Review: Beastly

Grade: C-

Upside: Neal Patrick Harris.

Downside: Everything else, especially the complete absence of subtlety and blatant pandering to the Twilight crowd.

Poor Alex Pettyfer.

Kid’s just getting his break and he’s had to play a knockoff Edward Cullen twice.

On the heels of playing an angsty love struck alien teen in I Am Number Four, he anchors a modern take on Beauty and Beast as an angsty love struck deformed teen in the aptly named Beastly.

Word on the street is already pretty damning about this flick—we’re talking “worst movie of the year” heat. But, come on, based on the trailers alone, did anyone think this was going to be high, or even moderately entertaining, art? Beastly is a tepid retread of the classic “true beauty is on the inside” fable designed to appease Twilight fans while they wait for Breaking Dawn.

Pettyfer stars as Kyle Kingston, a pompous, rich pretty boy who worships physical attractiveness and is king of the hill at a swank Manhattan high school that looks more like an office building. On his way to becoming president of the school’s vague environmental committee, he steps over shy, smart girl Lindy—Vanessa Hudgens playing her go-to ‘soulful, smart outsider’ character from everything she’s been in—and draws the ire of resident creepy goth/emo witch Kendra—Mary-Kate Olsen, clearly drawing from her own experience and wardrobe. After embarrassing, Kendra, Carrie-style, at a school dance, Kyle is cursed to live as a ‘tattooed freak’ who must find true love within a year. Removed from his cushy life in Gossip Girl adjacent by his equally conceited newscaster father—played with flat villiany by Parenthood and Six Feet Under's Peter Krause—Kyle spends half that time acting like he's maturing and trying to cajole Hudgen's Lindy to fall for him.

Pettyfer expands slightly on his role from Number Four. Instead of being stoic and boiling with teenage rage, he’s boiling with teen rage while being stoic and arrogant. See the difference there. Thankfully, he has a solid supporting cast, including the earthy Lisa Gay Hamilton as his forgiving Jamaican maid (not quite as bad as it sounds, but close) and the perennially awesome Neil Patrick Harris. NPH plays blind tutor to Pettyfer’s Kyle during his exile to the outer boroughs and it is his impeccable comic timing, razor wit and barely-contained exasperation that single-handedly saves this flick from being a complete waste. Think of NPH as the clever, wry voice of enlightened annoyance in the face of teen melodrama. If only there, were someone like that in Twilight…

Aside from a few solid performances, Beastly is generally a mild and forgettable experience with its greatest flaw being the pitiable lack of subtlety. Want to know how a character in Beastly feels? Give them a second and they’ll tell you, at the top of their lungs. The lack subtlety even extends to the direction. Director Daniel Barnz packs Beastly with extreme close-ups and gratuitous musical cues to punctuate the already thick melodrama. If it weren’t for a handful of reflective moments peppered throughout the 90-minute run time, there would be no clue that this was made after the late 90s. It is also noticeably light on action. Considering this is supposed to be an edgy update, one would think there be some significant action sequences to keep the 18-34 demo invested. With only one remotely thrilling scene, Beastly manages to deliver less action than the 20-year old Disney version. Beastly is definition of ‘meh.’ Uninspired, unoriginal and nowhere near unforgettable. The target crowd—Twilight fans and pre-tween girls—will eat this up, but most audiences will be too busy rolling their eyes at the over cooked melodrama to let this one take a place in their memory.

Review: Rango

Grade: A

Upsides: Original, clever and visually dazzling with a shockingly deep plot that tips its hat to revisionist Westerns and Gonzo Journalism

Downsides: Realistically detailed creatures, some rough language and a heavy plot might scare, confuse and bore the youngest viewers

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Why did the chameleon cross the road?

No ideas?

How about to find himself?

Gore Verbinski’s Rango offers one of the deepest punch lines to a chicken-cross-the-road joke all wrapped in the most original and subversive animated feature to emerge from a studio not named Pixar. Raoul Duke would be proud. Coincidentally, Hunter S. Thompson’s alter ego and his compadre, Dr. Gonzo, make a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in early goings, a clear tip of the hat to star Johnny Depp’s legendary turn as Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In many ways, Rango is a spiritual and visual cousin to the Fear and Loathing, right down to spastic chameleon Rango’s red Hawaiian print shirt.

Rango is a fever dream twist on classic westerns, spiked with existential dilemmas and the orneriest collection of humanized critters this side of a Disney flick. The animated epic follows the titular chameleon as he is thrown from his life as a caged pet with dreams of starring in his own story and is forced to live the role he was born to play. That role just happens to be sheriff of the dying western hamlet of Dirt, where the denizens---including all manner of lizard, rodent, feline and rabbit—are struggling to survive amidst a mysterious drought, outlaws, cannibals and the shrinking border of the ‘west’. Despite some mildly predictable plot elements, Rango tackles everything from the death of the old west to the actor’s search for identity and the importance of the audience to the storyteller—including a Greek chorus of Mariachi Owls—with cleverness and personality, proving itself so much more than a fish out of water story with talking animals it seems to be.

Star Johnny Depp knocks it out the park, as usual, voicing the conflicted Rango with his trademark buzzed mania, self-awareness and pitch perfect comic timing. He hits many of the same beats from Fear and Loathing, but his voice work succeeds largely due to the fresh context. The rest of the cast is no slouch either. Isla Fisher voices Annie Oakley-ish lizard Beans with pure spunk, while Abigail Breslin turns in a creepy, smart-alecky turn as field mouse Priscilla. Ned Beatty lends a gruff world-weariness to the treacherous Mayor, and Johnny Depp encounters Davy Jones again as Bill Nighy voices the machine-gun-tailed rattler from hell, Rattlesnake Jake. There’s even another surprise character cameo that’s sure to please Spaghetti Western fans.

Visually, Rango is amazing. The creatures of Dirt are not only painstakingly and realistically detailed, each has a unique physical deformity or signature that shows how much living these characters have done. The shots of the desert and Rango’s hallucinations are an awesome balance of majesty and mystery. Verbinski and the animators at Industrial Light & Magic proceed to outdo their work on the characters and scenery by staging some ridiculously elaborate action sequences—complete with dive bombing bats and machine-gunning rabbit cannibals—that exceed the limits of spectacle and imagination in most computer animated features.

Despite all of its distilled greatness, Rango may not play well to kids under ten, as many of creatures are appropriately frightening and the language can be coarse (hey, it’s a western. Tough talk is unavoidable). Not to mention, most of the existentialist and post-modern western themes are bound to fly right over their heads. While the kids may not get everything that’s going on, they’ll still be mesmerized by the dazzling visuals and slapstick shenanigans that punctuate the deeper storyline. Even if the kids don’t have fun with this trippy revisionist Western, fans of post-modern Westerns and complex, humorous epics in the vein of Verbinski’s and Depp’s last collaboration—something about pirates—are sure to have one heck of a good time.

Review: Drive Angry 3D

Grade: C

Upside: Visceral gory action and gratuitous nudity, with sly self-awareness, that's sure to please fans of 21st century grindhouse flicks like Machete.

Downside: Generally unoriginal with archetypal characters and falls flat when trying to add any depth.

I can imagine the pitch for Summit Entertainment's new Nicolas Cage vehicle, Drive Angry (Shot in 3D!): 21st Century Grindhouse! It’s The Crow meets Death Proof!

Tarantino would’ve killed to direct this in his heyday.

Unfortunately, the duty of directing one of the purest examples of 70’s era B-movie schlock in years falls to Direct-to-DVD vet Patrick Lussier. In Drive Angry, Lussier directs Nicolas Cage through ridiculously violent and brazen revenge fantasy. Cage plays the cleverly—to some—named John Milton, an escapee from Hell dead set on saving his granddaughter from slimy six-gun slinging Satanist Jonah King (Twilight’s Billy Burke). Milton is accompanied on his roaring rampage of vengeance by Amber Heard’s Piper, a Southern-fried pistol and dead ringer for Friday Night Lights’ Tyra Collette. Tailing Milton and Piper is a snarky soul collector known only as the Accountant, played by perennial ‘That Guy’ William Fichtner with his usual ticks turned up to 100.

Fichtner is not the only one who has turned the intensity up for this flick. Everything about Drive Angry is beyond over-the-top. From the cartoonish violence to the abundant nudity, this flick operates almost exclusively on Badass Logic and slavishly follows the Rule of Cool. Whether this works largely depends on your taste and tolerance for the hallowed conventions of grindhouse cinema. Taken at face value, Drive Angry’s hard ‘R’ qualities—including gunshots to the eye, a shootout during sex (ripped straight from another 21st century big budget B-movie, 2007’s Shoot’em Up) and a plethora of limbs destroyed by buck shots—could be appalling. Thankfully, the makers of Drive Angry don’t take the material seriously and the sly awareness of the flick’s B-movie roots makes it more digestible than it has any right to be.

The performances, on the other hand, are much harder to swallow. Cage hams it up, as usual, with his trademark stilted delivery that ranges from quirky cool to laughably explosive. Heard fares a little better, playing Piper with just the right amount of spunk of vulnerability to avoid be grating. Burke and Fichtner do serviceable jobs as antagonists, but neither brings anything original to characters that most audiences have seen before, which is the main problem with Drive Angry.

There’s nothing new here. Lussier does competent work that is at times thrilling, but is mostly a series of shots, characters and plot points that even the most casual moviegoers would recognize. One would think that with carte blanche to go balls-to-the-wall Lussier and his team would be a bit more creative. If Lussier couldn’t give the flick a bit more originality, at least he could’ve given it some depth. Sadly, anytime Drive Angry tries to switch gears and show some character growth or even something resembling real emotion, it falls flat. Trust me, it’s never a good sign when the audience laughs at the most dramatic scenes. Despite these failings, Drive Angry succeeds in being exactly what it seems to be on the tin: a total turn-off-your-brain experience in 3D(which is noticeably clearer and more effective than recent 3D releases, thanks to some cool effects with objects shooting towards the audience). If you can manage to ignore the B-movie styling, unoriginal characters and rehashed plot, or you just love movies like Machete or Death Proof then Drive Angry is right up your alley. If not, it’d be your best interest to drive away from this undercooked revenge flick.

Better Than it Should Be? That’s The Dilemma

Vaughn and James Wring Some Depth Out of Their Latest Comedy

Vince Vaughn and Kevin James latest, The Dilemma, will leave with your own quandary: Is this movie really that good or am I just lying to myself? Truthfully, that’s not a terrible dilemma, and neither is this unexpectedly deep comedy about one man’s tortured attempt to keep a secret that could ruin much more than a friendship.

Vaughn and James play longtime friends and business partners, Ronny and Nick, on the verge of their big breaks, romantically and professionally. As the two work on an electric engine with bite for Chrysler that could change their business fortunes, Ronny, inspired by Nick’s wedded bliss with wife Geneva (Winona Ryder), is gearing up to propose to girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Connelly). Complications arise when Ronny catches Geneva playing cougar to Channing Tatum’s tattooed bad boy, Zip. Hi-jinks and heartbreak ensue as Ronny struggles with telling Nick the devastating truth and risking the Chrysler deal.

Director Ron Howard—or at least Universal’s marketing department—pulled a nifty bait and switch with The Dilemma. What was clearly marketed as another Vaughn frat buddy vehicle, with James stepping in for Owen Wilson, is actually a mildly heart-wrenching, and occasionally riotous, study of the psychological, and physical, stress associated with keeping secrets that threaten the delicate nature of relationships, platonic and romantic.

Vaughn truly carries the film, portraying a man besieged by a secret he doesn’t want to keep. He still delivers his trademark snide insults—as well as a punishing amount of physical comedy when he tousles with Tatum in the film’s funniest, yet oddly violent scene—but the majority of his performance is balancing the jokes with a little more pathos than expected. While Vaughn hits most of the dramatic notes, particularly when showing exasperation over his duplicity, he doesn’t dig as deep as he could, often bailing for a joke instead of showing too much genuine agony.

With Vaughn carrying the comedic and dramatic load, James is left to play straight man and victim. Admittedly, it’s strange to see James in a role devoid of pratfalls, but he plays Nick with an equal measure of naivete and anxiousness, as a man beset by career anxiety while wholly unaware of his wife’s duplicity. James lets Nick’s good-natured gullibility sink in so deep that audiences will still feel a bit blindsided at the denouement, despite knowing exactly what’s coming. Winona Ryder takes another turn as a deplorable character playing Nick’s philandering wife without complexity until the final frames. Connelly plays a compassionate counterpoint to Ryder’s spiteful shrew with a low-key turn as Vaughn’s supportive girlfriend. Connelly may not have much to do, but at least she gives the role a dignity that eludes most contemporary female comedic leads.

Ron Howard does a fine job of pushing these actors just beyond their comfort zones—some much more than others—giving them characters with a little dirt on them who are constantly forced to suppress their personal and professional secrets. The understated confrontations, and subsequent confessions, between Vaughn and Connelly alone give the Dilemma more depth than it deserves.

Despite surprising depth and strong performances, there are notable missteps particularly with supporting actors who are grossly underused—Queen Latifah and Tatum in particular—the lack of comedic material for James, and the wall-banging reluctance of the characters to just fess up, already! Even worse is the amount of jokes that face plant from launch. The audience sat without so much as chuckling for most of the film’s two hours, largely due to a stream of tired Vince Vaughn jokes buried under the weight of the drama. Flat jokes and missed opportunities aside, the Dilemma is a real surprise, especially with its dreaded January release date, offering more emotion than laughs and showing viewers something they haven’t seen from Vaughn since his turn in The Break-Up: range.

The Dearth of Our Imagination

I returned from my first pilgrimage to Comic-Con inspired, but broken-hearted.

Comic-con was every inch the spectacle of legend. The central exhibition hall of the San Diego Convention Center, a two-block long cage of white-washed steel and glass, was crowded from wall to pillar to post to wall with an ocean of ‘geeks,’ children, tourists, stars, creators and drag-a-longs. The crowds clamored, pushed and tugged beneath towering displays of supersized mechas and movie posters, grabbing and snatching at every free trinket or toy tossed in their general direction. The hallways above the exhibition hall were congested with snaking lines that wrapped around, inside and outside the convention center. Hall H alone was a staggering, humbling sight. The cavernous hall, housing more seats than a small theater, barely contained crowds of thousands who waited hours with baited breath, and sharpened pencils, to squint at the movie stars of the month and gaze at sizzle reels. Among those crowds, the brown and, especially, the black faces were easily outnumbered by what seemed to be a 100 to 1 ratio.

For two days, my girlfriend and I squeezed through the stifling crowds, sliding between bodies to grab swag and wearing out the soles of our feet for a chance to see our favorite TV stars from 300 yards away. As we shimmied through the crowds and stood in ridiculously long lines, I noticed how rare a sight we were. In a moment like this, my girlfriend’s brother would pose the terribly clichéd inquiry, “How does it feel to be the pepper in the salt shaker?” My typical response would be to let the question hang until the silence becomes too awkward to continue any conversation. But this time, I would’ve answered, “lonely and discouraging.” Sure, attendees of myriad ethnicities attended Comic-Con. The diversity of California’s population practically demands it. But, among the rainbow of attendees, people of African descent were notoriously underrepresented. As bad as it seemed, the dearth of black creators and talent was even more distressing.

The minimal presence of black artists at Comic-Con was enough to make one ask, “Do we have any imagination?” Personally, I wondered: Where were the representatives of Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks—a series steeped in as equal doses of pop culture lexicon to rival Scott Pilgrim—? Who was present to discuss DC Comics Milestone Line—one of the most influential collection of African-American superhero creations—? I know we are capable of contemplating and conjuring the same feats imagination as creators of any other culture—despite having less money in many cases—but looking across the exhibit hall would prove that assertion wrong. I passed maybe four or five booths, out of hundreds, with black artists and, even more depressing, maybe one or two booths with black-owned properties. Of the two booths displaying black-owned properties I saw, one was a cheaply-made comic with poorly rendered superhero archetypes and the other was a clear Boondocks knock off, complete with brown-skinned anime characters. Generally, this type of creativity is inoffensive and tolerable, but, in a room where creativity is bursting at the seems, a couple of derivative projects with brown and black characters weren’t going to draw much attention. Perhaps the best example of dismal black attendance on either side of the Comic-Con fence came in the last minutes of our last day at the convention. My girlfriend and I were making our final rounds on the exhibit floor, minutes before the doors were to close, when a stocky black man with a immaculate ‘fro and a wide collared shirt over a canary yellow suit caught sight of us. I saw him approaching out the corner of my eye, hoping he wasn’t some suit trying to drag us to a preview of some hackneyed project like No Ordinary Family or The Cape. Instead, he politely blocked our path and asked “Do you guys know Jim Kelly?” Of course, I knew the legendary Jim Kelly from Enter the Dragon and Three the Hard Way. Since the question was obviously directed at me more than my girlfriend, I replied with a guarded enthusiasm, “Yeah.” He responded, “He’ll be here tomorrow…Come and check him out.” We nodded, feigning enthusiasm and knowing that, even if we were coming the next day, we probably wouldn’t stop to see Mr. Kelly because we’d rather catch the Marvel movie preview in Hall H.

Our apathy for black projects or seeing an aging black actor was likely informed, in some part, to the apathy our people show towards aspects of pop culture that don’t include music or sports. Despite the fact that the world is falling at the feet of the comic and video game gods, we don’t seem to care to contribute. However, we’ll gladly consume. We’ll buy movie tickets, video games, toys and a select few will purchase comics, but we rarely have a presence at the creator’s table and, at times, it seems that we don’t care to. Now, I won’t decry the hard work of the black creators who are stretching their imagination and creating uniquely creative work that demonstrates we are on par with the best creators of any color. Unfortunately, these creators are buried beneath the rappers, athletes, actors and quasi-celebrities who most of America associates with black “creativity.” Making matters worse is the reluctance of some creators, even the best, to avoid creating material so ingrained in “our” struggle that it turns off the mainstream consumer. I believe everyone should tell their story their way, but if we persist in telling stories with decaying neighborhoods, discordant romances and preachy drag queens, and we only stretch our imagination to evaluate the same issues of racism, poverty, and urban despair that have been repeated ad-hoc for decades then we risk alienating mainstream audiences who are far more engaged in the fantastic than the tragicomic. We don’t have to sacrifice the spirit of our stories and the integrity of our voices, but a little variety wouldn’t hurt. There are infinite ways to address these issues with imagination and ingenuity, from metaphor to allusion. If we, as creators, don’t embrace creative approaches to our material and start dreaming a little bigger then we’ll be stuck selling the same stories to the same people. With African-Americans making up a small percentage of the country, how far will that strategy take us?

To be fair, I’m sure a number of black creators and talent would have willingly attended Comic-Con to sell their stories and promote their projects. I’m also sure that there’s a sizable community of African-Americans and individuals of African ancestry from other countries who would love to have attended the convention as witnesses to the glut of creativity, but couldn’t for a myriad of circumstances. The truth is not everyone’s going to make the pilgrimage every year, but that shouldn’t stop those of us who love this stuff—the comics, the movies, the video games, the genre shows, the anime, etc.—from trying, at least once. And, for those of us who dare to create pop culture art or tell a wildly inventive story—myself included—it is imperative that we make the pilgrimage at some point, so that we can share our creations with an audience that will devour them without hesitation. Let’s just be sure to bring something fresh and original that will blow the geeks out of the water and show them that creators of color can dream as big and as bright as the best in the business.