Warm Bodies: A Near-perfect Twilight or Why R is Better than Edward

"I am nothing like that guy. Seriously, look at these cheekbones."

Dear Stephanie Meyer,

Re: Warm Bodies

This.

Sincerely,
Fans of Supernatural Love Stories and Everybody Else

I knew it wouldn't take long for somebody to really get out there and make a better Twilight. Heck, the only place to go from Twilight was up, so there was pretty low ceiling for failure. Yet, Jonathan Levine's adaptation of Isaac Marion's zombie love story, Warm Bodies, is such a tight and alarmingly heartwarming narrative that it makes you wonder how Twilight made it to bookstores and the silver screen first, despite the very clear and reasonable evidence that without Twilight there would be no Warm Bodies. With that in mind, we almost have to thank Stephanie Meyer for screwing the pooch so royally that dozens of others were inspired to clean up her mess. And what a masterful job Levine did in adapting one of the best attempts to clean up the Twilight mess.

Warm Bodies is a simple, yet reasonably original, love story that acknowledges and comments some of literature and pop cultures best inter-species love stories from the most obvious, Romeo & Juliet, to the contemporary, Twilight of course, and everything in between, including Edward Scissorhands and Beauty and The Beast. At the center of Bodies is R (Nicholas Hoult), a teen, or maybe twenty-something, zombie who spends his days stumbling through an abandoned airport in the aftermath of an ill-defined, possibly supernatural, zombie apocalypse and barely making small talk with his one "friend", M (Rob Corddry). On a "routine" hunt for food (read: brains), R encounters a band of humans from one of the last surviving human settlements and is immediately infatuated with Julie (Teresa Palmer), who just so happens the daughter of fanatical human resistance leader (John Malkovich). After consuming the brain of Julie's boyfriend (Dave Franco), R "kidnaps" Julie, for her safety, taking her to the grounded plane he calls home, where he finds himself becoming more human as he gets closer to her. Admittedly, the setup is pretty rote,  what with all the star-crossed lovers from opposite sides of the track, but what makes Warm Bodies work is that this setup launches a very charming, tight narrative devoted to building a solid relationship between R and Julie rather than putting their relationship through the typical contrived Rom-Com paces.

In many ways, Warm Bodies is reminiscent of the best parts of The Artist: the charming characters (R moreso than Julie, easily), avoidance of rom-com tropes, and the focus on building a relationship rather than pasting it together. There's a moment near the midpoint, where R, who speaks through either internal monologue or barely understandable grunts, admits a pretty damning secret to Julie, and it is handled without melodrama or histrionics but a level of maturity and intelligence that is often lacking in both genre flicks and rom-coms. That moment is one of many, including a witty yet subdued Beauty-and-the-Beast scenario, that sold me on Levine's  minimally schmaltzy take on the material. Beyond Levine's admirably restrained approach, Nicholas Hoult's portrayal of R is quite special because he imbues R with a reticent, almost reluctant charm. His R is that stock character who only wants a "normal" life, but he also acknowledges that his reality is not always pretty. He is essentially Peter Parker as a zombie, right down to the Red-Blue outfit. Yet, once he is exposed to the potential to become more human, R doggedly pursues his love and life without resorting to an abundance of moping or machismo. R is a great romantic lead because he is honest, earnest, and fallible, which makes him charming in a way that his closest contemporary, Edward Cullen, will never be.

Hoult's performance is critical to the relatively slow-burn nature of the flick, which is admittedly well-paced. With Warm Bodies, Levine does not rush the proceedings and instead lets the relationship between R and Julie grow slowly, giving the two a chance to develop trust beyond R's initial infatuation and allowing that trust to blossom into a relationship based on an oft-ignored concept called honesty. This approach also allows Levine to guide the movie beyond a simple romance, which is welcome because Warm Bodies really isn't about romance. It is a fable about the resilience of humanity in the face of its own inhumanity. Bodies may not be the most heady examination of that topic but at least it's ambitious enough to attempt to discuss such a weighty topic. As R's love for Julie blossoms over the course of the film, his physical body comes to reflect the struggle plaguing him since being turned. Essentially, it reveals a soul who, despite a very unique condition, struggles to hold onto the things that make him human. Even the character most likely voted as antagonist, Malcovich's cold Geneal Grigio, is a man struggling to hold on to humanity, in both a personal and explicitly broad sense, after losing his family in the wake of the Zombocalypse. Again, this flick touches on heavier issues than something like Twilight ever will, but it does so with a less-than-cynical outlook, which makes it altogether far more endearing than its contemporaries.

Yet, for all its bright spots, Warm Bodies is quite an acquired taste. It is can be intermittently uneventful, follows a pretty worn path, and the ending essentially requires us to believe in magic, which may alienate those already put off by the exhausted supernatural romance angle. Also, Hoult's R is far more likable and relatable than Palmer's more stoic and underserved Julie, leading Bodies into a space that Twilight always occupied where the female lead is far more stoic and less appealing than her suitors. This is particularly damaging because movies such as this need both leads to be equally appealing. Finally, there's some insightful commentary on zombie tropes that is occasionally chuckle-worthy, but most of it is no more insightful--yet still fairly clever--than most intelligent zombie fare. Still, Warm Bodies is not completely undone by its faults. The amount of heart on display is unmatched by most zombie narratives, and the optimism at the core of the movie is refreshing in an era where narratives about the supernatural seem more interested in remarking more on our capacity to destroy than our ability to build and persevere. Even more welcome, is the flicks attempt to show that love can blossom when both parties involved are honest and reasonably mature rather than the celibacy slavery that Meyer champions in her Twilight saga.

Gangster Squad: Turning the Untouchables into a Saturday Morning Cartoon

"Watch out for that new Power Ranger franchise: Power Rangers - Untouchable Gangster Squad!!"

Twenty years ago, Gangster Squad would have changed my life. I would have been a fresh teen, sneaking into a cool R-rated actioner filled with quick-witted aces, duplicitous dames, and brutal bad guys that looked and sounded just like most of the heavies from the first season of Batman the Animated Series.

Of course, that would have only happened if I never saw the Untouchables, Devil in a Blue Dress, or LA Confidential. But, at ripening old age, I have seen all of these movies, as well as countless other flicks, shows, and video games, some successful (Boardwalk Empire) and some less so (The Black Dhalia and Rockstar's L.A. Noire), which have covered this ground with greater craft and concern for verisimilitude, character, and narrative than Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad.

Mind you, I enjoy Fleischer's work. Zombieland was pretty solid for its relatively modest ambitions, and 30 Seconds or Less is a decent, if slight, diversion. However, Fleischer is purely a populist filmmaker who likely has his sights set on becoming the next Zack Snyder or Michael Bay, and he will probably be sliding into a cushy position as a middle-of-the-road journeyman whose works will inevitably display more bombast than vision. Granted, that's a bold prediction, but I offer Gangster Squad as proof. At its best, Gangster Squad is a rip-roaring good time in the vein of old school gangster B-movies, like Angels with Dirty Faces, where morality is black and white and characters are flat as paper but bullets fly as fast as the quips. At its worse, the flick is a living cartoon with simplistically insulting morality, almost zero cleverness or narrative depth (despite rich source material), and a cast of characters that seems handpicked by the Saturday Morning Cartoon Commission on Diversity.

I want to start with the characters in Gangster Squad because as a viewer with a personal awareness that a multicultural vigilante unit in 1940's LA is a deceptively pleasant fiction, that element sticks out like the sorest thumb imaginable. Despite Fleischer and crew's best efforts at reaching a broad audience and respecting global cultural diversity, there is literally no way an African-American or a Hispanic-American would have occupied a place on an elite vigilante unit in pre-Civil rights era Los Angeles, no matter how progressive California was and continues to be. As a Black man, I admit it's cool to see Anthony Mackie playing knife-slinging, smart ass cowboy/ninja/cop Coleman Harris, but I know it's BS, the special brand designed to entice the 18-35 black male demo to come out and see a movie they would have seen with or without an African-American character. Even worse, Fleischer makes only a cursory acknowledgement of the fact that Harris' presence on the squad is inherently odd. To further diminish suspension of disbelief, he adds a Mexican-American character, the colorfully named Navidad Ramirez (Michael Pena, woefully underused), who is essentially a "My Man Friday" to Robert Patrick's rootin-tootin' Yosemite Sam, Max Kennard. That said, the white boys don't fare much better, as Josh Brolin is saddled with every Irish cop stereotype in the book with the exception of red hair, as hard-fightin' and hard-drinkin' John  O'Meara. Only Giovanni Ribisi, as surveillance geek with a conscience, and Ryan Gosling narrowly escape such egregious one-dimensionality, most likely because the romantic lead has to have some semblance of depth, even if that depth only reaches into the reservoirs of Gosling's previous turns as a tiny-voiced charmer. 

Aside from its Rainbow Heroes Collective, Gangster Squad boasts a narrative with little to say and even less on its mind. Not every piece of work that graces the silver screen has to be art; we all know that, but even the pure popcorn entertainment should endeavor to be mildly clever in its progression and respectably honest  about its setting. The vigilantes and villains at the center of Gangster Squad are easily the dullest knives in the drawer, bar none. O'Meara and his squad plan to go to war with East Coast mobster Mickey Cohen, but they have only the barest of bare bones plans: take'em down head on. How about planning an attack? How about wearing masks (which only happens once and never again, leading to friends and families being put in avoidable danger)? How about killing your enemies before they kill your families? How about scouting your enemy then planning an attack where you wear masks and kill those who might kill your family? None of these options are viable; instead, the squad opts to bug Mickey Cohen's home and proceed to bulldoze through a gang war like stickup kids.Cohen, for his part, isn't much smarter, spending more time cackling and grimacing like he was auditioning for a role as one of Gotham's lesser known Batman punching bags than devising fool-proof plans to build a low-key criminal empire--his big plan is to force all West Coast gambling through a central location, because that would never catch the authorities attention. Though Penn probably enjoyed gnashing on scenery in a manner that could only rival the chomping DeNiro displayed in DePalma's The Untouchables (yes, those guys, again). 

To make matters worse, countless works of fiction and non-fiction have gone to great lengths to reveal early 20th century Los Angeles as a complex beast, one that was as affected by racial strife, drugs, crime, and police corruption as it was by the ever growing movie industry. Very little of that complexity, much less the adherent gray morality associated with such a murky period, is acknowledged on camera. If Gangster Squad was the first of its kind, it's black-white morality, in which good cops are unflinching paragons of virtue and gangsters and corrupt cops are the slime that oozes between the sidewalks, might be refreshing, even optimistic, but it exists in the shadow of more than a dozen, or more films that have dealt with the period and its complexities with greater depth, honesty, and entertainment value. Heck, one only needs to look at LA Confidential or the classic Chinatown as evidence.

So, how does Fleischer and his crew counter this lunk-headed approach to narrative and theme? With guns-a-blazing, slow-mo, nacho cheesy dialogue, and a saturated palette that makes the setting as much a cartoon as its characters. For all its faults, Gangster Squad is pretty consistent with the shoot-outs and the stabbings and the beatings. There is such quick movement from set piece to set piece, often with only the barest of rationalization, that one could ignore the lesser elements and just have a whizz-bang good time watching O'Meara and co. gun down the bad guys like the video game characters they are. For most audiences, that will be enough. For anyone with cable or over the age of 13, the proceedings of Gangster Squad will seem flashy but highly derivative. To wit, those multiple set pieces lack any sense of tension beyond the moments that encourage the audience to take bets on which character will die the tragic death that will spur our heroes to cross the line in their pursuit of the pugnacious Cohen. 

Ultimately, Gangster Squad is just the type of throwback action flick that belongs in the January doldrums, that rarefied space where we get a ton of action movies that would have easily been banished to Netflix if not for the generally empty slate studios offer in the early months of the year. Of course, it was originally scheduled for release in November, as some whispered about potential Oscar nods that would never surface, but was pushed back for reshoots after the Dark Knight Tragedy in Aurora, CO last July. As bad as it may have seemed at the time, that move was probably a blessing in disguise because now Gangster Squad seems like it might have a shot at dominating the box office without the threat of real competition,  aside from Marlon Wayans' A Haunted House--which will surely sneak up on the Squad and probably crush them. Instead of being demolished, Gangster Squad will have a clear lane to taking its place as a decidedly guilty pleasure for teenagers who have never been allowed to see a gangster flick of worth, so good job Gangster Squad cast and crew, you only had to leave your original release behind and your brains at the door to take your place in the hearts and minds of the unenlightened youth. Congrats.