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Personal documentaries rarely operate under the aesthetic and narrative rules of horror films, incorporating shocking Shyamalan-esque twist endings, but Dear Zachary: A letter to a son about his father does, so it’s fitting that Oscilloscope are beginning its roll out on Halloween. When filmmaker Kurt Kuenne’s childhood best friend Andrew Bagby was killed at the age of 32, almost certainly by his years-older jilted girlfriend Shirley Turner, Kuenne began filming testimony from his friends and family as a memorial to his lost friend. Shortly thereafter it was revealed that Andrew’s probable killer, who though charged with the crime had not yet been extradicted from Canada, was pregnant with Andrew’s child, and as Andrew’s parents Kate and David moved to Newfoundland and fought for custody of the baby, Kuenne drove across the continent from California to conduct interviews. At that point, he restructured the project: it was now a filmed letter addressed to baby Zachary, about the man his father was. But before Kuenne finished filming, the story would take another, much more devastating turn. It may be impossible to talk about Dear Zachary in terms of craft without spoiling the real-life twist which compromises the integrity of its structure, but I’ll try to be as vague as I can.

The story itself is unbelievably compelling: Bagby met Turner, twelve years his senior and twice divorced, as a medical student. They dated on and off for a couple of years, and when Andrew broke it off, Shirley drove across the country to see him and, apparently, shot him five times in the middle of a park. She then headed off to Newfoundland, where snafus in the Canadian legal system insured that she kept at least partial custody of Andrew’s son Zachary, even as she moved in and out of prison. Dear Zachary moves at a breakneck pace, often edited to Kuenne’s breathless, almost staccato narration, which is itself sometimes backed by a creepy, Psycho-like score. Kuenne conducts tons of interviews with Andrew’s friends and members of his large, close family, which the filmmaker chops up into flashes and weaves back together thematically. On initial viewing, only those closest to Andrew pop out as characters from what otherwise plays like a blanket of overlapping sentiment.

Kuenne is wise to let Andrew’s parents, seated together on a couch in a basic two-shot, tell the backbone of the story. Mother Kate, often teary, rarely makes eye contact with the camera, but father David, still clearly livid, often looks directly at us while detailing their relationship with “that fucking bitch” Shirley. Seen mostly in still photographs which seem to always freeze her in a state of manic motion, Shirley is blonde, skinny, with wild eyes hidden behind librarian glasses. The most compelling evidence to support the Bagby’s horror story comes from recordings of their phone calls with her and Shirley’s hysteric voicemails. Her voice is naturally sing-song in the creepiest way imaginable, and Kuenne gets a lot of mileage out of pulling soundbites like “Mommy loves you!” out of context and into the fabric of his horror movie soundtrack.

About two-thirds of the way through, a second crime is committed, at which point the pretense that this is “a letter to a son about his father” is no longer applicable. Dear Zachary then becomes many things –– a harangue against the broken child services system of Newfoundland, an advertisement for David Bagby’s new career as a legal activist (he published a bestselling book about the Turner case in 2007), and, as Kuenne puts it in a bit of narration towards the end, “a letter to someone else.” At this point, as a viewer it’s hard to not feel as though your sympathies have been taken advantage of. Ironically, in being honest about how, when and why his project changes focus, Kuenne has to initially lie to his audience. He documents an undeniably affecting personal story, and patches it together like a short attention span scrapbook with his fingerprints intact, but there’s something about it which feels false enough to undercut some of its potential power. In its title and initial structure, Dear Zachary sets up a foundation which it knows it’s going to pull out from under us, and that makes it every bit as emotionally manipulative as a studio film.

Under discussion:

Changeling  (2008)

I have not been kind to Changeling, the Angelina Jolie-starring, Clint Eastwood-directed Oscar bait which opens wide today –– but admittedly, I also haven’t taken it very seriously. After seeing the supposed true-to-life drama at the New York Film Festival last month, I made the snap judgment that the film didn’t deserve my time –– it was such a silly, blatant exercise in statuette fishing, I thought, that the energy that I could expend detailing all its faults and falsehoods would be much better spent elsewhere. And certainly, plenty of other critics have covered some of the film’s key problematic factors. Dana Stevens‘ review pretty much sums it up, whether she’s citing Eastwood’s “clomping heavy-handedness” or his need to create a “deeply phony moral universe” in which to surround his victim-as-martyr manipulation shtick, which “keeps us at a stately remove, presenting Christine’s suffering as a kind of religious tableau.” But it was a throwaway line in A.O. Scott’s NYT review that made me realize that Changeling isn’t just a bad film –– it’s the final sign in a long line of them that Angelina Jolie, as we once knew her, has ceased to exist. That’s worth a minute or two.

Stevens, and Stephanie Zacharek, and Ella Taylor are among the many critics who have noted that Jolie is essentially miscast in the role of Christine Collins, a fragile woman who hides her slightly hunched, rail-thin frame behind flowing layers and a giant cloche hat. Jolie’s strength, her sex appeal, the almost otherworldly confidence that makes her so genuinely fun to watch as a blockbuster anchor –– there’s room for none of that to shine through in this dreary story of a single mother who is suckered into an LAPD conspiracy, and yet manages to stay weepily polite about it for a good 80% of the film, even when dragged into the loony bin. It’s who she meets when she gets to said institution that really throws the split between the Angelina Jolie who wants an Oscar now, and the Angelina Jolie who won an Oscar eight years ago –– and trumped her own victory headline before the night was out by kissing her brother –– into sharp relief. After noting that “something essential is missing, not only from [Jolie's] performance but also from the film as a whole,” Scott runs down a bit of the plot and eventually gets to the matter of Christine’s incarceration in the police-controlled mental hospital, “where she meets Amy Ryan, who is to this movie more or less what Ms. Jolie was to Girl, Interrupted.”

I’ve pulled this line out of context; in the review, it’s in parentheses at the end of a paragraph, as if it’s an aside, as if this isn’t the only thing about this movie that could potentially even matter. Because Scott is right: In Changeling, Angelina Jolie cedes the Angelina Jolie role to Amy Ryan so that she can take the ill-fitting Winona Ryder role: the frightened, sexless, allegedly sympathetic but ultimately boring, straight woman who can’t take control of a desperate situation until a much stronger woman shows her how it’s done.

In Girl, Interrupted, Jolie was just supposed to set up the pins of Ryder’s long-nurtured Oscar-baiting vanity project so that the lead actress (and at the time, much bigger star) could knock them down. It didn’t work that way, and really Ryder should have known better than to assume that her comparatively prim self-consciousness would have a chance up against the larger-than-life Jolie in the much flashier role. Jon Voight’s daughter had been slowly building an image for several years as uncomfortable Hollywood royalty, rebelling via the usual means –– tattoos, knives, bisexuality, a foolish lack of filter and willingness to promote her own libertinism — but the added spotlight afforded by the run-up to the Girl, Interrupted Oscar suddenly made her growing pains seem glamorous. Her tough girl hedonism and its extreme difference from co-star Ryder’s boyish, non-threatening, very early-90s sexuality made the latter seem outmoded.

Amy Ryan, already an established character actress and Oscar nominee, will probably not see the same bump in celebrity, but her character plays the same catalyst role as Jolie’s in Interrupted, and the performance similarly cracks Changeling wide open. She plays mouthy, ballsy (but kind-hearted!) prostitute Carol who imparts on Christine the learned wisdom that she’ll need to survive in This Place while upholding little interest in self-preservation. To her captors, she telegraphs the illusion that she cannot be contained, but Christine understands that her new friend’s rebellion is actually a kind of theater, and what’s more, it’s more often than not selfless–Carol acts up to distract attenton away from Christine, and ultimately, offers herself to up to punishments so that Christine will be spared. We thus understand that Christine is victim of the system, the one who doesn’t belong in This Place, while Carol — even if she’s innocent of the psychiatric charges against her — has no normal life to go back to. She has nothing to lose, and so she’ll go through everything and anything so that our heroine can’t come out free.

One wants to be upset at Jolie for going for the bloodless supposed Oscar sure thing at the expense of playing to what we perceive as her strengths, as if her own experience netting a statuette should have taught her the folly of such a thing. The “old” Angelina would never have done such a thing, we sniff. As if the “old” Angelina Jolie — the tattooed man-eater, the weird girl on the cover of MAXIM who seemed to be enacting the revenge of the teenage outcast –– ever really meant as much as she seemed to mean, for awhile, just by virtue of existing. Nowadays, it’s almost impossible to remember that this woman once seemed like a loose-canon anecdote to the industry of celebrity, before she became its chief moving cog.

The fact is, Angelina Jolie has become such a huge star, she’s so overseen, that now it’s as if she can’t be seen. And so she can front a disposable film like Wanted on bad girl autopilot and rack up the box office victory, and no one comments on her performance because she has become so practiced at that kind of role that there’s no longer anything to say. It’s east to forget that Jolie is only now typecasted because she was somehow able to invent a new type of type. What made Jolie initially impressive and exciting––that she was simultaneously scary and sexy, smart and strong, unpredictable but in control––has been flattened down into the Angelina Jolie brand, and that brand has become a summer blockbuster mainstay. She’ll never be able to impress us with it again. And yet, when she deviates from her persona––on the rare occasions when she dares to actually show up and try––it’s read as desperate Oscar baiting. It’s a no win.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t complain. There’s a scene in Changeling where, in a desperate, futile gesture, Jolie hurls a plate of macaroni at a wall (yes, it’s that kind of film) and shrieks, “I want MY son back!” It’s hard to watch the film and not think, “I want MY Angelina Jolie back!”

Under discussion:

Dungeons & Dragons  (2000)

In May 2006, Legendary Pictures announced that they had acquired the rights from Blizzard Entertainment to make a World of Warcraft movie. There was the sound of enormous rejoicing from gamers around the world and then … a great silence. As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in joy and were suddenly silenced. Since then, the silence from Legendary and Blizzard has been fairly deafening. Two years later and still no news on the project. Apparently it’s still in development but they haven’t hired the “someone along the lines of a Zack Snyder, Christopher Nolan type” they wanted to direct the project.

With a planned release date of 2009 impossible to meet at this point, why not just scrap the whole thing? They could save themselves the embarrassment of spending over $100 million dollars on a movie that’ll end up tanking at the box office and become a pack-in freebie with the next expansion set. There’s a growing mountain of reasons not to make this movie; take a look at them after the break.

First and foremost, it’s only been eight years since Dungeons & Dragons came out, and gamers are still feeling the sting. This was a big budget (relatively — $45 million dollars wasn’t that small in 2000) movie based on another extremely popular role playing game. However, it tanked at the box office and is generally loathed by both fans of the game and moviegoers alike. Over the top acting from Jeremy Irons, deadpan lines from Thora Birch, and a ridiculous storyline that didn’t pay attention to the years of manuals and expansions didn’t help.

They followed that up with a direct to TV sequel in 2005 that tried to right all the wrongs: it included specific items from the games, made reference to many of the expansion sets, and had characters who followed the “rules” of the game. Plans were that it would lead into a series on the Sci Fi Channel, but that possibility faded into forgotten realms. The blurb for the series, which was to appear in 2009, has since been removed from the Sci Fi Channel website.

Second reason, as they say on NPR’s Marketplace… “Let’s do the numbers.” At last check, Blizzard had more than 10 million subscribers for WoW. That means if every one of those people bought a $10 ticket, they’d make $100 million dollars on the movie, which is what they’ve said the budget is. However, with prints and advertising often doubling the cost of a movie, that means it woulndn’t even have made a dent in making its money back. Plus, many of those subscribers are no doubt duplicate accounts from the same person, as evidenced by one guy who plays 36 characters at the same time. So if you account for those, and people who tend to not go to the movies, you’re already cutting your installed fanbase down significantly.

Third, it’s not The Lord of the Rings, which many people compare the Warcraft storyline to. The problem is that people had been reading the Lord of the Rings for years before that movie came out, so it had a large base to begin with. Even if you hadn’t read it, you were somewhat familiar with the legend of Bilbo and Frodo, either by hearing about it from friends, or seeing the Ralph Bakshi cartoons that were popular in the late 70s.

With Warcraft, you’d be hard pressed to get the storyline out of many gamers. Plenty of people jump in, skip past the cutscenes, and just want to start playing the game. The original Warcraft: Orcs & Humans was a real time strategy games, pitting orcs against humans. You had to harvest lumber, mine gold, and build different units in an effort to both protect yourself from the enemy, and to eventually try and overrun them. Eventually a storyline and a plot were fleshed out through the four sequels that followed, and expanded even more in the World of Warcraft RPG game.

But can the average gamer tell you the plot? I played WoW for nearly nine months, and all I know is that I was a Warlock trying to level up. You had to complete hundreds of mundane quests like “Find this rare ale for me, so I can make my daughter’s wedding perfect!” in order to gain experience, while fighting off different creatures along the way. That’s somewhat of an oversimplification, but I just wasn’t aware of a single overreaching storyline. Don’t get me wrong, the game was still fun, but that was because of the gameplay mechanics and the rich world they’d created… not an ongoing story.

A good example of this is Metal Gear Solid 4. Easily one of the highest anticipated games ever released for Sony’s flagship PlayStation 3, it featured over 90 minutes of cutscenes. That’s enough to cobble their own movie together. Some of these were presented to the gamer in extremely long chunks, which led many people to just thumb a button and skip past them. In an battle of short attention spans, the it’s just too easy to press the shiny button to get back into the game. As a result, a lot of people played through MGS4, but weren’t too sure what had just happened.

Finally, it’s been over two years since the announcement was made, yet they don’t have anything to show for it except one piece of concept art. No script, no storyline, no director, no attached talent… nothing. The game has powered ahead full steam with the Burning Crusade expansion in January of 2007, and the new Wrath of the Lich King pack coming out on November 13th. So where’s the info on the movie? For all of the gung-ho attitude about it with a 2009 release date, it seemed to vanish overnight. Even at this year’s BlizzCon there was no movie news, except that they’re “working on it.”

It would be best if Blizzard shuttered these plans altogether, and instead released a series of DVDs or movies available to download that feature the same amount of animation that goes into the opening cinematics and trailers for many of their games. They look a lot better than they could ever hope the live-action movie would. Save us all and channel that money elsewhere, both gamers and movie lovers will thank you for it.