I could probably make this review incredibly brief and make everyone happy. If you liked the first two films you’re likely to like the the third.

I wrote that review while waiting in the line for the men’s room.

Like Paranormal Activity 2, Paranormal Activity 3 is a prequel to its predecessor. It takes place in the month of September of 1988 when the two sisters of the first two films were little girls and the referenced beginning of their experiences with the invisible, kitchen furniture-hating demonic figure began. Seriously, this demon really hates kitchens. I think he hates everything but camcorders.

Remember the salad days, when commercials tried to tell us that Paranormal Activity was the scariest movie ever made? And remember when you finally saw the film, and it had one jump-scare, and that was it? Just me? Well, we can talk about that later. It was a bit of a no-brainer that Paranormal Activity would spawn a franchise – after famously being made on the cheap, and gathering serious word-0f-mouth buzz by way of the Internet (a sort of modern day The Blair Witch Project approach to viral techniques of marketing, paired with a sense of the secretive), Paramount would have been stupid to let the “found footage” smash hit go without pushing out a few more sequels. There was Paranormal Activity 2, which served as the chocolate wafers to the cookie cream that is the Oreo that is the Paranormal Activity franchise. That’s a yummy way of saying that the events of the first film fit into the middle of the second film, making it both a prequel and sequel. Clever! Now we get a real prequel, one that goes way back to the childhood of Katie and Kristi, the sisters at the center of the mystery. Check out the second trailer for Paranormal Activity 3 after the break, which expands on the first glimpses we got of the film from its earlier teaser, glimpses that show us that young Katie and Kristi were, well, pretty damn hard to handle.

What is Movie News After Dark? It’s like that time your boyfriend promised to call, but he didn’t. Then he called, like, way later and you still forgave him anyway because you love him. It’s exactly like that. Nathan Adams and Cole Abaius team up to handle the post this evening (hint: Nathan wrote the funny ones), and we lead off with some new pictures from The Daily Mail of Spider-Man swinging around in the air on wires. They mostly just look like Spider-Man swinging around in the air on wires, but I think that’s pretty cool because those last movies looked mostly like cartoon Spider-Man swinging around in the air on wires. If I wanted to see that I would just watch cartoons. I like that they’re making the effort of actually hauling some poor sap up there for practical effects.

I had the privilege of seeing the surviving Maysles brother, Albert, do a Q&A after a public screening of Grey Gardens (1976). During the discussion, somebody asked him the inevitable question regarding how the presence of the camera changed the very subject he was documenting. It’s an interesting and essential question for any documentary filmmaker to consider, especially when one is engaging in the direct verite style rather than a traditional retrospective style, because it’s simplistic for the filmmaker to consider themselves “objective” or “invisible” when putting a camera on their subject: the presence of the camera changes things. Albert Maylsles responded with an amusing story about how the conversations the brothers heard between “Big Edie” and “Little Edie” outside the house when not filming were exactly the same as when they were inside. While this is no doubt the case as the eccentric Beales would certainly “be themselves” no matter the occasion or circumstance, with all due respect Mr. Maysles’s assessment of the question was a bit too narrow. Putting cameras within the aging walls of Grey Gardens did, in fact, change everything.

Welcome to the first edition of This Week in Blu-ray for 2011. Want to know what my New Year’s Resolution was? 52 consecutive Tuesdays with Blu-ray advising for my adoring fans. Needless to say, we’re off to a good start. That is if we consider timing and completion to be the pinnacle of success with this column. This week’s releases won’t exactly blow you away, as we’ve got some very middling movies to talk about (I’m looking at you, Dinner for Schmucks, Catfish and Machete). However, there are some winners in one back-breaking horror film and a back-catalog release that will likely cause a backdraft of fireballs aimed right at your pocketbook. Does anyone else see a theme here? And why does my back hurt all of the sudden? Quick, you read the column while I go stretch.

Welcome to 2011! The doldrums of last week have been left far behind, and the powers that be have returned from the break to release a torrent of titles onto DVD and Blu-ray. There’s nothing truly great out this week, but there are at least two titles entertaining enough to buy. There are also a couple surprising ones to avoid, but as usual the bulk of this week’s new titles fit comfortably in the nether region between the two extremes. Which of course means they should be added to your Netflix queue… Titles out this week include Robert Rodriguez’ ridiculous action romp (Machete),  Joe Maggio’s foodie abduction thriller (Bitter Feast), the other social media movie of the year (Catfish), a mediocre remake of a very funny French film (Dinner For Schmucks), and more!

It’s that time of the year again: that brief span of time in between Christmas and New Year’s when journalists, critics, and cultural commentators scramble to define an arbitrary block of time even before that block is over with. To speculate on what 2010 will be remembered for is purely that: speculation. But the lists, summaries, and editorials reflecting on the events, accomplishments, failures, and occurrences of 2010 no doubt shape future debate over what January 1-December 31, 2010 will be remembered for personally, nostalgically, and historically. How we refer to the present frames how it is represented in the future, even when contradictions arise over what events should be valued from a given year. In an effort to begin that framing process, what I offer here is not a critical list of great films, but one that points out dominant cultural conversations, shared trends, and intersecting topics (both implicit and explicit) that have occurred either between the films themselves or between films and other notable aspects of American social life in 2010. As this column attempts to establish week in and week out, movies never exist in a vacuum, but instead operate in active conversation with one another. Thus, a movie’s cultural context should never be ignored. So, without further adieu, here is my overview of the Top 10 topics, trends, and events of the year that have nothing to do with the 3D debate.

With the release of Pixar’s Up, last year saw a great deal of conversation surrounding the ghettoization of animated movies at major awards shows. This debate resulted in something of a minor, qualified victory for animated cinema of 2009, as Up was the first animated movie to be nominated for Best Picture since Beauty and the Beast, but then again it sat amongst a crowded bevy of nine fellow nominations, and animated films remain unthreatening to their live action competitors because of the separate-but-unequal Best Animated Feature Category. I’d like to take this space to advocate for the big-category acceptance of yet another marginalized and underappreciated category around awards time: non-fiction films.

With both Catfish and The Social Network, we’re thinking more and more about how the internet has affected our physical lives. This is not some grand revelation or big surprise considering how embedded in the culture our binary personae are – in fact, it was suggested decades ago and not seen as some sort of crazy prognostication by mad men. It was accepted as what would eventually happen as more and more people plugged in. One such prognostication came in the form of a short film from 2001 called The Parlor. It’s now more relevant and more entertaining than it was back then. And, in the interest of being mysterious (since that’s what sells films these days), I’ll rhetorically ask in big bold letters: WHAT IS THE PARLOR?

Here at the new (and soon to be improved, I promise) Reject HQ we are in countdown mode for Fantastic Fest 2010. I believe that several of our team members — the likes of Fure, Hunter and Abaius — are packing their bags and getting ready for a week of greasy Drafthouse food, movies in not English and sleeping on a floor littered with beer bottles and piles of Pepto. So the next time I bring you the best of the week in The Week That Was, I may be under the influence of peer pressure and bad food. But until then, it’s business as usual here in Reject Land. And by business as usual, I’m of course referring to copious amounts of shenanigans as we continue to bring you the best, unbiased, no bull-shit, non directorial ball coddling coverage of the film industry on the web today. We also wrote some articles…

It’s difficult to conduct an interview about a film that no one’s supposed to be talking about, but there’s more fascinating things going on beyond the mystery of Catfish. In a closed door, password-protected session, I sat down for a lengthy conversation with directors Henry Joost and Ariel Shulman, and the subject of the documentary Nev Shulman to discuss how real everything was, the horror aspect, aborted plans to use Bruce Willis’s face for advertising, the list of possible titles, it’s Grizzly Man connection, and what they’re turning down the Justin Bieber biopic to make next. [Spoilers exist simply because we'll be talking openly about the film.]

The Machete Spanish title worked so well a few weeks back, we figured we should probably stick to a dialect a little closer to home this time around. Therefore, in honuh of The Town, as well the othuh fine films in contention this box office weekend, we’re shipping up to Boston, Dropkick Murphys style. It should be a fairly close race between the newbies. M Night is producing a horror film about some people in an elevator. Lionsgate’s got a new animated flick to drop bomb on us. Easy A is a nice throwback to John Hughes’s comedies. Some of them will hit the Green Monster (this week, that title denotes cold, hard cash) solid, and some will slip into the Charles River without so much as a whimper. Let’s see how it shapes up. It’s about to get wicked retahded in he-uh.

The release of Catfish, a movie that will cause you to be beaten to death by the internet if you even mention its name, brings to mind a few movies of the recent past that we couldn’t talk about. These films were more than just big twists. They were entire experiences that audiences, in rare form, decided were too incredible to spoil for anyone. It seems we’re getting farther and farther away from that here in the Information Age, but Catfish (whether or not the hype is deserved) is a great reminder of films that gained mystique because you “had to see them for yourself.” Here are a few of those films.

Other than being vaguely aware of an argument as to the authenticity of the contents of Catfish, and the equally vague but glowing praise for the film coming out of of Sundance — it seems that my fellow reviewers honored the advertised wishes of Rogue Pictures in keeping their friends in the dark. I walked into the Arclight Theater with a clean slate; having no idea what kind of film I would be reviewing. What I was treated to was a lovely, disturbing, hopeful,  perhaps too well edited/played out documentary. The last part, however — never really matters, because the content of the film is still rich and meaningful, which ends up being more important than most of the questions you may end up asking yourself once the credits roll.

“Blessed with perceptive insight into the Internet age, the rewriting of social rules it has spurred and the new forms of creativity it has inspired, the film is very much a product of the here and now. So the fact that it seems the breakout success from Sundance 2010 comes as no surprise.” These are the words of our very own Robert Levin, reviewing Catfish earlier in the year up in the snowy forefront of Utah and the little indie festival they’ve got going there. That breakout success has now officially broken out into the mainstream as it hits limited theaters on September 17th. So what’s this reality thriller all about? You’ll have to watch the trailer for yourself to be told that you can’t know what it’s about:

Relativity, Rogue Pictures and Universal have finally won the race for Sundance’s hottest ticket, the social media-centric mystery doc Catfish.

‘Catfish’ is, arguably, the breakout hit from Sundance 2010. Expect to hear a lot more about it soon.