MICROBLOG #1 - I Have Just Enjoyed "Exhibit A"

My name is Stephen Thrower, I'm 47, I update my blog once a month at best, and that's just not friendly. My solution is this: to tell you what I saw last week and to recommend or blast it. Nice and quick. Smash and grab. Blog and run.

This week: Recommend: Exhibit A 
(Yorkshire, 2007, dir: Dom Rotheroe)

I had this in my house for a fortnight before watching it, mainly because of its boring and unhelpful title which manages to conceal a minor masterpiece. Exhibit A is a post-Blair Witch movie that pisses all over such 'reality-cam' junk as Paranormal Activity (in which the word 'activity' is a flagrant breach of the Trades Descriptions Act). Instead of waiting sixty-five minutes for a family camcorder to observe a ghost shutting a cupboard door - whooooh! - how about we watch in gradually mounting despair as that perennial figure of fun the 'naff dad' goes off the rails and does something really really bad...?

Part-financed by Warp Films, this is a terrific and often terrifying film that's the flipside of the comedy of embarrassment. In (brilliant) TV shows like The Office we meet idiots like David Brent, who suffers indignity after indignity for our amusement. Exhibit A depicts the same sort of character, but the aim is not to make us smirk at his social faux pas: instead we cringe as the poor slob comes unglued and commits the most awful crimes.

PS: Don't watch the trailer; it's misleading rubbish that lards music over the images in a dumb and insulting way.