Maybe I’m just desperately continuing a theme here after last weekend, but I found something similar in The Tracey Fragments to the whole Alice thing. I only really began to realise another side to “Alice in Wonderland” last week when somebody was talking about how old the Disney movie is now and how wild it must’ve seemed at the time of its release considering even now, in the wacky world in which we live, it’s still pretty wacky. I said, it’s true, in a world where we never quite know what’s going to explode next, where we never quite seem to be able to do the right thing, we kind of live in Wonderland now, and our response to Carroll’s creation is sort of doomed to be jaded – you can pause for a moment with all the technology, information and possibility around you and almost go mad; so it’s better to be, well, a little numb to it.

For teenagers, of course, it’s always been this way. So many options. Right and wrong. Good or bad. Cool or not. Even their bodies are betraying them inside and out. One could argue that the fragmented images on the screen here are like a broken looking-glass, the cinema screen often called a mirror to the audience; that the varying sizes of images on the screen are like Alice’s changes in size. Tracey has parents, teachers, school peers and even a psychotherapist – people who are meant to help her cope in this wonderland, yet like all Alice’s acquaintances, none of them do squat for her. In the end, it’s she who has to find out herself, how “No one can stop me,” she says at the end; “No one can make me stand still.” She kinda becomes a superhero in that moment – it reminded me of the, “Why aren’t my hands shaking?” scene in The Brave One.

Like Sofia Coppola’s films outside of The Virgin Suicides, it’s probably a film whose success in portraying the very adolescent nature of adolescence is actually its biggest problem. The fragmented screen gimmick seems like just that at first but in the end it’s used cleverly enough to make it not just a gimmick – at times it captures stuff the way I always believe cinema should capture stuff better than any other format could … it’s the ultimate extension of what’s grown from split-screen to Mike Figgis’ Timecode to TV’s 24 etc, etc. But ultimately its success is in portraying the adolescent state of mind … and I just don’t know how fun a thing that is to spend even the movie’s admirable 80-minute runtime with. I discovered while reading about the movie online that all the shot footage for the movie was actually released via BitTorrent last year for people to make their own creations with it. It might be quite the amazing DVD when it emerges. So many possibilities. Like another review I read recently said, maybe someone will crack the code and make this as good a movie as it deserves to be.

“If it’s not on camera, it’s like it never happened …. right?”

It sounded a little dodgy and I certainly didn’t want to be too hasty about being excited about this latest “official” installment in the Romero Dead series after Land (which I’ve watched most of again recently … in short, it really didn’t warrant a new review, it’s pretty unremarkable) ... but at the same time I kind of couldn’t help myself. Even though this mockumentary horror thing has been done almost to death now since Blair Witch leading through to Cloverfield, bringing the technique to the Dead series sounded pretty fascinating, and any time Romero returns to this series it’s exciting, as they’re always among the most important horror movies, if not always quite the best.

Overall, it works. While it’s not quite the “zombies in a mall” of the masterful Dawn, the social commentary here (though perhaps a little obvious: just about anyone who documents the dreary details of their life in a blog or who has neglected to truly experience a vacation because they were behind a camera the whole time will understand what it’s saying well enough) is certainly more pointed than that in Land.

It gets a little dull towards the end, the whole thing just isn’t as awash with the message as Dawn was, and it frequently becomes “just another teen horror movie”. But the end (“Are we really worth saving? You tell me.”) sends you out with genuine chills running down your spine. It’s in your face and feels like a hammer on the head, but it does the job of “implicating the audience” a million times better than, for example, Funny Games U.S.. There is some humour to counter this depressing stuff, however: I don’t think I’ve laughed more this year than I did over the “Hello, I’m Samuel” sign

I have some catching up to do so the next reviews might seem rushed, sorry bout that … I’m just gonna tidy up what I’ve already written and post.

Score 3 for the “movies I almost saw on my birthday this year but didn’t, thank god!” field lol. And this is the one that I really thought couldn’t fail for me. A movie like this should have my eyes unable to look away at all times, and frankly, this one didn’t achieve that at all. It rarely rises above its basic concept – War of the Worlds meets Blair Witch (or “there’s a visual effect loose in Manhattan and all I have is this lousy handycam!”). The only moderate surprise was Lizzy Caplan (Janis Ian from Mean Girls), who at first I thought was Zooey Deschanel’s sister. I was expecting a movie where if we saw the monster at all it would only be at the end; I think (ed.: hmm, I don’t know what I think, I left that sentence unfinished when I left off writing a week ago and I don’t know how it was gonna end LOL).

Its technical qualities lift it above most of what’s been released so far this year, though of course that isn’t saying much. The “wiping the tape” subplot is kind of as cute as it is hokey and leads to an ending that can’t fail to tug at the heartstrings. The whole message of the movie is clearly appreciate what you’ve got because it could all be gone tomorrow but I can’t help but think it could’ve been delivered better – dare I say it even, without the whole video gimmick that makes it remotely unique. I’d be amazed and depressed by the audience member who relates or so much as gives a damn about the characters here; and even if you were to start out with the blindest faith in them, the writer breaks the fourth wall horribly with misplaced humour like the Superman/Garfield dialogue, it’s just beyond hideously done. Even the second port of call, the visuals, isn’t really a department you can get too excited in – the monster itself is quite embarassingly reminiscent of the devil thing that appeared in the Season One finale of Torchwood. It’s probably cool to watch with a frenzied audience … but you know my feelings on that way of judging a movie’s true quality.