Yours portly is playing catch-up on the blog after a grueling Homecoming Week at work. Apologies for delayed and/or missing posts lately. —TPP
I’m not a huge fan of “found footage” films, most of which are just knock-offs of The Blair Witch Project (1999). Of course, I see the appeal for studios: these flicks are cheap to make, and offer (at least in theory) a more visceral experience. There are exceptions (such as today’s film), but found footage flicks typically devolve into lots of shaky camera work and improbably perfectly placed cameras that always seem to capture the exact video and audio that they need to tell the story.
Naturally, that’s because it’s all directed and staged, but it reveals the lie inherent in these films. Far from being “found,” the footage is actually quite curated—but in a sloppy manner to create the illusion of us just picking up someone’s perfectly edited (in-camera!) VHS tape.
Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of reviewing security camera footage will know that they rarely capture anything worthwhile. The footage is too grainy to identify anyone positively; audio is lacking or non-existent; footage gets overwritten with new footage quickly. The frustration for law-abiding citizens, of course, is that security cameras never seem to get the right angle to catch criminals, but always keeps an eye on the rest of us. CCTV might help keep down crime, but it really just ends up monitoring the rest of us. It’s the definition of anarcho-tyranny.
But I digress. I recently watched a good found footage film, 2020’s Spree. It’s a horrific dark comedy, mostly because it shows the extreme toll of living in a terminally-online world, in which shallow and hallow people gauge their self-worth in terms of likes, impressions, and reactions.
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