Chronicle makes waves due to really good special effects (CGI) and lead characters who come from a dark place. Three high school students find strange formations in a cave that give them weird telepathic powers.

The lead kid is constantly being bullied by his classmates, another is a popular jock and the third the bland yet sensible cousin of the first. The entire film uses the point of view of video camcorders with the action being switched off between students. In the last act that is abandoned with Chronicle still adhering to an objective stance of its characters.

The effects unfold in a super hero sci-fi mode such as flying through the air and using psychokinesis to crush and rip. Naturally the battle is a mind contest where the trio debates whether to use their newfound powers for good or bad. You just know the kid who’s been hazed his entire life is going to get some form of revenge. The climax highlights Seattle locations including the space needle.

Chronicle should be of interest to sci-fiers and youngsters who can finally give their oppression a face.

– Michael Bergeron

The Innkeepers starts with a montage that merges images of a 19^th century hotel with its 20^th century renovation. As writer/director Ti West’s film begins in earnest we already have a creepy feeling intensified by the progression of the building from a grand palace to an archaic structure wedged between refurbished buttresses.

The Innkeepers is a charming ghost story,” West tells Free Press Houston in a phone interview. “You have to make a film not scary in order for the scares to work,” West adds about the rhythm and timing he uses in building up the scenes. The main characters are two hipster twentysomethings who occasionally study, sometimes drink beer but more often pontificate about the possible ghost that occupies the soon-to-be-closed hotel during their regular nightshift.

Sara Paxton and Pat Healy posses the right amount of nerdy charm and goofy innocence to give the film what West describes as a “goofball quality to the serious proceedings.”

West had the world premiere of Innkeepers at last year’s SXSW. “At first I was full of trepidation because it was a key Saturday night screening at the Paramount, the largest venue. The movie had no big stars, which is what the festival usually uses that slot for,” says West. “Now I think of SXSW as a second home,” such was the success of that premiere.

West considers his trajectory through filmmaking as “an indie film lifestyle more than a career.” West was one of six directors of the omnibus V/H/S that played at Sundance this year and which West promises to bring to SXSW. “All I want from Hollywood is $20-million versus the $60-thousand that I normally spend. But if you go that route you have to do the test screenings, the endless marketing meetings and the headaches,” allows West. Whatever his method West has made a film that pays off in its chosen genre.

The Innkeepers will open Friday, February 3 at the Alamo Drafthouse West Oaks unwinding until Monday, February 6 when it moves to the Alamo Drafthouse Mason Park location for a three-day run ending Thursday, February 9.

– Michael Bergeron

Big Miracle is a film with a big heart. BM almost seems like a documentary, so absolute is director Ken Kwapis’ focus on the actual events surrounding a family of whales who’re trapped in ice. The trio quickly named Fred, Wilma and Bam Bam, five miles from the ocean and blocked by solid ice, are existing by grabbing oxygen from a small hole in the ice.

The whales cannot make the five-mile trip underwater and meanwhile the nearby town (more of a settlement) of Barrow Alaska tries to save the large aquatic mammals. By the way, I realize that Bam Bam was Barney and Betty’s son and Pebbles was the progeny of Fred and Wilma but all that’s explained in Big Miracle. It’s also revealed how a Mexican restaurant above the Arctic Circle acquires avocados.

In 1988 the actual international whale rescue effort was referred to as Operation Breakthrough. The magic of the movie results from over a dozen disparate characters being introduced and played to the hilt with little regards for their political leanings. Sure, some of the characters are tree huggers like Greenpeace advocate Drew Barrymore, and some are conservative to a fault like National Guard officer/pilot Dermot Mulroney yet by the endless progression of plot and character development all motivations become a level playing field of altruistic feeling for animals and ecology.

A veritable Shakespearean roll call of characters includes Tim Blake Nelson, John Krasinski, Ted Danson, Kathy Baker, Stephen Root, Vinessa Shaw and Kristen Bell. Imagine my surprise when revealed in the end credit roll two of my favorite characters turn out to be James LeGros and Rob Riggle as a couple of do-gooders with the strongest Minnesota accents north of Fargo.

All the events depicted in Big Miracle really happened and it’s a tribute to the time and era that the seemingly impossible was accomplished. Big Miracle is the first film I’ve seen this year that I can’t wait to see again.

– Michael Bergeron

Driving to the Galleria area hotel to meet and interview Dallas Robert has me thinking about the weather because it’s chilly outside (around 50 degrees). After talking to Roberts about his role in the outdoors adventure The Grey I’ll probably never complain about the cold again. Roberts starts by confirming the movie was shot on location in upper British Columbia at temperatures that hovered at times around the 40-degrees-below-zero mark.

Under the rugged direction of Joe Carnahan The Grey has a real Jack London vibe. You sense many things in this story of a handful of men who’ve survived a plane crash in the Arctic. One thing you sense is that at any moment anybody can die. In freezing weather they gather what few supplies they can and head for the tree line, all the while being chased by a pack of wolves.

Roberts acknowledges it’s good to be in Houston as he grew up not far from where we’re talking. “I went to Robert E. Lee High and Paul Revere Middle School, but things have changed. I don’t recognize anything except Taco Cabana,” Roberts laughs. “I call New York home but when someone asks me where I’m from I say Houston.” Roberts confides that his Dad tried to name his younger brother Houston. “He got Dallas past my Mom but she put the kybosh on Houston.”

“It was the coldest I’ve ever experienced on the planet,” Roberts says about the outdoor locations. “Negative 40, 60 miles an hour winds, and that’s when the sun came up. It was properly brutally cold.” Cranes would freeze and the cameras would freeze. The actors were driven in darkness to reach the locales by daylight, of which there was only six hours worth per day. “It was impossible to totally shield the actors from the cold not to mention the crew; they had icicle ears, we had permanent frost on our beards,” grins Roberts.

“Carnahan screened films for us at a local theater, films like Jaws, Touching the Void, Deliverance. It was watching movies and hanging out,” recalls Roberts. “There’s always a sense of camaraderie on location shoots but this was less about hotel lobbies and more bonding in snow cabs.”

Roberts admits that for the scene where he goes underwater he was wearing a rubber suit under his clothes and then close-ups and underwater shots were done on a soundstage back in Hollywood. “After the plane crash sequences were shot the rest of the film was pretty much filmed in chronological order. So as characters would die off the actors would wrap and leave the set. You really felt their departure in a real way.” The Grey opens wide this weekend.

– Michael Bergeron

You know how in the summer there seem to be one or maybe two movies a week that opens. It’s the opposite in January with at least a half-dozen titles premiering this week alone. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the underground films shot last week in my bedroom by the Free Food and Drug Administration.

• Miss Bala comes from Mexico fully armed. This import at first seems like a send up of beauty pageants, perhaps not unlike the 70s satire Smile or perhaps a more lamebrain version of Miss Congeniality. No chance as Miss Bala rapidly escalates into full blown armed conflict between drug gangs and DEA agents and corrupt government officials, all of them using Miss Bala for their own nefarious reasons. The title is a pun on the Miss Baja contest (bala translates as bullet).
• We Need To Talk About Kevin isn’t a friendly film. If you manage to slog through the narrative about a loose canon high school student who gets medieval on his classmates you’ll marvel at Tilda Swinton’s performance and the art direction but little else.
• Albert Nobbs has been a pet project of Glenn Close who performed the role in the early 80s off-Broadway. As helmed by Rodrigo Garcia Albert Nobbs gleams with harsh Dublin winter light, cold color schemes and dejected working class stiffs suffering under the thumb of class division. Albert Nobbs is a woman who passes as a man in order to earn a living wage. In fact she’s so immersed in her identity that she can’t remember having lived as a woman. Expect poignant emotional situations highlighted by Close and Janet McTeer’s performances.
• Black Swan plays as a midnight movie this weekend at the River Oaks Three. If you haven’t seen this dark thriller about a ballet dancer losing her mind you need to put it on the list.

– Michael Bergeron

The mind processes 3D films differently than regular films. Also the brain handles subtitled films in a different manner than films in one’s native language. Pina, a dance documentary by Win Wenders on Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater dance ensemble, unwinds in 3D and with subtitles.

“The brain and the body process images differently, it’s true,” Wenders tells Free Press Houston in a phone interview the morning after Pina is nominated for Best Documentary Picture. “Regular movement can be so close to dance.” Wenders was born in Dusseldorf, which is close to Wuppertal the home of Bausch’s Tanztheater. The project was in the pre-production stage in 2009 when Bausch passed away. At first Wenders wanted to abandon his labor of love. After all the planning and talk Bausch would never see any of the footage. But Wenders also realized the film would be a lasting tribute to his friend.

“The film was shot over the period of one year,” Wenders explains. Many of the early film tests showed the bodies in motion were blurred. At first the equipment was bulky. “We started out using these dinosaur cranes, but a year later the technology and equipment had evolved and we were shooing 3D with a Steadicam,” continues Wenders. Assembling a team of 3D experts and technicians Wenders experimented with different lenses and frame rates. Ideally Wenders found the best way to project the images would be to shoot at 48 or 50 frames-per-second and have the resulting film projected at the same rate. “It could happen but at this point the entire industry is locked into 24 frame projection and they’re not going to change for me. After all James Cameron proposed the same thing when he shot Avatar and they didn’t change for him.” Wenders used two cameras, the huge Sony HDC 1500 and as the shoot progressed the lighter experimental Sony HDC P1. Wenders utilized DigiPrime lenses with focal lengths of 10mm, 14mm and 20mm. “We actually shot 80-percent of the film with the 10mm lens which is the equivalent of a 35mm camera’s 28mm lens. That lens gives the viewer a sense of natural vision.”

At the beginning Wenders shot stage bound footage but a lightweight prototype 3D camera allowed him a new found sense of mobility. “It gives the film a feeling of time, of living and being in the city,” notes Wenders. Taking the dancers outside in Wuppertal, Wenders utilized the landscape and several scenes on the elevated train system, which Wenders notes was built in 1900.

Film fans familiar with world cinema know the lengthy filmography of Wenders. I ask him whether one of my favorite films, The American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund), will be released in blu-ray. “Yes,” says Wenders. “Criterion has released Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire in blu-ray, with upcoming plans for Alice in the Cities and American Friend.” Asking about Wender’s first film Summer in the City brings out a hearty laugh. “You’re opening old wounds. I was a young and naïve and didn’t clear rights for the music. There’re songs by Hendrix, The Kinks, obviously the Lovin’ Spoonful, Dylan; all of them combined would be impossible to clear rights and pay royalties so I’m afraid that film will never get a DVD release.” Pina 3D opens this weekend.

– Michael Bergeron

It’s remarkable enough when a person turns 100 years of age, but somewhat of an achievement in a capitalist society when a business entity celebrates its 100^th anniversary while still retaining the charm that brought them popularity in the first place. Universal Pictures is still cranking out the kind of entertainment, and by that I mean some occasionally excellent genre films, as when they were branded in 1912.

Okay, I wasn’t alive in 1912 despite what some may say. And after all, Coke is still around after being introduced in 1886 although its formula today consists of corn syrup in place of the few ounces of coca leaves per gallon of syrup that attracted its 19^th century fans. Movies on the other hand have wisely not diluted the formula, sometimes sophisticated and sometimes common denominator, that served them well in the first place.

By the way Universal isn’t the only studio celebrating a centenary. Paramount was actually founded first albeit in the same year. 20^th Century Fox was incorporated in 1935, the result of a merger of Fox (1915) and Twentieth Century (1933). Disney was distributed by various companies (Columbia, RKO, United Artists) starting in the late 20s and didn’t become a studio per se until after WWII. Warner Bros. was involved in various way in the movie industry from the turn of the century but officially opened their studio in 1918. Columbia Studios while founded under another name in 1919 became Columbia several years later and was most recently acquired by Sony in 1989. An excellent overview of Columbia in the 30s, at that time considered the bastard son of movie studios, can be found in Frank Capra’s bio The Name Over The Title.

We’re not even mentioning the studios that’ve fallen by the wayside, like MGM. But the scope of this article deals with Universal and in particular their effort in 2012 to restore a dozen of their classic titles.

The restoration of classics like All Quiet On The Western Front, Dracula, Frankenstein, and more recently Jaws are important because these are more reputable indications of our 20^th century state of being than atomic warfare, civil rights or the lack thereof, and ecological transformation. A quick glance at Universal’s release slate (on Wiki) shows a legacy that includes, in addition to the titles mentioned, Welles’ Touch of Evil, Hitchcock’s The Birds, von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives, To Kill A Mockingbird, Somewhere In Time, Weird Science, They Live, and need I add American Pie and Half Baked. Some of the Universal franchises include Ma and Pa Kettle, Francis the Mule (a personal favorite as the mule evolved into Mr. Ed from the same director Arthur Lubin), Jaws, Airport, and currently The Fast and Furious, and The Bourne Identity, which later this year gets a reboot with Jeremy Renner rather than Matt Damon.

And let’s get stoked on the Universal monsters, a classic line-up that began with Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, and The Wolfman and continued until the mid-50s with The Creature From The Black Lagoon. Another Universal series, Abbott & Costello combined a handful of those monsters although more recently the same formula was considered a failure when the monsters reunited for Van Helsing, a film maligned perhaps unfairly because the CGI effects were rushed for a release date rather than for an artistic vision. If I was a Universal executive with the power of greenlight I would petition immediately for a monsters reboot that included vampires, werewolves, monsters and creatures with Larry the Cable Guy.

– Michael Bergeron

When The Divide opens tonight in Houston it’s but the second film produced by Ross Dinerstein opening today at midnight. In addition to The Divide (playing midnight this weekend at the River Oaks Three) Dinerstein will be premiering The Pact as a midnight movie at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

While The Divide, a post apocalyptic thriller, and The Pact a modern tale of ghostly horror adapted from director Nicholas McCarthy’s short by the same title, skew traditional genre conventions Dinerstein tells Free Press Houston that his credits include mainstream titles as well, like Powder Blue (2008) and the poker tournament comedy The Grand (2007). “I’ve had a diverse career,” Dinerstein says in a phone interview.

Dinerstein was born in Houston, grew up in the Piney Point Village area and attended Kinkaid. “I got out of college in Nashville (Vanderbilt University) and headed straight to Hollywood.” Dinerstein rapidly landed a job with Miramax in their acquisitions department. “I told them that I’d been reading every issue of Variety while in school. I was working on the best indie films, they received something like 17 award nominations the first year I worked there” After a prolific decade in the film industry Dinerstein offers sage wisdom to neophyte filmmakers.

“Make sure your movie has a universal theme,” Dinerstein advises. “At the end of the day how does your audience relate to your movie?”

The Divide took Dinerstein two years to get made. The Divide revolves around nine strangers who’ve come together in a basement after an ambiguous nuclear attack. “It’s a post-apocalyptic Lord of the Flies,” adds Dinerstein. “It’s a contained thriller that we take to the next level.”

Indeed, The Divide examines isolation as the survivors barricade themselves inside their bunker. Before long mysterious soldiers wearing hazmat suits invade their sanctuary. After repelling these invaders the group starts to dwindle and eventually human barriers break down into barbarism. Michael Biehn and Lauren German star, direction by Xavier Gens and special make-up effects by Stephen Kostanski.

– Michael Bergeron

It’s one of those weeks where there’s at least nine films opening up in Houston. Here’s a rundown on a handful of titles.

• The Viral Factor is a high octane Hong Kong crime thriller from director Dante Lam. The plot revolves around one brother, an Interpol style cop, and his efforts to track down his brother who’s a master criminal. Playing exclusively at the AMC Studio 30.
• Full Metal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos is a feature adaptation of the Japanese anime cartoon series from the Bones animation studio. There’s alchemy, bureaucratic exploitation and a philosopher’s stone involved. Playing exclusively at the Alamo Drafthouse West Oaks for a week, and moves to the Studio Grill on February 1.
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close may be emotionally manipulative but in a way that’s not aggrandizing. Occasional forced perspective optical points of view highlight this 9/11 story with a great cast that includes Sandra Bullock and Max von Sydow. Thomas Horn stars as a kid who’s equal parts sympathetic and obnoxious. Opens wide.
• Red Tails has great visual effects that aid the story of The Tuskegee Airmen in WWII. Produced by George Lucas, opening wide.
• Tyrannasour offers the directorial debut of actor Paddy Considine with a gritty British drama. Peter Mullen, Olivia Colman and Eddy Marsan star. Exclusively at the Sundance Cinemas Houston.
• This Is Not A Film is a film about Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panani, currently under house arrest, and his oppression under the current government. The film, which is part of the Iranian Film Festival at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, was surreptitously shot and smuggled out of Iran. This Is Not A Film plays 1/21 (7 pm.) and 1/29 (5 pm.).

– Michael Bergeron