Trolling Along: TROLLS

Trolls is DreamWorks animation’s attempt to turn the troll dolls into the Smurfs. It cobbles together a flimsy fantasy world for these old toys – nude genderless little goblins with big bright primary color puffs of hair – that finds them in a village in the woods. They’re happy all the time, but live with the memory of having escaped from a race of giants called the Bergens, essentially a city of Gargamels who look like a cross between The Boxtrolls’ villain and the Blue Meanies. (Here’s a confusion I had. Are the Bergens giants? Or are they our size and the Trolls are just doll-sized?) The entire story of this 90-minute feature involves a Bergen discovering the trolls and kidnapping most of them, leading the plucky Troll Princess Poppy (Anna Kendrick) to mount a rescue attempt. She recruits Branch (Justin Timberlake), the only sad Troll, to help her. It’s a real there-and-back-again, and would be over in 15 or 20 minutes flat were it not for the padding involving: simplistic emotional appeals, obvious lessons, an unlikely Bergen Cyrano/Cinderella-riffing romance, scattershot inanity, a variety of oddball road movie montages, and a whole host of jukebox covers. It’s colorful nothing.

The movie is a step back for DreamWorks, who have in the last several years pivoted away from a preponderance of snarky pop-culture saturated annoyances into some high-quality fantasy. From the relatively serious adventures – the How to Train Your Dragons – to slapstick silliness – Mr. Peabody & Sherman, Penguins of Madagascar – and those in between – the Kung Fu Pandas – the animation studio has been doing good work building worlds and experimenting in a variety of tones, styles, and moods. Here, though, we’re back with an overqualified and underutilized all-star cast (tiny voice roles for Zooey Deschanel, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Christine Baranski, Russell Brand, Gwen Stefani, John Cleese, James Corden, Jeffrey Tambor, Ron Funches, Kunal Nayyar, Quvenzhané Wallis…) who pop in as barely characterized background players in a grindingly obvious plot. Is there any doubt the sad troll will learn to be happy again by journeying with an irrepressible optimist and saving their joyful kind? The trip is dusted with wacky humor, random nonsense – glittery flatulence, slangy punchlines, awkward innuendoes – and hectic movement.

So there’s not much to it. This is the sort of short movie that feels very long. But it’s not entirely unpleasant. Directors Mike Mitchell and Walt Dohrn (SpongeBob SquarePants) play around with the look of the picture in some appealing ways. The CG is used not to create the usual vaguely plastic look of so many big studio animations, but instead makes a look approximating yarn, felt, and scraps from a craft store reject pile. This gives it a faux-handcrafted texture as it spins out odd forest creatures: spindly spiders, giant mouths, floating eyes, ginormous snakes, and a talking cloud with arms, legs, and sneakers. Did I mention it’s all a bit of a trip? This is a kids’ movie so formulaically developed on a plot and thematic level that the only thing the filmmakers could think to keep the adults’ attention is randomness. It’s not inherently funny when these characters sing pop songs or say things like “Oh snap,” or when a Julia Child-looking Bergen chef appears to be performed in a Carol Burnett voice impersonation. But it’s enough to make the parents in the audience chuckle from the sheer unexpectedness. It is what it is.

Derivative and hackneyed in the extreme, it doesn’t try too hard to build a world or develop characters. It’s simply a bright-hued cartoony cast of toys now available at a store near you. This fits a movie more interested in look and design than in emotional underpinnings. When we finally learn why Branch is so sad all the time – his grandmother died because of singing – it sounds like a joke, complete with a cutaway flashback. But it plays out on the characters’ tearful reactions like we’re supposed to take this sentiment seriously. The movie’s both too randomized and too routine to settle on any one satisfying storytelling approach. It’s all about whatever erratic nonsense it can joke around with while cobbling together the expected kids’ movie beats. At least it’s enjoyable to look at some of the time, and for all its frazzled mania is never as grating as The Secret Life of Pets or actively hateful as Angry Birds. You could do a lot worse for kids’ entertainment this year, is what I’m saying. And maybe on this dark pre-election weekend, an insubstantial movie about dance parties and positive thinking melting away seemingly intractable disagreements is just the silly distraction we need.

High-Flying Adventure: HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2

Like all good fantasy sequels, Dreamworks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon 2 takes the world its predecessor built and expands upon it. The first film introduced us to the tiny island of Berk where a village of Vikings lived to fight off dragons preying on their flocks of sheep. It followed Hiccup (Jay Baruchel), the shrimpy son of the leader (Gerard Butler), as he learned dragons aren’t so bad once you get to know them. By the end, he’d trained a fierce and adorable one he named Toothless as a pet and saved his village from destruction in the process. Now, as the sequel starts, the village lives in peace with the dragons, having realized they’re lovable, loyal, useful animals. There’s no conflict there, so the movie pushes forward, opening five years later on Hiccup and Toothless flying out over the ocean exploring new islands and finding new species. When they land on what is to them uncharted territory, he takes out his hand-drawn map and adds a new page, as fitting a symbol for the start of a new chapter as any.

Writer and director Dean DeBlois, who served as co-writer and co-director with Chris Sanders on the first film, takes the light boy’s adventure and enriches it by foregrounding the boy’s evolution into a man and bringing the cast of background characters more clearly into focus. While struggling with his status as heir, Hiccup, now taller, more toned, and with a touch of stubble on his chin, is drawn into conflict. First, he runs into dragon trappers, led by a hunky, ambiguously bad guy voiced by Game of Throne’s Kit Harington. They’re mercilessly poaching the majestic beasts. But that’s merely prelude to bigger trouble care of a distant warlord (a growling Djimon Hounsou) who threatens hostilities with his army of captive dragons. With a name like Drago Bludvist, pronounced “blood-fist,” he’s born to be bad. Riding out to help quell this new conflict are Hiccup’s father, as well as a likable ragtag band of villagers (America Ferrera, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, T.J. Miller, and Kristen Wiig) who last time were background color, but this time come into focus as their own distinct characters with subplots and emotional throughlines. 

The first time around, the dragon training was a highlight, a boy-and-his-dog dynamic between a scrawny teen and a jet black, bat-winged, puppy-dog-eyed salamander. Never better than when in flight, the 3D animation dipped and spun with immediacy and vertiginous beauty. It was a thrill. This time, the thrill comes not just from that relationship and the dragon flying, which is as nicely and excitingly rendered as before, but also in the conflicts complicating this fantasy world. The threatened destruction is at a higher magnitude, the characters have more at stake, and the scale towers over them with subwoofer-rattling rumblings. New dragons include a skyscraper-sized alpha beastie that breathes icy breath leaving jagged icicles in its wake. The damage to dragons is also more personal. The introduction of a mysterious figure in the wild, a protector of dragons (Cate Blanchett) who unlocks further secrets of the species, finds time to highlight sliced wings and missing limbs, the result of near-misses with hunters. There’s an ecological weight to this film, a sorrow and responsibility.

The dragon protector has an important connection to Hiccup and much to teach him. The way the plot unfolds finds surprisingly rich emotions to tap into as their relationship is fully explained. The scene where this woman meets Hiccup’s father is astonishing in its tenderness and maturity. It could’ve gone in many big ways – tearful, scary, or regretful – but instead goes for a hushed whisper and a sweet folk song. The film is all about surprising with those kinds of scenes. An early moment between Hiccup and his love interest has a loose conversational quality as they flirtatiously tease each other. A late turn that deepens and darkens the relationship between boy and dragon is unsettling and a real shock, making the resolution all the more stirring. There’s seriousness to the storytelling here that respects both the fun of its colorful fantasy and the emotional lives of its characters.

It’s a movie about responsibility, aging, death, abandonment, and environmental destruction. You know, for kids! It’s bright, vibrant, has a soaring score and rousing action. But there’s a melancholy beneath that’s unexpected in its gravity. I appreciated how respectful of its audience the film is, unwilling to talk down to children and not feeling the need to stretch for adult attention. It’s simply a good story told well. And that’s more than enough to captivate. The animation is gorgeous, digital-painterly tableaus of fantasy landscapes and fluid character movement. The images within stir the imagination. A swarm of dragons flutters about like a flock of birds. Rising slowly and silently out of the clouds, a lone rider wearing a horned mask and carrying a rattling staff, sits atop a massive creature. A boy flies his dragon into the wild, and returns something closer to a man. It’s a terrific, exciting, involving adventure told with great feeling and a good eye.

The Boys Next Door: NEIGHBORS

An R-rated comedy can sour quickly. There’s a tendency among Hollywood’s purveyors of that subgenre to rush to the R and forget the comedy when planning their edgiest jokes or letting the actors endlessly riff on the lines until scenes grow baggy and dirty. The surprise of Nicholas Stoller’s Neighbors is that it gets the balance mostly right. You’d think a movie about a married couple and their newborn daughter who find their lovely suburban college-town lives disrupted by a rowdy fraternity moving in next door would lend itself to lazy stereotypes and general degeneracy. It does, but even though the movie is exuberantly vulgar, broad, and loud, it never loses track of the human qualities in its characters. There’s an allowance for some small nuance that avoids reducing the characters to their cheapest, ugliest selves.

We start with the married couple (Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne) trying to adjust to life as parents. Unlike Rogen’s many man-child roles, this is a movie about two adults who are mostly happy to have matured to the extent they have. With movies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and The Five Year Engagement, director Stoller has proven himself interested in exploring the emotional shifts the continual process of growing as an adult entails. In his films, the relationships ring true and are treated with a degree of weight. Here our leads are doting on and toting around their adorable baby, enjoying life while still wondering if having a child has to mean leaving their carefree party days behind. Just as they’re figuring out their new, more responsible, fully adult selves, an explosion of youthful id moves in next door.

At first it doesn’t seem so bad. The frat’s president (Zac Efron) promises they’ll keep the noise down. The other boys (Dave Franco, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Jerrod Carmichael, Craig Roberts) seem nice enough, cooing over the baby and saying they want to keep the neighborhood pleasant. But then the partying starts. It’s loud, long, and debauched, just as you’d expect. And soon the couple is forced to call in a noise complaint. When the responding cop (Hannibal Buress) tells the frat the source of the call, the frat takes it up a notch. They aren’t just loud and obnoxious partiers by night, litterers and loiterers by day. (That’s familiar to anyone who has lived in a college town.) They’re now actively antagonistic, pranking their neighbors in escalatingly dangerous and improbable ways. After a visit to the flighty dean (Lisa Kudrow) proves unhelpful, the couple decides to sabotage the frat and shut them down for good. The script by Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O’Brien follows a clear structure, with the frat behaving boorishly and the couple plotting ways to force them out.

With such a setup, it’d be easy for the movie to fall into characterization as simple and button-pushing as its preoccupation with bodily functions, body parts, and bodily harm. A lesser comedy would make the frat boys only villains and the thirtysomethings only virtuous. Here the terrible frat boys are, between raunch and bullying, allowed moments of surprising tenderness, self-doubt, and worry about their fast-approaching post-graduation prospects. One guy goes to a job fair where he’s told flat out he’s “too dumb.” Later, one frat kid earnestly tells another, “You don’t like them [the neighbors] because they remind you of the future.” As for those neighbors, they like smoking a little weed now and then, want to keep their sex life interesting, and have real doubts about the suburban bliss they feel pressure to want. These unexpected shadings go a long way towards balancing the broader, dumber moments.

Some of the situations are unlikely. (Wouldn’t the couple at least close their curtains at night?) Slapstick – like a violent and far-fetched airbags prank – and gross-out gags – like a breastfeeding emergency or, worse, a mix-up involving a discarded, unused prophylactic – might go too far. But the film remains largely likable because it has the right balance. Cinematographer Brandon Trost (who also worked on the better-looking-than-you’d-think This is the End) shoots with a slick, loosely held style that gives weight and a degree of realism to the proceedings. Maybe that’s why the more exaggerated moments feel a bit false, but it also helps sell the truth in the solid performances. Rogen and Byrne have warm chemistry and easy repartee. I particularly liked them arguing about who gets to be the irresponsible Kevin James-type in their marriage. Around them the ensemble – from Efron and Franco on down – is well-cast and well-deployed. And the baby is adorable, ready to give cute cutaway reaction shots while being kept nice and safe, sleeping peacefully when the most dangerous moments erupt.

Too often movies about frats want to wink, nudge, and enjoy the sexism, racism, carousing, and homophobic hazing, wallowing in celebratory immaturity. It’s good, then, that Neighbors finds itself squarely on the side of growing up, saying to do so means finding the proper balance between partying and responsibility. It likes its characters, even when they make mistakes, even at their most caricatured and stereotypical. It’s not a great comedy, a little low on laughs, but it’s pleasant enough to be a decent time at the movies. Without a mean spirit and with a relatively short runtime of 90 minutes and change, it’s the rare R-rated comedy that accommodates dirty jokes, bad behavior, and even a few unfunny scenes, without going sour. 

Kick Back: KICK-ASS 2

I get – or is that hope? –Kick-Ass 2, the thematically ugly follow-up to a film that was none-too-pretty to start with, is intended to skewer power-trip fantasies of the superhero kind. An oft-repeated bit of phrasing in the narration and dialogue wonders what would happen if a person in the real world decided to suit up and dish out vigilante justice. Almost as often, a character will growl, “this isn’t a comic book!” But this cornerstone of the premise was thrown out well before the first film ended with Kick-Ass, a dweeby high school student, riding a jet-pack to fire rounds from a bazooka into a penthouse apartment where a mobster was beating up Hit Girl, a little girl trained by her ex-cop father to take the law into her own hands. So, you see, Kick-Ass, for all its professed interest in more grounded superheroics finds itself squarely in shoot-‘em-up, blow-‘em-up territory with outlandish characters with wild backstories doing exaggerated battle with each other. Its one bit of (almost) novelty is the nonstop vulgar language and copious gory effects of combat. But, even more so the second time around, that has the effect of making the whole thing revel in the very implications it ostensibly brings up in order to critique the very genre of which it’s ultimately a total embrace. It’s purposelessly toxic.

This movie finds Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) students by day and superheroes by night. It makes a certain amount of sense that the aftermath of the first film finds the mobster’s son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) looking to avenge his father’s death by cooking up a new persona as a self-declared “world’s first supervillain.” It makes less sense that the events of the first film have inspired a bunch of copycat heroes who roam the streets looking to do good. They end up forming a team with Kick-Ass and call themselves “Justice Forever.” I like the detail that one of their outings as do-gooders is volunteering at a soup kitchen. The group is lead by an ex-mob enforcer turned born-again Christian (Jim Carrey) and includes a motley collection of teenagers (Clark Duke, Robert Emms), young professionals (Donald Faison, Lindy Booth), and a middle-aged couple (Steven Mackintosh and Monica Dolan). Eventually, the supervillain gathers up an army of his own and the whole thing starts to look suspiciously like ugly gang warfare in silly costumes.

But it’s been ugly well before then. What’s worse? That the film is offensive or that it feels like it has to try so hard to get there? This is a film that’s mean-spirited and tonally off, expecting us to laugh and cringe and cry at violence presented at more or less the same speed and style all the way through. It’s full of quick and dirty stereotypes and unfeeling exaggeration of conventional superhero tropes. The filmmakers seem to have missed the point that’s not only implicit in their material, but is actually swirling around unformed on screen as well. (To their credit, the source comic book by Mark Millar missed the point, too.) Real life superheroes are just vigilantes in costumes. Just because they think they’re the good guys, doesn’t make their actions any less scary as individuals and destabilizing as a group. When Justice Forever breaks up a poker game below what we’re told is a brothel of captive illegal immigrants and cuts through a bunch of people, we’re only told they are “bad.” It’s presented in the film as a lark, but isn’t it terrifying? Wouldn’t an anonymous tip to the police be better for everyone involved? Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass was far from flawless, but at least it seemed aware of the scary and dangerous edge to the premise.

Violence and vigilantism are not the only ugly aspects of Kick-Ass 2. That it has characters explicitly call out racism and homophobia doesn’t make the film any less so for such attitudes running rampant throughout. Especially distasteful is the villain’s gang filled exclusively with lazy racial stereotypes. Twice he’s told he’s being racist and he waves off criticism. But then the movie goes ahead and has, say, a tough Russian henchwoman dressed up like Ivan Drago, as if the villain’s racist hiring practices would be embraced by his hires. Besides, every other “bad” person besides Christopher Mintz-Plasse is a broad stereotype, from the Asians in the aforementioned brothel poker game to the Latino thugs Kick-Ass fights near the beginning of the film to the black MMA fighter that jumps at the chance to work for the bad guy. Maybe one or two of these would be fine, but collectively it paints a picture of “non-white” or “foreign” equaling “bad.” Those few self-conscious lines do nothing but point out that someone involved thought the movie should say something to cushion the blow.

Misogyny doesn’t even get called out in this way. The movie is too busy doing a good job hating every non-Hit Girl woman on screen young and old alike. If they’re not actively hateful, they’re mocked and dismissed or turned into an objectified pawn in the plot. Even Hit Girl’s tragic backstory is plowed under for cheap thrills and lazy motivation. Instead of thinking through the aftermath a childhood like hers would lead to, she’s dumped into a Mean Girls scenario between martial arts battles. I felt disappointed for Lyndsy Fonseca, who, after playing a central role the first time around, here is written off in a jealous overreacting misunderstanding never to be seen again. But I felt only pity for young Claudia Lee in her first film role. She plays a vicious queen bee of a high school girl. Aside from her one-note slimy sniping and insinuating bullying of Hit Girl, she’s dressed in ultra-tight clothing, gives a risqué dance at cheerleader tryouts, then plays a scene in which she’s embarrassed in the cafeteria when she projectile vomits and has explosive diarrhea at the same time. We’re supposed to be happy watching this comeuppance, but I just felt sad for everyone involved.

The actors aren’t to blame for any of this. They do their best with bad writing. A waste of a good character can’t stop Moretz from seeming like the star on the rise that she is. She’s a captivating screen presence and sells some risible moments I wouldn’t have thought sellable. She’d be more than capable of selling a female superhero movie, a sadly nonexistent variant of the genre as far as Hollywood is concerned. Carrey’s fiercely entertaining, but in an awfully small role. Mintz-Plasse goes for it, as misguided as his character is. Taylor-Johnson plays the hero well; maybe we could get him in a better franchise, stat. The supporting cast is filled with fine work in roles either underwritten or set dressing, and certainly nothing as unexpected and weirdly weighty as Nicolas Cage in the first movie. Technically, he does appear here in a photograph on a wall, proving that he may be the only actor who can get a big laugh out of me in a film he didn’t act in. (I was the only one in the theater to laugh, though, so take it with a grain of salt. It was a reversal of the crowd’s reactions the rest of the film.)

The ultimate failing of Kick-Ass 2 is the complete fumbling of tone that comes with writer-director Jeff Wadlow’s approach, especially when it comes to violence. The first film had Matthew Vaughn, who, though far from perfect on this matter, seemed to understand how to shape it for the screen in ways that sometimes seemed aware of impact and timing. Wadlow simply splatters the screen, fundamentally misunderstanding the power of the images he plays with, unable to make violence matter or jokes land. He underestimates how uncomfortable the film as a whole begins to feel. It’s a film that’s callous and for all its talk of justice and surface-level grappling with talk of responsibility and questioning the net societal gain of superheroes, jocularly fascist and carelessly corrosive.

The movie is punishing and upsetting, all the more so for treating its content so lightly. When one “bad” character kills a string of policemen in creatively gory ways while two side characters crack jokes about her killing prowess, that’s not entertaining. It’s deeply uncomfortable. When a threat of rape is used as a tool of intimidation, even in a scene that tries to make the villain the butt of the joke, that’s not simply an illustration of evil; it’s awful and tonally mismanaged. No amount of straining for cheaply offensive surface detail, juvenile jokes and cussing can paper over the movie’s wholly bankrupt thematic and moral center.

He Sees Dead People: PARANORMAN

The creative people at Laika, the stop-motion animation company that first brought us Henry “Nightmare Before Christmas” Selick’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, are back with a first-rate family-friendly horror movie called ParaNorman. It’s the story of Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee), an 11-year-old boy who can see ghosts and though it’s scary, it’s not too scary. The film may have more in common stylistically with Poltergeist and Halloween than Scooby Doo, but its heart is all R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps books and Gil Kenan’s underappreciated Monster House, yet another horror movie for kids. ParaNorman is the safe, fun kind of creepy scary that wraps up the danger and suspense in heaping helpings of humor, slapstick, and life lessons.  I’ll bet brave and precocious kids will happily, if maybe a bit uneasily, gobble it up, mostly because I know I would’ve done so when I was 11-years-old, as I did now.

Written and co-directed by debut filmmaker Chris Butler (his co-director is animation veteran Sam Fell, who previously helmed Aardman’s Flushed Away and Universal’s Tale of Despereaux) the film opens with Norman having a good chat with his grandmother (Elaine Stritch) who just happens to be dead. In fact, most of his social interaction happens with these floating ghosts who inhabit this small, sleepy Massachusetts town. Of course, no one believes him. The poor kid is surrounded by people who just don’t understand: his parents (Leslie Mann and Jeff Garlin), his older cheerleader sister (Anna Kendrick), and the school bully (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). He’s a loner who only has a semi-clueless chubby kid (Tucker Albrizzi) to talk to, even though they’ve only just met.

The town’s getting ready to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the town’s claim to fame: the Puritans’ hanging of a girl they declared a witch who, before she died, is said to have cursed the judge and jury to walk the earth as zombies. But, that hasn’t happened in all this time, so the town has grabbed onto the historical anecdote and made it their main reason for existence. On the eve of this anniversary, as the school kids prepare to put on a reenactment – complete with their children’s choir rendition of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” – the town’s resident crazy guy (John Goodman) runs up to Norman and urges him to use his powers of communicating with the dead to stop the witch’s ghost (Jodelle Ferland) from returning to exact revenge by activating her curse.

Wouldn’t you know it? That’s exactly what happens and now it’s up to Norman to avoid the zombies shuffling through town, find a way to break the witch’s curse and stop it all from tearing the town apart. It might be too late. The zombies – shambling corpses with green skin hanging loosely off of fragile bones – are already causing quite a bit of chaos. Unfortunately, when the night grew dark and stormy and the curse came whirling into action, Norman was stuck with his sister, the bully, the chubby kid, and that kid’s older brother (Casey Affleck). They aren’t exactly much help. At one point Norman grumbles that if he’d known what breaking the curse entailed, he’d have “gotten stuck with a different group of people who hate me.”

What keeps the potential intensity of it all manageable is the way Butler, Fell and their crew of technicians keep the nice handcrafted feeling – the textures of the sets and figures are so intricate, vivid and tactile – animating the macabre dollhouse aesthetic while heading off into two pleasantly surprising parallel avenues of attack. Firstly, the film is proudly funny, with all manner of coy references, chipper dialogue, and sight gags jumping right along, puncturing scenes before they get overwhelmingly scary and sliding instead into pleasantly creepy, gorgeously animated, territory. The zombies themselves, initially only great jump-scares and slow-moving threats, are used for both their menace and their inherent goofy physical properties, losing limbs that continue to crawl around and staring agape at the strange modern world around them. They’re as confused as they are dangerous. After all, they’re from 1712.

Secondly, the film finds some unexpected depth in its story of a kid bullied because he’s different, eventually drawing some nice parallels with the town’s violent history. I’d never have guessed that ParaNorman would become, even casually and in an unemphatic, and all the more powerful for it, way, a film about how a town’s history informs its present, about how bullying is a sad fact of human nature, about how retrograde fears and mob mentalities never really go away, they just return in newer, modern iterations. By the end, the striking visuals and creepy fun plot add up to some good lessons and sweet, moving emotional resolution.

From the movie’s opening scratchy, faux-retro studio logos that fade into a cheesy zombie movie that is revealed to be what Norman and his ghost grandma are watching on TV, I knew I was in for something special. This is a movie made with great care and attention to detail, bursting in every frame with imagination and creativity. It’s clear that the filmmakers love this genre and love their characters. And that’s contagious. This is a terrific entertainment that hurtles forward with atmosphere and energy, a fun ride to a satisfying destination.

There Goes the Neighborhood: FRIGHT NIGHT

Fright Night, a Todd Holland film from 1985, is a horror comedy about a teenaged horror fan who is convinced that there is a vampire living next door. It’s a film that’s fitfully amusing and frightening and very much of its time. When I saw that, very eighties, film for the first time earlier this year I found myself affectionate towards it while seeing room for improvement. Now, here comes Craig Gillespie’s remake, a film with gimmicky 3D effects, a soundtrack featuring Kid Cudi and Foster the People, and characters checking their smart phones for important information. In other words, it’s Fright Night marked specifically for posterity as belonging to 2011. It’s also, luckily, a slightly better movie in some ways than its predecessor, a little bit funnier, a little bit scarier, a little bit slicker. It’s a good story that’s now been well told twice.

This version bursts to life in a stylish way. Bold, graphical splashes of blood-red credits announce the film’s visual energy. The camera swoops in bird-of-prey circles around the little neighborhood, spinning mid-air to capture the isolated tract housing, the place with the unseen menace lurking under a deceptively normal setting. The movie situates the suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of Las Vegas, the city that never sleeps. It’s the perfect cover for this vampire who can claim his blacked out windows and nocturnal habits are because he works the night shift in a downtown tourist trap. Jerry the Vampire trades in his relaxed, suave Chris Sarandon eighties wear for a grimy workingman wardrobe placed on the muscular shoulders of Colin Farrell. He’s a physical creature, a matter-of-fact menace, and a disarmingly regular guy who digs around in his home improvement projects and kicks back with a beer in front of his TV to watch some iteration of the Real Housewives.

The kid next door knows what’s really up, though, but not at first. The kid (Anton Yelchin) is Charley, a high school student. He’s a former nerd who’s distanced himself from his best friend (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) in exchange for entry into the cool crowd, including a budding relationship with a class hottie (Imogen Poots). The new neighbor only registers as a mild annoyance until Charley’s friend comes to him with proof of strange goings-on. People have been disappearing and a chart of last know positions puts Jerry’s house at the center of the mystery. That seems to point to more than just an annoyance next door. With a little research (well, spying and Googling), it becomes clear that Jerry is indeed a vampire. But we already knew that.

The film then becomes more or less what you’d expect, an escalation in the tension between the teens and the vampire. Charley’s mom (Toni Collette) is a little oblivious. She thinks she might have a chance with the attractive neighbor. Charley’s girlfriend’s weirded out. Why doesn’t he want to make out with her, prefering instead to leap up at the sound of a car in the neighbor’s driveway? Charley finds this all distressing. Why won’t anyone believe him? It’s bad enough that the vampire tells him to his face that his mom and his girlfriend have nice necks, but now his friend is among those who have disappeared. (Maybe Charley should ask for help from the Vegas magician (David Tennant) who claims to be expert in the occult). It all builds to a series of splashy effects pieces, well rendered conflict between the horror creature and the only mere mortals who know what he really is

This is effective, energetic popcorn filmmaking. Like the original, it’s a halfway decent teen comedy that turns into a series of effects sequences. Laughs are lightly mixed in with the flowing tension and gooey gobs of CGI blood. The performances are largely charming and the adapted script by Marti Noxon (a writer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) knows its way around teens and vampire hunters while still humanizing them all. There’s enough grist of psychological complexity (not a lot, mind you, but just enough) to ground the insistent effects and showy scares in some small semblances of reality. The film also makes great use of a score by Ramin Djawadi that contains a wonderful melodic flourish that works hints of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor,” a piece associated with old-school horror, into the film’s musical texture. All of this just to say that this new version of Fright Night surprised me. It held my attention and entertained me by being better than I expected it to be. It’s not a lazy remake of a minor 80’s hit. It’s reworked and, as they say, reimagined into a proficient new telling of a solid story.

It's an Early Summer Kick-Off: KICK-ASS

There’s a commercial for the new R-rated adaptation of Mark Millar’s superhero comic Kick-Ass that contains, among several sound-bites from “real” audience members exiting test screenings, a frothing fan who exclaims that she “never had so much fun watching the bad guys get slaughtered.” I cringe at that, not just because it shrieks of an unfortunate mindset, but because that’s precisely the kind of predicted attitude that causes the kind of moral outrage and hand-wringing that this film has prompted from a handful of critics and op-ed pieces, but to my eyes the film is no more violent and no more callous than countless other worse shoot-‘em-ups. Even among its R-rated comic book kin, Kick-Ass has violence a notch or two milder than Wanted (another Millar adaptation), or Sin City, or 300, or Watchmen. And it is certainly much less implicating in its violence than a first-person-shooter video game. Here, it’s presented with a somewhat more cartoony touch, though it’s still definitely R-rated. Besides, haven’t the kinds of people so willing to engage with their basest of instincts while watching a film always existed? And why should we condemn a film simply because of what some of its more reprehensible viewers might think?

A great deal of this outrage rests on the character Hit Girl, an 11-year-old girl who slices and dices her way through several bloody action set-pieces, which play like Kill Bill with a kid in the lead, and spouts off shocking profanity (the kind that isn’t even commonly shortened in polite society with dashes or a “-word” suffix) in exactly four lines. (Those lines are mostly just shock for shock’s sake). The sight of a grown man fighting a small girl is troubling and a little nerve-wracking, but the action sequences (especially the big climactic confrontation) are meant to be troubling and suspenseful, aren’t they? It’s strong and intense content, to be sure, and there’s some small dissonance in having such material layered underneath an occasionally snarky tone. There is a lot in the film that is played for laughs, even, yes, some of the violence, but I hardly think that the filmmakers intended for us to laugh at a bloodied child. If an audience laughs, which mine did not, there’s something wrong with them. In the final action scene, I was troubled and nervous because I cared about the character and her situation.

It’s hard to type out a defense of the film because I can understand the viewpoint of the outraged. I can understand, and even sympathize, with those who are troubled by the violence and the vulgarity and the age of this supporting character. But still, despite such justifiable qualms, I found myself enjoying the movie. As unsettling as it can be, I found myself the most uneasy about its themes and content only after the fact while trying to work out how I can bring together two opposing impulses: that I found the movie to be hugely entertaining and that I can see how the movie can be troubling. Ultimately, I think the movie is as slick and enjoyable as studio fare and yet it also plays with exuberance in the key of exploitation, by which I mean it’s a successful entertainment that’s also a bit of a live-wire.

The movie takes what is at this point a fairly routine superhero format and tweaks it into something approaching freshness. It features a bland geeky teen played by Aaron Johnson, who looks more or less like a cool kid, but is actually fully ignored by the majority of his schoolmates. It requires the same level of disbelief that we use when we agree to pretend that a rom-com’s gorgeous lead can’t get a date. Anyway, he decides to become a superhero, donning a scuba suit and a mask and calling himself Kick-Ass. Despite his quick fame, thanks to a viral video, he finds himself to be fairly inadequate, especially as he gets drawn into a plot involving a drug kingpin (Mark Strong) and his son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and father-daughter vigilantes who go by the names Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz). The plot is complicated, but never dull. There’s energetic frankness (there’s plenty of jokes and conversations that wouldn’t be out of place in an Apatow film) and stylishness to the proceedings as director Matthew Vaughn (of Layer Cake and Stardust) keeps things whipped up into a hip frenzy. It’s his best work yet. Though the film’s often calculating, knowing exactly what blockbuster buttons to push, it’s never untrue to itself, even if it means getting in its own way.

The film seems to be a critique of fanboy culture, especially in the way these “superheroes” are quickly idolized and the way thousands will mindlessly devour real-life violence as their own entertainment. And yet, the film plays too well to fanboy culture to really be engaging in such a critique. While it’s nice that the action scenes are, for once, not totally chopped up into nearly unintelligible bits of motion, it’s too easy to see the moments where the audience is expected to see a flash of stylized gore as a cue to cackle. Still, the action is swift, exciting, and plenty fun, even as it borders on unsettling at times. (I think seeing it with a more bloodthirsty crowd would raise my uncomfortableness). Style and theme are at odds in ways that are difficult to disentangle. The film seems to point towards showing real consequences of comic-book violence, but then locates this theme in a stylized world.

In some ways, I resent the fact that the film has to be so controversial and thought-provoking, mostly through its lazily underdeveloped and conflicting themes, because my experience of actually watching the film was much more uncomplicated. For all of my post-screening intellectual consternation and racing, conflicting thoughts, as the film was unspooling I was having a blast. Vaughn doesn’t lean too heavily on any of the deeper meanings that are half-formed in the execution. The film settles for shrugging off any responsibility to be any kind of meditation on deeper themes and just shooting forward as a high-quality action film. This isn’t the kind of film that is filled up with indistinguishable action. The action sequences are well spaced. They have shape and stakes; each one is distinct and clearly defined. As the movie moves forward, the action beats build in impact on the plot and in the risk to the characters. By the time we reach the climax, the action has reached a roaring crescendo.

In addition to the speed and style and great action of the film, what carried me through, and kept the outlandish violence from overwhelming the fairly light tone, was the cast. The actors are able and ready to balance the tones of the film and it’s because of them that I actually cared about the characters. The adults put in good work. Mark Strong plays his gangster with the right amounts of threatening machismo and self-conscious caricature. Nicolas Cage is strange and scary, sweet and suspect, funny and indelible, the qualities he can always bring to a role when allowed. Yet the film is carried by its younger stars. Aaron Johnson gives the kind of performance that feels naturally stylized. Christopher Mintz-Plasse is fast becoming one of our greatest character actors. And young Chloe Grace Moretz handles her rough role with a certain grace and cheerfulness that almost – almost – counterbalances her role’s edginess without trampling either the sweet little girl or the inherent tragedy of being essentially brainwashed into becoming a tool of revenge. I found myself genuinely caring about these characters, especially Cage and Moretz who have a moment of emotion late in the film that felt genuinely touching.

Once I realized the movie wasn’t going to provoke my sense of moral indignation, I enjoyed it as an accomplished and solid trashy blockbuster. It’s smoothly raucous and randy, and even has a few genuine surprises in its plotting. It’s not too all tastes, and though I understand the objections some have to the content, and really, the movie leaves itself open to such objections by having confused themes, I can’t deny the entertaining rush of energy the film supplied. I found the film exciting and enjoyable. I have to admit that the finale even left me charged up for a sequel. It’s energetic and explosive and, to quote the immortal Henry Higgins, it’s “so deliciously low.”

Year One (2009)

Year One is an uneven episodic comedy, goofily charming at times, cringe-worthy at others. It stars Jack Black and Michael Cera as pre-historic guys who get thrown out of their small tribe (for eating forbidden fruit, no less) and, in their subsequent wanderings, interact with various Old Testament figures. There’s Paul Rudd and David Cross as Cain and Able, Hank Azaria as Abraham (about to sacrifice his son, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who plays him as a sort of Biblical-times McLovin), and (an unfortunate) Oliver Platt as an oily priest of Sodom. There are funny actors here, but they aren’t given much that’s inherently funny. When they succeed, it is through likability and talent. When they fail, they’re given the benefit of the doubt. Surely it wouldn’t be their fault, right?

The movie goes down easily enough. It’s occasionally funny, but it’s never a funny movie; its structure wouldn’t support it. In its construction, in its characterization, in its every line, it’s so ramshackle and misguided. It plays like a mediocre series of recurring sketches on Saturday Night Live (see: MacGruber) strung together (and out) to feature length. It’s clunky and episodic and every five to ten minutes I was wishing it would move on to another moment.

There’s some novelty to the experience. Jack Black and Michael Cera don’t break any new ground for themselves in the acting department but that’s part of the initial fun, at least, to see the boisterous-Black and stuttering-Cera types exhibited by cave-people. The idea wears out its welcome fairly quickly though, leaving two grating performers stumbling through backlot sets amid indifferent extras.

It’s directed by Harold Ramis, and, while this is certainly no Groundhog Day, he seems to be able to find funny moments within the performances in otherwise bland material. There were times when I surprised myself by chuckling, but it was no more surprising than the times that I cringed. It’s a little sad to watch a comedy and have it give such a feeling of indifference that any reaction is surprising. The movie wheezes through its structure, laboriously setting up jokes (or worse yet, running jokes) that are barely humorous and introducing characters and concepts that are only worth a smile at the most. It didn’t stir up hatred within me, and it’s not unpleasant, but I’m sure it’s a movie that would play better if it was on late-night TV when I'm half-asleep.