No restrictions

Earlier this week I wrote about a movie (Mama) I was surprised to see get a PG-13 rating. Now I'm writing about one I'm surprised to see get an R.

Who would have thought that any studio desperate to capitalize on the dying embers of the Twilight phenomenon would slap a restrictive R rating on the same type of movie?

You could argue that Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is not going for the same audience, but I think you'd be fooling yourself. It may be one extra degree removed, but the relationship is pretty explicit. Hansel & Gretel reminds a person of Red Riding Hood, which reminds a person of Twilight. Not that far to go.

In fact, so sure was I that it would be PG-13 that when someone posted the red band trailer on Facebook and speculated that this meant the movie would be R, I did everything short of calling him a fool. Yet he was right.

The curious decision to include enough violence and/or nudity to earn the R shows that studios are no longer shying away from the R the way they once were. They clearly recognize that an R rating does not stop determined teenagers, and may in fact give them greater encouragement to see the movie in question. Which basically means that studios think theaters don't really police the selling of tickets, and they're probably right. After all, there isn't the same kind of penalty for selling movie tickets to an underage person as there is for selling cigarettes or alcohol to that same underage person. There actually may be no penalty at all. Or perhaps there's a theoretical penalty that never gets practically enforced. Can you imagine someone engaging in this kind of sting, sending a 14-year-old to buy tickets to an R movie the way they sometimes send 14-year-olds to buy cigarettes? I didn't think so.

And by placing greater "restrictions" on the audience, they're actually removing the restrictions they place on their filmmakers. My guess is that however good Hansel & Gretel ends up being, a couple of bloody witch beheadings and perhaps an errant tit or two will make it that much better.

And it's not just the latest potential Jeremy Renner franchise (seriously, doesn't this guy have better things to do than this movie?) that shows studios are noticing the box office power of R-rated films like Ted and The Hangover. In three weeks A Good Day to Die Hard will drop, also with the same R rating that the original three Die Hards carried, the same R rating that was abandoned for Live Free or Die Hard. As though to welcome the return of the R rating with open arms, Fox has been running with the tagline "Yippee Ki Yay Mother Russia," as though promising to complete John McClane's trademark phrase -- which was famously clipped before it could finish in Live Free. (Which is kind of the opposite of "living free," when you think about it.)

Hansel & Gretel is a bit different, though. We all know that R-rated action movies can succeed, but R-rated fantasy? It's been a much more untested realm. I think of movies like Excalibur, The Sword and the Sorcerer and Conan the Barbarian from my childhood, and I remember even then being confused about why I wasn't allowed to watch them. How could a movie with men carrying swords be rated R? It just didn't compute. Excalibur in particular took on a huge fascination for me, though not enough to have sought it out as an adult, I guess. In fact, I've seen none of those three.

In recent years there have been a couple other fantasy movies that have scored Rs, specifically, two movies from 2011: Immortals, probably a bloodier 300 (I didn't see it) and Your Highness, a stoner comedy that happens to be set in a fantasy world, and includes some boobs and a prosthetic monster penis. But neither of those movies seemed to expect their audiences to cross over with the Twilight audience.

You could say that even more than Ted and The Hangover, there's another recent successful entertainment commodity that gave MGM and Paramount the courage for this particular R: Game of Thrones, in which bare-chested women and gushing blood are so commonplace, they are almost gratuitous. Yet that has been one of the great critical and popular successes of the past couple years, its content not the least impediment to reaching a wide audience.

Lest you be worried that the next Pixar movie is going to be rated R, let me assure you that there are plenty of movies still content to go the "old-fashioned" route. On the very same day that A Good Day to Die Hard releases, a more traditional Valentine's Day movie also hits theaters: Beautiful Creatures, which is as naked a capitalization on Twilight as anything that's come out since Twilight first hit the scene.

Quaintly, it's rated "only" PG-13. 

Seriocomic running

Because the Twilight series famously does not need to advertise in order to sell tickets (plenty of tickets), I had not seen this poster for the series' final installment until last Friday night.

And then I just laughed. And laughed. And laughed.

I mean, they've got to be kidding with this poster, right?

The insufferable love triangle at the core of this series looks like they're running -- their bodies all appear in running poses.

Their faces? An entirely different matter. Their faces are perfectly still and perfectly stolid, not to mention typically humorless. They display none of the effort that would normally be associated with running.

Admittedly, it's hard to capture movement in a still photo. All you can do is show legs and arms in familiar running poses, and let us assume that they are moving forward with a certain alacrity, especially if they are being chased by creatures who mean to do them harm.

But the faces just belie any sense of forward momentum these characters might have.

I've written before about how realistic running is one of the most surprisingly difficult tasks for actors to master, and there are only a small number of them who excel at it. In fact, in this post, I sung the praises of unequaled run-actor Tom Cruise.

But come on. Even for a shot that is clearly posed rather than being extracted from the finished film, this is pretty lifeless. It's some of the worst photo shoot directing and photo shoot acting I've ever seen. (These days, the actors may not have even posed for it. It's certainly possible their heads were just Photoshopped on running bodies. In fact, that would explain a lot.)

You could argue that a really intense runner sometimes does have a perfectly stoical expression, one that results from total concentration and focus. But the effect of having all three of these characters wear that same expression, plus the fact that they look like they're going for a light jog rather than outrunning death, just saps all the intended drama out of this image, rendering it utterly comedic. The fact that these movies have always taken themselves so seriously only makes it funnier.

All this said, the movie does have a pretty impressive 68 Metascore* as of this writing. (I wrote this yesterday -- with the new Friday reviews, it's now down to 53.) Which makes me wonder if the same thing is going on here that went on in the Harry Potter series, which is the most similar model for the way these movies have been released (especially releasing the adaptation of the series' final book in two parts).

Namely, with the arrival of the final movie, a nagging sense of prolonged water treading might finally be dispelled. I think the reason I loved Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 as much as I did was that we finally got to see this big showdown that everything had been building toward. With that series in particular, and with me as a viewer in particular, the momentum stalled almost to a complete halt during the middle movies. (Everything after Prisoner of Azkaban, really, until the final movie.)

Now, I have no idea what has happened in the plot of this series, since I watched only the first movie, and only then so that I could have it as a cultural touchpoint. But I can only assume that the Twilight saga has been leading up to some kind of similarly epic confrontation between ever-growing legions of good characters and bad ones. (I actually do know that there's some icky stuff about Bella's pregnancy in this last book, having read a shocked negative review of the book in Entertainment Weekly at the time it was released.) And maybe this sense of something finally happening makes this final entry in the series better than the rest.

So I guess I better catch up on Twilight: New Moon, Twilight: Eclipse and Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1 before I go to the theater and see Breaking Dawn Part 2 this weekend, right?

Wow, I couldn't even type that with a straight face.

I knew Anna Kendrick was cool

But she doesn't have much luck being construed the way she wants to be.

I was drawn to an article on Moviefone titled "Anna Kendrick, What to Expect When You're Expecting Star, Relieved to No Longer Be In Twilight." While that may be a needlessly complicated and frankly awful headline, it did the job of getting me to read the article. After all, I liked the sentiment. I have always thought that Kendrick was better than Twilight. You could say I have a little bit of a crush on her, which is funny, because she's been in a couple movies I haven't been a huge fan of (Rocket Science, 50/50). I didn't even love Up in the Air like most people did.

Anyway, I love the fact that they're making Kendrick out to be basically embarrassed about her involvement with the Twilight saga. Even if it's not entirely accurate.

Here's how it really went down:

Interviewer: How does it feel to not be involved in the final Twilight movie?

Kendrick: It’s a relief, you know? Because it’s kind of off my shoulders [in terms of] talking about it. Because talking about it I always feel like I say something that gets misconstrued or I offend someone because people are so deeply passionate about that series. So, I’m actually sort of happy to be not talking about it.

Well, nice try not talking about it, Anna. And good luck being construed better next time. 

Just begging for some British accents

As I was watching Red Riding Hood this weekend -- not at the drive-in, as originally planned, but in a dumpy theater in Marina del Rey -- I became acutely aware of the need for fake British accents in films set at some point in the nebulous past.

Without them, you are even more aware of the fact that people are just parading around in costumes.

We tend to tease movies set in times of antiquity for their reliance on generic British accents, even when the action is not set anywhere near England or its colonies. As an extreme example of that, I laughed at the fake British accents in 10,000 B.C. -- not only was there no English language at the time, but there was probably no language, period. We tend to think of those people as communicating via pre-linguistic grunts. Then again, we also tend not to think of them as fighting with woolly mammoths, so that was not the film's only problem.

But the alternative is not usually what Mel Gibson did in The Passion of the Christ or Apocalypto, where the language genuinely spoken by the characters was the language used. Sometimes the alternative is to speak with an accent appropriate to whatever region of the world it is, but that can be really hokey if the actors can't pull it off. (And tends to seem racist if the action is set in Asia, for example.) The more common alternative is to just strip away all artifice and let the actors speak in their own regular voices.

Which is what Catherine Hardwicke decided to do in Red Riding Hood. Many of the actors in this movie are Americans -- notably excepting Julie Christie -- and they talk like Americans. Like modern-day Americans. This leads to a number of problems, not the least of which is that it reminds everyone that this is frivolous teen fare -- not unlike Hardwicke's own Twilight.

Surely, part of why most things in Red Riding Hood seem frivolous has to do with Hardwicke's direction. I'm not usually one to single out the directing in a film, such that I say a film was "badly directed" --- that may certainly be the case, but I tend to blame the director for the overall failure, not for "directing badly," per se. But this film was the exception, where I watched the stultifying acting and thought "This movie is badly directed."

But part of it has to do with those American accents for sure. They seem anachronistic, because they remind us that there was no country called the United States when the events of Red Riding Hood would have transpired. England, on the other hand, has been around since -- well, since 10,000 B.C., it would seem. So British accents never seem anachronistic, even in a movie about cavemen. Sure, they're ridiculous if you think about it -- but most people who watched 10,000 B.C. did not think about it, and the accents just sounded right.

American accents do not sound right in a movie like Red Riding Hood. Surely, with higher caliber actors and a better director, they'd sound more right. But they are ultimately hamstrung by how modern they sound. Which just leads a person like me, who watched the movie for some good art direction and possibly a creepy wolf-on-girl sexual encounter, to think all the more about a teen-oriented contraption like Twilight.

I don't have anything more to say on the subject, but I thought I'd leave you with a little personal anecdote from the experience of seeing Red Riding Hood. You may remember that back in January, I lost my wallet at an illegal double feature of The Green Hornet and Blue Valentine -- illegal in the sense that I paid for the first and snuck in to the second. (How could you not remember it, I keep making reference to it.) My wallet was ultimately found by the janitorial staff and turned in to their lost and found.

Well, this past Sunday I got to return the favor. As I was walking in to the bathroom to relieve myself before the movie started, I saw a wallet sitting on top of one of the urinals. You men will be familiar with the spot -- it's that area atop the flushing mechanism, where you sometimes rest things when you don't have any available pocket space, and you need your hands free to do your business. I was immediate struck by the appropriateness of finding this wallet, scooped it up, and brought it to one of the ushers.

It gives me an intense feeling of satisfaction any time I find a lost item, because I know I'll do right by it. I know that if I lost something, I'd want me to find. I love being the link in the chain that helps this person get their property back, that helps put a little spring in their step that day. Because if you've lost something important and then found it again, you know that the feeling is so good, you're happier than if you'd never lost it in the first place. Which can most certainly be a life-affirming sensation.

However, when I posted about it on Facebook, someone did make a comment that got me thinking, and I'm curious about your opinion. In this scenario, would you have turned it in to the theater staff, or tried to reach the wallet's owner directly? My commenter suggested that the person might have gotten the wallet back faster if I'd done the latter. I momentarily wondered about that, and realized that it's true -- either the theater staff could botch the return of the wallet, or the person who lost it might not realize that the theater was where they lost it. And even if there was no way for me to call the person, I'd have their address on their driver's license, and could probably find them on Facebook to send them a message.

But I ultimately decided that the course of action I took was the correct one. I thought the most likely outcome would be that the person would realize they'd lost the wallet before they even left the theater, and would know they had it coming in, because they used it to pay for their tickets. They'd go straight to the lost and found and would get it straight back. And I'd save them at least an hour or two of panicked retracing of their steps, before they'd have a chance to check Facebook for their message from me.

What would you have done?

A grievous error

We had a son the other day. Wednesday, to be exact. Hence the unexplained two weekdays in a row without a new blog post. We're still at the hospital until tomorrow, but an emergency has come up that makes it necessary that I get a quickie in now.

As much as you weigh the pros and cons of a name before choosing it, there's always a way to screw up in ways you never could have imagined.

Our son is named Jasper. We love the name, everyone else loves the name (or so they say). My mom gave off a surprised laugh when she first heard it, but I think she likes it too.

But a few minutes ago, when we met our umpteenth nurse who will be taking care of us for the length of her shift, and we told her his name, she uttered a dreaded word: "Twilight."

It was early in the morning so I didn't figure out exactly what she'd said, but I immediately pulled out my laptop to check.

Yes indeed, there is a character named Jasper in the Twilight movies. In fact, you're looking at him above.

He's a secondary character, to be sure -- it's not like we named our son Edward or Jacob. (I do have friends who named their son Jake just before the Twilight phenomenon exploded -- though I think that's his full name, not short for Jacob at least.) But he's prominent enough to have his own promotional artwork. And boy does he look milquetoast and "wet," to use a term my wife (an Australian) uses. "Wet" means about the same thing as milquetoast. Yes, he looks the teen heartthrob equivalent of "intense," but doesn't he also look like he might be about to cry?

I only saw the first Twilight, and it was before we were pregnant, and my wife wouldn't touch this series with a ten-foot pole, so I don't know how we would have been expected to know about this. Looking on IMDB, Jasper Whitlock (played by Jackson Rathbone -- funny, Jackson was another name we were considering) is the 13th listed member of the cast of characters. So, not that prominent, all told. In Twilight: New Moon, he's moved up to 11th, and for some reason is now called Jasper Hale. (I guess I would have to see it to understand why.) In Twilight: Eclipse, he's muscled his way up to ninth -- I don't like this trend. And he's the seventh highest listed cast member in the two parts of Twilight: Breaking Dawn, due out in 2011 and 2012.

So what does it all mean, other than the fact that I generally detest anything associated with Twilight?

For one, it means that Jasper will not be nearly as uncommon a name as we expected it to be. And while we chose it for its uniqueness, I suppose there's a benefit to not giving our son the weirdest name anyone's ever heard of.

But I'm also a bit worried that the other Jaspers out there will give our Jasper a bad name. Far be it from me to stereotype, and no offense meant to you, dear reader, if you are a Twilight fan. But if you are a person who's naming your son Jasper specifically because that's the name of a character in Twilight, I'm concerned about the genes you will be passing on to him. I really don't want my Jasper to be confused with a bunch of little goth Jaspers running around, looking like the Jasper you see above.

Oh well. Nothing we can do now.

But we love our little Jasper. And I must say, if I hadn't been posting about this, I might have been posting about the birth of a child being one of life's truly cinematic moments. And it lived up to all my expectations in that regard. I was the supportive husband, soon-to-be-daddy, holding my wife's hand, telling her she could do it, telling her to push, praising the job she was doing. And then, after a surprisingly short amount of pushing, there was my son's head, peeking out, ready to join the outside world. Moments later, his little blue alien body emerged, and I had a video camera in one hand, scissors to cut the umbilical cord in the other, blubbering like an idiot.

And it was wonderful.

Zeitgeist viewings

There wasn't any part of me that wanted to see Twilight.

Except, that is, the part of me that wanted to be able to reference it.

You see, I have a general contempt for youth culture. I'll be the first to admit it, and I'll also be the first to admit that it makes me just like all those other "grownups" who swore to remain forever committed to embracing what's "young" and "hip." (Or failing "hip," at least "popular.") Well, there's a reason that "young" and "hip" things don't appeal to us that much -- they also strike us as frivolous, as something we'd never have had the poor taste to endorse when we were that age. (This coming from a generation who worshipped New Kids on the Block).

But film critics can't afford to be so removed from "what the kids like these days," because we may review a movie that requires that knowledge at any given time. Just because I, a 35-year-old film critic, am not interested in Twilight, doesn't mean that the person I'm writing for isn't. Even if I'm not actually reviewing Twilight itself.

Okay, Vance, I get why you might need to keep an open mind if you were reviewing Twilight. But why watch it if you're not reviewing it?

Well, because I never know when I might want to make a snide reference to it in some other review, or some other piece of writing altogether. And you can be a lot more confident in your own snideness if you've actually seen the product in question.

I've seen a number of movies that capture the zeitgeist for this very reason. One that comes to mind is High School Musical, which I also watched when my wife was out of town. She wouldn't do anything more than shake her head and laugh, and she'd even get my reasoning. But I would have been self-conscious. It still strikes me as silly in some way, as me regressing into the mind of a teenybopper. So she'll have to check out my "most recently seen" section of my blog if she wants to know I saw Twilight. (Eh, I'll probably tell her.)

Teen movies are one kind of movie I see in this way -- another is movies that ruled the box office. I remember that I had to see The Passion of the Christ (in the theater, no less) because I wanted to get "what it was all about." I felt it was important, as a critic and fan, to have this movie in my personal database. It's for this same reason that I sometimes feel myself moving toward Paul Blart: Mall Cop on the new release shelf. I want to understand what it was that made American moviegoers shell out $146 million in ticket sales for it. (By this same logic, I will eventually have to relent and see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, even after deciding against it upon hearing the hoots and howls over Skids, Mudflaps, and all the other Michael Bay-related ridiculousness).

So of the movies I've just mentioned, how many was I actually glad I saw? Well, all of them, in a way, even though the only one I'd say I liked was High School Musical. (In fact, I may consider seeing the sequels at some point.) I did not think that much of Twilight, at least not after the promising first 30 minutes. The movie has major structural/pacing problems, most notable from the point when the vampires are involved in a casual game of vampire baseball, and then barely 10 minutes later, the plot has progressed to a hurried and silly climax. And you pretty much know the deal on Passion of the Christ -- it's unmitigated masochistic torture almost from start to finish.

But whether these movies are good or not is pretty much beside the point. People have asked me why I would intentionally see movies I know are not good, and usually I can answer that I'm reviewing them, thank you very much. But there are also movies you should see just for the sake of it. It's gotten past the point where this kind of reference would have any currency, but I still feel like I must eventually sit through Gigli, even though I understand it is not "so bad it's good." Sometimes you have to see bad things just because they are bad -- and because famous bad movies are just as important to know as famous good movies.

I don't generally like writers who are always engaged in "cultural name dropping" -- it's a bit like those shows (Psych is one) that think the only thing you need for clever writing is to make as many pop culture references as possible. But a well-placed, relevent reference can really bring something home to a reader. How else could I have ever written this opening line to my review of White Chicks, which I happen to still enjoy, even though my references are totally random?

"There were certain things audiences were just never going to accept: 1) that everyone in Weekend at Bernie's really thinks Bernie is alive, 2) that Denise Richards plays a nuclear physicist in The World is Not Enough, and 3) that two Wayans brothers in whiteface, looking more like carnival freaks than drag queens, could be mistaken for prominent teen socialites by everyone in the Hamptons."

Hey, it's not Shakespeare, but it's as close as I'm going to get.