Short Take: Three Horror Movies.

The scariest thing about the Paranormal Activity movies is still how popular they are. How this brand of cheaply done and cheaply looking films can manage to outgross much better projects is a sad reminder that today's audiences are victim of cattle thinking. Once they get used to a "series", they don't care how many times they are told the same story. These movies prove that audiences enjoy the act of not thinking. The third installment in the series, goes back to the very beginning and explores why numbers 1 and 2 happened. To say the reasons are preposterous would be nothing compared to the way in which the filmmakers rely on facile trickery and obvious techniques to try and scare us. The effects have been getting consistently better, something which can't be said about the acting and plot devices. This one, set in the 80s, has us wondering how did these progressive people guess that everything should've been filmed in case a movie was made about them decades later. The film doesn't rely try to adjust itself to the settings and to the spirit of the era, it goes straight for the established process that's worked for them in the past, the only thing they've changed is the medium by which we see the demonic activities. One must wonder, by the time they get to Paranormal Activity 45 will the stories be displayed using cave paintings? Grade *

The only good thing that came out of Dream House must've been Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz getting married. The rest is an outrageously bad attempt at mating Shutter Island, Memento and any Stephen King novel involving snow and houses. If you've seen the trailer, you don't need to bother with the rest of the movie. What remains mysterious is why people like Sheridan, Watts and pretty much everyone else involved in the production (the underrated Elias Koteas for example) saw in the lazy screenplay and the redundant characters.  Grade *

The Change-Up tries to invent the wheel by taking Freaky Friday and adding curse words, boobs and poop jokes. Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds play bets buds who go through a body exchange situation after peeing in a magical fountain. One's a control freak lawyer, the other's a slacker. You don't need to try hard to guess which one plays which; one of the many reasons why you wonder why was this movie even made. Everything about it has been done before and in much better ways. Props to Leslie Mann for always adding a very human layer to her characters. Grade *

Brothers **

Director: Jim Sheridan
Cast: Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman
Sam Shepard, Mare Winningham, Bailee Madison, Taylor Geare
Clifton Collins, Jr., Carey Mulligan

If you have seen the Danish film "Brothers", you will have a hard time swallowing the sweetened American remake. Story's the same: Sam Cahill (Maguire) is deployed to Afghanistan days after his brother Tommy (Gyllenhaal) is released from jail.
His wife Grace (Portman) is left behind taking care of daughters Isabelle (Madison) and Maggie (Geare), when news arrive that Sam has been killed, Grace begins to get close to Tommy until
Sam returns from the dead.
Sheridan tries to emulate the humanity he created beautifully in "In America" (and he does get splendid performance from his young actresses) but "Brothers" mostly feel like it's pretty actors playing house.
Portman, whose quiet sensitivity isn't enough to muster motherhood gravitas, underacts her way through every scene reaching a point of indifference.
Gyllenhaal, who has the most interesting character in the movie, suffers from lack of nuance. This might not be his fault because the screenplay has shaped Tommy into the archetypal "bad seed" who has visible tattoos (Sam has one on his chest meant to be only seen by Grace we can assume), gets drunk, smokes and changes Thomas Newman's score whenever he appears from tranquil piano motifs to rockier tunes.
Maguire also has trouble conveying the moral dilemma that plagues Sam in the film's second half. One would assume that the actor's barely there look would serve him to evoke loss, but it only makes him seem like he forgot his dialogues.
In all the major problem with "Brothers" is that it suffers greatly from its change of setting. The Danish version inspired encountered feelings as the soldiers were participating in a war they never even started and are serving as proxies from their army's previous commitments.
When translating this to a nondescript American town (when one character is asked where did they grow the answer is "twenty miles from here" keeping the anonymity of the town as ways to inspire a feeling of-it could happen to you- universality) the plot looses its ability to question the system and is reduced to what almost all Afghanistan/Iraq films have come to in the last decade: a politically correct tale that empowers the army while trying to grasp the pain people in the outside world go through.
If not why then should Sheridan linger more on the death of an American soldier than the equally brutal killing of an Afghan?
And why is it only the death of said American that traumatizes Sam?
What director Susanne Bier achieved with the original movie was a raw evaluation of where the world stood when a global power sucks the rest of the countries into its sinkhole, what this "Brothers" offers us is a simplistic tale of Oedipal complexes (at the service of Shepard who plays the Cahill's patriarch) set to a U2 song, because if Bono sings about it, then it must be true.