Point-By-Point: The Grand Budapest Hotel 8/10

Wes Anderson has always enjoyed creating complicated setups for his films -- replete with absurd situations and characters and an exhaustive attention to detail, but the towering layer cake that is The Grand Budapest Hotel, in both narrative and architectural structure, is a step above most of his work. Hell, if anything, I don't know if I've seen another film that becomes (I think I have this right): a flashback being told as a story, inside a flashback, inside a novel.

The Good:
While I enjoyed Anderson's most recent offerings, Moonrise Kingdom, The Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Darjeeling Limited, I couldn't help shake the feeling that some of the sheer joy and energy of his earlier movies had disappeared. One of the most striking aspects of The Grand Budapest Hotel is precisely what those movies lacked: a jubilant, unfettered freneticism. This is not a movie during which you can easily take a bathroom break or even check your email: it demands your full attention, but it rewards it, as well. I feel like Anderson had spent some time marathoning Guy Ritchie movies and pulp action flicks like Shoot 'Em Up when writing this script and it works. It works possibly better than it should. TGBH is more violent than anything else Anderson's done, unexpectedly and sometimes shockingly, but it adds an interesting counterbalance to some of the more twee aspects that, of course, permeate this film.

Yes, that's Tilda Swinton. She had to get in on this somehow!

Not least among the more Anderson-y elements are the performances. When you think of Ralph Fiennes, you think of his work in such things as Schindler's List, The English Patient and other brooding, intense, roles. Here, however, he is exuberantly everything-but-that... and it looks wonderful on him, darling. It's fun that each scene is pretty much a who's-who of character actors and the hipster elite of Hollywood... but this is Fiennes's show.

The Bad:
The sugar-rush giddiness that powers TGBH, for as much fun as it is, unfortunately sometimes overpowers some of the more resonant and potentially-meaningful underpinnings that could have really made it powerful. The Royal Tenenbaums managed to nail this balance exquisitely, and Hotel has a few scenes that almost attain that level, but as a whole it chooses fluff over substance. It was so close, too!

One of the hallmarks of Anderson's scripts is rapid-fire, repeated lines of dialogue ("This is M. Ivan, please get me M. Edward." --> "This is M. Edward, please get me M. Jonathan." --> "This is M. Jonathan, please get me ..." etc). This admittedly annoys the hell out of me and in TGBH it's used just a few times too often, and in each case, a few too many times in a row. It's a little thing, but it sets my teeth on edge.


The Ugly:
I was taken aback by how violent and sometimes crude this movie was. This isn't rated R for a few well-placed profanities or an errant nipple -- it earned its classification, and not in the artsy, restrained way that, for example, The Royal Tenenbaums did.

Points I Pondered:
1. I feel like I've seen the intentionally-obvious backdrop paintings effect in a few movies recently. Is this a thing?

2. "Funicular" is a great word. It doesn't get used enough.

Point-By-Point: Stoker 9/10

I avoided Stoker for a long time (hence its grievous exclusion from my Best of 2013 list) because while I was highly intrigued by the idea of Chan-wook Park directing a gothic, English language thriller, I was also scared. Oldboy has some of the most viscerally disturbing violence and imagery I've ever seen, his piece of the triptych in Three... Extremes grossed me out, and from what I've read/heard of Lady Vengeance (sorry, PCW, I just couldn't bring myself to watch that, however gorgeous the woman's eye makeup may be), the theme would continue. And so I braced myself... then kicked myself -- hard -- for having avoided it.

The Good:
It'd be too lazy to say, in response to this: "everything", but there's a silly little part of me that wants to. I'm rarely jaw-to-floor stunned by a movie -- impressed, gobsmacked, and giddy yes... but not just wholly blown away. Stoker got me good.

Yes, you can criticize it for being style-over-substance, and it is, in many ways (the story is not overly complicated and the characters are those you've probably met before in other movies/books/plays), but it's the ways in which the style enhances the substance that make this fascinating. The colors in this movie are straight out of an Edward Hopper painting, deep and rich but never over-saturated. The palette and texture, then, become an unspoken character in the drama, dark earth tones shot through with poisonous color. It's the color palette in which you read a Flannery o'Connor novel, with all of that terrifying undercurrent of heat and shame.

The Bad:
To be fair, I am the ideal audience for this movie -- I love the attention to detail, I prefer obsessive psychodrama to fast-paced action and noise, I'll pretty much follow Mia Wasikowska anywhere. Stoker isn't for everyone -- it's very R-rated and pervy as hell. As well, as discussed above, it very strongly focuses on images and texture instead of straightforward plot.

This dream-sequence atmosphere can be perhaps the most irritating aspect of Stoker. In a few key scenes, you're truly not sure exactly what happened, or are only able to parse the options later, based on new information as it is revealed. For more from a real reviewer whose opinion runs toward style-chokes substance, see this one, by Mick Lasalle -- he brings up some genuinely good points, especially if you are more easily bored or less enamored of the aesthetic strength of the movie as a whole.

The Ugly:
There's a longer essay to be written on this, I'm sure (and I'm sure someone's written it), but I hate the stylistic choice to to use female masturbation as metonymy for her descent into insanity and/or evil. It's lazy and prudish and awkwardly male-gazey. There are so many better ways to illustrate this (even in this movie, the daddy-long-legs imagery could have been re-used for great effect), that it's endlessly frustrating.

More stylistically satisfying, but far more perverse, is the incestuous sex (masturbation? see what I mean about dream-state narrative style?) scene at a piano. Never has playing a duet generated this many conflicting emotions. It's beautifully shot and compelling, but outrageously disturbing.

Also: any movie that opens with a shot of someone popping a blister sets its bar high for ick-factor.

Points I Pondered:
- Can we bring saddle shoes back as an acceptable style-choice for adults? Please?

Point-By-Point: Inside Llewyn Davis 6/10

I may be in the minority here, but I like the slower, more serious side of the Coen brothers. The Man Who Wasn't There (in many ways), A Serious Man, now Inside Llewyn Davis: they're more difficult, surely, and maybe not even as good in many respects, but they have a personal feel that, for all the power of No Country for Old Men or O Brother, Where Art Thou? don't.

The Good:
I'll be honest: NPR had the soundtrack to this movie on "First Listen" a month or so ago and I wore out the repeat button. Even if you hate the story being told in this movie, if you have a soft spot for folk music, you'll enjoy it. Oscar Isaacs has a beautiful, slightly-imperfect voice with just the right amount of pathos in his intonation to make these songs work. T Bone Burnett previously worked with the Coens on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which is well-recognized as one of the best country/bluegrass compilations in recent memory, and while I don't think "If I Had Wings" has the same ear worm quality as "Man of Constant Sorrow", the love and care taken with the music in this movie is stunning.

The atmosphere, as a whole, is lovely: all the grays and blues of a New York winter, brown tweed and corduroy. The overall feel is immaculate -- it's a little too clean to ring "authentic", but it's the well-shot nostalgia-veiled version of authenticity (everyone smokes, but you never smell it or feel that grittiness). I'm actually complimenting this slight shininess -- Llewyn is a fairytale, albeit a depressing, frustrating one. Hopeless dreamers don't feel that grit, and they don't remember it, even when it gets all over them. 

The Bad:
I'm so, so frustrated by the construction of this film. In a movie that is explicitly straightforward -- there are no flashbacks, no intercutting of different scenes/people -- WHY is there an out-of-time bookend? It throws off your entire understanding of the story. I'm sure there's an explanation (any movie this carefully constructed doesn't just do something like that without a good reason), but for the life of me, I can't figure it out.

Really, the central problem in Llewyn is that our eponymous protagonist is kind of a drip. He doesn't act... he is acted upon and the script uses that failing against him to no end, but there's no redemption, no learning. There's a theme running lackadaisically through this movie of the unintentional hero, or the epic-journey-by-necessity (the cat's name is Ulysses, he walks past a movie poster for The Incredible Journey, etc). The implication is that Llewyn's journey is supposed to fall into that same mythic realm, but there's no payoff -- instead of Ulysses, he's Sisyphus, endlessly having that rock roll back down the hill. For more on the mythopoetic aspects of this film, I refer you to this post by Richard Brody who explicates these far better than I could.

Llewyn's impotence is also illustrated in the picaresque structure of the narrative itself -- when you're not the actor in your own life, events become vignettes of excitement between stretches of nothingness with no true flow between them. This was actually an element of this film that I enjoyed, but my dear viewing companion and most of the reviews I've read choose to disagree (hence its inclusion here, rather than above).

The Ugly:
I wish I hadn't seen the trailer for this before I watched it. Actually, I wish they'd re-cut the trailer to remove certain sequences. More than most movies, the ad for this spoiled the experience -- lines that you recognize from the trailer should have hit like sucker punches, but they're blunted.

Carey Mulligan, Carey Mulligan... what are you doing? It's a tough role, to be fair: the tightly-wound, secretly-desperate friend/lover, but it's played for full harpy effect. On paper, she's one of the most sympathetic characters in the film, but her delivery undermines the rapport she could have generated with the audience.

Overall, Inside Llewyn Davis isn't a perfect film by any standards, but if you have any affection for folk music and the dreamers (and potentially losers) who sing it, there's something worthwhile here. Even if I may intellectually have significant qualms with it, this movie worked for me emotionally in a way that I can't entirely validate rationally.

Haiku: Silver Linings Playbook 7/10

Silver Linings Playbook

Sports fanaticism:
mental illness sanctioned by
societal norms.

OR

Bringing crazy home.
Frustrating plot but a great
Oscar vehicle.

Point-By-Point: Her 6/10

It's not often that I don't know how to respond to a movie. Even if it's just a firm "meh", I usually can at least put a finger on what I'm feeling in regard to what I've just seen. It's been a few hours since I walked out of the theatre after having seen Her; I still have no real idea if I liked it or not. I respect it, surely, but liked it? I don't know.

To be fair, I was inordinately intrigued by this movie's premise from the minute I heard about it. My real job involves building natural language models for a company that creates virtual assistants (albeit corporate-focused ones) and I couldn't wait to see what someone's imagined future related to these products looked like. My CEO even got in on the hype surrounding Her and talked to the New Yorker about the human connections that get created by the current generation of interactive virtual assistants. If for no other reason than professional fascination with this type of programming, I was perhaps set up for disappointment in the finished product.

Anyway...

The Good:

Spike Jonze is an immaculate filmmaker. This movie is beautiful: the colors, the soundtrack, the sense of place, all are realized with elegance. As well, Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson both turn in nuanced, confident performances, which can't be easy when most of your lines are delivered while talking to an earbud (the former) and as an entirely voiceover performance (the latter). Theodore Twombly (Phoenix) isn't  a particularly likable character, but he is a recognizable one. The dialogue reflects this -- it's intelligent, with just the right amount of that comfortable smuttiness that friends can generate.

I genuinely liked the world that is set up by Her. It's not particularly original, but it feels very real and like an understandable extension of where we are in 2014. I'm not sure I'm sold on the idea that computers are moving in the direction of wholesale voice-control, but this movie illustrates what it could look like in a very straightforward way.

The Bad:

For a movie ostensibly about the revelatory power of connection and its necessity for full human flourishing, our hero has very little, if no real emotional arc. He's a man-child -- stuck in a (self-acknowledged) world of video games and online porn -- and doesn't seem particularly interested in changing that. You never get a sense that he's learned anything from his experiences with Samantha, but rather that he just used this sentient operating system as, perhaps, the ultimate distraction: a video game that can be made pornographic when it suits. 

One of the movie's conceits is that Theodore writes beautifully sensitive, poetic letters for strangers but can't express his own feelings to the people he cares about. This is not a new theme (think Joseph Gordon-Levitt writing Hallmark cards in 500 Days of Summer or Jack Lemmon's consumption of old movies in The Apartment), but one that could have been used very effectively here. Unfortunately, when that denouement comes, it's unsatisfying and seems to contradict the overall implication drawn by the conceit itself.

The Ugly:

Honestly, one of my favorite little touches is the trousers that all the men in this movie seem to favor: high-waisted, wide-waisted wool slacks with welted pockets. As far as I know, this is not a current style, and it makes for a subtle, interesting futuristic note. They're not pretty, but I like that someone took the time to design them (and evidently, they're real now!)

In more serious criticism, I continue to be frustrated by the message that this movie. It seemed to want to say that relationships are what you make of them, and that emotional connections are more about you than the person to which you feel the connection. Unfortunately, the message that comes across is that the best relationships are those that do not challenge you or your interests. 

Points Pondered:

• Is voice-control really the way that computers are going? Yes, I can now talk to the Xbox and turn it off by saying "Xbox off"... but no keyboards? No touch screens? No phone screens at all? I'm not convinced.
• This movie made me realize how many personal conversations and interactions we have every day in plain sight. We just assume that no one's listening. 
• It seems like a computer with a (very human, thinking/feeling/reactive) personality would be more trouble than benefit. What happens when my OS gets peeved with me and hides email? Or deletes files? How do you reset it? Can you override it? It's all very fluffy and consensual in Her, but I feel like there's a dystopian corollary here that could be interesting to explore.
• For more on this same theme, I highly recommend searching out the Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back" -- it's a beautiful, heartbreaking meditation on something similar.

AMF's Miscellaneous Recognitions

Not all movies can end up on a "best of" list... but that doesn't mean they weren't without merit. It's been a good year for Hollywood!

Biggest Disappointment: The Place Beyond the Pines
I wanted so much to love this, and I did love the first story (the movie is structured as a triptych, telling three unique stories using the others as context). The first third is brilliant and so the stupidity of the second and (especially) the third segments becomes exponentially frustrating. So much potential... so much wasted potential. Although you have to [SPOILERS] give props to a movie that offs its headlining actor less than halfway through the run-time.

Most Unfairly Panned: [tie] The Host; World War Z

I'm not saying either The Host or World War Z deserve to win any awards (although some of the SFX in the latter are pretty brilliant), but I will argue that both of these movies are better than public reception led you to believe.

If The Host hadn't been cursed by the phrase "based on the book by Stephenie Meyer" on its poster it may have fared a lot better, regardless of content. Taken in and of itself -- ignoring all Twilight-y context -- it has some really interesting things to say about sexuality and sexual autonomy, as well as the mores of attraction. It's heavy stuff for a teen romance, and it's not all handled perfectly, but it's there and it's legitimately interesting. 

World War Z had a similar expectation problem... only this time for the opposite reasons. The book (by Max Brooks) on which this is ostensibly based is brilliant, and has been a cult favorite for years. The movie cadges the title from said novel and not much else; if you were expecting a true adaptation of Brooks's work, you were left tragically wanting. Taken as a non-affiliated big-budget zombie apocalypse film, though, it works well and manages to do some interesting things in a genre that has been run into the ground.

Most Inscrutable: Upstream Color 

I legitimately don't quite know what this movie was about. I truly don't know if I liked it or not. It's slow, it was clearly done on a beyond-shoestring budget, it's in many ways very, very disturbing... and yet, it was compelling in a modern-art kind of way. I'm not sure what happened or why I should care, but maybe that's beside the point.

Best Trailer: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty 
This teaser whumped me. I fell in love. By all accounts, the movie doesn't live up to the promise displayed by the trailer... but I don't care. The pure, almost-tragic joy in these two minutes can (and maybe should) be taken on their own. Of Monsters and Men and magic realism -- can you get much better?

Biggest Guilty Pleasure: Battle of the Year 
This movie is terrible. I'm not defending its merits, but just like you sometimes crave Cheetos instead of some fancy French cheese, sometimes you need b-boy dancing and Sawyer from Lost being emo instead of a film. This has training montages (multiple training montages!), inspirational coach speeches, some great male bonding, and dancing (so much dancing!). Cuddle up with your Cheez-Puffs, grab some Diet Coke, and turn off your brain. It's all good.

Worst Movie: Romeo and Juliet
I watched this with two brilliant Renaissance Lit scholars and thus cannot even claim to be as pained by it as one could be (although by the end even I was howling in rage)... but even if your sum contact with Shakespeare was reading Romeo and Juliet in high school, you may very well be offended by the aggressive stupidity of this adaptation. For one thing, you know that "wherefore" (as in "wherefore art thou Romeo?") means "why", not "where". Too bad nobody told Juliet that before she recited it. Ouch.

AMF's 2013 Year-End Recap

Top 10 Movies of the Year (in no real order)

Blue Jasmine
Woody Allen's candy-colored tragedy about the wreckage that mental illness leaves in its wake gets my nod for best film of the year, hands down. It's pretty and sprightly and utterly, holistically heartbreaking. 

Enough Said
Nicole Holofcener writes people like nobody else. These are people you know: they're your friends, your co-workers, they're the people you see every day and who you intrinsically care about -- they may not be perfect (in fact, they're usually far from it), but they're very, very real. Nothing earth-shattering happens in this movie, but it somehow leaves you excited for the adventure ahead of our protagonists, even after the credits roll. 

Moral of this movie: love is sharing your stoop

Nebraska
I have a little "thing" for movies about old people confronting their own obsolescence (don't even play the theme to Up unless you want me to start bawling). I'm not sure entirely what I was expecting from this movie, but I loved what it is -- a quiet, sometimes-frustrating meditation on what it's like to realize who your parents were before you, and who they are because of you.

American Hustle
This ballsy tour de force is one of the most self-assured crime movies I've seen in a very long time. It's exquisitely put together, yet giddily enthusiastic -- Christopher Nolan-esque precision, yet with such a dirty, sexy vibrance that you never see the surgically elegant hand behind the action. 

dude-perms and velvet and boobs, oh my!

Warm Bodies

Every end-of-year list needs one movie that may not be good, but just makes you feel good. I grinned for essentially the entire run-time of this movie, and for ages afterwards. It's a Romeo and Juliet story that, on first glance, doesn't look like much... but it gets under your skin. It's a movie to turn on while you cuddle with someone. It may not be life changing, but it's warm and sweet and oddly affecting.

Dallas Buyers Club

I almost didn't bother going to see this because, based on the trailer, it just looked schmaltzy and like a soggy change-of-heart sob story. Ads, luckily, lie. Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto both rock some serious Method acting and while this is inherently a rather emotional story to tell, there are no cheap saccharine moments here.

McConaughey and Leto waiting patiently for their Oscars

Gravity
The spectacle of this movie may suffer on DVD, but the experience of seeing this on a theatre screen in 3D, was truly one of the highlights of the year. I panic-attacked multiple times (the first time being about 2 minutes in... it boded well for the next 2 hours), but the completeness of the world constructed by Cuarón is immersive and incredible.

Blue is the Warmest Color
I was conflicted about putting this on my list. It's 3 hours long but could have easily been edited down to about 2, the director is a perv (as well as essentially abusing his lead actresses), and, let's be honest: there was no need at all for that 9 minute pornographic sex scene that earned the movie its (very valid) NC-17 rating. But on the other hand, it has two of the most beautiful performances (by Léa Seyoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos) I've ever seen and the first 90ish minutes are a near-perfect depiction of what the confusion of being a teenager in love feels like.

this is a kissing movie

The World’s End
I would follow Simon Pegg and Nick Frost almost anywhere and while this didn't generate the buzz that Shaun of the Dead did, I almost think it was funnier. It is, like the rest of their oeuvre, smart, snappy and silly... and then it just jams you in the gut with legitimate emotional heft. 

Much Ado About Nothing
There's no movie I'd rather have been a part of than this. A long weekend overflowing with wine, friends and Shakespeare -- what could be better? 

everyone's had this house-party moment ... right?

Point-by-Point: The Man with the Iron Fists - 4/10

We start in China at some unspecified-but-long-ago time. There's a gang that was taken over by a traitorous lieutenant, there's a rightful-but-out-of-power leader to said gang, there's a blacksmith, there's a madame and her prostitutes, there's a western badass, and there's a buttload of gold that they all are somehow involved with. A variety of things happen, but any plot is mainly an excuse for kung-fu action.

The Good: While none of the action is outstanding, the variety of characters and weapons is entertaining. I especially enjoyed Zin Yi's knife armor that would sprout blades wherever needed. The movie is ridiculous in a campy / throwback sort of way, and there are enough fun bits that you begin to think it would have been very possible to make a better movie than what they ended up with. Russell Crowe is fun to watch and seems to be having a good time, although he does end up making the rest of the cast look bad.

The Bad: RZA. He's a pretty mediocre director and an utterly horrible actor. Since this is his movie and he was the main character, that inevitably led to a crappy outcome. There are some interesting style choices, especially when it comes to music, but the movie begins to drag towards the end and some of the fight scenes rely on CGI gore instead of actual fight choreography. The story is a little thin, but you can chalk that up to the genre. Even with all of that, the movie could have been salvaged if RZA had picked someone better in the lead role instead of trying to do it himself. He doesn't have the acting chops to pull off the dramatic parts and looks downright silly during the action scenes. I don't know if he chose to be the main character because of ego or just because he thought it'd be fun, but he should have hired a real actor.

The Ugly: With all the gore in the unrated version, there are a lot of scenes to choose from. However, probably the ugliest was just how the Man with the Iron Fists comes by his name.

Points Pondered

-Were I Russell Crowe's character, I'd think about carrying an actual gun along with my knife gun.

-Mirrored battle rooms seem far more confusing in movies than they'd actually be in real life. If the average 8 year old can make their way through a hall of mirrors at a carnival, a trained martial artist can figure out where the bad guy actually is.

-Taking a 10 or 15 minute timeout to learn the Blacksmith's history was a bit much, but then watching the RZA try to fight people made the whole exercise laughable. If he doesn't fight like a badass, no amount of backstory will convince us.

-Knife Armor seems like a risky proposition, and would probably be a hassle to put on and take off. Still, pretty cool looking. 

Point-by-Point: The Frankenstein Theory - 4/10

A researcher finds out that his ancestor was the basis for Dr. Frankenstein. He thinks the monster is still alive, and he hires a documentary crew that accompanies him to the arctic circle to track the creature down. It goes about as well as you'd expect.

The Good: This is an interesting idea for a movie, and by framing it as a documentary, there's slightly higher production value than the average found-footage film. Also, the acting (save for the main character, sadly) is well above par for this kind of movie. They actually spent some money on real actors for the side characters - the meth head and the guide both did standout jobs. 

The Bad: Our hero Dr. Venkenheim veers a bit towards Gene Wilder in a supposedly serious film, and it doesn't quite work. But the main problem is this movie just doesn't deliver on it's promising premise. It's a very slow build up to an utterly underwhelming conclusion, and there's nary a startle along the way. 

The Ugly: The weather. I really hope they didn't drag the entire crew up to the arctic circle, but wherever they were looked miserably cold. Oh, and I guess you see a corpse that was ripped in two. But mainly the weather.

Points Pondered

-At first I was about to give the movie a 6, but then I realized I had just watched Greystone Park and in comparison everything looks like Shakespeare. Just because a movie isn't terrible doesn't make it good.

-Christine Lakin of Step by Step fame plays the doctor's girlfriend, which I only realized after I saw her name in the credits. I would say she should be in more stuff, but a quick check of her IMDb page shows she's in about 5-10 things a year. Might be time to raise her standards.

-There's absolutely nothing in the movie you don't see coming from miles away. Halfway in and most people could give you the order in which the cast is culled.

-Be warned - the cover is much cooler than anything you see in the movie.  

Point-by-Point: Greystone Park - 1/10

A group of folks with a camera wander in to a haunted mental hospital. Why, or who exactly these people are, isn't made entirely clear. Anyway, if you've seen a found-footage horror movie, it's basically just like that, but worse.

The Good: Move along, nothing to see here.

The Bad: This movie is a mess. The premise is overused, the characters are utterly boring, and I'm not entirely sure there was a plot. Even for the shaky-cam genre, the camera work was notably bad - the movie was overly dark, with far too many out-of-focus and wildly-swinging shots, and an amazing amount of fake distortion / cutting to random 'creepy' shots the camera could never have taken. Trying to follow along with anything in this movie is a lost cause. Of course, it wouldn't be a total loss if it was at least scary, but no dice. Sure, there's a jump scare or two and the occasional shadowy blur as the camera pans across from one wooden actor to another, but that's nowhere near enough to keep the average viewer from falling asleep. So, to recap, the acting, editing, writing, and directing were all horrible. I bet the catering even sucked.

The Ugly: The look on Oliver Stone's face when he saw just how crappy of a job his son did. That's an assumption, of course, but it's a safe one. 

Points Pondered

-If you can figure out the relationship between our main characters, or even how many people are actually in the group that enters the asylum, my hat goes off to you.

-If this is found footage, why is there a score?

-There's not one point in this movie where I felt like I had a firm grasp on what was happening. It quickly devolves into people yelling at each other in similar looking rooms and hallways. 

-Until they find a fully-lit cathedral. In the middle of an abandoned mental hospital.

-The credits look like they were created in iMovie - 3D stone-textured names, poofing off the screen. I mean, did the director even watch this?

-Really, just watch Grave Encounters instead. Or maybe even an episode of Ghost Hunters.