FLICKERS

review: The Damned United

THE DAMNED UNTIED

We call it soccer, but for the Brits it’s football, and it’s damn serious business. From 1968 to 1974, Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) a manager/coach from the tiny town of Derby, and his assistant manager, Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall), turned a third-rate club into division champs. That success wasn’t nearly as sweet as getting to take over Leeds United, a top-tier team previously managed by Clough’s archenemy, Don Revie (Colm Meaney). In this terrific film, screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) and television director Tom Hooper (John Adams), making his feature debut, use a series of elegantly staged flashbacks to trace Clough’s and Taylor’s rapid rise to fame, and the hubris that led Clough to stumble badly when he got to Leeds, while also wounding his lifelong friendship with Taylor. A movie about soccer that doesn’t spend a lot of time on the field, The Damned United, like everything Morgan writes, is an intimate character study, one that’s enriched by a stellar ensemble of British pros, including Jim Broadbent as Derby’s team owner. These actors are good at what they do—like those players who dodge and weave with effortless grace. (Chuck Wilson)   

review: Paranormal Activity

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY

For Katie (Katie Featherston), a San Diego college student, things have been going bump in the night since she was 8-years-old and a ghost attached itself to her. The unseen being that has been benignly haunting her for years thrills Katie’s loving but skeptical boyfriend, Micah (Micah Sloat), who sets up a video camera to capture any supernatural goings-on. For his debut feature, reportedly shot in seven days at a cost of 15 grand, writer-director Oren Peli works wonders with stationary camera footage of the sleeping couple: the bedroom door moves, slightly, lights in the hallway go on and off, a shadow passes the bed. As the nights go by, the presence, seemingly annoyed at being recorded, begins upping the ante, and soon it appears that poor Katie is on the verge of channeling her inner Linda Blair. Grounded by strong performances by newcomers Featherston and Sloat, who pretty much have the movie to themselves, Paranormal Activity, which demands to be seen in a crowded theatre, is refreshingly blood-free; the fact that its old-school scares caused seemingly jaded twenty-somethings at a recent midnight screening to squirm in their seats suggests that there’s hope for the world after all. (Chuck Wilson)