Change Your Image
trouverite
Reviews
Promises Written in Water (2010)
watch it as you would your favorite painting
the best thing about promises written in water is how it reveals the narcissism, not in the director, but in consumers of cinema today. by presenting an impressionistic cycle of events that belie the richness of love beyond the walls of a cinema and providing the opportunity for an audience to re-experience them purely empathically--anyone with whom the events do not resonate is just expressing both an inability to empathize and the personal tragedy of never having accidentally loved in the absurd way that love should exist. everyone knows asking an audience to think about anything is hard. we now know that asking them to recognize their own vulnerability is even harder.
Paranormal Activity (2007)
don't waste your time...
this was, quite possibly, the worst of what i call "trouverité" films. i was actually embarrassed to be in a horror flick where the best peanut gallery commentary a new york audience could muster had to do with addressing foul language used by micah. pathetic. if new york can't suspend its disbelief long enough to digest another pocket-change budget found-reality flick... you're doing it wrong. the non-acting is overacted. the couple's chemistry is non-existent. the dialogue seems to have been written in a trapper keeper by a high school student in the mid- 90s and shelved until 2007--never having been updated to account for actual adult interaction. all in all, this film was painful to watch--not for blood-curdling terror or popcorn-flipping shock, but for the energy it took to resist falling catatonically into a coma of boredom and self- loathing for the 12 bucks i'd just been willfully conned out of.