As Long As You Love Me: POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING

A light and frivolous comedy with a pitch-perfect recreation of modern celebrity culture, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping need only present a tiny exaggeration of the lifestyle of a coddled music industry star to count as satire. In the guise of a concert tour documentary done in a self-mythologizing slick puff piece style, a la Justin Bieber: Never Say Never or Katy Perry: Piece of Me, complete with talking head acclaim from colleagues and clouds of social media reaction flying out of the screen, this movie is too cozy and celebratory to be a devastating satire. It knows its lead is dumb and shallow, and wants him to succeed anyway. But it’s smart, and totally dead-on, in its evocation of our buzzing echo chamber, with so many outlets and avenues chattering, demanding access to celebrities’ lives every hour of every day. To be a music icon these days is to be living your life as performance art, always on, oversharing taking the place of actual insight.

The movie invents the dim but apparently talented Connor4Real, an egotistical practitioner of the smooth falsetto pop/R&B with rap breaks the likes of Bieber and Justin Timberlake put out. Connor (Andy Samberg) rose to fame with his two childhood best friends (Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone) in the group Style Boyz, which was part Beastie Boys, part Backstreet Boys. Eventually he went solo, while the others became a D.J. and a farmer, an unpleasant split that nonetheless resulted in a hit album. (He called it Thriller, Also.) Now, as the movie begins, he’s about to go on tour for his second album, and it is terrible, full of songs like a belated and self-aggrandizing marriage equality anthem that constantly reminds the listener Connor isn’t gay, a booming braggart’s club beat about how humble he is, and a filthy number of elaborate metaphor comparing lovemaking to the death of Bin Laden. The movie concerns Connor’s slowly dawning sense of his waning cultural relevancy and his desperate moves to grab it back.

We’re told the songs he’s promoting are terrible, but really they’re insanely catchy, put together by The Lonely Island, the stars, directors, and co-writers of this movie and the comedy rap group responsible for the terrific Digital Shorts from their time on SNL. Of course the guys behind such memorable music video parodies as “Lazy Sunday” and “I’m On a Boat” would be smart enough to write songs so beautifully stupid. The music in the movie is consistent with those earlier parodies, with elaborately produced videos and stage performances that are smartly constructed silliness, crude lyrics with melodies cleverly matching existing popular genres. Still, we get the idea these are songs no one wants, especially after a disastrous corporate cross-promotion gets them beamed into every refrigerator in the country. That’s a funny swipe at U2’s last album’s sudden appearance, and a good jab at synergistic corporate-sponsored album releases of all kinds. As Connor says, “there’s no such thing as selling out anymore!”

Connor’s tour tanks as ticket sales are low. To make matters worse, the album isn’t exactly flying off shelves. He’s just not the celebrity he used to be. The movie follows his increasingly desperate attempts to get attention for himself, trying to maintain his lavish bubble and protect his thin skin until he can hear the roar of uncritical success once more. (Maybe if that doesn’t work he could run for president?) It becomes a slap-happy lampooning of the modern media landscape, a predictable movie about how predictable a pop news rise-fall-rise narrative can be. He goes on The Tonight Show and gets suckered into a nostalgia act. He tries to get E! to cover his impending engagement live on the air. (His girlfriend (Imogen Poots): “Aw, you invited the press!”) He Snapchats and tweets and vlogs, clearly emotionally troubled but egged on by all the chatter swirling around him, a cycle of scandals and photo-ops, manufactured mostly, but sometimes accidentally real, like a quick change that leaves him naked on stage for ten seconds. “A third of the way to Mars!” Connor shouts, in one his most Zoolander-like moments.

There’s nothing particularly serious about Popstar, which uses its laser-focused precision for playful surfaces on which to goof around, but it moves too quickly to be anything less than a good time. It’s chockablock with cameos, SNL vets making the most of tiny roles – Tim Meadows, Sarah Silverman, Maya Rudolph, Bill Hader, and the like making memorable impressions – and music world legends – Ringo Starr, Questlove, Usher, and many, many, many more – playing brilliantly to or against their public personas. It just zips right along, through enabling entourages, crazy fans, wasteful lifestyle choices, pranks, paparazzi, chattering gossip programs, colliding camera crews, and concerts. My favorite moments, sparingly but cuttingly used, are a perfect parody of TMZ’s show, with Will Arnett an uncanny Harvey Levin type draped over a cubicle and cackling with his reporters. The movie is breathlessly ridiculous, never lingering too long on any one aspect of pop stardom, tightly packaged and efficiently silly. Is it a modern-day Spinal Tap? No. But it’s the closest thing to it.

Punk'd: GREEN ROOM

Green Room is little more than an exercise in unrelenting tension. It locks its sympathetic protagonists in a small space, trapping them with danger all around. The situation doesn’t look good, and only gets worse as it springs a steadily more inevitable series of violent incidents upon them. There’s a grim competence to its interest in the process of their plight. This is writer-director Jeremy Saulnier playing to his strengths. His last movie, the small-budget success Blue Ruin, was a clammy revenge thriller that was at its best when methodically locked in on its squirming characters as they fumbled toward hard-fought empty catharsis. Here Saulnier brings only that sense of mounting dread, put to use for a movie more interested in conventional genre thrills, in building a contraption by which to torture its characters for our benefit. You could almost read it as a restrained sideways slasher picture, more muted and dry than that subgenre’s usual fare, but just as single-minded in its kills.

At its center is an obscure, struggling young punk band, members played by familiar faces Anton Yelchin and Alia Shawkat with young character actors Joe Cole and Callum Turner. Likable enough, they seem like cuddly rockers, the sort drawn to hard rock as a way of posturing over their vulnerabilities. In it for the love of music, they’ve barely enough in their coffers for a tank of gas. The group is so desperate for a gig they decide to head out to a backwoods skinhead bar where, through the cousin of an acquaintance, they’ve been promised $350 for a quick afternoon set. “Just don’t talk politics,” their helpful contact (David W. Thompson) advises. It goes off without a hitch until they happen to witness a murder, and then get locked in the green room – with the dead body, a hulking gun-toting guard (Eric Edelstein), and a frightened punk fan (Imogen Poots) – while the neo-Nazis gather on the other side of the door, wanting to get these interlopers out of the picture. Will they get framed? Tortured? Murdered? Whatever happens, it won’t be good, that’s for sure.

Saulnier gives the film a precision and clarity, capably mapping out the tight quarters and allowing us to understand the characters’ reactions. We process the threat as they do, while cutting between their claustrophobic fear and the looming threats assembling outside. The story is so quickly sketched there’s little room to understand the players as people or figure out their motivations beyond survival. What little background information there is gets doled out in convenient downtime lulls. The leads are so inherently appealing, however, that Saulnier merely has to ensnare them in his meticulous frames and crisp cuts to get the sympathy going. It helps that he has some real powerhouses for villains, making his Blue Ruin star Macon Blair into a soft-spoken henchman and no less than Patrick Stewart the main antagonist. He carries with him the aura of authority, lending much needed weight that's not exactly on the page to a mild-mannered Nazi who calmly assess the need to coax the band out to be killed, or, failing that, storm the green room and cut them up there.

So it’s a siege movie, like Assault on Precinct 13 or Die Hard, but played at a quieter and smaller scale. The sides are obvious, the goals are clear, and the obstacles are agonizingly stubborn. Saulnier provides good specificity to the locale, a dim and ugly lived-in bar with dangerous hate group fanatics growling and prowling. But the movie isn’t about a clash of ideology. That they’re neo-Nazis is only to provide shorthand for their villainy. (And for Shawkat to snark backstage that if Yelchin doesn’t do what she says, she’ll “tell them you’re Jewish.”) It’s not about ideas. It’s not even about music, punk rock only used for energy, background noise, and set dressing. It’s about strategy, watching as characters play out a literal and deadly locked-room game, making use of their wits to maneuver the few tools available to them and finagle a way to survive.

Crescendos of taut tension escalate to outbursts of truly disgusting displays of violence, detailed in the seeping wounds, spurting blood, dangling flesh, and gaping gashes. This is a slick, skuzzy, and carefully composed little thriller, Sean Porter’s cinematography so handsome and Julia Bloch’s editing so meticulous that Saulnier builds to Green Room’s most shocking moments with horrifying deadpan. It’s been a while since I heard an entire audience wince as one in response to an unexpected gory moment. The film may not add up to much beyond a visceral kick of surprise and terror while likable people get menaced, maimed, and murdered – and the tremble of relief as some find safety, even if it’s only temporary – but the experience is admirably tense. This is the sort of smartly constructed and capably executed thriller that may not have a lot on its mind, but at least it’s gripping on its own terms.

In the Cards: KNIGHT OF CUPS

I always leave a Terrence Malick film with my mind still cloudy with its cadence, and my eyes seeing the world more closely. He’s always been a poetic filmmaker, prone to gliding away from obvious plot progression through visual metaphor and a roaming curiosity for finding the beauty, the sublime, in any given moment. Lately, though, he’s been drifting further away from narrative. Where once his artful and spiritual approach was tied to the likes of a World War II film (The Thin Red Line) or a tale of colonial America (The New World), he now digs into his character’s minds with increasingly elliptical and empathetic discursiveness. He builds repeating patterns of images and rhyming, rhythmic, trance-like editing. Through The Tree of Life and To the Wonder and now his latest, Knight of Cups, he’s been drawn to similar images: beatific but sad women, stern fathers, people running barefoot on wet sand, hands gliding along surfaces smooth (stone, sheets, running water, skin) and textured (hair, grass, leaves). Does he repeat himself? Very well, then he repeats himself.

In Knight of Cups story and character are gathered only in flashes, flowing forth not in scenes but in impressions, moods, juxtapositions. Malick’s recurring images are the only entry point, and as a result it continues his trend toward gradually more obscurant and opaque films, increasingly alienating for anyone who can’t quite get on his wavelength or forgo skepticism about the sincerity of his intentions. But there’s real meditative, contemplative power for those of us who can. This new film stars Christian Bale as a disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter wandering through a womanizing, glamorous life in Los Angeles. But this is no hectic star-struck satire. Malick takes his style and approach to urban environs for the first time, but finds the intimate and the natural growing through. Every woman the man interacts with gets taken to the beach and cavorts in the puddles and waves. Gardens and boulevards express themselves through concrete and surround glassy mansions. One cameo-stuffed sequence finds a party in a palatial mansion, but Malick’s eye is often drawn to the mountains beyond.

This is an ethereal and spiritual story of a man who feels hollow, who tries to fill the void with women (a terrific lineup: Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Freida Pinto, Imogen Poots, Teresa Palmer), with family (a deadbeat brother, Wes Bentley; an imposing father, Brian Dennehy; a warm mother, Cherry Jones), with nature, with religion (a priest played by Armin Mueller-Stahl). But he can’t quite make the pieces fit. He’s a pilgrim without progress (the first voice we hear is Ben Kingsley reading from John Bunyan’s 1678 text), going through the motions. Not even an earthquake or a robbery can shake him from his haze of disaffected yearning. He wants to be made whole, and yet can’t figure out how to fill the missing parts of his soul. There’s a solemn sadness to the film’s hovering beauty, Emmanuel Lubezki’s luminous camera breathing and moving on a plane of enlightenment the character can’t. It floats, slowly tracking or pushing, distracted by beauty all around. It follows a stream of consciousness, of memory, poetic associations, intuitive connections, casual and tactile expressions of faith and philosophy.

Bale walks along empty beaches and vacant backlots, stands stranded in the desert, sees homeless and hurting people on sidewalks and in clinics, hobnobs with Hollywood elites, rolls about with lithe naked women, sinks into pools. He’s drifting through experiences, part of them without being a part. Tarot cards, agents, parents, lovers, all have advice to impart about what gives life meaning. Each person - a talented cast posing and maneuvering, each bringing a different flavor and tone into the mix - has an effect on him. And yet there are no direct dialogue exchanges of any import as scenes slide and collide, linger on silences and flow with wall-to-wall impassioned murmuring voice over and classical music cut with bits of score and rock. The film is a fog, rootless, directionless, adding up to great meaning that the character can’t access. Strangely, this walls off the audience at times. I felt its yearning for completion, was often moved by it, and still had moments when I stared at the screen in befuddlement as images collected while only occasionally connecting.

Perhaps the key to unlocking this entrancing, beguiling, beautiful mystery of a film comes when Bale imagines (or is it actually happening?) a rooftop confrontation with his stubborn but frail father. The old man laments that he thought as he aged everything about life would begin to make sense, but instead he’s sad to find nothing but a confusing tangle of messy memories. The film finds moments of intense emotional drama and thoroughly somnambulant despair, holding them both at the same remove, behind artful glass and sacred aloofness. Moments of pain and moments of grace are swallowed up by the character’s depression and the film’s interest in turning his distress into beautiful suffering. It all adds up to a heavy spell I’ve found hard to shake, even as my mind struggled in the moment and afterwards to puzzle through its throughlines. This isn’t one of Malick’s best efforts, lacking his usual intuitiveness in its progression, but that’s mostly due to how closed off it feels. I get the sense this is intensely personal, a movie dragged kicking and screaming out of his innermost being and now sits there vulnerable and foreboding, full of raw spiritual power.

Jokes Without Laughs: SHE'S FUNNY THAT WAY

She’s Funny That Way is funny in that way where you can see where all the jokes are supposed to be, but can’t quite figure out where to laugh. It’s an old-school screwball attempt, lousy with references to Lubitsch, Astaire and Rodgers, and Charles Boyer, without ever living up to its great inspirations. It turns itself in knots introducing a web of interconnected New York neurotics. We meet an aspiring actress working as a call girl (Imogen Poots) who is cast by her former john playwright (Owen Wilson) in a production he’s mounting starring his wife (Kathryn Hahn) and her ex-flame (Rhys Ifans) with the boyfriend (Will Forte) of the call girl’s psychiatrist (Jennifer Aniston). So far so good, a near perfect farcical setup that proceeds to fizzle out for the remaining 90 minutes.

Its director and co-writer is Peter Bogdanovich, a critic and historian who has made several great movies. His debut decade or so of work includes a disturbing mass shooting horror picture (Targets), a charming caper (Paper Moon), a tender small town drama (The Last Picture Show), a documentary (Directed by John Ford), a screwball comedy (What’s Up, Doc?), and a farce (They All Laughed). Not a bad track record, but he’s spent the last thirty-plus years infrequently making films that simply don’t live up to his early promise. Presently he’s slightly more interesting as a public figure, where he can occasionally be found blogging, lecturing, acting, or playing himself in one of the otherwise terrific The Good Wife’s worst scenes. His latest film is his first theatrical feature since 2001. I suppose he thought this would make for a fun little movie.

And it does at times live up to its potential. With co-writer Louise Stratten he’s concocted vaguely pleasant and moderately charming scenarios in which misunderstandings, deliberate misdirection, and relationships falling together or apart are enacted through juggled phone calls and slamming hotel room doors. There’s even a bubbling subplot involving detectives that recalls the best loopy moments of his They All Laughed. And what a cast assembled to pull it off! You don’t get the aforementioned grouping of usually reliable charmers assembled without generating a few smiles, at the very least. They’re terrific at what they do, holding the screen, digging out avenues for amusement while zipping towards emotional truths of their characters’ conflicts. It’s just a shame that the writing and filmmaking surrounding them is so lifeless, casual, and musty.

No scene is entirely successful. They are strings of mismanaged performances fumbling through fuzzy characterizations in a stumbling pile-up of frazzled lines. No one is miscast, exactly, but they can’t quite manage to make their thin types really pop in a way to be successful broad farce, or deep enough for real drama. This makes the film ultimately too shrill and too airless. Bogdanovich has the right idea, and a lot of the right notes, to make his nostalgia for Lubitsch movies into pleasant throwback comedy, but the rhythm and tempo is all off. Poots plays charming accent whack-a-mole, Wilson seems to have floated in from his Woody Allen collaboration, and the rest wrestle admirably and amiably with grating miscommunications. When farce goes bad, it goes very bad, indeed. At a certain point, I stopped struggling to have a good time and simple sat back and waited it out.

Car Talk: NEED FOR SPEED

Need for Speed is never better than when it spends time hurtling along in and around cars going top speeds down city streets, country roads, highways, and byways, racing and chasing in reckless and exciting ways. Luckily, those sequences feel like they take up just about the entire movie. It’s a fairly preposterous plot full of posturing archetypes, the kind who can’t handle much of an emotive burden and are never as funny as the movie thinks they are. They’re there only to help create enough of a story to string along scene after scene of cars zooming, providing just enough downtime and modulations of noise to prevent the whole movie from becoming a monotonous squeal of tires. When those cars peal out down the road, with burning rubber and roaring engines, it’s a visceral kick. With a movie like Need for Speed, based on a series of racing video games and advertised as a nonstop chase, what more do you need to see? It’s important not to cheat yourself out of simple movie pleasures such as these.

Director and co-editor Scott Waugh worked for many years as a stunt coordinator and stuntman on all manner of big exciting action sequences in films for the likes of John McTiernan, Michael Bay, and Doug Liman. He knows his way around a car chase, shooting them at top speeds with crisp, smeary digital photography that catches a motion blur off the gleaming paint as the sound design works with a bass kick of gears shifting and tires sliding. The star of the movie is a modified Ford Mustang. Waugh is always sure to let the camera linger on car logos, giving each new vehicle entrances that are usually reserved for starlets and special guest stars. The Mustang is tricked out to go fast; its top speed is somewhere just north of 230 miles per hour. A financially struggling mechanic (Aaron Paul) does the job for a snobby and insecure professional racecar driver (Dominic Cooper). They may be the humans that make the cars move, but their interpersonal struggles are sublimated at every turn into the action of the vehicles through the aggression of their driving.

And Paul certainly has reasons to be angry with Cooper, who cheats him out of millions of dollars, causes a drag racing accident that kills a close friend, and then flees the scene leaving him to take the blame. After a couple years in prison on manslaughter charges, Paul is ready for some macho car culture vengeance. He wants to reclaim his good name and expose Cooper as the smug villain he is. Paul is so good at playing the good-hearted criminal in over his head and paying for it through palpable emotional pain. He did it for five seasons on Breaking Bad, after all. Need for Speed calls on him to play a similar emotional range, but lighter, pulpier. He’s surrounded by a gang of smiling gearheads (Rami Malek, Scott Mescudi, Ramon Rodriguez) eager to help him, and a pretty car-loving girl (Imogen Poots) willing to ride shotgun. The plan is to zoom from New York to California in 45 hours, getting the attention of a webcasting drag race tycoon (Michael Keaton) along the way so he’ll give them an invitation to his infamous race and meet the enemy behind the wheel once more.

Does that make a whole lot of sense? I’m not so sure. But the screenplay by George and John Gatins uses it as an excuse to send the Mustang flying down the highway at over 100 miles an hour most of the way. Every few states, there’s a new obstacle. They appear with all the regularity of video game villains. In Detroit, there are cops who pursue them. In Nebraska, a state trooper spots them. In Utah, there are greedy bounty hunters. In California, there are other racers, still more cops, and, of course, Dominic Cooper, who would be twirling his mustache if only he had one. Most of the action takes place in broad daylight, the better to appreciate the impressive stunt work on display. The camera sits on the side of the road, hangs off of cars, flings forward into crashes, and stands back to take in spinning debris. It’s clearly and energetically cut together, ready to show off its best assets.

Waugh has grown as a filmmaker since his debut film, the military actioner Act of Valor, showed a glimmer of promise buried under a self-serious plot, stiff tone, and muddy action. Need for Speed takes itself the right amount of serious, which is to say not enough to be a drag. Waugh lets the scenes between the action get carried along by fine actors in thin parts before plunging back into the well-choreographed excitement of cars going very fast. He knows exactly what kind of movie it is, a throwback to films like H.B. Halicki’s Gone in 60 Seconds and Hal Needham’s Smokey and the Bandit, B-movies directed by stuntmen who reveled in sending real cars careening down real roadways. It’s a movie where the hero gets right up in the face of the villain (so close, watching with the sound down might make you think they’re about to make out) and threatens to prove who is the better man by winning the big race. It’s a movie that is bookended by a symbol (first abstract, later literal) of a lighthouse standing erect at the beachside finish line, to really hammer home the masculinity at stake. It’s a movie where inarticulate characters feel big emotions, anger, love, joy, and express them all by driving as fast as they can.

THAT AWKWARD MOMENT When Your Movie Is Terrible

Most romantic comedies have a moment where boy loses girl after a Big Mistake or a Regrettable Miscommunication and spends a montage or two mooning over what could’ve been before resolving to make things right and win her back. Usually, this serves to get an audience good and ready for a teary, smiling reunion and a happy ending. You know something has gone very wrong when you find yourself thinking instead that she’d be better off without him. That Awkward Moment goes wrong exactly like that. The thing is, characters in any movie should be likable or interesting, sometimes both, but never neither. Here it’s neither. The spaces where characters should be, characters to care about, get involved in, or find reflecting some kind of truth, are instead a vacant spot that’s at best bland and generic, at worst actively irritating.

At the end of the movie, all I really know about Zac Efron’s character is that he’s a twentysomething New Yorker who designs book covers and resists serious relationships until – surprise, surprise – he finds himself in one. The movie thinks this guy is great and deserves to end up with the sweet, bookish Imogen Poots for no other reason than because he’s the one the movie has set her up with. They’re meant to live out this rom com arc together since that’s what the movie thinks we are here to see, not because of who they are or what they represent to each other.

It’s the kind of movie where no one really talks to each other. They just speak thudding one-liners and the kind of overwritten buddy wisecracking that makes it seem like everyone is trying too hard to live their lives like it’s a sitcom. Efron and his fellow twentysomething buddies, a single carouser (Miles Teller) and a guy going through a divorce (Michael B. Jordan), sit around joking with each other in phallocentric R-rated ways, living in impossibly nice New York City apartments while working impossibly nice jobs, and heading out to pick up chicks in all-too-possible entitled and gross ways. What a life, eh? Since Jordan’s divorce is a fresh wound, the trio decides to stay single and support each other in their quest for hookups and Meet Cutes, wingmen to the last. They think they’ll have no problem living the bro lifestyle, but soon, in what is supposed to amount to surprise in this obvious screenplay, they all find romantic attachments they try to hide from their buddies so as not to create hurt feelings of un-bro-like conduct. Whatever.

Writer-director Tom Gormican has a flat and bland style that runs these cardboard types through the typical motions, thawing their dumb young hearts with sickly sweet love. If they ever had a thought in their heads or a clever comment amongst them, it’s kept off screen. The movie takes four appealing young actors and proves beyond a doubt that they can’t yet bring additional life to nothing characters. When Efron and Poots first meet, he bolts because he mistakes her for “a hooker,” the word choice he and his pals repeat ad nauseam because they think it’s a hilarious misunderstanding and because, ha ha, they think ladies are gross when they might have motives that aren’t pure desire for these guys. Despite starting off on a bad note, the two realize they both like Gramercy Park and playfully insulting each other, a pastime they combine and expand to others when they trick a realtor into letting them tour a home so that they can steal a key to the park. How romantic? I doubt it, but maybe I’ve been under the wrong impressions all these years.

They say movies sell unrealistic expectations of love, true enough in some cases, but That Awkward Moment is only operating under unrealistic expectations of what will delight and amuse an audience. I went into a screening in the middle of the afternoon and quickly felt sleep tugging at the corners of my attention. It was so dull and uninvolving, I spent some time thinking about how I’d start this review. And then, as I slid lower and lower in my seat, I started wondering if I’d be more comfortable if I balled up my scarf and used it as a pillow. I decided against doing that. The theater was a tad cold and I appreciated my scarf on my neck where it belonged, doing the job it was designed for. I didn’t hate the movie so much as I hated that it was still happening in front of me, and that time grew so slow. When I at long last left as the credits ran theoretically funny bloopers, I felt I hadn’t seen the sun in days, weeks even. Rarely does a movie that’s so thoroughly nothing seem to waste so much time.

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.