Considering that The Blair Witch Project has gotten more hype than Star Wars, this isn't going to be a straight-ahead review of the film. If you don't know enough about the film to form an opinion about it by now, you just haven't been paying attention to popular culture. Rather, I just wanted to note that I find it interesting that people have been lining up to see what's essentially a small time indie horror flick. It seems that selling the movie as a piece of an extended mythology was enough to pull in the X-Files fans, while the fake hype floating about the internet enticed in others. Having a few people who work for the film's distributor post messages like "Is the film real?" or "I heard the film is real!" on various message boards was a unique method of generating film buzz. Finally, leaking the film out slowly to a limited number of theaters was a shrewd move; nothing makes people want to see a movie like the idea that they might have difficulty seeing it.

But it wasn't any of these enticements that made me want to see the movie. Besides the idea that the movie just plain sounded like fun, I was intrigued by the way the movie was created. The idea of dumping the cast into the woods and letting them fend for themselves is a pretty novel idea for a movie. While it would be nice if the success of the movie inspired other small, independent films that were enjoyably different to the usual pretentious indie fare, I'm afraid it will just inspire a bunch of poorly shot horror movies. If there is one thing that I wish Hollywood would learn from the successful creative process that developed Blair Witch Project, it's that audiences don't mind if actors are starved and run ragged for the sake of a film. It was obvious that the actors in Blair Witch were tired and irritable, and that bit of realism added to my enjoyment of the film. Seeing as how I enjoyed complete nobodies being starved out in the woods, imagine how much more I would enjoy a movie that featured Hollywood stars in similar conditions. I would gladly pay to watch a film where Tim Allen or some other over-paid star was left to starve out in the woods. I swear, if I ran Hollywood things would be a lot more entertaining.

Comments? Age-old curses you'd like to discuss? Drop me a line at gleep9@hotmail.com, I'd love to hear/be hexed by you. Now, with video camera in hand, head on back to either the Movie page or the Main page.

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