Easy A (4.5 out of 5)

There’s a moment in Easy A where the story’s hero Olive says that she wishes her life had been directed by John Hughes. In reality, it might as well have been. The gift of Hugh's films was his ability to combine the idealism that we love in the movies with just enough intelligence and humanity to make them feel as though they were talking to, not above or below, us. That’s Easy A’s gift as well, right down to the musical number, and it gets it right for maybe the first time since Juno. There are so few good films about teenage girls that are honest and sincere enough to be genuinely perceptive to the plights of teenagers while also being funny and warm. Throw Easy A on that pile.

Olive (Emma Stone) is just your average teenage nobody until one day, trying to get out of spending the weekend with her best friend’s strange hippie parents, gets caught up in a lie about having lost her virginity. The little bathroom fib makes it’s way to the ears of the school Christian militant Marianne (Amanda Bynes) and soon the whole school knows about Olive and her faux sexcapdes, making her one of the most talked about girls at school.

Finding herself in detention for mouthing off to one of the Christians in class, Olive becomes friends with Brandon (Dan Byrd) who is gay and tormented daily because of it. If she would pretend to have sex with him he could lose his reputation and live happily through the rest of high school. She agrees and soon is in business as guys of all different varieties give her gift cards in exchange for the privilege of telling people they hooked up with her. Their lives are better and her notoriety soars.

As luck would have it, Olive is studying the Scarlett Letter in English class, a book in which its hero smears her good name and reputation in order to help those around her. Ah ha, parallels are brewing. Movies sometimes have a heavy handed way of using classroom scenes in order to bring in texts or theories that draw artistic and thematic parallels to the film itself. Some writers mistake this as being symbolic. Easy A however has the good sense, in that self-reflexive post modern way, to acknowledge itself as a modern day retread of the Scarlett Letter and working that into the story as the starting point instead of the whole point.

So Olive, in an act of defiance, just like in the Scarlet Letter, embroiders a red A onto the corsets she wears to school. This works wonderfully well for Olive until she soon realizes that, all the while everyone was interested in her for what she could do for their social lives, no one is really interested in anything more than that. Call it a critique on the state of our current superficial society in which sex tapes and tabloid exploits are the gauge from which we measure celebrity as opposed to, oh I don’t know, talent, being a good person, etc.

I also call it a lot of fun. Olive’s parents are played by Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as the kind of movie parents that everyone wants but so few ever really get: they are funny, smart, caring, supportive and understanding. Parents, especially dads, are so often the villains of films that these two are a blast of fresh air. In fact, all of the characters are refreshing. Sure the film sometimes feels like it is going through the motions of the plot (then again no one ever accused John Hughes of being a compass of daring and original work), but they all behave in that funny movie way that we love: they could never be mistaken as anything but movie characters, but they are the kinds whose company we love to be in.

The film is also hip and fresh in that smart and hilarious way that Clueless was in the 90s. But a few weeks ago I just got finished criticising Going the Distance for being too hip for it’s own good. Now here is another comedy that knows about books and movies and music (The Bible is in the best seller section of the local book store, right next to Twilight) but it manages to work them into the story in a way that makes them feel real and authentic. They add to the tone of the story. Sometimes when characters talk about pop culture they are just trying to be funny. Easy A is funny but it also creates the sense that these are smart kids who know how to effectively draw the lines between themselves and pop culture and the film ends with the biggest laugh maybe anyone has ever gotten out of Huck Finn. Mark Twain is out there, grinning somewhere.

Most of the film’s charm must be attributed to its star Emma Stone. Stone has been on the fringes of some good movies (Superbad, Zombieland) but is now on her way to stardom. Sometimes all it takes is for an actor to be in the right role at the right time and that’s what is happening here. Stone is funny and confident and cute and knows how to act in a way, that, although probably not realistic, is still believable in terms of teenage drama. Easy A is also a huge step up for it’s director Will Gluck whose previous credits include the horrible teen comedy Fired Up. Gluck directs this with the flair of a man who knows he needs to prove something. It’s like he’s apologizing for his past sins. Apology accepted.

Am I Missing Something?

Here's a funny question for someone who is more well versed on the subject than I. I was reading Roger Ebert's review for Twilight:Eclipse and he made a comment about the tent scene between Edward and Jacob. It was in jest, but Ebert made reference to Brokeback Mountain.

Then I was looking at IMDB to see who would be directing the fourth film and saw that it was Bill Condon, an openly gay man. I then saw in the trivia section that at one point Gus Van Sant, another openly gay man, had been in talks to also direct the fourth film. Considering that both of these men's films, if not dealing with gay characters, have homosexula undercurrents running through them, is there something inherently homosexual about Breaking Dawn or Twilight as a whole? Is it in the books? I think there could be an interesting reading here, but I don't think I'm expert enough on the Twilight universe to give it.

Any thoughts?

Celebrity Connection The Twilight Edition: Dr. Carlisle Cullen

So, New Moon sucked, Eclipse sucked and Twilight was pretty bad. However, one good thing has come from all three: this celebrity connection.





Could Dr. Carlisle Cullen really just be the vampire Lestat in disguise? You decide.

Twilight: Eclipse (1.5 out of 5)

The Cullens must just about be one of the most understanding families in all of cinema. Not only do they like their son Edward’s girlfriend Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), but they also accept her mortality and dedicate their entire effort as a family unit to protecting her against other vampires who want nothing but to make lunch of her to the point where they even make a pact with their enemies eternal, the werewolves, in order to help fiend these baddies off of poor Bella. At a certain point, when the family risks danger and disownment by betraying some sort of unspoken vampire code in order to fend for this girl, didn’t one of the elder Cullens ever think, hey, maybe our son could do better?

The werewolves, of course, also have reason to band together with the vampires because, well A) they don’t like vampires and the chance to kill some without breaking their ancient treaty is mighty appealing, but also because B) one of them, Jacob (Taylor Lautner) is kind of in love with Bella as well, in which case, in order for this story to work, Bella Swan would just about need to not only be the best thing since sliced bread, she’d also have to put that legacy into question. Certainly Bella, if worthy of these male pursuits, could, among other things, slice a loaf of bread or two, couldn’t she?

But the thing is, Bella’s nothing really that special. She’s a pale, skinny kid in blue jeans and a hoodie. I’m sure she’s a nice girl, but certainly not the type that would take your breath away after 100 of years of meeting cute high school girls. In fact, what comes out in David Slade’s Twilight: Eclipse, the third in the series, is that she’s kind of selfish and stupid. There’s a scene where she goes to visit her mother in Florida early in the film because, after graduation, she intends to become a vampire, marry Edward (Robert Pattinson) and never be heard from again. For a graduation gift mom gives Bella a quilt stitched together from all the T-shirts she got from their travels, to which she also chimes in that hopefully they can ad many more in the future. You realize here exactly what Bella wants to give up and have to wonder, why? She basically wants to give up the rest of her life for what symbolically comes down to sex. Unless of course Edward Cullen is the greatest thing since...

It’s at this point that one realizes that the Twilight films have been missing everything that, as far as fad franchises go, has made the Harry Potter books/films so special for so many years. Part of the joy of Harry Potter was in kids exploring a world unknown to them and discovering things about themselves, abilities and powers, but also exploring how they related to the everyday woes of growing up. Harry may have fought giant snakes in the basement but that didn’t make the stress of asking a girl to the Yule Ball any easier.

There’s nothing like that in the Twilight series that grounds it in some sort of plausible reality and provides an entry point as a way to care about these characters or anything that happens to them. Bella broods, Edward mopes, Jacob snarls and both men try to convince the emotionally confused Bella that their love is the best for her. And then Bella contemplates this, and changes her mind, and then changes it back, and then is mad at Edward, but then still likes him more, as the story, over the course of three books/films, still pretends to build to some important event that always feels just over the horizon but never manages to happen. The only difference between Eclipse and it’s predecessors Twilight and New Moon is that in this one, for fifteen minutes or so towards the end, something actually happens.

Did Stephenie Meyer really expand all this confusion, moping, assessing and reassessing over the entire span of three books? Has Hollywood really dedicated six hours to introducing these characters while they shuffle around in self pity while absolutely nothing even close to resembling drama ever comes close to happening? If Meyer wasn’t as incompetent a writer as she is, she would surely know that each work, although belonging to a singular network that propels the same story forward, needs to be self-sufficient as a complete whole insomuch as that, when it ends, the audience feels content in knowing that this chuck of the story is over and has passed through something even so slightly as resembling a beginning, middle and end. Instead Meyer and painfully faithful screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg are trickless magicians; always pulling air out of empty top hats. When the credits role over the close of Eclipse you get to thinking: oh great, now I have to wait for the next film for the action to actually start rolling.

You can’t blame any of this on the film’s players. They are, after all, working with source material about as awful as any there has ever been. Director David Slade (30 Days of Night) throws away the autumn hue of Chris Weitz’s New Moon in order for a darker, more murky look without returning to the ugly blue tint of Catherine Hardwick’s original Twilight film and also provides a climatic battle which is only the second most incomprehensible action sequence this summer. Stewart and Pattinson are about as good as they have been any other time, filling the role while making you realize they probably deserve much better, Dakota Fanning, still in cameo mode, shows up to assert why she probably isn’t the best choice to play villains and Lautner is still giving the kind of self-important performance that only a truly terrible actor can give when they fail to realize how bad they are playing.

And that’s it. The story will continue in 2011 when Bill Condon, the series’ most prestigious director takes a stab at the fourth and final chapter, in which maybe something will actually happen, although, considering the film will but cut into two parts, it’s unlikely that we’ll be seeing any life (no pun intended) from this franchise until 2012. Although, at this point, I think Edward and Jacob should cut their loses, find one of their own kind and let Bella realize that having a boyfriend when you’re in high school shouldn’t really be this much work.

Retrospective Review: Twlight: New Moon (1.5 out of 5)

I feel like I've been in a completely different world for the past four days. I haven't really read anything that has been going on here. I accepted posts but didn't respond to them because I didn't have time so I'm sorry. To anyone who did post thank you. I still have to do that whole Versitile Blogger thing for both Film Geek and Yojimbo. Such pressure. Anyway, I'm still not back into the swing of things and have many original pieces coming up soon, but until I get back into it, here's a review of New Moon. Expect my review of Eclipse within the next couple days.
Bella Swann (Kristen Stweart) may just be the unluckiest character in all of literary history. She certainly is close to the most pathetic if not naive as well. How unfortunate it is, after all, to have to fill the gaping hole left in your heart from a departed vampire lover with a new werewolf lover. Certainly there has to be a mortal boy or two at her small town Washington high school, no? That would certainly solve most if not all of her emotional afflictions, which in New Moon, the follow-up to Catherine Hardwick’s Twilight adaptation, are pushed out of the realm of innocent and dumb teenage after school special flirtation and into that of unbearable melodrama.
Bella’s love belongs to the vampire Edward Cullen who is played by Robert Pattison and looks like the son if Bela Lugosi, is eternally posed in some dark tableau of deep suffering and whose hair seems to have its own center of gravity. Fearing that such a mortal is not safe amidst his family of bloodsuckers, he ditches Bella and disappears in hopes of protecting her.

Of course the split hits hard; so hard in fact that Bella’s suffering surpasses that of general high school moping and instead keeps her up at night screaming out in such pain that you’d think she was in the throws of a heroin intervention program. I guess that’s why it is unwise to give all of your love to the only boy in class who would rather bite your neck than caress it.

What Bella discovers though is that, whenever placed in any sort of mortal danger, visions of Edward appear, who warns her against her actions. Bella thus becomes an adrenaline junky and in one scene narrowly escapes disaster when she crashes a dirt bike at top speed after being distracted by Edward. Although still a teenager, she should know that there is no greater danger while operating a dirt bike than the appearance of apparitions taking the outward appearance of former immortal lovers.

In an effort to cope with her pain, Bella begins becoming close with her neighbour Jacob (the invariably shirtless Taylor Lautner), who is both Native American and, she soon discovers after he too abandons her without explanation, is slowly turning into a werewolf as he ages. As if puberty isn’t hard enough. The werewolves of course are part of his tribe and have a pact with the vampires, their enemies, which agree that they will leave each other alone, so long as the vampires stay on their own land and don’t run around biting humans.

This proves to be a problem as Bella’s feelings are caught between both Edward and Jacob and so forth. There is also a rather fruitless subplot about Edward travelling to Rome to kill himself in front of a vampire committee of some sort named the Vultrians after he believes Bella has died during one of her adrenaline rushes. The Vulturians are lead by Aro who is played by the British actor Michael Sheen (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) who got to play a werewolf in the uninspired Underworld: Rise of the Lycans and goes just over the top enough here, his body twisting and contorting in on itself, to prove him a man in serious need of a leading role in an Anne Rice adaptation.

The film this time was directed by Chris Weitz, who directed two invaluable comedies (American Pie and About a Boy) with his brother Paul before heading out on his own with the truly underrated the Golden Compass. Weitz, a more honest storyteller to Catherine Hadrwick’s more stylistic tendencies, trades in the ugly blue murk that covered the first Twilight film and replaces it with a brighter, more natural autumn look. And that’s about the only difference; Weitz, a good filmmaker is awash in a sea of juvenile, ridiculous and, more often than not, just plain dumb material.

What’s most shocking is how very little actually happens in the film, which feels like a constant build up to some big event that never quite gets around to happening, as if we are only getting the introduction to the next film. But the first film did that too. Bella loses Edward, gains and loses Jacob, is attacked by bad vampires, is saved by good wolves, is reunited with Edward, is taken in front of the Vulturian and so on and so forth. But there is no overriding dramatic ark that makes the story feel like a self-sufficient whole.

The entire crux of the film is then placed on this silly, uninspired, two-thirds immortal high school love triangle. You’d like to think that, at the close of 2009, the least one could expect from a special-effects fueled blockbuster is some meaningful action that its characters are engaged in and that propels the story into some sort of complete narrative. At the end of the day all of the scenes with the vampires and the werewolves and the Vulturians are simply a collection of surplus episodes that all lead up to the slender but dire question of whether or not Bella and Edward will end up together again.

Of course it would be hard to blame Weitz or any of the cast and crew involved in the Twilight adaptations because all problems seem to originate directly between the pages of Stephanie Meyer’s books from which they are based. The books, although aimed at a preteen market, are written at about a nearly incompetent third grade level and would seem to have no concept of the politics of drama, plot or story structure. It doesn’t help that the screenplays are written by Mellisa Rosenberg at the same level of incompetence. Take this exchange, directed at Bella from a fiancé of one of the werewolves:

“So you’re the vampire girl?”
“Yeah. So you’re the wolf girl?”
“Yeah. Well, at least I’m engaged to one.”

What? She’s engaged to a wolf girl? How could such horrible, stupid dialogue pass by into the finished cut of the film unnoticed? At the end of the day, Twilight needs to be put into complete artistic turnaround. It needs a director and writer who are willing to break it down, move it as far away from the original texts as possible and rebuilt it back from the ground up. Fat chance of that happening.

It's the End of the Week

The great thing about still being a student is three day weekends. It's probably no surprise that I don't put much effort into weekend posts unless something big drops. There are some interesting things going on in the news that require a mention but not really a full post and since Mad Hatter and Encore Andrew (check them out for sure!) did posts today about other people's posts well, I've never come across a good idea I didn't want to adopt myself as well. So here goes:

/Film U.K. is reporting that the Alice in Wonderland controversy is starting already as three of the U.K.'s biggest theater chains are trying to boycott the film due to the truncated release window in order to get the film to DVD sooner. I've already done two posts on this issue so I won't repeat the story word for word but do read about it here. Also check out my past posts here and here.

/Film U.K. is also saying that Owen Wilson is trying to get his acting cred back after phoning it in with stuff like You, Me and Dupree, The Wedding Crashers and Drillbit Taylor (I liked Marley & Me, sue me). Not only does he have the upcoming Farrelly Bros. movie Hall Pass in the works (I've read it. It's funny), but he's also attached to James L. Brooks' next movie (although he hasn't made a truly great one since Broadcast News) and the new Woody Allen movie. That certainly offsets his involvement with Marmaduke and the next Meet the Parents movie. Now if only Vince Vaugh would follow suit.

Deadline Hollywood is saying that the trailer for the next Twilight film Eclipse will be debuting in front of Robert Pattinson's upcoming movie Remember Me, the trailer for which I happened to see before New Moon (clever, eh?). The trailer didn't really inspire me to want to see the movie. What else is curious is that Jenny "daughter or Sidney" Lumet's name has been taken off the IMDB page for the movie after she did work on the script. Although the Eclipse trailer may get the film a bigger audience than it would otherwise find, Little Ashes (remember that one?) didn't exactly prove that Pattinson had the star clout to open an original movie on his own.

I guess it was inevitable. Wes Craven begins work on Scream 4 in May. In other news surrounding sequels no one really wants, I just finished reading the third Riddick film. All I can say of it is: maybe Vin Diesel's return to XXX will be better.

Now I've seen just about everything. Once again, /Film U.K. has posted a trailer for an animated Bollywood film. The film is apparently a remake of a popular live-action Bollywood film and is the most expensive animated feature ever made in India. Check out the trailer below. Is it just me or is it kind of weird seeing animals talking and singing in Indian?