Project Almanac (3.0 Stars)

For once a movie produce by Michael Bay that didn't turn out to by the biggest stink pile of the year to my surprise.

The story is about an old tape of a birthday party that seems to confirm time travel, a group of teens actually construct their own machine... but as they change the past for their betterment - it wrecks havoc on the world and the only way to stop it may be to make sure the machine never comes to be - no matter the cost.

To those people who are sick of found footage movies well your not alone. Year after year you get the same formal of found footage movie genre and that's why I wasn't looking forward to this movie, because Micheal Bay is producing it and the fact that movie didn't really get my interest as I'm into movies that get my interest before seeing it. I was originally going to review this back in February but I didn't really have enough time and I got a lot of things to review at the time. But now finally seeing the movie I got to say it isn't as bad as I imagine it would be.

The time traveling part in the movie really dose come off fun, but they also time travel to solve their problems like if they failed a exam they can do it till they get it right, this is basically what I would do if I had time travel, and they also things I wouldn't waste time travel on like try to talk to the girl and some other stuff that I wouldn't really do. If I had time travel I would go back to the famous moment of are life time and re-life the moment that changed everything and made history, you know what I wouldn't do? use it on pointless this that wouldn't even matter.

The character's in the movie can sometimes come off annoying, loud, funny or just stupid. I see them as my old friends I use to hang around with and we too did some stupid sh't that I think is funny even today.

I had a lot of fun with Project Almanac. Now I'm not saying that this is a flawless movie that you should see and remember as the greatest, no it's not a perfect movie but I think it's surprisingly not bad and not horribly directed or acted as well.

For problems: The movie itself isn't very remediable and I'm not trying to be mean here but I think I will forget this movie after a couple of months because the movie doesn't really give me anything to remember it by, but I also seen other movie that I thought was good but I already forgotten it by now or I will never watch it again, it's one of those films.

View the original article here

Project Nim

The story told in James Marsh's new documentary Project Nim is essentially an outsider's tale, with the typical character of the socially awkward genius or abandoned gentle-heart replaced here by the eponymous chimpanzee, yanked from his mother's arms and tossed almost immediately into the home of a family of New York progressives. Named in honor of the famous philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky, Nim Chimpsky was the hopeful key to the future of communication in the 1970s, and his tale, as Marsh tells it, begins with ponderous notions on how we become civilized, how we are understood, and just how many evolutionary tip-toes we are away from our primal beastliness, or, more pointedly, how different primates are from us. And yet, Project Nim essentially hinges on a simplistic structure of a young, gifted child, led away from his primal instincts and into the choleric cobweb of human intellectual endeavors.

The central figure in a Columbia University-funded study led by professor Howard S. Terrace, who remains employed by the school, Nim's task was to learn sign language and communicate through learned routine, at first with the LaFarge family, and then through a diverse line of students and counselors working under Terrace; the latter group has been primarily designated as the major flaw in the project's eventual, highly publicized failure. Through an abundance of footage, pictures, audio, and interviews, Marsh charts Nim's progress and eventual abandonment by Terrace, which begins with a bit of Oedipal misbehavin'. Adopted into a free-love home by LaFarge matriarch Stephanie, Nim antagonizes and alienates her husband through all manner of mischief, but responds well to signing, enough so that Terrace rips him away from the second mother the chimp has known.

Given the film's subject, Marsh has all his interviewees sign their names and shows a proclivity for words in his aesthetic. Sometimes a single word looms large onscreen and other times dozens of words pile-up and overrun the images; these are not subtle attempts to visualize the learning process that Terrace designed and to which Nim was subjected. Marsh's last film, the remarkably entertaining Man on Wire, was anchored by an artistic impulse, that of the film's tightrope-walking subject, the galvanic Philippe Petite, to walk between the Twin Towers; the film is ostensibly a Moby Dick story set in the air instead of on the sea. With Project Nim, Marsh, at least initially, seems to focus on behavior, which is most fascinatingly explored in a segment of the film set in a mansion in Riverdale turned over to Terrace, his researchers and students, and Nim. There Nim at once excels and dismisses his teachings, lashing out both physically and through language, and Terrace, following a disastrous affair with Nim's third mother figure, loses publicity, funding, and interest.

From there, Nim is transferred back to the research facility where he was born. As funny as images of Nim taking puffs from a spliff are, this is essentially where Marsh missteps and lets his politics get the best of him. What began as a muddled yet effective and highly intriguing study in communication and psychology quickly degrades into something tantamount to a video project commissioned by a joint campaign between PETA and the ASPCA. The inherent strangeness of the premise disappears, replaced instead by a handful of teary remembrances, anecdotes, and rhetoric devoid of new thoughts; even Marsh's aesthetic is toned down to a whisper, allowing a clear, quiet stage for protestors of all sorts to overtly sentimentalize the director's subject for him. It makes for a familiar end to a unique story and seems to shrug off a large portion of the film's prior complexity.

Though they are both documentaries, Project Nim ultimately is less like Man on Wire and more comparable to Marsh's narrative feature, The King, in which Gael Garcia Bernal's bastard son attempts to ingratiate himself with his father's new Evangelical family. Things don't go well in either case, but in The King, the fact that Bernal is a human makes it easier to understand his trajectory. Project Nim begins with the ambitious promise of attempting to study a chimpanzee as he adopts human behavior, but by the end of the film, he is just one more face for animal rights posters -- another singular case exploited and expanded to look ordinary.      

View the original article here