HOLY SHIT!

REVIEW: ANNA

An interesting future promises a specialized group of individuals called "memory detectives" who possess the strange ability to enter memories of their subjects. Much like psychics, these detectives, hailing from a company called Mindscape, are used in investigations on behalf of law enforcement to search memories of the repressed or the suspect to determine absolute truth. 

John Washington (Mark Strong, Zero Dark Thirty) plays one of these detectives, whose memory-entering abilities are high-watermark. Working under the gentle persuasion of his mentor, Sebastian (Brian Cox, Manhunter), John is tasked with investigating a teenage girl named Anna (Taissa Farmiga, that "American Horror Story" nonsense), who has opted to stop eating following a traumatic event, to determine if the girl is a genuine victim...or a sociopath with a penchant for mind games. 

Soon after meeting her and entering her memories for the first time, which include her witness to a pair of dysfunctional parents immersing in alcoholism, abuse, and betrayal, John gets sucked into a mystery involving a nasty accident at Anna's house - her father is convinced Anna is responsible and wants to commit her to an institution, but Anna begs John to look beyond the accusations against her and search for the real truth.

Anna has an interesting premise and is competently handled. Despite being a mishmash of "Millennium," The Cell, Inception, and the tiniest bit of Lolita, for extra hot/wrongness, it all comes off as rather fresh and unique. It's almost surreal watching Strong stand by in Anna's collection of memories and bearing witness to the events as they unfold in her mind, and then later watching him interact with characters and ask them questions that have directly to do with the memories he experienced quite second-hand.

Director Jorge Dorado shines in his first feature film and first spoken-English project, and he's collected a classy cast for the honor. Mark Strong doesn't often carry the lead role, and his turn as John makes you wonder why. He's pretty great, in this and in everything he does. Brian Cox's screen time is unfortunately limited, but when he's on screen, he does his Brian Cox thing, which is: be awesome. Realistically, though, this is Taissa Farmiga's show. Being that she's someone you're not supposed to fully trust, she does a great job of riding that line between victim and psycho.

Like many other films involving a haunted protagonist, Strong's insistence on helping Anna has less to do with his personal involvement with her (at least at first) and more to do with the tragedy that seems to have befallen someone very close to him, glimpses of which we're provided, and only fleetingly at first until the film approaches its conclusion. Yeah, the whole "saving a stranger = saving my child/wife/whomever" has been done before, but like I always say: do something a hundred times and I'm cool with it, so long as you do it well. Dorado and Strong do it quite well.

The ending will likely generate controversy among its viewers. Many will ask, "That's it?" But there's more going on than some cheap twist out of left field. It's less about "how?" and more about "why?" Both Anna and Anna ask that age-old question: What is reality? Are memories of the mind real? They are, after all, only as accurate as the mind in which they exist is stable. Are they more or less real if they exist within a sound mind versus one of a sociopath, or a victim repressing and/or manipulating them to make them more bearable? And if memory has the power to obscure the truth, then what is truth?

And, simply put, what good is it?

Anna hits video August 5.

CRAPPYPASTA: WEIRD SMILING CREATURE

Once my mom visited to her far cousin (I mean her mother”s cousin have her daughter named cecil) told her a story. One night, Cecil go out to wait her husband from his work.A handsome american boy with black suit, a black long pants, a shiny shoes and a neck tie aproach her. Walking to north. “hey, that’s the wrong way this is the right way”.The man look at her and smile so big like his entire face covered with his big teeth.Cecil run so fast as she can. she wouldn’t look at her back while she running for her fear.Once his husband arrived, she take her to the hospital and because of her trauma, she been in hospital in months but it is long time ago.

So if you visited our country and discover our creepy native creatures, surely you run in fright!!!

Haha, man. Crappypasta...my favorite thing.

WHATEVER HAPPENS...

...don't scream.

REVIEW: KILLER LEGENDS

Co-writer/co-director Joshua Zeman took an interesting approach with his previous documentary, Cropsey. What is ultimately a true-crime examination of a series of child murderers that occurred in Staten Island, New York, actually began with a brief rumination on the idea of urban legends and how real-life monsters become mythical ones. This idea of investigating urban legends must've sat well with him, for he has returned with Killer Legends, a documentary that examines the origins of four of the most infamous urban legends in popular culture. Zeman posits that every urban legend is based on "some sort of truth," and our desire to believe these legends allows us to "pull back the curtain" on what scares us most: reality. This approach is taken as each popular legend is recounted and its real-life inspirations are analyzed.  

I have always been incredibly intrigued by urban legends – their origins, their power to spread from person to person like something contagious, as well as the stories themselves. I recall, when having watched the pretty terrible Urban Legend in my youth, wishing that the fancy leather-bound book one character looks through in the film, called simply "Urban Legends," both existed and sat on my shelf. There was something that seemed especially dangerous about those particular tales – they weren't just ghost or murder stories. They achieved a real power to them because many people who told them honestly believed they had happened to someone close to them. 

Though that fancy schmancy book of urban legends filled with classy pencil-sketch drawings may never exist, Killer Legends is a phenomenal substitute. Well realized and very well executed, urban legends of the "hook man," the "candy man," the "murdered babysitter," and motherfuckin' "killer clowns" are each explored as in-depth as the doc's running time would allow. Though certain legends have more time dedicated to them than others, the filmmakers deserve accolades for having put such effort into each investigation. We hear so often growing up, and see in films when one character tells a camp-fire story, some of which are featured in Killer Legends, only for the punchline to be a cheesy fake scare punctuated with proclamations that the storyteller's yarn never happened - that it was the stuff of fiction.

Not true. And that actually kind of surprised me. For so long we've been reassured by our parents and teachers that such stories we exchanged on the playground never happened, and we shouldn't worry. I suppose it was "okay" for them to lie to us at that age, in favor of letting us have a few more years' worth of peaceful nights before we found out that, yeah, this shit actually happened, and happens, and will happen.

The doc is propelled by onscreen hosts Zeman and Rachel Miller, but interviews with specialists, historians, and the real people who were local to the various crimes being examined also share their insights, some of them more surprising than others. Also bolstering the theme of life's infatuation with the dark are the assembly of movie clips from such titles as Halloween, Candyman, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, and oh yeah, Stephen King's IT.

Killer Legends has a lot to offer, and to many kinds of viewers. Students of true crime, folklore, psychology, and the casual horror fan – the doc will ably provide a wealth of entertainment, information, and at times even poignancy, depending on what you want to get from it. I'd love for Joshua Zeman to consider this documentary as the first in a series in which he examines handfuls of urban legends at a time. This kind of attempt has been done before, in cheesy shows like "Fact of Fiction" or the recent series "Urban Legends," but not with this kind of serious, investigative, or philosophical approach.

It's now available on DVD from Breaking Glass Pictures.

PLEASE, HAVE A...SHEEP?

VIDEO: THE PORTRAITS