Taylor Ri'chard/Zach Davis' THE FINAL PROJECT: the latest found-footage fumble

God damn -- they just keep on a comin', these nothing-new-under-the-sun, hand-held, found-footage exercises that began 17 years ago with The Blair Witch Project. With the exception of the terrific, engaging, funny, creepy and surprising Afflicted, there has barely been a movie in this new genre worth its salt, including that original boring and pretty awful marketing success, Blair Witch. Now arrives a film that marks the biggest waste of time TrustMovies has spent viewing both this year and last (maybe longer, too): THE FINAL PROJECT, the title of which comes via the video project a group of supposed college kids (they look a lot older) must deliver to their professor in order to get a passing grade. (The best thing about the film is its smart poster art, shown above.)

As directed, co-produced and co-written by newcomer Taylor Ri'chard (shown at left) and co-written/co-produced by Zach Davis (also a newcomer), the film begins with some barely understandable babblings (due to perhaps deliberately crummy sound) from a shadowy figure wondering why these kids would deliberately go into a known-to-be-haunted house. As Austin Powers might say, "Oh, come on!"

All too soon we realize that the sound is not the only thing sub-standard here. The visuals are even worse.  And both remain so throughout. I still do not quite understand why the filmmakers who dabble in this fairly new genre insist on providing some of the worst dialog currently going -- crammed with unsubtle exposition and attempting "realism" before art or entertainment.

These found footage "epics" desperately need characters with a trace of intelligence and wit, so that they can mouth some dialog that's fun and clever for a change, rather than the supposedly "realistic" but uber-tiresome stuff that comes out of the mouths of these cretins. The difference between the characters (their concerns and their dialog) in a joy like Paper Towns or the formerly mentioned Afflicted and the kids seen and heard here gives us the difference between a real movie and a big, fat waste of time.

Worse yet: So little happens for such a long while that audiences are likely to tune out well before the first scare (a comic one) arrives at the 49-minute point.  There's another scary scare at the 69-minute point, if you're still around. The entire film lasts only 79 minutes, with an extra full minute or more devoted to a supposedly frightening scratching sound on the soundtrack while the screen is black -- then appears a visual of a final newspaper article about disappeared students. All this extra nonsense allows the movie to reach its requisite 80-odd-minute running time.

Not a scene in the film has any originality; it's all been-there/done-that -- from playing the game of "Never-have-I-ever" and the inevitable sound of things that go bump in the night to dialog like "Mama, don't worry. Nuthin's gonna happen" and "We're gonna get outta here! It's gonna be all right!" If we are told -- and you can bet we are -- about an apparition in a white dress, you can be sure we'll see her eventually (as in the window above). Some of the other things we hear about, we don't see -- Civil War soldiers, for instance -- but as the budget here is miniscule, we are not surprised.

For awhile, the movie appears as though it might be more a simple murder mystery than anything to do with occult.  But so poorly made is the film that you can't be certain this was an intentional red herring on the filmmakers' part or the result of sheer laziness and lack of talent. The acting, from all concerned, is only as good as the dialog and characteri-zations make possible. The most interesting performance comes from Arin Jones (shown center, below, and three photos above), as the movie's most mysterious presence.

The surprising thing about The Final Project, however, is that it comes from the distributor, CAVU Pictures. CAVU releases a diverse slate -- from art films (Sunset Edge) to documentaries (The Real Dirt on Farmer John) to genre movie (Lucky Bastard). What unites these is their quality and originality. So I don't know quite what to make of this company's latest, well..., "surprise."

In any case, the movie opens this Friday, February 12, in Houston and Atlanta, and the following Friday, February 19, in Broussard, Louisiana, and on March 4 in New York and Los Angeles, and then expands nationwide. You can view all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters by clicking here. 

Whew! Robert Nathan's LUCKY BASTARD is one hot found-footage/porn-thriller/mockumentary

As found-footage/porn-thriller/mockumentaries go (and, yes, this is the first of this kind of genre mashh-up we've seen), LUCKY BASTARD -- the funny, nasty, scary, and a little too believable movie from first-time director Robert Nathan (better known for writing and producing successful television), who co-wrote his film with Lukas Kendall -- is the sui generis find of the month, maybe the whole year. It grabs you from first frame onwards, has a cool surprise immediately in store, then becomes, by turns, humorous, satiric, ugly, scary and very suspenseful.

Misters Nathan (shown at right) and Kendall (below) appear to know a bit about the porn business (or have watched the right movies to learn) and so they manage to both send it up and take it into a realm we've not yet seen on screen. The movie never loses that faint, sometimes rather heavy, scent of the sewer as it moves along (which, given the kind of climate in which most pornography is produced, seems fair enough), even as it implicates viewers from beginning to end in our own desire to watch something forbidden, sexy and transgressive.

Yet it also succeeds rather well in all of the genres it jumps: the satire and comedy of mockumentary, the thrills and suspense that all good what'll-happen-next? movies provide, and maybe just a tad less so in that lately overused found-footage area (even though there are many hidden cameras in the home used for porno shoots and reality shows in which the movie-within-a-movie is shot, you may still question how certain filmed sequences came into being). But that last genre turns out to be the least of it. Most viewers will appreciate Lucky Bastard purely as a hot little porn thriller-cum-mockumentary movie.

Nathan and his crew have cast the film quite well, too. Every last actor seems both real and entertaining as they go through their paces: fucking, filming, and finally becoming victims. (The film begins at its end, with the police arriving on the scene, and then goes back in time, so you'll pretty much know what you're in for from the outset.)

The story here tells of the Lucky Bastard porno web site, in which each month one paying member on the site is chosen to have actual sex, filmed of course, with its triple XXX star, Ashley Saint (a very good job by Betsy Rue, shown above). This month's "winner" (nicely portrayed in slow-burning degrees of disintegration by Jay Paulson, below), is a young man named "Dave," who seems to understand the importance of being Ernest.

The crew and other actors are well delineated by performers who both look and seem "real" while adding that extra kick that good actors always provide. These include Catherine Annette (below, right) as an up-and-coming, would-be porno star; Lee Kholafai (at right, two photo below) as a current hunk on the porno circuit; Chris Wylde as the goofy cinematopgrapher; and Lanny Joon, and the good-guy jack-of-all-trades on the set. They all play decent and sometimes rather charming characters, so you'll miss them as they begin to disappear.

The film's best performance belongs to actor Don McManus (above, left) as the porn director and owner of the web site, whose avarice and smarts combine to make this guy a user of remarkable skills. He may be the one character you'll feel gets what he deserves. The others serve as rather sad bystanders, accidental victims of the kind of surrogate sex that our society so skillfully serves up.

Lucky Bastard may leave a distinctly sour after-taste in your mouth, but it's a very well made piece of dark, nasty entertainment. The movie -- from CAVU Pictures and running 94 minutes -- opens this Friday, February 14 (gosh, for Valentine's Day!) New York City at the Cinema Village and  and then in Los Angeles on March 7 at Laemmle's NoHo 7.

Note: opening weekend personal appearances at the Cinema Village will include:  Friday,  Feb. 14 at 7:15 with filmmaker Robert Nathan & executive producer/co-writer Lukas Kendall;  Friday, Feb. 14 at 9:30, introduction by filmmakers;  Saturday, Feb. 15 at 5:00 & 7:15 - with filmmaker Robert Nathan & executive producer/co-writer Lukas Kendall; Saturday, Feb. 15 at 9:30 - introduction by filmmakers; and  Sunday, Feb. 16 at 5:00 & 7:15 - w/ filmmaker Robert Nathan.

Sebastián Cordero's EUROPA REPORT-- yet another found-footage space movie

First the good stuff: EUROPA REPORT, the new film from Sebastián Cordero (Rage and Chronicles), boasts a classy cast, a compact running time, and looks very good -- with a technical sheen and prowess that made this particular civilian sit up and take notice. Once notice was taken, however, a kind of boredom soon set in and TrustMovies had to pinch himself occasionally in order to stay awake. This is yet another in the found-footage, space-travel, would-be-documentary genre -- of which Apollo 18 may have been the most recent (and, in fact, a bit better) example.

Those of you old enough to recall George Pal's Destination Moon, another technically astute (for its time) sci-fi movie, may understand what I'm getting at here. We don't have to have monsters in our mission-to-Mars, Jupiter or the moon movies, but golly, they do help ward off the sleepies that sometimes arise from an emphasis on the technical. And -- spoiler ahead -- Europa Report even includes its own "creature," though Señor Cordero (shown at right, in black) and his screenwriter Philip Gelatt make us wait until the final few minutes to even get a glimpse of it.

Europa Report is certainly classier overall that any other "found footage" movie in any genre that I have seen, and its emphasis on sacrifice and the love for their chosen field that at least some of the crew (above, with Daniel Wu shown center), as well as those in charge back home on earth (Embeth Davidtz, below) exhibit goes a certain distance in making the movie a bit more moving than others in this genre. (Though it doesn't come close to the emotion that Brian De Palma managed to wring from the ending of his under-rated Mission to Mars.)

We do get this deeper sense of purpose from characters such as Dr. Petrovna (played by Karolina Wydra, below).

We might also get something deeper, if we knew more about him, from the slightly distur-bed Andrei Blok, played by Michael Nyqvist, shown at left, the very good Swedish actor best known as the journalist from the original Dragon Tattoo series, who is now cropping up in American films of the good variety (Disconnect), the so-so (Abduction) and the way over-blown (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol).

Then there are the other crew members like the two guys (Christian Camargo, above, and Sharlto Copley, below), whose distinguishing features are "family" and "jokiness." When the crew begins, one by one, to leave us, we'd like to be able to feel something more than the usual, Who's next? This is difficult when we know so little about them.

The crew member we most identify with is probably the pilot (that fine Romanian actress Anamaria Marinca, below, of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and Storm) who sticks to her guns and by virtue of sheer specificity and strength (we know no more about her than we do anyone else) impresses us. Granted, it is difficult in only 90 minutes to render anything approaching depth-of-character in a space/sci-fi movie, but this task would seem not to have been important on the agenda of the filmmakers.

Consequently, the film ends up a relatively smart mix of talking heads, would-be found-footage and sci-fi mockumentary -- without a lick of humor. It could have been a lot worse, but with real artists in command, it also might have been thrilling, meaningful, moving.

Oh, yes -- something should be said about the heavy-duty, ramped-up musical score. Found-footage now comes with its own musical score? Hmmm. Well, some audiences will fall for just about anything.

Europa Report, from Magnet Releasing, opens this Friday, August 2, in New York (Cinema Village), Washington DC (E Street Cinema) ad Hollywood (Sundance Sunset Cinemas). You can see all of the currently scheduled 15-cities opening by clicking here.