Psychics

Some of the shows that I love to watch when channel surfing late at night are those that involve psychics or psychic phenomena. There are a lot of interesting documentaries on psychic detectives, psychic ghost hunters, and the like. It was only a matter of time that a television series would feature a psychic—or, in the case of the two televisions series that I’ve been following recently, characters who sometimes pretend to be psychic.

The first show that I discovered sometime back through reruns on Star World is Psych. The show, which is a crime drama and comedy-drama combined, features Shawn Spencer (James Roday) as a young and dorky crime consultant for the Santa Barbara police department. He’s got super observational skills, often illustrated though quick zoom-ins and slight special effects, and a photographic memory. Shawn is actually a convincing psychic—if he’s not bumbling. He’s got an ever loyal sidekick with whom he often has conflicts, both serious and petty: his childhood best friend, the pharmaceutical sales rep Gus (Dulé Hill). Together they’ve put up a detective agency and sometimes their cases bring them head to head with the Santa Barbara police, with whom Shawn has a love-hate relationship.

I would say this is my Murder, She Wrote and Father Dowling Mysteries equivalent for the new millennium.

The second show I recently developed a fondness for is The Mentalist, which shows on Fox Crime. The series, I would say, is a serious version of Psych. It follows Patrick Jane (Simon Baker), an independent consultant for the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in Sacramento, California. Like Shawn, he also has amazing observation skills, plus other special skills he picked up from his past as a celebrity psychic medium using paranormal abilities he now admits to have faked. “There is no such thing as a psychic,” he declares repeatedly on the show. Patrick helps the CBI solve crimes—or, sometimes, he solves them by himself, and leaves the officers he works with frustrated at how he sometimes keep them out of the loop.

If there’s another thing Shawn and Patrick have in common, they’re both incorrigible and sometimes difficult to manage. Well, that, and they’re both good-looking in a boy-next-door kind of way.

Both shows are rather fascinating because they both show how sharp observation skills and common sense can solve a complex web of crime—which is quite refreshing after all the crime dramas went forensics on the viewers.

“ Paranormal Activity”

There’s a new film that’s going The Blairwitch Project route, Paranormal Activity. In this low budget film, a young couple, Katie and Micah, document paranormal phenomena in their little apartment. Written and directed by Oren Peli, it premiered at the Screamfest Film Festival in the United States on October 14, 2007. The slow road to its October 16, 2009 nationwide release has a good story to it. Somewhere along the way to its finding a distributor, the film ended up at the DreamWorks studio, where it impressed a production executive, who badgered her boss, the production chief, to watch it, who, in turn, asked his boss, the studio chief, to watch the film. The studio chief then handed it to top boss Steven Spielberg, who brought it back thinking it to be “haunted.” Supposedly, after watching the film, his bedroom doors locked by themselves and he had to call a locksmith to get out.

How interesting is that?

Still, the studio didn’t know what to do with the film, so they decided to test it with a screening audience—many of whom walked out. At first, they thought the audience had found the movie so bad they couldn’t finish it. Apparently, it was the opposite. The movie was so frightening, some of the viewers couldn’t take it anymore.

Again, how interesting is that?

Paranormal Activity has since set the record as the most profitable independent film ever made. It was made with a production budget of $15,000 and has since made over $100,000.

Visit the website at www.paranormalactivity-movie.com. Let’s hope it gets shown here!

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