Culture

Finally, the saga of Jigsaw comes full circle and the Saw franchise comes to an end. Or does it? Seriously folks, can we really trust horror movie franchises to end? Just take a gander at Jason, Freddy Kruger and Michael Myers… they won't die.
I predict that there will be more Saw movies – maybe not right away, but in the very foreseeable future – and lots of them.

Buried tells the story of Paul Conroy (played by Ryan Reynolds) an American truck driver in Iraq whose convoy is attacked by Iraqi insurgents. Rather than simply kill him, they abduct and bury him in a wooden box several feet below the desert. His kidnappers leave him with a pencil, a Zippo, a Blackberry and some instructions for what they want him to do. If I told you any more, it wouldn't be fair because part of the fun of this movie is discovering things as Paul does. Suffice to say, we are just as stuck in the coffin as he is, only hearing what he hears through the phone and never leaving the coffin to get another point of view.

Here's a handy tip for any aspiring screenwriter out there: Let's say you have three or four moderately interesting but half-baked story ideas and can't figure out how to develop any one of them into a feature-length narrative. Why don't you just combine them into a single script and make everything seem deeper and more profound than it really is?

It seems just about everyone is on Facebook these days. From your mom to your grandma to your boss, people you don't necessarily want to share every aspect of your digital identity with have sent you a friend request, but they aren't the only ones. You're also inundated with messages from people you've never met. Even before Facebook, the Internet provided a platform for people to “meet” other people from all over the world. We're more connected than ever before, but how do we know the people we are connecting with online are really who they say they are, and what happens when our “friends” aren't being exactly truthful about who they are? Earlier this month, The Social Network showed us the beginnings of a website that changed the way the world communicates. Now, Catfish takes that medium and documents the way it can be used to manipulate our perception of reality.

The found-footage genre is not for everyone, but for some reason it works for me like gangbusters. I saw Blair Witch before all the hype, so it scared the crap out of me and the original Paranormal Activity had me spellbound for most of its running time until the dodgy CGI-enhanced ending. The Internet tells me that people are sick of the found-footage genre because it's boring and nothing ever happens except at the end so this review comes with a caveat – if you hated Blair Witch or the original Paranormal Activity, then don't bother with this sequel because it doesn't break any new ground, but at the same time, it actually enriches the original and gives it an interesting mythology.