White Noise
The horror of an analog TV tuned to static. The terror of a really nice AV room in your home. The suspense of Michael Keaton sitting in front of various LED screen and looking at stuff. All this and more in the 2005 supernatural thriller, "White Noise," the chilling tale of a man who tries to contact a dead wife and eventually gets attacked by three nameless, shapeless, meaningless shadow things. Sit back, relax, and prepare for pain.
When I went to see this movie in the theater, I was expected something interesting. Something about the subtle, psychological horror of being contacted by the dead through media you thought could only show you the entertaining images you want to see. But no. What I got was nearly 101 minutes of a perpetually concerned looking man sitting at his desk looking at static. The basic point of the movie is that a grieving man attempts to contact his dead wife through EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) and ends up awakening some vengeful spirits, who seem to like to talk about pigs, rot, and bitches a whole lot.
Michael Keaton delivers a convincingly flat performance as the ignorant moron, blindly endangering himself more and more with no thought of consequences. Ian McNeice plays the sweaty, blundering "specialist" who introduces our hero to EVP by following him around at a distance until he is noticed. Unfortunately, he dies for some unexplained reason, leaving Michael Keaton to explore the terrifying world of vague and incomprehensible spirits. Michael does a fine job of this, adorning his home with hundreds of giant TV screens and computer recording devices. He contacts the relatives of some dead people he sees, saves a woman from a car, meets a blind psychic who tells him to stop contacting the goddamn dead, you idiot, and starts seeing people who have not died yet. None of these things seem to have anything to do with each other, and the ending has almost nothing to do with anything which has happened in the movie previously. WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD (like you care...)
Throughout the movie we have been seeing three shadowed figures (presumably Larry, Moe, and Curly) in the screens when Michael is not looking. At the end, after he follows some clues he has been seeing in his EVP recordings to an abandoned factory or military base or something like that (with a very clear sign reading "KEEP OUT"), Michael finds a makeshift version of his own EVP lab, doubling as an S&M den.
He finds some woman tied up (who Yahoo! Entertainment tells me is actually his dead wife) and then the three figures start flying around, and he starts screaming, and then the movie ends. But not before the flying and screaming and random flashing of lights has gone on for probably about ten minutes or so. The only good thing about this movie was the fact that it lasts only an hour and forty minutes, although this felt rather long at the time.
Final verdict: Actually it has that quality of taking itself so seriously that it is easy to make fun of, so I would recommend seeing it late at night with a lot of sugar and your funniest friends. Other than that, please do not see this movie. It was simply a mockery of everything I hold dear about cinema.
When I went to see this movie in the theater, I was expected something interesting. Something about the subtle, psychological horror of being contacted by the dead through media you thought could only show you the entertaining images you want to see. But no. What I got was nearly 101 minutes of a perpetually concerned looking man sitting at his desk looking at static. The basic point of the movie is that a grieving man attempts to contact his dead wife through EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) and ends up awakening some vengeful spirits, who seem to like to talk about pigs, rot, and bitches a whole lot.
Michael Keaton delivers a convincingly flat performance as the ignorant moron, blindly endangering himself more and more with no thought of consequences. Ian McNeice plays the sweaty, blundering "specialist" who introduces our hero to EVP by following him around at a distance until he is noticed. Unfortunately, he dies for some unexplained reason, leaving Michael Keaton to explore the terrifying world of vague and incomprehensible spirits. Michael does a fine job of this, adorning his home with hundreds of giant TV screens and computer recording devices. He contacts the relatives of some dead people he sees, saves a woman from a car, meets a blind psychic who tells him to stop contacting the goddamn dead, you idiot, and starts seeing people who have not died yet. None of these things seem to have anything to do with each other, and the ending has almost nothing to do with anything which has happened in the movie previously. WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD (like you care...)
Throughout the movie we have been seeing three shadowed figures (presumably Larry, Moe, and Curly) in the screens when Michael is not looking. At the end, after he follows some clues he has been seeing in his EVP recordings to an abandoned factory or military base or something like that (with a very clear sign reading "KEEP OUT"), Michael finds a makeshift version of his own EVP lab, doubling as an S&M den.
He finds some woman tied up (who Yahoo! Entertainment tells me is actually his dead wife) and then the three figures start flying around, and he starts screaming, and then the movie ends. But not before the flying and screaming and random flashing of lights has gone on for probably about ten minutes or so. The only good thing about this movie was the fact that it lasts only an hour and forty minutes, although this felt rather long at the time.
Final verdict: Actually it has that quality of taking itself so seriously that it is easy to make fun of, so I would recommend seeing it late at night with a lot of sugar and your funniest friends. Other than that, please do not see this movie. It was simply a mockery of everything I hold dear about cinema.