Skew

(2010) Written and directed by: Sevé Schelenz; Starring: Richard Olak, Amber Lewis and Robert Scattergood; Available on Netflix Streaming

Rating: *** ½

Full disclosure: When I was contacted by writer/director Sevé Schelenz to review his film Skew, I was apprehensive for a couple of reasons.  First, Cinematic Catharsis isn’t exactly a “brand-name” blog, so I wondered what the catch was.  Was this a legitimate film or some sort of prank?   Being a rather trusting individual, I concluded that Schelenz was on the up and up, and that this was a sincere attempt by a filmmaker to spread the word about his movie by utilizing a more “grass roots” approach.  With screener copy in hand, I soon faced another dilemma.  What if I didn’t like his movie?  Based on our email conversation, Mr. Schelenz seemed like a nice guy, and I’d hate to dash his hopes.  I realized that my wee blog’s influence on the film-going public was probably infinitesimally small, but I couldn’t help shake the notion that my potentially negative review could directly or indirectly affect his career.  I was relieved to discover that once I’d put my neurotic notions aside long enough to watch Skew, Schelenz had actually crafted a better-than-average psychological thriller.

Skew doesn’t start on a particularly promising note, looking a little too much like other found footage movies that involve one over-zealous character and his camcorder.  We’re introduced to three 20-somethings, about to embark on a car trip.  It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to anticipate that tensions will build between the characters, as they always do, and things will devolve from tentatively cordial to quarrelsome.  While none of this portion of the story appears out of place, the film gradually gains momentum by toying with expectations.  Akin to the film’s title, something in Skew appears to be a bit off, and you begin to wonder where it’s taking you.

I’ve never been a huge fan of the found footage sub-genre, which has always seemed somewhat contrived for my taste, but Schelenz does an admirable job of providing a credible explanation for the camera’s presence in the story.  We learn that Simon (Robert Scattergood) is using his camcorder as an emotional crutch, helping to fill in the blanks of an empty childhood.  He’s creating a new reality for himself with his camera, feeding his compulsion by documenting everything he sees.  His single-minded hobby takes a dark turn when he begins to see distorted faces through his lens.  When his fellow travelers fail to see what he sees, we begin to question Simon’s mental stability.  To complicate matters, there seems to be a correlation between his visions and the deaths of people he’s filmed.  But the question remains, why is it that only he can view their distorted faces through his lens?  This reminded me a bit of the premise behind the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Purple Testament” (where a soldier identifies people who were about to die by looking at their faces), but Schelenz’s story evolves into something else entirely.   

Simon’s best buddy Rich (Richard Olak) humors his friend’s odd behavior, although his patience eventually wears thin.  His girlfriend Eva (Amber Lewis) seems far less tolerant of Simon’s eccentricities and his intrusive camcorder, shooting daggers whenever she stares back through the lens.  At first, she just appears to be overtly hostile, but you begin to see that her behavior is probably justified.  There’s obviously more to their contentious relationship than meets the eye, as Simon’s camera lingers on her a little too long in several scenes.  It leaves the viewer feeling a little voyeuristic and unclean, which I’m guessing was Schelenz’s intent. 

Skew falls into some of the traps of the found footage sub-genre, with its bickering characters and conceit that all of the key scenes just happened to end up on tape.  I’m also left to question why someone didn’t punch Simon’s lights out or take his camcorder when he got too intrusive.  I also found it a little difficult to believe that he could maintain an unbroken, in focus, shot when he was engaged in an emotionally charged discussion.  While these scenes still work, taken in the proper context, it detracts from the film’s overall verisimilitude.

In the press kit, Schelenz cited The Blair Witch Project as one of the primary influences for his debut film, but I think that’s selling Skew a little short. While The Blair Witch Project was fairly straightforward, Skew toys with the subjective and the objective, asking us how much we can trust what we’ve just witnessed.  The ending seems ambiguous at first, but begins to coalesce as our brain processes what has occurred and we reassemble the pieces.   Skew is a pastiche of familiar elements, assembled into an intriguing whole that ultimately surpasses its parts.

* On a side note, Skew hasn’t been released on DVD yet, but for all of you Netflix users out there it’s available for instant viewing.

The Future of Home Video?

If Netflix has their way, we’ll all be watching our movies through a streaming device rather than a disc-based format (Read more here, here, or here.).  They paint a rosy picture when everything will be at our fingertips, and we will no longer need to reach for a physical copy in order to watch it.  The question remains, however: What will be lost in the process?  There’s been a lot of talk about the problem of bandwidth, and how they will be able to keep up with the increased traffic, or the quality of presentation in streaming compared to a Blu-Ray disc, but there’s another issue that no one seems to be talking about.  What about the extras?

In the glory days of laserdisc, one of the big draws compared to VHS was the myriad of special features that could be found on the more deluxe editions (think Alien, Aliens, and The Nightmare Before Christmas, to name a few).  The average Joe or Joanne didn’t exactly embrace laserdisc, but it paved the way for DVD, which included many of the kinds of special features that could only be found on laserdisc, along with improved picture and sound, and the occasional Easter eggs.  Granted, I didn’t always have time to listen to the director’s commentary, and certainly didn’t look at all of the special features every single time I popped in my discs, but I was sure glad that they were there when I wanted them.

Physical Media: A Dying Breed?

Extras are not even a consideration when watching streaming movies.  It’s all about the feature, and nothing else.  No more commentaries, no trailers, no featurettes or stills.  All of this will be lost.  I doubt the folks at Netflix plan to provide this extra content on their site, nor will the studios bother to host it.  Nope, the extra will be a dying breed, and we’ll be back to the good old days of VHS, when we were just happy to have the movie.

3D or Not 3D?

Although I wouldn’t describe myself as an early adopter, I’m usually a little bit ahead of the curve, technologically speaking.  Over the past 20 years, I’ve plunked down more dollars than I’d care to count in my endless pursuit of audio and video perfection.  There’s one constant, however.  Whenever I’ve pulled the trigger on the latest and greatest, the Next Big Thing has always been lurking around the corner.  Without dwelling too much on the geeky details of each component, let’s take a brief tour of the progression of the Cinematic Catharsis theater…

I started out with a JVC hi-fi VHS VCR and 2-channel stereo system in 1990, and it didn’t take too long to realize that this was hardly the pinnacle of home theater technology.  After renting laserdisc players a few times, I decided this was where I needed to go, and purchased a used model from a now long defunct store in Woodland Hills, California, called The Laser’s Edge.  Discs were bulky and expensive, and the player was temperamental, but I felt confident that I was partaking in the best that early 90s technology had to offer.  What could be better than that?  Little did I know that just a few years later, DVDs were lying in wait to unseat laserdiscs from their venerable pantheon.  After they stopped producing laserdiscs, I knew that I had to take the plunge again, into a new format.

Ahh... Laserdisc!

But wait, there’s more!  The details about the evolution of the Cinematic Catharsis theater get a little muddled here, but suffice it to say that the original DVD player suddenly wasn’t good enough, lacking progressive scan, so it was time to make another purchase.  And that was good… until high definition came along.  This required a new TV, and yet another format.  After the bloody HD disc wars had subsided, Blu Ray had emerged victorious.  And of course, I just had to have it.  After more than a little negotiating, cajoling and pleading with Mrs. Cinematic Catharsis to sell the merits of the new format, we purchased our new Blu Ray player in early 2009 to complement our 1080i television with a Dolby Digital/DTS sound system.  Not too shabby, but apparently not entirely up to the exacting standards of Blu Ray.  Time marches on, and we fast forward a wee bit to the present day, as the whole 3D marketing juggernaut is taking shape.  Forget for a moment that they were just telling us a little while ago that Blu Ray was the best thing out there.  Now there’s 3D Blu Ray.  It’s one louder!

What we have here is a gimmick that’s been shoved down the public’s throat since the 50s, albeit in new and improved form.  Now that the technology gap between watching a movie in a public movie theater versus watching a movie at home has narrowed considerably, we’re being subjected to the newest weapon in the electronics manufacturers’ arsenal.  I can’t help but recall the seminal children’s book “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.”  For the uninitiated, Laura Joffee Numeroff’s tome chronicles the nightmarish chain of events that follow after the eponymous mouse is given said cookie.  Its 3D equivalent might be titled, “If You Buy a 3D Blu Ray Player.”  If you buy a 3D Blu Ray player, you’ll need to get a criminally overpriced 3D television to go with it.  Of course, if you buy a 3D television, you’ll want to buy several $100 pairs of 3D glasses to share this amazing technology with your friends and family.  If you buy the 3D glasses, you’ll want to buy 3D Blu Ray movies to watch – all three of them (only a slight exaggeration).  Oh, I forgot to mention that if you want to listen to that incredible, upgraded 3D sound, you’ll need to get an HDMI 1.4 compliant receiver (Too bad for anyone who has an earlier model, but I’ll spare you the messy details).  But hold on a minute, Mr. Cinematic Catharsis, I heard that there are companies out there that are working on 3D TVs that don't require glasses!  Okay, point taken.  Just subtract the cost of the glasses, and you’ve still spent thousands of dollars on new equipment that will likely be obsolete sooner than you think.  You didn’t really think that the home video gods would let you off the hook so easily in your quest for video nirvana, did you?

This begs the question: Is 3D really necessary to enjoy movies?  At best, 3D seems well suited for “event” films like Avatar, but not quite as necessary for everyday viewing.  For more on this subject, I suggest reading Roger Ebert’s intriguing article about the relevance of 3D.  Suffice it to say that we are getting further away from the experience of movies as a medium of the mind, as it becomes all about the bells and whistles.  In the end, is the investment in yet another upgrade worth it?  Your mileage will undoubtedly vary. 

So, is the Cinematic Catharsis theater in danger of becoming obsolete?  I guess it depends on your definition of obsolete.  Even if you decide to buy the most up-to-date system imaginable, you can count on the marketing spin doctors to make you feel as if your current set-up is somehow inadequate.  After all, you might as well be looking at cave paintings, you unsophisticated cretin!  Unless we have the financial resources of Bill Gates, we all have to draw the line eventually, and I feel that it’s now.  For the foreseeable future, I will probably limp along with my plain-Jane, 5.1-channel, 1080i, dimensionally challenged system, while supplementing my disc-based viewing with the   less-than-perfect but instantly gratifying access to my Netflix instant queue.  This will have to do for the time being -- at least until they progress to the point of Star Trek-style holodecks or finding a way to beam their content directly to my cerebral cortex.

Here we stand, at another technological crossroads.  Will the public buy into it, or will 3D be another dead end?  Only time and discretionary income will tell.

The End... Or is it?