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.

Go West, Young Writer: ON THE ROAD

I, like many bookish English major types I suppose, have some lingering Beat desires to road trip across America and see what inspiration and experience I can stumble upon. To drive across the vast expanse of roadways crisscrossing the United States, open to possibility, ready to gather raw material for projects made up of the written word, has a powerful romantic pull. For me, this doesn’t even have anything to do with Jack Kerouac or his novel On the Road, which has its minor pleasures, but is no sacred text to me. No, this desire within me is inherited from nothing more than the reverberations of the Beat generation’s go-west-young-writer influence, a sense of literary manifest destiny and direction.

So I have both a rooting interest and a disinterest in the film adaptation of On the Road. I’m sympathetic to the impulse behind the plot, while conflicted over the source material’s place in the literary canon. Over half a century after the novel’s release, it is director Walter Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera who have brought the book to the screen, finding some compelling episodic energy here and there in this period piece as young writer Sal (Sam Riley) makes his way through American landscapes. The majority of this particular picture, however, is a slog of a road trip. This is a drudgery in which the sights out the windows and the character actors at each stop are meant to carry the day. This is an adaptation that misses the point. For me, what pleasures that can be found in Kerouac’s novel are all in the prose. It’s not what happens, but how it’s recounted through the flavor and cadence of the writing. Of course that’s tricky to capture cinematically, but once removed, all that’s left of On the Road is an opportunity to really highlight how empty a narrative it is.

How strange, then, or perhaps how lucky, to find nice performances scattered throughout the morass of it all. They are occasional crackles of charm in an otherwise overwhelmingly bland trudge. The road takes Sal to Viggo Mortensen, Amy Adams, Kirsten Dunst, Elisabeth Moss and Steve Buscemi, among others doing fine work in underserved roles. Sal is sometimes joined by Dean (Garrett Hedlund) and Marylou (Kristen Stewart). Those two actors in particular are delivering something approaching career highlight work in a movie that plays as if destined to be largely forgotten. Hedlund and Stewart are two performers who, when thrust into big budget material (like Tron and Twilight, respectively) are consistently (unfairly, I would say) derided as one note, stiff and unconvincing. Here, they’re loose – naked and emotional, open and vulnerable, confident and hesitant – in ways that prove their detractors wrong. They’re actors and good ones at that, able to convincingly play blank blockbuster types just as thoroughly as more nuanced character work. They’re rather enjoyable at times, just as the rest of the exceedingly talented cast is putting in agreeable hard work.

But this shouldn’t feel like work. Salles’s picture is trying so hard for freewheeling filmmaking that it’s a strain. The stream-of-obviousness plot stumbles when it should glide, muddles when it should clarify. It wears out its welcome then drifts, feeling repetitive and tiresome until it finally ends. Worst of all, there are dumbly obvious scenes of Sal bent over a typewriter, hammering away at the prose some of us will recognize from the novel. It’s a typically movie portrayal of a writer, scrunched and self-important, as if our Kerouac proxy already knows that he’s writing a book of some historical note. He types as if he’s placing himself on syllabi before our very eyes. But here is a film that is so relaxed and aimless that it fails to work up the energy to make an argument for its own existence, let alone its source materials. It’s just too low-key to do itself justice. 

Slight of Bland: THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE

What a difference ten years makes. In 2003, Jim Carrey starred in the comedy Bruce Almighty as an average guy given the chance to borrow God-like powers, but the real scene-stealer, indeed the only person whose contribution I can remember to this day, was Steve Carell in a supporting role. Now here we are in 2013 with the comedy The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. It stars Carell in the title role while the more memorable moments appear courtesy of Carrey in a supporting role. It’s amazing what can happen to a showbiz career in only a decade, an observation worth noting in connection with Wonderstone since it happens to be a point on which the plot hinges. Carell plays a cheesy, theatrical, old school magician who, with his partner Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi), has headlined at a Las Vegas hotel performing the same magic act for ten years. They were wildly popular and wealthy, but the act’s gone stale and ticket sales are plummeting. Their hotelier boss (James Gandolfini) says he’ll fire them and hire a flashy new magician (Jim Carrey), a decision that spurs Wonderstone to put together a new show that’ll wow the crowds all over again.

What follows is a movie that’s big, broad and bland. It’s predictable in every beat right up to the rather mean-spirited finale that’s nonetheless played as triumphant victory. Carell’s Wonderstone is nothing more than a pompous and out-of-touch cheeseball, a sort of softer, off-brand Zoolander. In the movie he follows the predictable arc that starts from top of the world before getting knocked down to low lows until he finds it within himself, through the help of the characters around him, to know better how to find his way back to the top. What little that’s interesting here relates to the tension between the older style of magic making, typified by a mail order magic kit hawked by a slick showman (Alan Arkin) that holds a special place in the lives of Carell and Buscemi, and the newer more aggressive and ugly magic as practiced by the flashy, gross magician played by Carrey. Where our protagonists are average guys all dressed up with pompadours and in velvet making a dancing entrance to Steve Miller Band's "Abracadabra," he’s wiry, with long stringy hair, black clothing and pounding heavy metal. He’s obnoxious, at one point cutting open his cheek to pull out a bloody, folded up playing card. “Is this your card?” he asks. It is. (His final trick is super gross, too. I shall not spoil it, except to say it’s horrifying, cringe-worthy, and a little funny.)

The tension between types of magic, though, is ground under by the homogenized mediocrity of it all in a film eager to use that central conflict as set dressing rather than utilizing it as the intriguing idea that it is. Director Don Scardino (a sitcom staple) finds little of visual interest, preferring instead to keep the in medium shots and let the lines land. It’s too bad the lines in the script by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (they of Horrible Bosses) are largely inoffensive clunkers that go down easily and without impact. It’s a comedy that fails on both on a plot level and on a scene-by-scene basis, gathering up few laughs and even less of a reason to care. Why, then, did I not out-and-out hate this movie? It’s the cast and the cast alone. Carell and Buscemi have a funny sort of buddy chemistry that occasionally wrings some laughter out of the neglected premise. A few of Gandolfini’s line readings are just unexpected enough to bring a sort of backwards gravitas to some very silly moments. And Carrey, flailing about with little to do, nonetheless makes a big impact by bringing total commitment to a nutty part that a lesser comic actor would’ve no doubt undersold.  

I haven’t even mentioned Olivia Wilde yet and that’s a shame. She’s playing a nothing character, a token female presence that is only around to provide an anemic romantic subplot. You could take Wilde out of Wonderstone entirely and the movie would lose exactly nothing in terms of coherence and impact. That’s unfortunate, but the movie is a big nothing all around. It has so many promising elements mixed in with a game cast and yet proceeds to make use of none of them. It’s blandly uninvolving and perplexingly dull, aside from the once or twice I snickered or half-smiled at the best efforts of everyone involved. The whole thing was leaving my head even as I walked out of the theater. I barely remember it as I type these words a day after I saw it, so I doubt I’ll remember anything about it in ten years.

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.

He Gives Love a Bad Name: YOUTH IN REVOLT

The amount of enjoyment you get out of director Miguel Arteta’s Youth in Revolt, based on the cult novel by C.D. Payne, may hinge on how tired you are of Michael Cera. After all, this is yet another one of his stammering-teen performances like the ones he’s given in Arrested Development, Superbad, Juno, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Year One. There are, however, slight variations in his screen persona from character to character, and I, for one, am not yet tired of his way of delivering jokes by sometimes shyly slipping lines past or throwing lines away, muttering them under his breath, and then other times, asserting lines with painfully earnest intent but deeply strange delivery. I still have to smile when I think of Paulie Bleaker telling Juno that she’d “be the meanest wife ever.” He’s funny precisely because he doesn’t seem to be.

In Youth in Revolt, Cera is given yet another funny character in Nick Twisp, a mopey teen who lives with his mom (Jean Smart) and her live-in boyfriend (Zach Galifianakis). He’s repulsed by them, but an escape to see his dad (Steve Buscemi) and his dad’s much-younger girlfriend (Ari Graynor) doesn’t do much to relieve his constant state of self-pity. He’s surrounded by people in love, or something like it, and yet is cursed to remain vaguely lovesick. That is, at least until that vagueness is sharpened and focused on one girl he meets over the summer while vacationing in a trailer park. That girl is Sheeni Saunders, a cute and funny young woman whose capacity for affected anomie matches only Twisp’s. Saunders is played by relative newcomer Portia Doubleday, a great find and a fine match for Cera. They make a relaxed and cutesy couple. Doubleday shares with Cera a sly way of delivering punchlines without seeming to realize how funny she is.

After leaving the trailer park containing his mother’s boyfriend’s summer home, Twisp creates what he calls a “supplementary persona” in the form of the mustache-wearing, cigarette-smoking, bad boy Francois Dillinger. A revoltingly suave youth, Dillinger will occasionally appear and give Twisp very bad advice. Of course, he’s only in Twisp’s mind, but he gives him the courage to act (sort of) wild in an attempt to be sent away to be closer to Sheeni. He takes to spitting, tipping bowls of cereal, and, naturally, starting a massive fire. Cera has fun with this dual role; if he’s mostly unconvincing - he is - I suppose that could be the mildly clever point.

It’s a good thing that most of the humor arises out of the chemistry between Cera and Doubleday (and between Cera and Cera), though, because the movie feels awfully raggedy. Good performers like Fred Willard, Ray Liotta and Justin Long (in addition to Smart, Galifianakis, and Buscemi) are tragically underused in extremely underdeveloped supporting roles. Subplots start nowhere and then never get going while the plot itself starts strong, hitting a few funny notes, and then consists of nothing more than slight, and slightly worse, variations on those same few notes. It’s lumpy and episodic with a snarky tone that gets wearying, especially when it asks us to care more deeply about its characters. That said, this is a gently crude, yet still hard-R, teen comedy that’s kind of enjoyable, in a scrappy sort of way. Cera and Doubleday make it worthwhile.