On Screen

...Despite its compromises...

...The transition from one type of film stock to another makes it apparent that The Blair Witch Project is a deliberately edited piece of work...

...Though it is thus apparent from the outset that our heroes will die, this idea still has a good deal of potential...

...Blandness is the principal disappointment of The Muse, an otherwise genial comedy from writer-director-star Albert Brooks...

...Rob Reiner, James Cameron and Martin Scorsese, and their films The American President, Titanic and Raging Bull, respectively, are of equal merit...

...But The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project at least deserve some attention, if only because they have both been extraordinarily successful at the box office...

...Nevertheless, after seeing it, I find it astonishing that it cost any money at all...

...His studio has lost interest in producing his scripts...

...Like Steven and Jack, Sarah agrees that a "great" script is one that finds favor with producers and the public...

...Rather than being a corrective to big budget horror films, with their reliance on quick pyrotechnic payoffs to conceal script inadequacies, TheBlair WitchProject can hardly be called a movie...

...More likely, it is the result of a few enticing advertising campaigns and the irritating recent tendency to cut multiple releases from the same cloth...

...Nothing particularly scary happens during the course of this dimly lit, sluggish picture...

...Shot by amateurs on videotape and 16-millimeter film, its visuals are shaky, out of focus and generally aimed at an insignificant portion of the landscape...

...But Shyamalan has practically nowhere to go and almost nothing to tell us...

...In thinking about why I found The Blair Witch Project so bland, I realized that the movies I find most terrifying are those that appeal to knowledge and understanding...

...To them...

...Steven is intelligent, rigid, cowardly, and stingy, yet it is hard not to sympathize with him when he suffers the torments of pleasing his muse...

...He tells his charge not to run in fear from the visiting spirits, but to do their bidding...

...Laura meets and bonds with Sarah, and their relationship inspires the housewife to become a successful cook, whose income promises to outstrip her husband's...

...Some will no doubt blame this sudden profusion on our millennial fears...

...The camerawork is so pathetic that we have to rely on the soundtrack for virtually every piece of significant information...

...The concluding revelation casts many of these expectations aside without explanation...

...In Blair the intellectual and emotional content is on a level with the cinematic prowess...

...Its most fervent spectators recover with sufficient quickness that they feel a perverse desire to relive the film's little jolts...

...But not only the omens themselves are left obscure, we also don't ever find out what they mean...

...Shyamalan leads us to assume his ghosts are bound by specific limitations, that they affect their environment in a predictable fashion...

...In a lesser film—say, a Jim Carrey vehicle—much of the action would have revolved around Steven convincing his wife Laura (Andie MacDowell) that he is not having an affair...

...The boy (Haley Joel Osment) and his psychiatrist (Bruce Willis) project credibility...

...An opening title informs us that several years ago, three young documentary filmmakers retreated into the Maryland woods to hunt a local legend, a belligerent supernatural being known as the Blair Witch...

...That it was made and promoted by Hollywood outsiders chiefly demonstrates that you don't have to be a major studio in order to convince American moviegoers that a toothless proj ect is worth their money...

...We never learn who the Blair Witch is, why she is so cruel, or whence comes her appetite for children...

...Since we only see the boy perform an act of vengeance, the filmmaker's depressing point seems to be that the dead are in fact just as petty and selfish as the living...

...After the final scene, the screen fades to black and a title reads, "A Film by M. Night Shyamalan...

...This isn't cinema...

...Still, to say that it is the best satire Hollywood has produced in years only shows the unwillingness of Steven's hated studio executives to produce comedies that are more strongly spiced...

...Repulsion and The Shining are genuinely frightening because they offer unpleasant insights into minds that are falling apart...

...In the movie, screenwriter Steven Phillips, who was once nominated for an Academy Award, has hit a dry spell...

...Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, who wrote and directed The Blair Witch Project, have composed an ingenious premise to mask their visual ineptitude...

...Its executives insist, without further comment or explanation, that he's lost his "edge...

...Brooks cleverly follows that line for as long as it is funny and then takes a further step...

...Actually, it is even less effective than audio drama, because every jitter of the lens reminds us of the project's artifice, points out the fact that it is only a movie...

...Desperate, Phillips appeals to his still successful best friend lack Warrick (Jeff Bridges), who confesses that he has long been inspired by a real life muse...

...The director seems to believe we will associate his name with a real achievement, instead he is reinforcing his appalling pretentiousness...

...Although The Sixth Sense is about a boy who can communicate with spirits of the dead, it qualifies as a horror movie chiefly because of the visual and aural effects built in by writer-director M. Night Shyamalan and composer James Newton Howard...

...But he pulls his punches and allows his characters to accept this possibly ironic means of redemption without comment, leaving his intent uncertain...

...In sum, the director has taken a low budget idea, something that could have worked well as a tight little episode of The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and stuffed it so full of portentous visuals and empty dramatic alleys that it ceases to make sense...

...On Screen CONFUSING SUCCESS WITH PROFIT By Raphael Shargel Multiplying faster than the evil hordes in the Alien movies, possessing theaters longer than the devil did Linda Blair in The Exorcist, and for the most part as rotten as the comically decaying corpse in An American Werewolf in London, the schlock horror flick is back...

...Its occasional use of slow motion, the hushed whispers of the characters, the surprising bursts of loud music, and the boy's frequent encounters with walking corpses are all attempts to convince us that what we are watching is of compelling import...

...After so much ado, the psychiatrist's solution is rather anticlimactic...

...Many fans became attracted to the film because of the television ads that followed very favorable reviews and an aggressive Internet campaign...

...The Muse is very well acted—particularly by Stone, who has the role of her career—and is as pleasant as it is unpredictable...

...It is also the product of Hollywood's confusion of artistry with financial success—a habit that goes far beyond the horror industry, and currently infects one of the season's best satires...

...But as he balks under her beck and call, her desire for a Waldorf salad at three in the morning, her insistence that Steven repaint her guest cottage, her ultimate occupation of his house and bed, we both laugh at and identify with his exasperation and outrage...

...The makers of The Blair Witch Project don't seem to understand that the reality of getting lost in the woods is scarierthan the idea of being chased by a ghoul who can't possibly exist, that a sharp picture of a mysterious omen is more unsettling than a fuzzy one...

...All three make cameo appearances, Scorsese doing a very funny parody of his famously agitated persona...

...As in most poorly plotted films, though, it does not hold up under scrutiny...

...Unfortunately, Myrick and Sanchez are inadequate to the task...

...Brooks himself may be satirizing the movie's central idea, for in the end he has Phillips regain his artistic dignity by selling a lucrative but esthetically null Jim Carrey vehicle...

...As I have suggested, its popularity does make it culturally significant, but no more or less so than The Sixth Sense, Runaway Bride, Big Daddy, or any of the other hugely successful films of the year...

...The characters, pursued by an unseen demon throughout the second part of the film, frequently shriek and hurl obscenities, but the actors' desperation fails to impress us...

...As for the horror glut, I don't have much to say about The Mummy, The Thirteenth Warrior, Stigmata, Stir of Echoes, or The Haunting—save that the last, along with The Thomas Crown Affair, is part of another late '90s phenomenon: remaking 1960s cult films that weren't very good in the first place...

...Brooks is perhaps the last in a long line of comic auteurs willing to play protagonists subject to wild humiliation...

...While it ultimately betrayed its rules, at least The Sixth Sense had some...

...The Sixth Sense sports a twist ending that seems genuinely to impress viewers, and I admit that it caught me off guard as well...

...By contrast, The Blair Witch Project, to date almost as big a moneymaker as The Sixth Sense, was made with tens of thousands of dollars, nottens of millions...

...To exercise her powers of inspiration, Sarah demands to be kept like a high class mistress, to live far above even Steven's very comfortable means...

...Sarah, the muse (Sharon Stone), agrees to take on Steven as her new client...

...Their characters vacillate jarringly between half articulate observation and obviously scripted lines...

...We are told that the footage that comprises the film is all that remains...

...Their unfocused film evokes vague anxieties without the resonance of possibility...

...The promotion of The Blair Witch Project has drawn tremendous interest...

...The lost youths spend every night of their expedition listening to howls in the wilderness, and wake each morning to discover that the fiend has surrounded their tent with omens of foreboding...

...A full hour passes before the boy explains his long evident secret power to Willis, and another 30 minutes before Willis believes and tries to help him...

...It's radio...

...I imagine that is why it has made so much money...

...Because we believe in Sarah's magic from the beginning, it is clear to us that he should cater to her whims...

...Some audiencemembers have sworn they completely accepted the film's verisimilitude, but I'll wager that these are the same folk who have been trained by their televisions to believe The X-Files is frightening and MTV's The Real Wold is real...

...We know the reasons why the dark forces in Freaks, Psycho and Poltergeist behave so maliciously...