Chronicle

What saddens me about CHRONICLE is that they needed someone else there in the editing room. Not where the actual film-editing takes place, but where the director needed someone whispering in his ear where he's going too far, isn't going far enough, when something is working. For, the first hour and a half or so of CHRONICLE is a great movie, a low-burner placidity and small town sensibility driven into the concept of telekinesis. Taking tedium, and altering it with the acquired telekinesis does little but add a gloss on some fine storytelling. It's clear that the writer-director twenty year olds understand a certain aspect of how teenaged boys talk to each other, dream, and grow angry in the 21st century, and through glossed-up scenes of special effects, they exclusively tap into that aspect. Then it all falls apart, like a mess, like CARRIE (a film to which it is most similar in theme and in downfall). For CHRONICLE falls into a trap of what it should be, and not what it is, replacing real emotions and actions and ideas for what is, sadly, tragically, a cliché. A disappointment, and a shame, but I'm not totally downtrodden, for I can just imagine what these filmmakers could do next time.

★★ out of Five