Guest Movie Review: The Apparition

The Twilight film series will finally be coming to a close this fall, and with it the free rides of many of the young actors and actresses who made names for themselves in their roles in the franchise. Series stars Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner have already left a trail of side projects trying to prove their versatility, with varying degrees of success. And nobody can deny Anna Kendrick’s rise to prominence with an Academy Award nomination for Up in the Air, plus starring roles in 50/50, ParaNorman and the upcoming Pitch Perfect. Even Kellan Lutz will have a chance to break out of the Twilight cage when he stars in the announced Tarzan movie. But it is the future career of series favorite Ashley Greene that seems to be in question. Besides appearing in a few little-seen Indies, Greene has yet to make a name for herself outside of the realm of vampires and werewolves. So naturally her first widely-released starring role comes in a movie about poltergeists. Stardom will have to wait a bit longer, because Greene won't be reaping any benefits from The Apparition, by first-time director Todd Lincoln. Lincoln also wrote the screenplay, which is partially based on the Philip Experiment; a real-life attempt in the 1970’s to manifest an imaginary spirit to show that it was an unexplained ability of the human mind to project spirits - essentially, that ghosts only exist because we want them to. A similar experiment starts off the film, as a trio of college students attempts their own supercharged version and in doing so seem to create a monstrous spirit with murder on its mind. Not long after, Ashley (Greene) and Ben (Sebastian Stan) begin to experience strange happenings in their new home. When things go from bad to worse, Ashley learns that Ben had been part of the project, and they team up with the only other survivor of the experiment to try and send this paranormal entity back to the place it escaped. If you watched the trailer, you might wonder where all the “You believe, you die” stuff comes into play; you know, the only part of what we were shown that was the least bit different from standard paranormal fare. Well, Lincoln apparently decided to scrap that angle - he even has his characters state that the ghost haunting our characters is indeed from another dimension and not our minds at all. So it’s just another poltergeist. Fantastic. Lincoln also eliminates much of the “science” in his experimentation, tossing out ideas for combating a spirit that seem to operated on the same principle playing a record backwards to discover satanic messages. In his life, Lincoln obviously has never heard of the scientific method, and much of his screenplay feels more comfortable trying (unsuccessfully) to scare the audience than explaining anything. In fact, he actually cheats, blaming the “illogical” and “unpredictable” attacks on the ghost itself and not his shoddy script. If you want to go the pseudo-science route in telling a story, I’d appreciate it if you actually bothered to use some science in the final product. Otherwise, why bother? The acting is nothing special, but one can’t help but notice the not-so subtle attempts to drag in the Twilight crowd. Greene is an obvious example. She’s beautiful, occasionally runs around in her underwear and in a script full of blatantly bad and clichéd dialogue, manages to hold her own competently enough. I’m sure there are those hoping she can graduate from the “Scream Queen” role, but for the time being she is at least well suited to it. The other bait seems to be the careful deliberation in turning Sebastian Stan into a poor man’s Robert Pattinson. Everything is there: the carefully-sculpted hair, the scruffy, shaped jaw line, the constantly intense eyes. Stan even shares Pattinson’s acting style, meaning you’re going to spend most of the film wondering why he looks so familiar when you ought to be paying attention to anything that happens to be going on. Tom Felton (Harry Potter’s Draco Malfoy) gets to be British again, which is the best thing I can say about his otherwise unremarkable performance. The guy who got to utter one of the best lines in last year’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes is merely here for exposition, and to die quickly. Nobody ever expected that this would be an “acting” movie, but considering it does little else well, the acting needed to step up and take control. Of course, all this would be moot if the film actually bothered to scare its audience. Even a movie substandard in every other way can make up a lot of ground by properly messing with your head and keeping you on the edge of your seat. But Lincoln, who has never created a show of this size, seems lost most of the time. His narrative is a mess; his story makes no sense, and while he occasionally strikes upon a moment (such as one featuring a neighbor’s child) that at least surprises the audience, he cannot maintain that focus, so everything once again descends into drudgery. The movie never takes advantage of its good ideas, so the whole experience feels like one long derivative college film exercise. We’re getting to that time of the year where horror becomes more prevalent, the transition of the summer blockbuster season to more moderate, subtle filmmaking. It also starts Halloween season, which means that The Apparition is just the first in a wide dispersal of scare-oriented movies designed to put butts in the seats in a cheap, efficient manner. Unfortunately, we're off to a rotten start: this was probably the worst horror movie I’ve ever seen - certainly it's in the running for the worst movie of 2012. With The Possession coming out next week and more seemingly superior titles on the horizon, there’s no reason to waste two hours and catch this on the big screen. Even if you’re consumed by the need to witness a Hollywood scary movie, you can do better than what Todd Lincoln has deemed “good enough.” Skip it at all costs. John C. Anderson is a freelance writer and film enthusiast living in Boston. For all his latest movie reviews, check out Hello, Mr. Anderson.

From the Archives: DC Comics Classics Library

DC Comics Classics LibraryThe Legion of Super-Heroes: The Life and Death of Ferro LadJim Shooter (script)Curt Swan (art)Superman: Kryptonite NevermoreDenny O'Neil (script)Curt Swan (art)DC Comics, 2009The most common misconception about comic books is that they’re an entirely static medium – the same heroes keep fighting the same villains, Batman foils the Joker time after time, and nothing fundamentally changes.Like most misconceptions, this is almost completely true – but the ‘almost’ contains a world of possibilities! In the seventy years they’ve been around, American superhero comics have attracted a small army of intensely creative people, and many of them have butted their heads against the conformity (fans would say mythology) of the industry. And there’ve been victories, some more lasting than others: the vast backstory that grew up over forty years around the character of Superman, for instance, although drastically simplified in the 1980s, has managed to regrow, whereas the 1970s transformation of Batman from a happy-go-lucky crime-buster to the grim avenger of his original conception is now permanently enshrined.The point is: writers, artists, enthusiasts achieved those changes and many more like them, and the artistic urge they felt to do so is every bit as legitimate as the one felt by Picasso or Bergman. Well-known comic characters like Superman, Batman, or Spider-Man are owned by comic companies, so the question is never ‘can a writer effect a permanent change?’ but rather ‘how creatively does the writer explore the temporary change he creates?’DC Comics recently began a series of hardcover reprints under the collective name of DC Comics Classics Library, to honor the best of these temporary creative runs. It’s an excellent and long-overdue concept, and it’s gratifying that DC has decided to make the books’ physical quality match the high caliber of the issues they reprint. These are slim, sturdy hardcovers with excellent bindings and a much less excitable paper-stock than, for instance, that used in DC’s Archives editions (the pages no longer blindingly reflect any light shone upon them, for instance – always a helpful feature in a book).In The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Life and Death of Ferro Lad, which collects Adventure Comics #346, 347, 352-355, and 357 (from 1966 and 1967), we are treated once again to the story cooked up by a 13-year-old Jim Shooter, of a masked young hero, Ferro Lad, who joins the 31^st Century super-team of the title, shares a few adventures with them, and then sacrifices his life to save the galaxy from a threat even the Legion couldn’t defeat. In the death-and-more-death aftermath of the Marvel Comics ‘80s, this may seem like a slight distinction – but in the ‘60s it had never been done before. Fans were stunned, and the entire comics genre was given a new benchmark of realism.Superman: Kryptonite Nevermore collects issues 233-238 and 240-242 of that character’s title, written in 1971 by Denny O’Neil, who was openly impatient with Superman’s near-omnipotence and the dramatic limitations placed on any character who could, as O’Neil put it, “destroy a galaxy by listening hard.” He set out to lessen the Man of Steel’s power – ironically, by first eliminating one of the character’s only weaknesses: a rogue chemical reaction de-toxifies every piece of kryptonite on Earth (in a classic sequence draw by stalwart Curt Swan, Superman demonstrates his new invulnerability in a merrily direct way).These Classics Library editions are something different from DC Coimics’ ongoing Archives project: they jump around in the titles and issue numbers they reprint, in order to highlight currents of outstanding creativity in what is, after all, a deadline-driven business. It’s a great new series, and future volumes are anticipated with glee. Steve Donoghue

From the Archives: Buffalo in the House

A Buffalo in the House, The Extraordinary story of Charlie and His FamilyR. D. RosenRandom House, 2007Now out in paperback is R.D. Rosen’s entertaining and enormously moving A Buffalo in the House, the story of how Veryl Goodnight and her husband Roger Brooks adopted a buffalo calf, named him Charlie, and made him a member of their bustling Santa Fe home. Charlie grows up (very quickly – two pounds a day!) to display a quiet good humor that is neither human nor canine nor feline but distinctly his own, and Rosen captures perfectly all the ways animals insinuate themselves into our hearts, as in a wrenching scene in which Charlie takes sick:

It was beginning to feel as if there was a glass partition between them [Charlie and Roger], the way there is between the healthy and the sick. Though the ill remain like us in every way but their illness, they inhabit a different world, fragile and unreliable, separated from others by the immediacy of their pain and fear. To dissipate some of the strangeness, humans can acknowledge it in words. Roger and Charlie seemed to have reached the limits of their extraordinary intimacy. Moreover, Charlie wouldn’t touch his food, which meant Roger couldn’t give him the antibiotics Dr. Callan had prescribed. In his stall, Charlie lowered his head and started eating dirt. It broke Roger’s heart.

The story of how one amazing family adapts to this one-ton orphan in their midst is just one strand of this entirely satisfying book. Veryl Goodnight is a descendant of Charles and Mary Ann Goodnight, who a century earlier had fought to preserve the last of the buffalo from extinction, and Rosen therefore spends a good amount of time studying not only the history of mankind’s interaction with buffalo in America but also the ongoing attempts at buffalo conservation – attempts Roger joins in, after Charlie’s death:

As he watched the proceedings on the other side of the river [buffalo, across the Yellowstone River in Yellowstone National Park], Roger felt a brief surge of relief. The sight of the buffalo, the progeny of those few animals who had escaped through the cracks of a nightmare 130 years before, delivered him a moment from his mourning. Charlie had walked into his life, told his story, and then disappeared, but the story, and these buffalo, were still alive, and the gift was still in motion.

Those of you who missed Buffalo in the House when it was published last year should investigate it today; it’s an urgently memorable reading experience.