Warm Bodies

Even in a post-apocalyptic future,

you'll end up next to this in the $5 bin at Walmart

Grade: C
Director: Jonathan Levine
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Teresa Palmer, Analeigh Tipton, Rob Corddry, Dave Franco and John Malkovich
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 37 min.

It takes more than Kensington Gore to make a good monster movie, and it takes more than spackling your film with Shakespearean tropes to lend it Meaning™. Warm Bodies tries to have to both ways, along with harvesting the teen romantic-comedy market for good measure. Isaac Marion’s source novel of the same name was published in late 2011, an important fact in nailing down its sundry pop-cultural influences. It’s Romeo & Juliet meets The Walking Dead meets Twilight meets a steaming pile of rotting entrails.

Our narrator is a zombie named R (Nicholas Hoult)—as in Romeo, get it?—who falls for a girl named Julie (Teresa Palmer)—as in Juliet, get it?—and has a best friend named M (Rob Corddry)—as in...oh, forget it. There’s also a scene where R appears below Julie’s balcony. But while R and Julie’s respective tribes don’t get along, it has less to do with family squabbling and more to do with the fact that R’s undead pals want to feast on Julie and the last vestiges of humankind.

But R is unusual, starting with the fact that while he can’t talk, sleep, dream or do anything but amble around all day waiting for a dollop of viscera to fall his way, he can provide an entirely articulate, introspective voice over narration. While on food patrol one day, R and his buddies happen upon a band of gun totting 20-somethings, including Julie and her boyfriend Perry (Dave Franco). R munches on Perry’s brains, allowing R to absorb and envision Perry’s memories, which are projected somewhat miraculously in two-shot and multi-angle imagery. R becomes infatuated with Julie and sneaks her to his home, an abandoned 747 parked on the tarmac of a derelict airport.

Never mind the fact that R chowed down on Julie's boo—his tousled hair and ‘80s vinyl record collection, when combined with a heady dose of Stockholm Syndrome, is all that’s required for her to go gaga. In return, R starts experiencing some special feelings that spread to the rest of his carnivorous clan the first time they glimpse R and Julie holding hands.

Director Jonathan Levine (50/50, The Wackness) aims to imbue this romance with some sidelong commentary about our disconnected society. But limiting ourselves to the zombie genre, that was done better and more satirically in just the opening half-hour of Shaun of the Dead. All Warm Bodies does is offer up such puzzling queries as why these zombies are the slow-moving George Romero kind at the beginning of the film but the frenzied 28 Days Later variety by the end. Why is ‘80s rock, record players and Polaroid instant cameras featured prominently alongside iPods, Blu-ray and convertible BMWs? What is the power source for R’s airplane and the moving walkways at the zombie-populated airport? Since R is already dead, why does Julie constantly refer to the threat of him “dying” or getting “killed,” including at the hands of her ramrod, freedom-fighting father (John Malkovich)?

Levine shoots the film in a drab grayscale; apologists would say this is to capture the look of a post-apocalyptic tableau when its true intent is avoiding the sort of vivid imagery that would usually carry with it an R-rating instead of the tepid PG-13 the filmmakers clearly wanted. Moreover, if you’re going to foist Romeo & Juliet, then have the courage of your literary conceit and embrace its tragic story arc. Put these together, and Warm Bodies is the thing you’d least expect: bloodless.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

Zzzzzz: Part 3

Grade: C +

Director: David Slade

Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, and Billy Burke

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 4 minutes

The dread comes in early in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, and once again, it is not the variety you would hope for from a tale about vampires, werewolves, and forbidden love. The film opens with Edward (Robert Pattinson), the most benevolent bloodsucker this side of Count Chocula, and the angst-ridden Bella (Kristen Stewart), still the most dysfunctional movie teen since Heathers, lying in a field of wild flowers. “Marry me,” says Edward; “Change me,” answers Bella; “I will if you marry me,” replies Edward; “Not again!,” screams the inner-monologue of every audience member who does not choose movies based on the recommendations of “Seventeen” and “Us Weekly.”

In truth, the tedium still outweighs the titillation in this tertiary film adaptation of Stephanie Meyer’s fantasy-romance franchise. But, new director David Slade credits include the pedophile-torture, Ellen Page vehicle Hard Candy, and 30 Days of Night, Josh Hartnett’s own vampire slasher flick. While still constrained by Meyer’s insipid prose, Slade struggles mightily to bring a dark visual and thematic edge to Eclipse. Vampires, werewolves, and a plot…oh my!

Vile Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard, replacing Rachelle Lefevre) is up in Seattle recruiting an army bloodsucking “newborns” to help exact revenge on Edward and Bella. Sensing encroaching danger, Edward and the rest of the Cullen clan call an uneasy truce with Jacob (Taylor Lautner) and the lycans in order to join forces and brace for battle.

Unavoidably, however, the main storyline always reverts back to a tedious love triangle over who Bella really wants to take her literal and metaphorical virginity: Edward, who glistens in sunlight and can give her immortality, or Taylor, who sports a six-pack and has enough body heat to help her stave off hypothermia when all three go camping during a blizzard. Call me crazy, but if Bella wasn’t in the pup tent, Edward and Taylor’s heart-to-heart détente had the makings of a supernatural Brokeback Mountain moment. Guess what? That would not be the worst development that could take place in this otherwise inert hunk of mass-marketing.

Eclipse corrects some of the oversights in its two predecessors, including some welcome flashback exposition about Jacob’s Native American tribe and the origin stories of vampires Jasper (Jackson Rathbone) and Rosalie (Nikki Reed). The action sequences are energizing while propelling the story forward, and there are several flashes of sly humor – “Doesn’t he own a shirt?” Edward asks about the chronically bare-chested Jacob.

But, like a vampire getting his first taste of blood, all these flirtations with competence only tease the ways this series has fallen far short of its latent potential. The three leads remain vapid eye-candy, particularly in comparison to a supporting cast that now includes Howard, Anna Kendrick, Dakota Fanning, and Catalina Sandino Moreno. More importantly, Eclipse toes, but never wholly crosses, the dividing lines of race, class, and religion inherent to Forks’ demography and lingering the background of Bella’s star-crossed dalliances, boundaries that should have been breached two movies ago. Instead, the whole spectacle is dumbed-down into a more easily marketable row between Team Edward and Team Jacob, with the only arbiter of righteousness being the decibel level of teenagers’ screams.

During the climactic battle scene in Eclipse, there is a moment when Bella – reenacting a bit of Quileute folklore – nearly carries out an act that would both save Edward from his attackers and force him to transform her into the thing he does not want her to become. Unfortunately, the plot – like the series as a whole – plays it safe, eschewing any possible complexity for the refuge of more wild flowers and inevitable “Will they or won’t they?” blather.

With two more films on the horizon, there remains hope. But – at the risk of mixing metaphors – it will take more than a simple transfusion for the sun to shine after this Eclipse. Twilight needs a heart transplant, stat!

Neil Morris

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

The excitement level 2 hours into watching New Moon

Grade: C –

Director: Chris Weitz

Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, and Billy Burke

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 10 minutes

Earlier this month, Taylor Swift starred in a Saturday Night Live spoof of Twilight entitled Firelight. Perfectly mimicking actress Kristen Stewart’s mannerisms, Swift’s Bella Swan doppelganger struggled to cope with her star-crossed love for a young Frankenstein and friendship with his rival, a teenage mummy. The sketch was meant to be farcical, but what actually made it so funny was how close it hit the mark. Vampires and werewolves; Frankensteins and mummies – what’s the real difference?

In other words, with its monster motif and twice-baked teenage angst, the film adaptations of Twilight and now its highly-anticipated follow-up, New Moon, have passed a point of self-parody. Think of it as One Tree Hill with fangs. Chris Weitz assumes the directorial reigns from Catherine Hardwicke, but he remains saddled with Melissa Rosenberg’s insipid screenplays adapting Stephenie Meyer’s book series.

Here, a three-sentence plot gets bled over two hours and 10 minutes – if Bella really wants to experience immortality, she should just watch this film because it seems like it’s never going to end. The entire narrative is a series of near-misses and near-kisses, breakups and breakdowns, with a clumsily shoehorning Romeo & Juliet premise for good measure.

Bella (Stewart) and Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) remain madly in love until Edward suddenly skips out of Forks, Wash. to protect her from encroaching evildoers and his urge to accommodate her ongoing desire to join the undead. Bella’s already crippling – and annoying – neuroses spiral into a tailspin until Jacob (Taylor Lautner) seizes the opportunity to strip off his shirt, flashes his pecs, and make his move on Bella…until he, too, gives her the high-hat in order to (you guessed it) protect her. Bella saves Edward, Edward wants back with Bella, Jacob wants back with Bella…on and on it goes, each trying to eventually be the first to pop Bella’s supernatural cherry.

At least the squeals of delight from pubescent fans might drown out dialogue that fluctuates between the monotonous – “So, you’re a werewolf?” “Yeah, last time I checked.” – and the risible – “I just couldn’t live in a world where you don’t exist.” And, the sparse satisfactory acting talent involved is wasted in supporting roles. Anna Kendrick remains relegated to the nothing role of Bella’s gal pal, Jessica. Dakota Fanning’s ballyhooed casting turns out to be a glorified cameo. At least there’s a guilty pleasure in seeing the terrific Michael Sheen, who played the Lycan leader in the Underworld films, cast as the Grand Poobah of a vampire conclave (stationed in Italy, no less).

Otherwise, New Moon is just more of the humdrum, hormonal same. You’d hope for plenty of sucking in a movie about blood-thirsty vampires…just not the figurative kind.

Neil Morris

Twilight

One Tree Chill

Grade: C –

Director: Catherine Hardwicke

Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, Nikki Reed, and Anna Kendrick

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours, 2 minutes

Forget for a moment the juvie frenzy associated with Stephanie Meyer’s bestselling Twilight series. Fact is every couple of years another incarnation of the vampire mythology rise from the grave and sinks its teeth into pop culture – Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Underworld, Interview with the Vampire, the Blade trilogy, and, of course, various remakes of Dracula. On one hand, Twilight, the film adaptation of Meyer’s first novel from director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen; Lords of Dogtown), bears greatest similarities to The Lost Boys and its kitschy take on adolescent vampires gone wild. Unfortunately, this turgid tale of forbidden, foreboding teen love more closely resembles the pilot of a midseason replacement on The CW.

When Bella Swann (Kristen Stewart) relocates from Phoenix to Forks, Washington in order to reconnect with her estranged dad (Billy Burke), she finds an eclectic citizenry that includes Native Americans who are brethren with wolves, and a cliché of odd high schoolers who couldn’t draw more attention to themselves – without supposedly wanting to – if they all hung signs around their necks that read, “Warning: Vampire!”

Hunky yet aloof vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) takes a liking to Bella because, unlike everyone else, he cannot read her thoughts (neither Edward’s attraction nor Bella’s invisible firewall are ever explained). So begins an uneasy romance that rests on the fact that Edward must hope his love for Bella overwhelms his desire to guzzle her blood. In other words, Bella falls for the bad boy, while Edward is another man forced to become more sensitive in order to keep a girl.

Triteness aside, the primary problem with Bella and Edward’s star-crossed dalliance is that precious little that is interesting ever happens other than woeful acting and even worse dialogue. “You’re my own personal brand of heroin,” mumbles Edward (cue unintended laughter). “I don’t have the strength to stay away from you anymore,” intones one of them (it doesn’t matter who). And, the “Stupid Lamb”/”Sick, Masochistic Lion” exchange, one of the book’s iconic buzz phrases, just sounds silly coming from two sullen actors who look as though they prepared for their roles by watching a “One Tree Hill” marathon interspersed with Abercrombie & Fitch ads. Gone is any of the book’s playful, lively banter, replaced only with dull adolescent angst.

Only Bella’s non-predatory friends add a spark of life to the film, especially her spunky friend, Jessica (Anna Kendrick, the standout in last year’s high-school debate comedy, Rocket Science). And, there is a brief, semi-amusing Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner scene when Bella visits Edward’s vampire family. However, the only real action comes with a trio of rogue blood-suckers wanders into town and starts hunting human prey. But, even this hurried subplot falls victim to Hardwicke’s low production quality.

Nevertheless, a film like Twilght, particularly the shrieking preteens at the early screening I attended, makes me recall Marty McFly’s line from Back To The Future: “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it.”

Neil Morris