Ted

3/5

Seth McFarlane’s live-action feature film debut, Ted, has at least one good thing going for it: It’s better than Family Guy.  I’ve never understood the wild popularity of that stale and exhausted Simpsons knock-off.  Although, its ubiquitous animator and creator, who at one point had three programs running back-to-back on Fox’s Sunday Night Animation Domination (Family Guy, American Dad, and The Cleveland Show), is pretty well-suited for a single, solitary time slot.  He’s really a one-idea kind of artist.  Family Guy was never consistently clever enough to maintain its required airtime.  That’s not to say that Stewey, the brilliant Bond Villain baby, and Brian, the dog who’s ten times smarter than his owner, weren’t good ideas in the first place.  They were great ideas. 

            

Ted, the raunchy and hilarious, R-rated fairy tale about a boy whose Teddy Bear comes to life one magical day and proceeds to grow up alongside him, is another inspired concept.  As the boy, John, becomes an adult (at least physically), Teddy becomes Ted, a vulgar and immature slacker who spends his days smoking weed and his nights partying with hookers.  Ted is, in essence, a reflection of John’s arrested development, his refusal to put away childhood and become a grown up.  The central premise is so obviously good it’s hard to believe someone hadn’t already thought of it.  What would have made for an absolutely tremendous animated or live-action short film is here stretched out to over 90 minutes and, miraculously, the movie doesn’t rip its stitching—although it comes awfully close. 

            

Now 35-years-old, John (Mark Wahlberg) is a well-meaning goof and rental car employee with a gorgeous girlfriend (Mila Kunis) who’s sick of sharing her man with his boorish stuffed (party) animal.  Ted is voiced by McFarlane himself—a gifted vocalist who, admittedly, finesses a comedic line so superbly that nearly everything Ted has to say comes out barbed and penetrates right to the funny bone.  The plot involves John trying to mediate the two poles tugging on him: the girl dragging him kicking and screaming into a responsible relationship and Ted, who’s still the security blanket for this frightened man-child.  At some point, Giovanni Ribisi enters the picture as a creepy Teddy Bear stalker straight from Silence of The Lambs.  That superfluous plot point provides the action necessary to propel the movie to its feature length goal, but adds little else. 

            

Made in the same pop-culture savvy style that Matt Groening invented and McFarlane later adopted for his animated sitcoms, Ted gushes over Star Wars and Flash Gordon while jabbing at such easy pickings as Jack And Jill and Taylor Lautner.  One of McFarlane’s trademarks is his unearned flippancy: he loves to rip on zeitgeist fads without having the intelligence to send them up in any insightful way.  Like South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone, McFarlane sits on an ivory tower chanting “Everyone’s Stupid But Me”.  Unlike the South Park duo, McFarlane puts nothing up, never pushing boundaries or provoking people to rethink their own ideologies or obsessions.  That same hypocrisy exists ever so slightly in Ted, but, for the most part, McFarlane is working more from Judd Apatow and Kevin Smith’s handbook for jejune but teary-eyed modern comedies. 

            
As the classic story of a boy, his best friend, and the girl that comes between them, Ted mostly works, because the script (written by McFarlane) mixes puerility and scatological humor—its so dense in dick, feces and sex jokes that all you can do is give in to the immaturity and laugh—with shards of wisdom and heart.  Ted’s annoyingly cutesy “I Love You” audio function has remained inside his stuffing over the years.  If it gets touched, an adorably childlike voice giggles that most unmanly phrase, and when inconveniently toggled during a poignant moment of male bonding between Ted and John, it perfectly sums up everything the two boys feel but can no longer say to one another.  It’s those sorts of heavenly messages that exist organically throughout Ted.  If only McFarlane had done more with them.  Too often it seems he’s just trying to please his Family Guy faithful, but in all honestly, it’s probably time he outgrow them. 

Prometheus

3/5

With Prometheus, legendary director Ridley Scott makes his long-awaited return to the science fiction genre, his bread and butter.  I know many of his dearest fans have been anticipating this release like the Second Coming, but I held my enthusiasm.  To these eyes, the director hasn’t made a great film since Blade Runner 30 years ago.  For a one-time genius of the form, he’s quite rusty.  Prometheus, about an interstellar space expedition aboard the titular vessel, where the crew of deep space explorers stumbles on the scary inhabitants of some distant planet, is not Scott’s expected return to the annals of sci-fi mastery, but little more than an effectively executed and exhilarating piece of 70’s style science-fiction-horror filmmaking.  Any stabs Scott makes at intellectualism or deeper meaning hardly resonate.  Prometheus is a well-made, big-budget creature-feature—no more, no less.      

            

The year is 2089 and Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) are archeologists and lovers digging through caves in Scotland when they discover a pictogram with a map directing them toward a constellation of stars thousands of light years away.  The two opine that these galactic coordinates will hold the secrets to humanity’s origins.  Two years later, cut to the Prometheus spacecraft, where android David (a brilliant Michael Fassbender) maintains the ship, peeps in on the dreams of the slumbering crew, and plays Lawrence of Arabia on repeat.  Fitting David with the flamboyant elegance of a starchy English butler, the underhandedness of surreptitious villain, and the muted emotion of his namesake robot from A.I., Fassbender makes David the most interesting character in the film.  When someone harshly points out his inherent soullessness, the magnificent Irish actor reacts with the perfect amount of concealed heartbreak.  Even if it’s true, intellectually, David understands exactly what it means. 

            

A terminally ill billionaire named Weyland (Guy Pearce in old man makeup) has funded the mission and assembled a crew including the scientists Shaw and Holloway, the no-nonsense ship overseer Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), the captain (Idris Elba), and a number of skeptics and clashing personalities.  As the team enters a mysterious planet’s toxic atmosphere and then sets down on its rocky and desolate surface, we already know where this ship’s headed.  The pre-humans—or “Engineers”—that Shaw and Holloway hope to find aren’t necessarily friendly, and Prometheus, at times, becomes the kind of don’t-leave-the-group slasher flick we’ve seen a thousand times already.  When some slithery alien life form, that looks like an eel mixed with a giant parasitic inchworm, makes contact with one of our unwitting crewmembers, he decides to approach the thing as one might approach a stray puppy.  The audience bellows in unison, “What the hell are you doing?” right before it leaps through his mask and down his throat.  We’d never be so stupid.  We’ve seen this movie before. 

Although Ridley Scott did not invent the science fiction horror film—just watch anything from the 1950’s that involved Vincent Price or Roger Corman—he certainly modernized it, gave it grit, and raised the fright-factor to levels no one had ever experienced in a movie theater.  When that gnarling little monstrosity burst out of John Hurt’s chest halfway through 1979’s Alien, audiences knew they were watching a different kind of horror film; it was an amalgam of classic haunted house clichés and atmospherics and new school sci-fi blood and gore effects.  The combination was incendiary.  It launched dozens of copycats and helped inspire the remakes of The Thing and The Fly by Scott’s contemporaneous sick-puppies John Carpenter and David Cronenberg.  As expertly designed and imagined as Prometheus might be, one never gets the feeling that they’re watching something special or unique.  The film’s centerpiece scene—involving Shaw, an alien fetus, and a surgery machine that looks like a futuristic tanning bed—is truly terrifying, disgustingly squirm-inducing, and all too palpable.  But the scene is also, in so many ways, just a more explicit reimagining of the alien-violating-human chest-buster scene from the original Alien.

Many have deemed Prometheus a prequel to that aforementioned game-changer, and, having now seen the film, I can say it lends itself to that analysis, but Scott isn’t entirely up-front about it.  It exists in the same universe as Alien, but the two films aren’t necessarily connected.  Whatever the case—prequel or not—Prometheus certainly doesn’t improve upon Alien.  Anyone hoping that this picture would take the genre to the next level will be disappointed.  

Written by John Spaihts and David Lindelof, the movie has a number of plot twists and curious character developments—Vickers’ pervasive iciness isn’t just her personality and David’s insidious trickery has more dimensionality than some simple robotic directive.  Shaw’s clashing belief system (How can one be a Catholic and a scientist?) gives the film its existential gravitas.  But mostly, the story doesn’t add up to anything particularly inventive or revelatory.  Prometheus does offer beautifully rendered imagery, with graceful and subtle use of CGI; an assured performance from Rapace, who’s tough enough to recall Ellen Ripley and sweet enough to recall Audrey Tautou; and the right amount of pulse-pounding excitement to reward the price of admission.  This half-successful sci-fi horror flick is best viewed as a masterfully conceived throwback that, in its finest moments, makes you nostalgic for the kinds of movies Scott used to make.

Snow White And The Huntsman

2/5

Taking familiar stories and repackaging them is the name of the game in Hollywood today.  Snow White And The Huntsman has got dwarves, magic mirrors and poison apples, as is necessary to nominally be considered a Snow White tale.   But this misbegotten reinterpretation feels less like the magic of Walt Disney than the entire long agonizing slog of The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy jammed into one two hour endeavor.  The movie, which was directed by Rupert Sanders and stars Charlize Theron as the evil queen, Kristen Stewart as Snow White, and Chris Hemsworth as the hunky huntsman, has the same feudal-filth stylistics as the popular historical fantasy Game Of Thrones, but in its mish-mashed approach it only sullies the enchantment of the classic story with Dark Age gloominess.  Muddy, loveless and as over-produced as the worst Hollywood assembly-line epics, this revisionist fairy tale is far more grim than Grimm.  

Besides a handful of technically impressive visuals—Theron’s Queen Ravenna ages forward and backward like a perpetual motion machine, her skin withering into pockmarks and wrinkles before magically resurfacing into splendid Neutrogena cover girl smoothness—this is a rather joyless affair.  It begins with Ravenna usurping a king’s throne with a black widow’s ruse—marrying him then sticking a knife in his heart—and locking the prepubescent princess in a tower until she grows up into the inescapable and insufferable Kristen Stewart.  (The Twilight actress tries her hardest for an English accent and fails, miserably, but that’s hardly the biggest problem with her performance: Stewart acts as if constantly suppressing a migraine.) 

Regardless of any self-serious, swords-and-shields reimagining, the essence of the Snow White character has and always will be absolute kindness and generosity, almost to the point of masochism.  The ultimate message of the Snow White fable was that, despite the queen’s best efforts, she could never be as beautiful as Snow White because Snow White had an untouchable beauty of spirit; the queen was overflowing with festering hatred.  Stewart, with her Got-Milk gawkiness and two or three expressions, is so sullen an actress that she comes off as enormously self-centered, a most antithetic character trait.  When Snow White is invited to dance by a love-struck dwarf, she obliges, but Stewart is so phony she has to force a smile, like a preteen brat reluctantly dancing with the class dweeb at her Bat Mitzvah.

Admittedly, Stewart, green eyed and raven-haired, does have a natural on-screen beauty, most clearly in evidence early on.  But compared to her breathtaking costar, Charlize Theron, Stewart is a feather battling it out with an anvil on a triple beam balance.  When it comes to screen radiance and explosive histrionics, Theron’s incendiary turn as Ravenna sporadically set the theater aflame.  Other times, all the shrieking and overacting prompted a good amount of unintentional giggling (from this viewer particularly).  For better or worse, though, the Oscar winner is at least wholly committed to role, affording the archetypal evil queen far more sympathetic depth than any previous incarnation.  Of course, I use the term sympathetic rather lightly; she’s still the “evil” queen, after all.  When her old consigliore, the magic mirror, warns her of Snow White’s potential beauty, Ravenna decides to devour the girl’s beating heart, absorb her purity, and achieve omnipotence (or some other magical jargon I can’t remember). 

Snow, instead, escapes to the Dark Forest, where she allies with a widowed huntsman named Eric (Hemsworth, in his third feature this year already) and seven dwarves played by famous British actors with their faces graphically placed on little bodies Benjamin Button style.  They trudge through a sludgy fantasia filled with gravelly trolls and effulgent sprites for what feels like eons, get chased by the Queen’s inept guards, and then arrive at the base of the Rebel Alliance, where the messianic Snow White gives the most laughably unconvincing of rally-the-troops pep talks before leading an army to defeat Ravenna and take back the kingdom.  The script, which is credited to Evan Daugherty, John Lee Hancock and Hossein Amini but was probably passed down an entire batting order of Hollywood hacks, is symptomatic of the Twilight-cancer, adding a superfluous second love interest named William, an ace archer with curls and dimples. 

He’s kind of like Prince Charming, but in all honesty, he and Eric should probably just be one character.  The writers think they’re being subversive, or at least clever, by hinting toward an inevitable romance between Snow White and her burly anti-prince, Eric.  But the two have zero chemistry.  (Probably because acting opposite Kristen Stewart is like acting opposite a frozen freezer door.)  Teutonic with an oceanic ocular glimmer, Hemsworth also has a cheeky self-knowingness to go along with his movie star looks.  Putting on a Scottish brogue and donning ragged, greasy threads of hair, the Australian doesn’t quite shine in this picture like he does as the Norse demigod Thor, but he has an earthy, aggressive charisma that seems as inherent as it is irrepressible.    

At times, he reminds me of a young Brad Pitt, perhaps if Pitt had moonlighted as a rugby enforcer.  But the movie is a thankless death-march for the entire cast.  It’s the cinematic equivalent to long unrefrigerated String Cheese: processed and produced, spoiled into a putrid miscellany of fashionable plot devices and visual tendencies, and repackaged and resoled.  Snow White And The Huntsman doesn’t care a lick about genuine adventure, romance or heart—only box-office returns.  If you choose to indulge, I don’t think any magic kiss will raise you from this movie’s sickening spell.

Dark Shadows

4/5

The master of pop-gothic cinema, director Tim Burton, and his chameleonic muse Johnny Depp have come together for their seventh film collaboration, Dark Shadows.  Based on the same-named soap opera that ran from 1966 to 1972, the movie is an ingeniously entertaining hodgepodge of garish gothic imagery, grotesque horror, soapy over-dramatics, seventies nostalgia and fish-out-of-water comedy.  To call the film wildly discursive and somewhat aimless wouldn’t be inaccurate, but for Depp, who plays the highly aristocratic 18^th century bloodsucker Barnabas Collins, and Burton, his like-minded guide through this intoxicatingly strange whirlpool, Dark Shadows marks a new height in deranged experimentation.  At its best, it’s galvanizing in its dementia.    

After a brief prologue explaining his origins as the heir to a 1700’s fishing fortune, Depp’s Barnabas is unearthed after 200 years buried in a coffin.  He was transformed into a vampire and buried alive by a wrathful witch named Angelique (Eva Green) whose love for him went unrequited.  Now, it’s 1972 and Barnabas waltzes back into his old abode to find his family business in jeopardy and his descendents a motley and dysfunctional lot.  They include Michelle Phieffer’s punctilious matriarch Elizabeth, her surly adolescent daughter Caroline (Chloe Moretz), her haunted nephew David (Gulliver McGrath), his sleazy, philandering father (Johnny Lee Miller), their boozing live-in shrink Dr. Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), and a strange and delicate new governess named Vicky (Bella Heathcote).    

Dropped headfirst into the trailing fumes of the sixties counterculture, Barnabas marvels at lava lamps, troll dolls and television, pensively embracing a culture as odd to modern audiences as his would be to anyone around during the Nixon administration.  Burton juxtaposes the antiquity of the film’s old world set design and its 70’s kitsch, creating a link perfectly manifested in a montage of Barnabas roughly settling into his new milieu as Karen Carpenter’s innocuous crooning of “Top of the World” breathes contrapuntal life into the lamest of all 70’s tunes.  Among the menagerie of oddballs Barnabas encounters, none are more welcoming than a drum circle of hippies who, like him, are several years too late for the prom, desperately holding onto to a way of life that’s not only out of vogue; it’s also become kitsch.  Throughout Dark Shadows, Burton gloriously melds styles and tones.  After dispatching the hippies with feral ferocity, Barnabas goes home to sing romantic poetry to Vicky, the reincarnation of his long lost love.  Romance is in the air, so are the soft lyrics of 70’s anti-Rock accompanied by the cries of Barnabas’ helpless victims. 

He’s a monster, a lover, and an austere patriarch who sets his sights on returning the Collins family to the glory it once knew under his father’s watch.  Trouble is, Angelique has magically stayed young over the centuries and her rival cannery has all but put the Collins family into complete destitution.  In Barnabas’ day, she was the servant girl in love with the master’s son, heartbroken by the haughty aristocrat, and her vendetta to ruin the Collins’ posterity, driven by the scorn of thwarted romance, is a true—if somewhat perverted—exemplification of American workmanship and enterprise, allowing a working class individual—a woman no less—to topple the blue-blooded oppressors of the old European system of serfdom.                   

Of course, her love for Barnabas has not wilted since the colonial era.  His reluctant attraction to Angelique and his much-purer infatuation with Vicky, a meek and ethereal Jane Eyre, provides the film its obligatory love-triangle, true to any good soap opera.  But if the time was ever right for Dark Shadows’ monsters-and-melodrama, Dracula-by-way-of-Guiding-Light experiment in Daytime television to be raised from the dusty, cobweb-infested casket of your grandmother’s midday favorites, it’s now.  Vampires and insipid romances have never been as closely intertwined as they are in entertainment today, with Twilight’s ubiquitous adolescent lovers either lighting up your life or shrouding it in perpetual darkness.    

The faddish combination of vampires and swooning probably helped Burton get the green light, but the great thing about his version of Dark Shadows is that it’s honest about its macabre romantic soul, while not quite a parody and not completely straight-faced either.  Inhabiting some dreamy middle-ground between the series’ actual self-seriousness and Burton’s more sensational and imaginative memory of it, the film finds the best of both worlds, lampooning its source while effectively honoring it.  Dark Shadows is not a Brady Bunch Movie-type roast, nor does it embody the show in its original form—it’s a phantasmagoria of dreams, nightmares, anamneses, and gothic reveries mined directly from the cranium of the film’s eccentric creator.    

From the appearance of Depp’s Barnabas Collins—with his chalk-white skin, gauntly statuesque facial features, jagged bangs, and Nosferatu fingertips, he’s a sight of ghoulish, uncanny elegance—to the lavishly archaic Collins estate—an opulent haunt that looks like the Addams Family’s extravagantly dusty homestead reborn in the campy hues of the Grand Guinol—its all proof that Burton has concocted this movie from the fruitful well of his wild imagination. 

Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows is an auteurist work of fantastical wonder and dread; it’s funny and scary and melodramatic, a deliciously bloodthirsty yarn showcasing the extreme talents of its mastermind and star.  Admittedly, the storyline, which was written by Seth Graham-Smith, at times feels as meandering and directionless as an entire season of the original sixties television show.  But if in the end Dark Shadows could have a little more dramatic shaping, I don’t think it could ever have more hauntingly invigorating spirit.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

2.5/5

Comfort food for the older crowd at the box office, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is easy to swallow, but it’s also overstuffed and maudlin—an impassioned British comedy-drama starring an admittedly impressive assembly of world-class actors and featuring some scenic Indian locales that never quite coalesces.  The movie is about a troupe of down-on-their-luck British strangers who start to feel the emotional as well as financial sting of entering their golden years, and decide to move to an alluring Indian hotspot outside Jaipur.  But what looked in the brochure like an oasis of affordable luxury and relaxation turns out to be a shaky pile of bricks run by an optimistic but inept young Indian named Sonny, played by Del Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) with a permanent idiot’s grin and a surplus of enthusiastic energy. 

As the hotel’s first and only lodgers, the group includes the newly widowed Evelyn (Judi Dench), an amateur blogger who specializes in facile epiphanies; the exhausted ex-judge Graham (Tom Wilkinson); horn dog Norman (Ronald Pickup); gold-digger Madge (Celia Imrie); married couple Douglas and Jean (Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton), who from the outset are obviously mismatched; and, lastly, Muriel (Maggie Smith), who steals the show as a crotchety racist that only came along to take advantage of the country’s cheap and expedient medical care.  The hotel’s motto is “outsource the elderly”—a clever play on the epidemic of corporate outsourcing to Asia, but the epigram also epitomizes something much sadder: the cruelty of a society that neglects its citizens once they become old and inconvenient.  

The characters are basically forced out of England.   And while their journey East finds each searching for something specific—Graham to find a lost love, Norman to recapture his fleeting sexual swagger, and Muriel for a new hip—they’re really looking for a fresh start in a new place that will see them as valuable citizens, not just over the hill.  The thematic gesture is sympathetic enough, and the acting, especially from Dench, Wilkinson, and Smith, whose wheelchair bound hauteur generates most of the film’s more successfully droll comedic moments, is uniformly exceptional (how could it be anything but?).  The location—a place Evelyn describes as an “assault on the senses”—has a commendable tangibility that places viewers on the rickety, overcrowded bus that transports the heroes to the swelteringly hot and anciently rundown but beautifully hued and exotically magisterial hotel where they unpack their bags. 

Most of the roadblocks lie in the script, which was written by Ol Parker based on the book These Foolish Things by Deborah Moggach.  It’s a bit scattershot and is bereft of the dramatic focus necessary to successfully explore the lives of any of its many characters.  The film’s pivotal lens is supposedly Evelyn, whose blog provides a voice to the story’s What I Learned At Summer Camp pontificating.  But even Evelyn’s tale of loss and loneliness and new beginnings starts to feel like a subplot in a script without a solid protagonist or an explicit story arch to guide its ensemble.  Too much attention is paid to Patel’s Sonny, a peripheral character with a telemarketer sweetheart and a disapproving mother.  Further hindered by its mawkish tone and abundance of clichés (before it starts take bets over which geezer will be the obligatory croaker), the movie strives for easy sentiment and tidy characterizations as opposed to any trace of genuine truth or honesty. 

Viewers with a hunger for Dench’s regality and Smith’s trademark superciliousness—and those who want to get a taste of India without having to, you know, go to India—might just enjoy The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its kitschy depiction of existential woe.  Directed by John Madden (Shakespeare In Love), the film does have a sharp wit, but I’d prefer if it had narrowed its attention down to a more manageable subject of fruitful rumination rather than false endearment.  For all its better qualities, this slightly miscalculated comedy-drama starts to feel like group therapy with a side of saffron rice, clumsily spooning out faux-inspirational messages and tired symbolism in an attempt to prompt some feel-good tears.  Believe me, if I was crying at the end of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, it was definitely from the curry.

The Hunger Games

3/5

The Suzanne Collins’ novel, on which this passable if unspectacular action-adventure-coming-of-age-romance is based, was like a re-interpretation of Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man as fascist allegory and teen-romance-novel amalgam.  The protagonist is a piss-and-vinegar huntress named Katniss who gets selected as a Tribute to fight to the death with 24 other teenagers in a publicly broadcast bout, put on by the totalitarian leaders of a dystopian future.    

The author was supposedly inspired to write The Hunger Games by channel surfing between violent news stories and numbing Reality TV.  But Collins is hardly the incisive satirist necessary to puncture the dark heart of America’s desensitized lust for violence and slave-like reliance on media and technology.  Her books, while thankfully effective at snapping some of the Twilight crowd out their Edward Cullen love-trances, were excitingly well-paced without being particular vivid or intelligent.     

Collins lack of expressive imagery left more than enough room for this hotly anticipated movie adaptation to shade in many of the imaginative blank spots.  If only director Gary Ross had been able to reinvent some of the kaleidoscopic visual splendor of his last film, Pleasantville, he might have made some something iconic and resplendent.  Unfortunately, this time Ross only paints with easy allusions: the heroine’s impoverished mining District (there are 12 in Collins’ universe) is heavy on Dust Bowl and Ozarks hillbilly images, but light on artistry and humanity.   

At one point, all the kids in The Reaping, a lottery to decide which unlucky lad and lass must represent their District in the titular games, are herded into a high-walled concentration camp of monochrome grey, strewn with barbed wire fences and peopled by dispassionate armed guards, manufacturing a grade-school Holocaust evocation.  From there, the gutsy, older-than-her-years sixteen-year-old pragmatist—played by the rock solid and reactive Jennifer Lawrence—is dragged off to the Capital. The film’s landscape transforms into a Vegas by way of Oz by way of Cirque Du Soleil metropolis, where Katniss and her fellow gladiator, a nervous baker’s son named Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), get introduced to Woody Harrelson’s drunken mentor and Elizabeth Banks’ District rep, a haute couture pixie clown. 

The games themselves make up most of the film’s 2 and ½ hour runtime.  In a woodsy coliseum that looks a little too commonplace—like the forest behind Ross’s house, maybe—the kids fight off starvation, thirst, exposure, hallucinogenic hornets nests, and, most dangerously, each other (they wield knives, spears, bows or any number of serrated weaponry) in an effort to be the last one standing.  All the while, Caesar, a celebrity talk show host played by Stanley Tucci with a spray-on tan and a hive of blue hair, commentates on the barbaric proceedings with more detachment than an ESPN commentator.            

The juxtaposition of the everyday with the fantastic and the horrific is ripe for potential revelations.  When it’s all said and done, though, the premise is conceptually rich while the movie itself is not.  It would take a director like Paul Verhoeven, whose acidic lampoonery of the media and whose use of revealingly fetishistic ultra-violence were on full display in RoboCop and Starship Troopers, to actualize in full Collins’ half-baked themes on Reality TV as a vehicle for voyeurs to indulge their most perverse inclinations, in this case, assuaging a bloodlust through the brutality of on-screen violent spectacle.  

Ross, though, is anything but a provocative filmmaker.  He’s a sentimentalist who, too often in The Hunger Games, succumbs to his worst impulse, relating the story’s sadder moments with melodramatic musical cues and hokey photography of light pouring through treetops.  With too many plot points to check off, he can’t explore his characters on any rewardingly thorough level.  Collins’ unorthodox setup requires a superfluous amount of expositional dialogue, sacrificing the more character-driven variety that would give the likes of the guarded Katniss and the romantic Peeta greater emotional depth.      

Like the novel, the movie is brisk and, impressively, it covers a lot of ground.  I can’t say I enjoyed Ross’ frenetic photography during the fight scenes.  (When you can tell a director’s going for Paul Greengrass’ chaotic stylistics and all you’re seeing is shaky frames, there’s a problem.)  And despite it all, the novel’s massive fandom will enjoy watching The Hunger Games come to the screen in this serviceable adaptation that sticks rather faithfully to Collins’ prose and sets up nicely for the next installment.  If given the choice between Twilight’s risible monster-mash-love-triangle and The Hunger Games strong-willed saga of survival, I’ll take the latter every time.  While both turn their children into murderous monsters, only The Games, in its Shirley-Jackson-goes-Sweet-Valley-High kind of way, recognizes that, just by tuning in, we’re complicit in the carnage.

The Lucky One

1.5/5

Film adaptations of Nicholas Sparks’ novels are like the female equivalent to the testosterone-fueled carnage of the Transformers movies and their many clones.  There’s a core group of young men that go to theaters solely to gorge on numbing special effects junk food—along the lines of Michael Bay’s deliriously pointless, noisily mechanized and blindingly fiery spectacles—and drool ferverishly at the Maxim centerfold eye-candy of Megan Fox or Rosie Huntington Whitely.  Their wives or girlfriends, on the other hand, get their kicks from the three-hankie melodrama of Sparks’ mawkishly mishandled and jejune tearjerkers that, transplanted to the screen, are little more than sappy cardboard romances spiced up with their own brand of pinup-boy eye-candy, provided by teenybopper favorites like Channing Tatum and Liam Hemsworth. 

In The Lucky One, former Disney Channel heartthrob Zach Efron tries to navigate the tricky leap into serious actor territory, but really just joins the former ranks of chiseled meathead lover-boys. As another syrupy Sparks adaptation, the movie’s look is as kitsch-painterly—with images of billowy red mists, sunsets over sparkly water bodies, and glorious rays peaking through Southern-sumptuous vegetation—as its story is bird-brained and bloodless.  But The Lucky One, at the very least, has a premise worth jumping off from, even if its subsequent plot progression is more of a descent than ascent in quality.   

Efron plays Logan, a Marine in Iraq who ventures away from his unit only momentarily to pick up a wallet-sized picture of an anonymous lovely blond lying amid the rubble of Baghdad.   A mortar lands on the exact spot he previously stood, sending dumpsters full of dirt and a number of his fellow Jarheads sky-high.  Logan is eventually discharged and sent home to Colorado, but he holds onto the picture, which he considers his good luck charm.  With no real plan and a touch of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Logan decides to walk from Colorado to Louisiana in order to find this random beauty and thank her for saving his life. 

Having once espoused his admiration for Leonardo DiCaprio’s smooth transition from fan-girl poster-child to Oscar favorite, Efron is clearly on the hunt for juicy dramatic parts that will help stake his claim as an actor of substance.  More or less, he’s found one in Logan, a haunted but gentle warrior struggling with survivor’s guilt and a crippling lack of purpose.  Beefed up and ruggedly unkempt, Efron plays him strong and silent, but where’s the heartbreak below the stony visage?  He’s more of a hunky mannequin than a human being, and Efron, relying more on his hypnotic blue peepers than on protean emotional expressions, misses a chance to give the film’s central dreamboat a candidly colorful puissance.

After a little light investigating, Logan tracks the girl to a kennel out in the Bayou.  Deciding to keep his ulterior motive a secret, supposedly because it’s too hard for him to talk about, Logan gets a job there, cleaning up after the mangy mutts.  His luminescent guardian angel, Beth, played by Taylor Schilling with a more variant spectrum of sneers and lustful glances, turns out to be the owner.  At first, she treats Logan’s “drifter” with cold reticence, but then warms to him after seeing how good he looks while lifting heavy bags of dog food in a tight shirt.  Logan’s motives are never entirely clear, but we can assume the attraction is mutual.  The necessary hurdle blocking their serendipitous path to love is Beth’s jealous ex-husband, Keith, the local sheriff, a villain so clichéd and boorish he’s practically a cartoon. 

The best character in the movie is Beth’s grandmother, Ellie, who’s played by Blythe Danner as a slightly amused box of wisdom.  Overall, though, the movie languorously moves through its highly robotic motions, groping desperately for any shred of drama or romance.  Working from a lackluster adaptation, director Scott Hicks can’t really rely on his young actors—especially Efron—to transcend the material, so there’s very little revelatory dialogue to be found, even of the sappiest variety.  Hicks, instead, tries to tell the story the characters can’t through florid and autumnal pictorials of Schilling splashing in creeks or Efron walking soldierly along Southern dirt roads, all tuned to the romantic keys of inoffensive pop love-anthems.  Mostly, The Lucky One is a series of lethargic musical montages and truncated dialogue scenes strung together by the dental floss of passionless romance and a dishonest portrait of returning veterans.  Even for cinematic junk food, this is pretty indigestible.