. Yes, I’ll be filming people getting tortured YET AGAIN. So we’ll have to put off me making a film she can actually watch for another year.

On the Paranormal Activity side, I wouldn’t be too worried. There’s a script, but considering they signed a director closely associated with a series based on visible gore for the sequel to a flick where the lack of gore is key, rethinking that choice may be best for the franchise if it’s to deliver more of the same (which is presumably what it intends to offer up as an alternative to Saw for October moviegoers). Latest baffling word from the LA Times is that Brian De Palma is a leading candidate to direct Paranormal Activity 2. Others in the running are Brad Anderson (Session 9, The Machinist, and for my money one of the most underrated directors working), and the talented Greg McLean (Wolf Creek, Rogue). All three are probably well above Paranormal Activity 2, but unless Saw picks up Wes Anderson, any of them would cement Paranormal as the more intriguing of the warring projects.

On the Saw side, the seventh installment is written by Patrick Melton — a better stylistic fit than Greutert, considering his experience on Saw (episodes V and VI) and the grisly recent Collector — who says he has a strong feeling that it’ll be the last. Melton isn’t calling the shots here, regardless of whatever finality he thinks he’s written into the flick — after all, this is a franchise which has run four installments since the bored creative crew killed off the villain. Most folks seem to be citing as evidence of VII’s finality the rather poor box office take of Saw VI, which topped out domestically at $27 million in comparison to the rest of the series (the others each made at least $55 mil), but that’s a healthy profit on an $11 million budget. Even if Lionsgate doesn’t want to put the advertising budget into it anymore, I can’t see it not continuing as a direct-to-video endeavor. David Hackl was on board to direct Saw VII before getting the boot. Hackl’s tale? He’s been with the Saw series since II as production designer and second-unit director before trying out the director’s chair for Saw V.

Like everyone else, I make a lot of fun of The Global Asylum’s brand of shameless low-budget knockoffs (the term mockbuster seems to be gaining currency) without ever having stooped to watch one. Paranormal Entity intrigued me: if the real thing was shot for fifteen large,  how much would The Asylum spend? If Roland Emmerich’s 2012 cost Sony $200 million and Asylum brought Doomsday: 2012 in at, say, a quarter of a million (as estimated by IMDb), does that 0.00125% proportion hold true for other flicks? If so, Paranormal Entity would have to come in at $18.75, which seems stingy even for them. If, on the other hand, they’re willing to look past their strict formula, they could confidently drop a still-thrifty fifty grand or so and hike the production values up well past the level of the film they’re aping. I was curious enough to make it my first Asylum venture.

Well, if they dropped fifty grand on this, they dined well, unless they had to pay Erin Marie Hogan a topless bonus. If you had the camera (singular will do) already and weren’t paying your actors, I think you actually could wrap this one up for that $18.75 — a couple blank tapes for the camera and a quick thrift store outing and you’re all set. Actors bring their own costumes, which is to say, wear their usual clothes. House is already set up. Very little lighting needed (if the camera doesn’t have a night-vision function, you shoot day for night and tint it minty green in post-production). Come to think of it, Paranormal Entity is probably the closest thing to a Dogme film I’ve seen in a couple years. Heck, the director doesn’t get credited, and I’m not even sure Lars von Trier sticks to that one. In defense of The Asylum’s penny-pinching, this does mean it’s faithful to the production values of the original (where ‘production values’ means ‘general appearance of somebody’s house’ and not in any sense ’special effects’).

And how similar is the movie itself? Usually the Asylum shoots these things early based on premise; it’s not tough to whip up an outline for Transmorphers without seeing Transformers, assuming you’ve got a passing familiarity with 1986. Here they couldn’t have known Paranormal Activity would be worth jocking until that sizable wave of viral marketing crested into a heavy TV spot campaign just before the release date. So they didn’t get to it until afterward, and as a result, it didn’t fit with the preferred Asylum release method of hitting DVD a couple days before the big-budget version hits theaters. Luckily it takes The Asylum about two weeks to shoot even its bigger, more megashark-laden productions, so Paranormal Entity had plenty of time for writer, cast and crew to watch Activity at their leisure (this borne out by Hogan’s admission that she’d seen the movie prior to being cast) before shooting, so they’d know what they were aiming for. The production timeline on Paranormal Entity comes out looking something like this:

• buy tickets to Paranormal Activity for a couple key players,
• bang out an outline (i.e., jot down Activity’s basic structure) during the flick,
• writer / uncredited director / unseen male lead Shane Van Dyck plots a few key moments (“Most of the script was improvised,” said Hogan),
• shoot for a few days in someone’s house,
• and still probably wrap within a few weeks of the first Activity screenings,
• managing in the end to beat Activity’s DVD release date by a full week.

As for the content, it’s remarkably faithful to the film it’s based on, not scene-by-scene but not too far removed from it, and the major touchstones of Paranormal Activity are replicated, or at least recounted. Particularly entertaining: the central setpiece, the single most talked-about sequence? Either the crew of Paranormal Entity couldn’t quite figure it out (I know I couldn’t) or couldn’t afford it. It still happens, but it happens offscreen and is summarized by a witness. A few things are changed around — true to name, the filmmakers borrow a bit from The Entity (1981) — but this might be the first of Asylum’s flicks which could pass the Folgers Crystals test. If you’d kind of heard about Paranormal Activity, and maybe seen the TV spots, and you walked into a screening of Paranormal Entity (if such a thing existed), would you know you’d been had? Well, yes, you would, but you might or might not realize you weren’t watching the movie in question, a testimonial which doesn’t hold true if you’re inexplicably wandering into a screening of The Terminators. If such a thing existed.

Still, spell-check wouldn’t have hurt.

Closely realted — so, the neighbors?

Redacted is neither sequel nor remake, but may offer a glimpse of the more interesting motivational forces behind the concept of the sequel/remake: a filmmaker’s continuing focus on a set of themes and ideas.

Iraq films, both documentary and fictionalized (okay, usually they’re both) are all over the film festivals this season. Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha, Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah, George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, Charles Ferguson’s No End In Sight, Phil Donahue (different one) and Ellen Spiro’s Body of War are all making the rounds to various degrees of acclaim and discussion.

Redacted is Brian De Palma’s Iraq entry, currently making the film festival circuit (Venice, Toronto, Telluride, New York). At Venice, after the film’s premiere, De Palma received a ten-minute standing ovation on the way to picking up the Silver Lion for best director.

The piece tells of a group of U.S. soldiers in Iraq who rape a young girl and kill her and her family. It’s based on a true story, the Al-Mahmudiyah killings of 2006. It’s nearly twenty years since Casualties of War, when De Palma told of a group of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam who rape and a kill a young Vietnamese woman. It almost seems like cheating to bring up the parallel. Mortal outrage at war crimes hardly makes De Palma an obsessive filmmaker, and it’s almost disingenuous to mention this even in the context of a thematic remake – after all, Casualties was based on its own true story, forty years before Al-Mahmudiyah. It’s its own story, and it’s very nearly dismissive to frame it as something worth mentioning in the context of allowing De Palma to make a new film updating an old angle. I leave it in on the basis that it feels in keeping with some of the loftier ideals of remaking: that some things are cyclical, regardless of how long ago they were buried. The soldiers responsible had probably seen Casualties of War, but if Anthony Swofford is right in Jarhead, the experience of going to war may have robbed it of its lessons, converting it, with Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, into personal fuel for American military power. The soldiers failed to learn the lessons of the past: they repeated it pretty faithfully, and three of four are in prison, with the last awaiting trial. Redacted is criticized for being anti-troop (more on that in a moment) but those critics fail to comprehend the idea of an American taking a few moments to point out that it’s not just those who fail to remember the past who suffer the effects of its repetition.

Redacted is already drawing fire. Chief among its critics is Bill O’Reilly, who refuses to see the movie and has been making a habit of denouncing De Palma as a traitor on numerous occasions. His chief salvo can be seen here, in which he says he’ll call for boycott and protest of any American theater chain with the nerve to carry the film.

Fox’s Neil Cavuto (against whom Eli Roth mounted a solid defense, despite what was presumably Fox’s attempt to stack the deck by booking an easily-attackable defendant) and CNN conservative Glenn Beck have chimed in as well. As Redacted draws nearer, expect all the heavyweights to make their opinions known. It should be noted that O’Reilly did not make clear any desire to embarrass Ellen Knickmeyer or bury the Washington Post for reporting the story as linked above. Slate, NPR, CNN, etc. all similarly escaped O’Reilly’s wrath for publishing reports of troop uninfallibility.

On the filmic side, this ad for Redacted is basically useless. There might be something useful to say about integrating making-of footage – De Palma is interested in blurring the film/making of film line, as seen in both Femme Fatale and Redacted – but the ad sure doesn’t offer it, opting instead for clips of Carrie and The Untouchables. I get the impression they show behind-the-scenes footage both to heavy-sell De Palma himself, who’s the focus of the ad, and to avoid telling potentially cowed viewers what the movie’s actually about. HDNet softpedals by calling it controversial but assuring us not that the film won’t disturb – which, by all accounts, it will – but that your old pal De Palma (oh, he’s the Scarface guy) knows what he’s doing.

Redacted will have a controversy-filled multi-stage release in November and December.

Closing out Brian De Palma’s birthday week (he turned 67 on the 11th) with the highest-profile of the blog-relevant projects: the prequel to his Oscar-winning*, Potemkin-borrowing 1987 The Untouchables. The movie was based on Eliot Ness’ 1957 memoir-novel of his famously incorruptible unit’s quest to take down Al Capone; two years later, it was a TV show starring Robert Stack.

*Sean Connery for Supporting.

The Untouchables: Capone Rising will probably have its title changed before release (currently projected 2008). Thanks to the poor returns on 2007’s Hannibal Rising, the word “rising” is not currently a viable origin-property-branded term. The plot deals with young Al Capone’s dealings with young Jim Malone (the character played by Connery), Capone’s rise to power, and Malone’s rededication to the right side of the law.

David Mamet, who scripted the 1987 film, had no dealings with the prequel. Three writers have credits: Brian Koppelman, David Levien, and David Rabe. Rabe wrote the script for De Palma on Casualties of War. Koppelman and Levien are writing partners and no strangers to crime drama: Ocean’s 13, Runaway Jury, Knockaround Guys, Rounders. They’re also responsible for Belmont Boys, the upcoming Clooney-directed and Ocean’s-similar (a group of thieves reunite to work on a heist) flick, as well as Frankie Machine, the upcoming Scorsese-directed mob flick starring Robert DeNiro as an ex-hitman going back to work. Apparently, it seemed he was out, but just when he came to think so, he was somehow pulled back in.

Nicolas Cage was confirmed in May to play Capone, but has since left the project. At 43, Cage might not be the best choice to play the “young” Capone; DeNiro was 44 when he played Alphonse in ‘87. Gerard Butler (37 years old) is cast as Malone. (If the age gap between Capone and Malone is consistent with the first film, Capone should be 24 or thereabouts.) Speculation remains rampant; early rumors of Colin Farrell and Sean Penn have yielded little. The questions remains: who will play a young Charles Martin Smith?

A 1993 TV show was spurred by the success of the film; it met with somewhat less success than its 1959 predecessor. It cast Tom Amandes as Ness and William Forsythe as Capone. Just three years earlier, Forsythe had played henchman to Al Pacino’s Al Caprice, an analog of Al Capone, in Dick Tracy.

An additional henchman note: Billy Drago played Frank Nitti as a crazy assassin in ‘87; Anthony LaPaglia would handle the role in a more even-tempered treatment in Frank Nitti: The Enforcer, made for TV the following year and surely fast-tracked due to Nitti interest.

I also recall a fairly good Super Nintendo game.

Sisters isn’t the only Brian De Palma flick going into the shop for retooling. De Palma’s 1980 Dressed to Kill is getting a remake, due to go straight-to-DVD in 2008. No director announced, but writer is Rick Alexander. Alexander’s self-penned biography lists numerous projects and lofty claims, but his only real credit so far is extensive writing duty for woman-positive medical drama Strong Medicine.