Monster Cash (Grab): HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2

Hotel Transylvania 2 is the sort of movie that’ll satisfy some in the audience some of the time, but will satisfy no one all the time. It’s one of those cheerlessly and mercenarily divided family films where the jokes for parents and the jokes for their kids are completely separate. We get a joke about a butt, then a throwaway gag referencing childproofing. We get a joke about new parents needing alone time, then a joke about a zombie falling off a cliff. It’s broad in both cases, reaching for easy jokes and lazily winding its way down a set of obvious stereotypes. In its cartoony way it at least proves it’s willing to pander to everyone equally. But when I see Genndy Tartakovsky’s name in the credits, and think back to the great cartoons he’s been involved with – Dexter’s Laboratory, The Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars – it’s hard not to wish this monster mash was more. This movie somehow doesn’t allow him the room to show off his visual pop, expressive action imagery, and effective all-ages plotting. It is dull, repetitive, and infantilizing.

It’s all too slack and aimless, the talented computer animators at Sony Animation finding nothing new to say in a world already fairly exhausted of potential last time. It picks up where the first Hotel Transylvania ended, with the cute vampire girl (Selena Gomez) having fallen in love with a dopey human boy (Andy Samberg) while her protective father (Adam Sandler) grew to be okay with it. Except he’s still harboring anti-human sentiments that doesn’t go away during the opening wedding, or through a few time jumps that bring him a grandson (Asher Blinkoff). See, the little kid with his big doe eyes and curly red hair is just too human for his grandpa’s (vam-pa’s) liking. Why, if the kid doesn’t sprout his fangs by his fifth birthday, he might be totally human. The vampa would be sad not to have his vampire genes passed on, but worse the kid might have to go live in the human world instead of a soft slapstick monster hotel. What’s a grandpa to do?

The screenplay by Sandler and Robert Smigel uses the monster/human tension to stage a too-cutesy metaphor for prejudice of all kinds. The boy’s parents will be okay letting their son be whoever he was born to be, but grandpa’s slow on the uptake. He conspires to sneak the kid out on a road trip with Frankenstein (Kevin James), The Mummy (Keegan-Michael Key), The Invisible Man (David Spade), The Wolfman (Steve Buscemi), and a gelatinous green blob. They go through the countryside showing the boy how much fun it is to be a monster, but because they’re all buffoons they actually show how irresponsible and soft they’ve become. A stop at a vampire camp is a weird crotchety skewering of overprotective parenting. Are we supposed to be on the monsters’ side when they scoff at sweet campfire songs and roll their eyes at a condemned tower the campers aren’t allowed to play on? Seems fine to me. Later, after the monsters collapse said tower and set the camp on fire, the counselor accuses them of child endangerment. Uh. Yeah.

All of this is in service of an obvious message to respect others’ differences and accept people’s identities no matter what. They were born this way. It’s a nice moral, and I guess there’s enough zipping around and potty humor to hold kids’ attention. But it’s both too adult and too childish, unable to find a good middle ground between limp slapstick shenanigans, loose sight gags, loud pop music, mild riffs on monster iconography, and what the MPAA might call “thematic material.” By the time Mel Brooks shows up as great vampa Vlad, wheezing in his recognizable exaggerated old man voice (which has only grown more authentic as the years pass) it’s clearly a movie haphazardly aiming at too many demographics to work. It’s just an uninspired attempt to milk more cash out of a hit. How else to explain the prominently displayed Sony brand cell phones the characters use? It’s not every day you see an animated movie with product placement.

Distracted Driver: GETAWAY

The short, high-velocity car chase picture Getaway has as its premise one of those villainous plots that make little sense in the moment and even less afterwards. A mysterious voice (Jon Voight) calls a former professional racecar driver (Ethan Hawke) who has just discovered that his wife (Rebecca Budig) has been kidnapped from their home in Sofia, Bulgaria. The voice tells the driver to steal a car – a Shelby Super Snake that has been outfitted with armor and a dozen surveillance cameras – and take off careening through the streets. He must drive as directed or he’ll never see his wife again. Throughout the movie, much is made about puzzling through the bad guy’s motives and outsmarting his evil plans, but it never really makes sense. By the end, one wonders why anyone – no matter how improbably deranged – would go to such lengths for anything, let alone be able to (mostly) pull it off.

The movie is built out of such silliness, but it’s nothing that couldn’t have been entertaining if the movie wasn’t so consistently undermining its sole reason for being. The car chase sequences make up just about every single second of the runtime, with the exception of brief flashes of flashbacks (and by brief, I mean no more than a minute total) and the occasional quickly spoken bout of strategizing and negotiation. I appreciated the directness and simplicity of the movie in this regard. There’s no wasted time and absolutely no reaching beyond its means for plot, theme, or character that would hit the breaks. But the chase is built out of choppy chaos from which we only grab glances of presumably impressive stunt driving and real crunchy crashes. Why go to all the trouble of driving real cars down real streets, really crashing them into each other, if the footage will be shot and cut indiscriminately?

Director Courtney Soloman (the man who most notably brought us the disastrous 2000 fantasy adaptation Dungeons & Dragons) keeps the in-the-car action suitably claustrophobic, with tight close-ups of Hawke sweating it out behind the wheel while the voice drones out his instructions – avoid the cops! run over that Christmas tree! blow up that power plant! – over the car’s hands-free phone system. The script by Sean Finegan and Gregg Maxwell Parker even adds a nicely ridiculous, but wholly necessary, addition when the car’s owner, a computer-nut, gearhead teenager (Selena Gomez) tries to steal back her car and gets trapped in the whole crazy situation with the driver. The voice seems to have directed her there to help Hawke. I’d explain more, but I’m not sure the script quite understands why, so what chance do I have of getting it? Maybe they realized Hawke needed someone to talk through the problem with. Or maybe the addition of a cute girl really helps out the marketing department. The characters’ terse chemistry under pressure is actually rather enjoyable in a way that matches the movie’s abundant absurdity. They underplay it nicely, leaving overplayed entirely to the plot.

It’s everything outside the car that’s the problem. In a movie that only exists as an excuse to get cars zooming fast, careening around and through obstacles, narrowly missing pedestrians, and smashing and crashing into each other, the visual style has very little need for speed. It’s all about the smash, not the hurtling. The characters wince and shout in close-up, tires squeal and motors roar on the soundtrack, and the camera spastically bounces around catching motions and consequences haphazardly. There’s no flow, no momentum, and certainly no coherence. It’s a jumble of cheaper low-res images, some beamed in from the cameras on the lead car, hurtling through the stunts at a high-impact speed mixed in with shinier, more polished digital imagery capturing the characters. It’s all bleary and blurry, making it difficult to appreciate the hardworking stunt drivers. A lot of work went into designing these chases, but little care was shown in deciding how the audience would see them.

Only one staggering shot – a climactic extended long take from the POV of the Super Snake’s bumper that weaves in and out of moving traffic in hot pursuit of a villain’s vehicle for over 90 uninterrupted seconds – shows off what the movie could’ve truly been capable of delivering. The shot’s so good, I laughed a few times out of sheer disbelief and grew disappointed when we finally, inevitably cut away. If only that much suspense, danger, coherence and imagination had found its way into the rest of the picture. I didn’t much mind watching the movie. It’s thin and single-minded, but the leads are appealing, the plot ludicrously stupid in a largely inoffensive way. It knows what it is, but without the good sense to be a better than middling version of what it is. It’s the kind of dumb actioner with a glimmer of a good idea that’ll play a lot better if and when you catch it on TNT or somewhere like that on a lazy weekend afternoon. 

Girls Gone Wild: SPRING BREAKERS

Spring Breakers is a film that has its cake and eats it too. It’s a turbulent high/low collision, an art house exploitation film and moody mainstream wallow. It springs from the head of Harmony Korine, a once-precocious filmmaker who has made a career out of creating films that serve as thumbs in the eyes of both propriety and audiences in detestable artfully artless small-scale grime like Gummo and Trash Humpers. (The outlier is the sweetly, emptily bizarre Mister Lonely.) What’s left to do once you’ve so thoroughly cultivated a niche aura of punk unpredictability? His new film is a stab towards something like mainstream disreputability with a topsy-turvy R-rated update of the squeaky clean 1950s teen beach movies that’s been driven off the surf and into a neon beach out of a Michael Mann film, a feature-length montage overlaid with Malickian voice over and a non-stop dubstep and hip-hop soundtrack (Skrillex wrote the music with composer Cliff Martinez). It’s a film that sends its characters straight into a horrifying bacchanalia and keeps pushing until it finds the even more horrifying criminality simmering permanently underneath. It’s ugly, volatile, occasionally offensive, largely troubling, and always mesmerizing. What a trip.

It all starts at an unspecified any-college, where whomping bass seeps out of carousing frat house gatherings and bored youths stare vacantly at their history professor, the darkened classroom a sea of glowing laptop screens. We first meet Faith (Selena Gomez) at a campus church group. Afterwards, one of the other young congregants (Glee’s Heather Morris) asks Faith if, for Spring Break, she still plans on going to Flordia with a group of rowdier girls. “I’ve known them since Kindergarten,” Faith says, summoning a kind of protective innocence. (Her friend’s advice? Pray.) Everything will be fine, Faith thinks. It’s all going to be fun. But, with her religiousness and her name being clear thematic markers, what she’s really in for is a trip to a metaphoric Hell above and beyond the collegiate partying she’s witnessed. She’s also not aware that, with money tight, her travelling companions (Ashley Benson, Vanessa Hudgens, and Rachel Korine) have just raised the money necessary for their travel by robbing a diner armed with squirt guns and a sledgehammer.

That this information, when revealed, isn’t an immediate red flag to Faith is a little disconcerting, but away the young women go, itching for adventure, St. Petersburg bound. Once there, they find themselves in the middle of the prolonged beachside riot of drugs, alcohol, and young bodies in slippery swimsuits that is Spring Break in certain areas of the nation’s warmer climes. Korine films it all so closely and lovingly that I felt the need for a new word, one that would go above and beyond “ogle.” The way his camera lunges towards and lingers on extras, but especially at his constantly skimpily attired stars, is about as subtle as a cartoon “ahoogah!” Numerous scenes of youthful people engaging in varied, energetic, and dangerous activities immediately follow. Now, I don’t think I’m being a premature fuddy-duddy to say that this kind of partying seems to have nothing to do with fun. It’s an endurance test of ingesting the most mind-altering, mood-scrambling substances, damaging property, staying out in the sun all day and risking severe bodily harm all night. Inevitably, I suppose, the girls end up in jail when a party they’ve stumbled into gets broken up. Standing in the courtroom for sentencing – pay a fine or spend two days in the slammer – wearing only their Day-Glo bikinis, the judge takes one look at them and asks “spring breakers?” knowing full well the answer. He must see a lot of them this time of year.

The girls are unexpectedly bailed out. Alien, a creepy low-level, drug-dealing, wannabe rapper who gazes out at them from over dark sunglasses with a smile so wide they can admire his grill, pays their fines in full. Played by James Franco in spectacularly ratty cornrows, this self-styled gangster brags about wanting to “do bad,” not wanting to “do good,” shows off his guns and knives, lets them try his weed, and makes sure to put in a plug for his music which he proudly says can be heard on YouTube. He oozes a sense of danger and razor’s-edge impulsiveness that informs the rest of the film as the college girls (all at first, but as some return home, their number grows smaller and tougher) get slowly pulled into the local underground scene of drug dealers, thieves, and club owners that feeds parasitically off the marginally more reputable waves of spring breakers that annually flood the city. Let’s just say that the guns at play are squirt guns no more. That in this final narrative descent, Franco’s rival, played by Gucci Mane, is the only black character to have any lines and is here only to create a clear villain (or something close to it) is ugly, an example of the film’s occasionally offensive jumble.

But, troubling though it is, Korine’s film is both ugly and sublime, sometimes at once, as in a string of shakedowns shot in slow motion and accompanied by only the sound of Britney Spears’s ballad “Everytime.” (Earlier, the girls goofily sang “…Baby One More Time” to each other, though the Britney songs that you’d think would be most apt to the proceedings – “Oops! I Did It Again” and “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Women” – go unheard.) It’s hard to parse if the film is reveling in the teasing debauchery or drawing a stark lesson in its inevitable descent into greater and greater criminality. Is it a film of instant-gratification nihilism or stylish hedonism? Is it aghast or roused by the behavior on display? Is it corrosive or celebratory? I choose all of the above. It’s at once objectified youth culture hothouse and giddy satirical denouncement. Is Korine creating a millennial Gatsby party or participating in the emptiness of it all? (A key may be the fate of Faith.) It’s often hard to tell with a movie so close to an embodiment of the subject at hand if we’re experiencing a work of understanding or scorn or both at once. My verdict was prone to shifting mid-scene. Either way, it’s artful trash that’s far from Korine’s usual overthought sloppiness; it comes by its loose sliminess, its casual beauty, and its most offensive qualities quite honestly. In fact, one might call it a trash-terpiece.

Monster Mush: HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA

You might not know it based only on the evidence of Hotel Transylvania, but Genndy Tartakovsky is one of the best animators of his generation. People around my age, especially, will recognize his powerful influence over his field if I mention the titles Dexter’s Laboratory, Powerpuff Girls, and Samurai Jack, three popular and influential animated series he directed for Cartoon Network in the 90s and early 00s. Characterized by fast, expressive movements and crisp, clean, caricatured figures moving through bold, colorful landscapes, these 2D, largely hand-drawn, shows play like they spring fully formed from a consistent, energetic vision.

But now, to the film at hand: Tartakovsky’s feature film debut. It’s a three-dimensional computer animated comedy about Dracula not wanting his daughter Mavis to leave the monster hotel he built to keep her away from dangerous humans. It’s clear that something went wrong during the making of Hotel Transylvania. You can tell by the gorgeous watercolor concept art that serves as a backdrop for the end credits. There’s certainly nothing that entrancingly good-looking in the film itself, a bland overly-familiar CGI animation effort that feels colorful and plastic in predictable patterns, where wacky character design looks like nothing more than a basket of McDonald’s toys. I like how broadly caricatured famous monsters like the mummy and Frankenstein look here, but they’re really only good for a sight gag or two before growing boring. Gone are Tartakovsky’s instantly recognizable drawings, subsumed in a cookie-cutter computer environment, his bold expressive 2D style ironically flattened out and homogenized in 3D.

The more-or-less one-joke plot (attributed to five writers) is as follows. A human wanders into Hotel Transylvania (a huge Scooby-Doo­-style castle) and catches the eye of Mavis, so Dracula tries in vain to keep the human away from the castle in order to protect his daughter from falling in love and to maintain his business model, which is built upon assuring the guests, monsters all, that humans are A.) universally dangerous and B.) never to be found on the grounds. The plot has thinning issues, growing less complicated as it goes along, settling far too easily into predictable grooves of narrative along paths that have been well trod. Stranger still are the moments when it eschews predictability to ill effect. Why not play around with the received pop-culture assumptions about these famous monsters? Why not go out on a rousing cover of “The Monster Mash?”

Voices heard here are grating, frenzied explosions of mismatched celebrity voices. As Dracula, Adam Sandler commits to one of his infamous grating accents, this time around a broad, sloppy Bela Lugosi vant-to-suck-your-blud style of loud mumbling. On the other end of the spectrum is Selena Gomez as daughter Mavis, who seems to have perhaps literally phoned in her lines in her normal speaking voice. The human who gets mixed up in door-slamming, pay-no-attention-to-the-guy-who’s-clearly-not-a-monster shenanigans is Andy Samberg who does a broad SoCal drawl. Elsewhere, cartoony monsters can be heard speaking like Steve Buscemi, CeeLo, Kevin James, Molly Shannon, Fran Drescher, David Spade, and Jon Lovitz. Weird, huh? Distracting too.

Hotel Transylvania is a movie both manic and sleepy, racing through turbocharged sub-Looney Tunes concepts so quickly and constantly that none of the gags have time to land, assuming they ever could have done so. I don’t know. When I see Frankenstein detach his legs and walk them behind the mummy to unleash a stinky blast of flatulence that is then sucked up by a witch with a bellows who then proceeds to use it to stoke a fire, I’m just not amused. Maybe that means I wasn’t on the right wavelength for this picture, but I tried. I really did. I like fast and silly, but this movie’s so much of both that it skips off the tracks and lands with a disappointing thud on the same old tracks we’ve been down hundreds of times before. Gee, parents and kids should better understand each other. People should not be hated for being different. It’s all wacky jokes, pleasant enough, but not too funny, in service of all the usual morals. That’s fine as far as that goes, but if you don’t have anything new to say, at least you could say it in an entertaining way.

Royal Mixup: MONTE CARLO

What makes Monte Carlo such a surprisingly enjoyable squeaky-clean family comedy is its low-key, laid-back approach to its mild farce. It’s a fantasy European vacation involving beautiful scenery, pretty young ladies, fashionable young men, glamorous clothes and accessories, and a central case of improbable mistaken identity, but the movie never makes too much of an effort to point out the fantasy of it all. It’s a sweet, disarming production that moves along pleasantly, genially, and allows the audience to simply enjoy the warm, relaxed comedy of it all.

Up-and-coming young actress Selena Gomez, notable in last year’s Ramona and Beezus, has a sense of ease on camera that places her firmly ahead of her fellow Disney Channel alums of the Miley Cyrus ilk. There’s never a sense that Gomez is straining to play at the comedy or the charm of the film. No, she just settles into the right groove and works the moods perfectly well. She plays a girl who just graduated high school and who, after saving her money and receiving a graduation gift from her mom and stepdad, is off to spend some days in Paris with her best friend (Kate Cassidy), a twenty-something high school dropout who works with her at a local diner. At the last minute, they’re told that Gomez’s recently added college-aged stepsister (Leighton Meester) will be tagging along as both a bonding experience and as a covert chaperone.

The girls zip off to France and find that they’ve selected the worst tour possible, one seemingly designed to not allow visitors the chance to actually look at Paris. They race through the Louvre so fast that they have to be coming close to breaking the record set in Godard’s Band of Outsiders, leaving the trio no choice but to dash down the corridors to catch up. When they finally take a moment to breathe and look out over the city, getting their first chance to just simply marvel at the beauty of it all while at the Eiffel tower, the bus leaves without them.

Lost in the city and caught in the rain, the girls stumble into a fancy hotel to dry off when they discover a spoiled British heiress (also Gomez) who is getting ready to ditch her scheduled charity trip to Monte Carlo. Upon emerging from the lobby bathroom after attempting to towel off their hair, the trio are spotted by hotel staff and whisked into a luxury suite and eventually given their airplane tickets for the next day. The heiress is nowhere to be found and the resemblance is so close (it’s a dual role for Gomez, after all) that these Americans abroad are about to get an all-expenses-paid weekend of Gallic glitz and glamour so long as the mistake isn’t caught.

Though sitting atop a shaky premise, director Thomas Bezucha, who also co-wrote with three other credited writers, keeps the proceedings light and frothy, never trying too hard to convince us of its veracity and never once patronizing its target audience. The relationships between the three main girls feel real and are teased out in ways that are quieter and subtler than you might expect. Gomez handles the double role convincingly with plenty of charm while Cassidy and Meester have little arcs of their own that unfold with a convincing patience. All the while, Michael Giacchino’s jazzy score and Jonathan Brown’s sunny cinematography help keep the film in a nice balance between fizzy and frivolous with just enough weight to keep the admittedly far-fetched events at least somewhat grounded.

It’s exactly what you’d want from a summery family comedy. Well, maybe not you specifically, but it’s certainly more than I expected from this one. There’s enough low-key farce to keep things hopping and enough chaste romance to keep the tweens in the audience swooning. The actors are fun to spend time with, the scenery is lovely, and the plot bumps along with a likably unhurried quality refreshingly devoid of heavy-handed moralizing. This is not a great movie, but it’s sweet and amiable and in this case that’s enough. It tells its story with a dose of relaxed charm that was unexpected enough to win me over.

Sister Act: RAMONA AND BEEZUS

Ramona and Beezus is based on the much-loved children’s novels of Beverly Cleary that follow the exploits of the fictional families who live on Klickitat Street in Portland, Oregon. Throughout the dozens of books, the main characters were, more often than not, the Quimbys and their friends. Though they are not without their fair share of problems, the Quimbys are rich in happiness; they’re always ready to make lemonade out of lemons.

Cleary’s first book was published in 1950. Through the screenplay adaptation by Laurie Craig and Nick Pustay, who pull plot points from many of the stories, and the direction of Elizabeth Allen, the film takes a 50’s sensibility and filters it through modernity. It achieves an effect that approaches timelessness. Ramona and Beezus is a sweet, wholesome, G-rated experience, but it’s not without some small nuance and genuine emotion. These positive qualities shine through even Allen’s small missteps, like with a handful of obvious music cues. This is a rare live-action family comedy that’s free of cheap innuendo and mean pratfalls.

This is a film that deals honestly with a sisterly relationship. Ramona, age 9, is imaginative and mischievous. She seems to get in trouble merely because she has too many ideas to fit in each day. Joyfully inhabited by newcomer Joey King, Ramona is an irrepressible creative spirit prone to flights of fancy and fits of exaggeration. She accidentally wreaks havoc, from an ill-advised car wash to pulling on a classmate’s fancy, bouncing curls. But she (almost) always has good intentions, and her big sister can see that when she’s not on the receiving end of the damage.

Her big sister is Beatrice, age 15, with a baby-talk nickname, Beezus, bestowed long ago by Ramona. She’s self-conscious, easily annoyed, and unsure of her own confidence. In other words, she’s directly in the middle of her awkward teenage years. She’s desperately trying to strike a balance, yearning to be older while wanting more time as a kid. Disney Channel alum Selena Gomez plays Beatrice with just the right level of complexity the movie requires. She loves her sister, feels protective of her, finds that they can confide in one another, but she is also quick to get upset by Ramona’s antics. This is a film that accurately finds the strain and strength in the relationship between sisters without ever making its observations broad or obvious.

The film also deals touchingly with parent-child relationships. Bridget Moynahan and John Corbett bring a weary love to their roles. These are patient, caring parents who truly, deeply love their children. Even a central economic crisis in the household can’t strain things too badly, though the tension it puts into an otherwise solid relationship is nicely handled. Other scenes that show simple interactions between parents and children feel wonderfully underplayed, touching where they could have gone manic, sweet where they could have gone cloying. Small moments between Corbett and King accrue a subtle power.

This is a movie that’s contagiously happy. It rarely rains on Klickitat Street. The imagery is sunny and the cast is glowing. Even small roles are delightfully filled by the likes of a beaming Ginnifer Goodwin as Aunt Bea, a charming Sandra Oh as a teacher, or a charmingly goofy Josh Duhamel as a neighbor. This is a movie filled with gentle laughs and soft sniffles. It’s refreshing to see a family film so simple and casual in its portrayal of good people with decent relationships. What could easily have felt monotonous and maudlin instead feels truthful.

It may be hard to believe sometimes, but some people have mostly happy childhoods. Some neighborhoods are essentially safe, pleasant environments to raise a family, even to this day. But that doesn’t mean these lives in these places are without incident or without struggle. This is a movie that feels true to these characters, true to real people who are like these characters, and true to the gentle, heart-warming spirit of Cleary’s original stories. It’s the sweetest, most welcome surprise of the summer.