Movie Box Review

It may not be pretty, but surely it's true--Credit must go where credit is due.  In this case, that means the Universal Pictures Marketing Department, which as it turns out has done a splendid job these last few weeks of hiding just how thoroughly terrible the new movie of Dr. Seuss' THE LORAX really is.  

Considering how cinematic the works of Dr. Seuss seem to be, the films based on his work have a surprisingly bad track record.  Horton Hears A Who! managed to be mediocre, but How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat In the Hat were two of the most painful family movies of recent years.  Part of the problem is undoubtedly that Seuss' picture books don't have enough story for a full-length feature, and thus have to be "opened up," usually badly.  (The 1966 TV Grinch was and is a short classic, but Ron Howard's movie is a bloated disaster.)  There's also something about Seuss' extravagant, anarchic imagery that seems to give filmmakers (and sometimes actors) the sense that they're free to indulge themselves, and that only too much can be enough.

The Lorax was produced by Illumination Entertainment, which gave Universal its big hit Despicable Me, with Illumination honcho Christopher Meledandri serving as producer, over director Chris Renaud (also a director of Despicable).  As written for the screen by Cinco Paul (another Despicable vet) and Paul Daurio, Lorax is badly constructed, overly blunt and emotionally unsatisfying.  The first hour of the story is mostly a series of flashbacks:  young Ted (Zac Efron), on a mission to please Audrey, the girl of his dreams (Taylor Swift--who doesn't sing, even though the movie features several ghastly songs by Cinco Paul and composer John Powell), sets off to find her a real living tree.  This is a challenge, because Ted and Audrey live in Thneedville, a completely artificial town where the "soil" is painted concrete and the "trees" are inflatable.  Thneedville is run by O'Hare (Rob Riggle), who's gotten rich by selling the inhabitants bottled air less poisonous than the polluted stuff around them.

Ted is advised to seek out The Once-ler (Ed Helms) for tree-related wisdom, and finds him walled up in the only structure standing amid the wasteland outside Thneedville's city limits.  Once-ler, at great length, tells Ted the story of how he became the victim of his own ambition and greed, breaking his promises to the forest creatures and to the mystical Lorax (Danny DeVito), who speaks "for the trees," chopping all the trees down in order to build an industrial empire producing unnecessary Thneeds.  (This will not be Mitt Romney's favorite movie of the year.)    Eventually, Once-ler gives Ted the last remaining tree seed, and that leads to a final half-hour of chase scenes and supposedly heartwarming conclusion.

We know for a fact that it's possible to tell a whimsical animated fantasy about the dangers of corporate greed and human indolence, because it was called WALL-E and it was a masterpiece.  Rango, too, had a not dissimilar plot (evil industrialist villain, water instead of trees being withheld from the town) and melded its message with weirdness to brilliant effect.  The Lorax makers, however, don't evidence a fraction of the artistry that went into those films.  Even if one applauds Lorax's environmental message, the singleminded way it beats that drum becomes wearying, and the characters are all exceedingly flat.  That even includes DeVito's Lorax, beyond the couple of decent lines that are already in all the trailers and ads.  

The look of the animation (which, by the way, makes almost zero use of the 3D imposed on it) is reasonably colorful and Seussian in a general way, but for a story that hinges so much on the preciousness of nature, there's almost no memorable imagery here, not a single moment that brings home the message the picture is trying so desperately to send.  

The Lorax is dreary, a bore despite its brief running time.  These multimillionaire purportedly anti-corporate moviemakers have done nothing but grind a small, charming piece of literature into an outsized corporate product.  It's a Thneed.

PARENTHOOD is sort of the Bizarro version of a broadcast network drama:  it shines when addressing the kind of tiny moments of human interaction that just about every other show on TV can't be bothered to notice, but it sometimes falters when attempting the Big Event Episode that's bread and butter for most series.

Last night's season finale, unfortunately, was an example of the latter.  The episode, written by showrunner Jason Katims and directed by Executive Producer Lawrence Trilling, centered around the long-postponed and now very sudden wedding of Crosby (Dax Shepard) and Jasmine (Joy Bryant), but also tried to wind up, or at least advance/twist, almost all the other storylines of the season.  It was a lot to do in an hour (or what's left of an hour after commercials and promos), and much of it felt rushed and undeveloped.

The problem was evident from the episode's start, when Crosby's and Jasmine's respective current romantic interests (Courtney Ford and D.B. Woodside), both made into real human beings over several previous episodes, were dismissed in an opening montage where almost all the dialogue was drowned out by a background song.  No time!  

What followed, though, was Parenthood at its best , a messy, believable all-hands-on-deck fight between brothers Crosby and Adam (Peter Krause) because Adam had gone behind Crosby's back to negotiate the sale of their jointly-owned recording studio.  The differing priorities of the brothers and their resulting tensions had been so well built-up over the course of the season that the explosion felt very real, and the fact that it was happening in front of the entire family managed not to seem at all gimmicky.

After that, the show had to settle down to the grim business of dealing quickly with all the season's accumulated storylines, which led to some unusually clumsy dramaturgy.  Julia (Erika Christensen) and Joel (Sam Jaeger), who had just suffered the heartbreaking failure of a failed adoption when the birth mother (Rosa Salazar) changed her mind after the birth, were informed, out of the blue, that children are sometimes available on a moment's notice when mother's give up their rights in emergency situations, so we knew that would happen before the episode was over--which it did.  (Although the show tried to throw a bit of a curveball by making the adoptee much older than the baby we were expecting.)  Kristina (Monica Potter) had a heart-to-heart with niece Amber (Mae Whitman) to tell her she couldn't be both employee and girlfriend of the city council candidate they both work for--and within minutes, Amber was delivering the same message and being assured that all was well, she could keep her job.  No sooner had Sarah (Lauren Graham) broken up with Mark (Jason Ritter) than he showed up at the wedding and proposed to her.  (Although if both Parenthood and the new Ritter/Katims pilot are picked up for fall, that marriage won't be happening.)  Most awkwardly of all, Adam suddenly changed his mind about selling the studio in a contrived (non) best man toast at his brother's wedding.   (As to which, by the way--if the studio is worth $2M+, as it clearly is, the brothers' financial issues should ease whether they sell the place right now or not.)

Even below-par Parenthood is far better than most network 1-hours.  The show juggles an enormous number of characters with--well, usually with remarkable grace.  The cast, which also includes Craig T. Nelson (whose character amazingly survived the episode without any heart palpitations), Bonnie Bedelia, Sarah Ramos and Max Burkholder, is as well-meshed an ensemble as any on television.  Katims and his writing staff are superb at showcasing the subtle connective tissues of family life.  

Parenthood is located squarely on NBC's bubble, with ratings that would surely get it canceled on any other network, but (especially in the last couple of weeks) in the not-so-bad range for the Peacock.  If network branding and identity still mean anything, the series, even with its occasionally flawed episodes, should be granted the opportunity to continue telling its first-rate tales of ordinary people.

FOX's new series TOUCH got off to a very good start in the ratings with a "preview" episode last week (having American Idol as a lead-in didn't hurt), and certainly indications are that it could be a solid hit when it makes its series debut on Mondays next month after Alcatraz is done for the season.  To these eyes, though, it looked to be as boneheaded a TV series as any in recent memory.

Touch was created by Tim Kring, who gave us Heroes, which became a very odd network TV phenomenon:  the hit that never really was.  Heroes started off like gangbusters, and visions of spin-offs, merchandising bonanzas and feature films danced in NBC's desperate head.  Then the show came back for a disastrous second season (remember the medieval Japanese storyline?  the multiple versions of just about every major character who kept turning up?), and it never recovered; Heroes limped along for another couple of seasons, but its downward trend was irreversible.  Touch doesn't feature super-powers per see, but it already shows clear signs of the kind of confusion and soft-minded preference for mysticism over plot logic that doomed Heroes.  

Touch brings Kiefer Sutherland back to TV, this time playing Martin Bohm, a baggage handler at JFK who manages to be as ineffably grim and determined as Jack Bauer used to be.  Martin's wife died on 9/11, and he's raising son Jake (David Mazouz) on his own.  (One of the pilot's weirder conceits is that although Martin can barely make ends meet, he and Jake live in a multi-million dollar 3-bedroom Manhattan loft because his stockbroker wife left it in trust for Jake--hopefully that included funds for yearly maintenance and property taxes.)  Jake is really the show's focal point, a magical autistic who sees the hidden, mysterious patterns in the universe but who can't or won't speak or otherwise directly communicate with other human beings--including, generally, by touch.  (He does, however, narrate the series, although mercifully not with the voice of Helen Mirren a la Glee.)   As Martin is told several times in the course of the pilot, it's his job to protect Jake and decipher the meanings of the patterns Jake finds, so as to save whoever is due for rescue that week.

To call the plot of Touch convoluted and contrived is less an insult than a factual description.  In the pilot, Jake fixates on numbers that reveal a trail to 9/11 and the fireman who discovered his mother in the World Trade Center, a winning lottery ticket, a phone booth in Grand Central Station, a missed train, a school bus crash, and the miraculous saving of its passengers.  A B/C story that doesn't seem directly related to Jake similarly unites the British parents of a dead child, a Baghdad boy who aspires to be Chris Rock but whose search to find a pizza oven for his father forces him to become an unwilling suicide bomber, an Irish amateur singer who's also a helpful cell phone carrier employee, and Japanese prostitutes.  Note:  I didn't make any of that up.

Touch is sort of an Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu movie (Babel, 21 Grams) for dummies--intercontinental strands of story forced into unconvincing connections.  All Touch has is plot, because with Jake not communicating and Martin mostly spitting out intense pronouncements through gritted teeth, there's nothing in the way of characterization.  The only other substantial regular character is Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Jake's social worker, who's briefly officious but who, by the time the pilot is over, has already acknowledged and embraced Jake's strange powers.  (Since Danny Glover is listed as a regular, one assume that in future episodes, his single scene as a sort-of scientist who appreciates Jake's abilities will be expanded.) 

The Touch pilot was directed by Francis Lawrence, whose feature films include I Am Legend and Water For Elephants, so it's certainly slick enough, but it has no substance beyond its glib New Agey everything-is-connected message.  Perhaps the Highway to Heaven-plus-autism formula will connect to audiences for years to come; for some of us, though, the overblown daffiness of the enterprise severs the connection from the start.

There's a classic line in Albert Brooks's incredibly prescient 1979 Real Life where Brooks, as the prototype of a reality-television director, tries to decide whether to do something unethical.  His rationalization for going ahead:  "What are they going to do--put me in movie jail?"

Of course there really is a movie jail, but it's not about ethical shakiness--you're sentenced there if your movies flop.  And there's little chance of appeal, no matter how pristine your prior record has been.  Cameron Crowe has given us such classics as Say Anything..., Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, but he's been in movie jail since 2005, when he committed the felony known as Elizabethtown, a purported romantic-comedy that combined dreadful reviews (28% on Rotten Tomatoes) with awful boxoffice ($27M in domestic gross).  As you'd expect, there's only one way for him to win his freedom now:  make a hit.

WE BOUGHT A ZOO is Crowe's petition to the parole board, an amiable, fairly smart and quite charming big-tent family movie for the holidays.  Based on the British writer Benjamin Mee's memoir, and written for the screen by Crowe with Aline Brosh McKenna (who on the one hand wrote The Devil Wears Prada and on the other was responsible for I Don't Know How She Does It), the Mee of Crowe's movie has been relocated to Southern California and turned into Matt Damon.  Benjamin and his children Dylan and Rosie (Colin Ford and Maggie Elizabeth Jones) are at loose ends after the death of their wife and mother, and when Benjamin quits his job and decides to relocate, they impulsively buy a house that comes attached to a dilapidated, privately-owned zoo.  (In real life, the family first bought the zoo and after that Mee's wife became fatally ill, which would have made for a less cheerful movie.)  They find themselves responsible for operating it and for dealing with the motley team of suspicious zoo employees, headed by Kelly Foster (Scarlett Johansson) and including Patrick Fugit, Elle Fanning, Angus MacFadyen and Carla Gallo.

Naturally the zoo has to be brought up to code if it's to re-open, and naturally it has to re-open if the adorable animals are to be kept, and naturally there's a drop-deadline by which that has to happen and an officious inspector (John Michael Higgins) who's impervious to the heart-tugging efforts of the family and crew.  This is the kind of movie that pretends to have suspense, but everyone knows the ending is thoroughly preordained (maybe a Lars von Trier version would work out differently), so the point isn't so much the destination as the journey.

Luckily for everyone, Cameron Crowe can do heartfelt like nobody's business, and even at its most predictable and cloying, We Bought A Zoo is enormously likable.  Just when things are getting too sentimental, Crowe and McKenna will have Ben's world-weary brother (Thomas Haden Church) show up, or get us to a surprisingly tough-minded argument between Benjamin and his son.  The dialogue is often sharp and amusing, and it can deliver strong emotion when it's time for the movie to land its heavy punches.  

One of Crowe's greatest skills has always been his work with actors--it's remarkable how many of the performances given in his films rank with the best of those actors' careers, from John Cusack in Say Anything..., to Kate Hudson in Almost Famous, to Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire.  Damon underplays beautifully here, a self-effacing piece of work that illuminates the performances of his co-stars.  Even de-glamorized, it's not hard to figure out what Johanssen is ultimately doing in the story, but Crowe and McKenna smartly push romance to the back of the movie's mind, and Johanssen gives a flinty, believable performance.  Colin Ford is strong as Ben's resentful son, and he has the great good fortune of sharing scenes with Elle Fanning, as luminous a young presence as any on screen these days.  The rest of the cast is populated by charmers, with Haden Chuch particularly good at hitting Crowe and McKenna's lines out of the park.

Zoo is also a lovely piece of craft, with glowing photography by Rodrigo Prieto, an easygoing pace set by editor Mark Livolsi,  and of course, this being Cameron Crowe, a great musical combination of score by Jonsi and selected songs.

We Bought A Zoo is, to be sure, shallow and obvious--you won't learn much of anything about the real-life challenges, let alone the moral issues, of zoo operation.  Plot turns are convenient and sometimes generic.  But there's nothing wrong with a little holiday warmth when it's played right, and Crowe has earned his way out of his studio cage--er. enclosure.

The two things Teenage Daughter does have going for it are its stars.  Pressley was marvelous on My Name Is Earl, and Finneran stole "Promises, Promises" out from under Sean Hayes and Kristen Chenoweth on Broadway; both are naturally likable and have expert timing (although they're both clearly far smarter than their idiot characters).  Against all odds, they occasionally manage to suggest human beings in this shambles, but their fans would be better off waiting for their next projects.

Teenage Daughter may not be the flop it deserves to be:  FOX has given it a prime timeslot, following the Wednesday installment of X-Factor, and Mitch Metcalf's projection has it behind Criminal Minds and Happy Endings, but ahead of the aged audience for NBC's Harry's Law.  Success, though, isn't the same as quality, and the best to be said about this so-called comedy is that it conveniently already has the word Hate in its title.

When it was announced that Disney's new movie of THE MUPPETS (the Mouse House bought the entire franchise from Jim Henson's company some years ago) was going to be written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, previously behind Forgetting Sarah Marshall (and Stoller also directed Get Him To the Greek), and directed by James Bobin of Da Ali G Show and Flight Of the Conchords, the prospect of a reboot both fun and a little bit subversive was tantalizing.  Perhaps those old felt darlings could come back to life, kick-started in the way Ron Moore had given new life to Battlestar Galactica or Chris Nolan to Batman (except, you know, a little less viciously dark).  A Muppets that was looser and more improvisational, yet still with enough wholesomeness for the entire family.

What The Muppets is instead is... a Muppets movie.  Which is absolutely fine for the 7-year old goofball in all of us, but a little lame if you were hoping for more.  

Segel and Stoller have smartly approached the comeback of the Muppets with a story about the fuzzy crew needing exactly such a comeback.  In the story, the Muppets have mostly gone their separate ways:  Kermit still lives in their now disapidated mansion, but Miss Piggy has become a fashion editor, Fozzy performs in a Muppet tribute band, and so on.  When evil zillionaire Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) plans to seize the land of the old Muppet Studios for the oil beneath it, the Muppets can only regain control by, darn it, getting back together and putting on a show.  

The hokiness of all this, of course, is deliberate, and perfectly in keeping with Muppet tradition.  Where things go more than a little overboard is with the introduction of the major new characters:  human Gary (Segel) and his Muppet brother Walter (the story of how that came about would probably have been more interesting than this movie), as well as Gary's longtime girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams), who naturally only exists in order to long for Gary to propose to her.  (Lest we worry that Gary and Walter share a man-felt love that truly dare not speak its name.)  When the three of them go on a trip to Hollywood, they become the catalysts for the Muppet reunion.  These three characters are so aw-shucks sweet and laboriously naive that the Muppets themselves seem like Quentin Tarantino characters in comparison.  Despite some bright songs (especially one for Gary and Walter by Bret McKenzie, also of Conchords, that's probably the highlight of the entire movie), the three are all utterly one-dimensional and tiresome, without enough wit to be self-parodies.  That's particularly disappointing in Adams' case, because in Enchanted she did such a wonderful job of both embodying and satirizing family musical conventions at once, while Segel is just dull.  Bobin's direction, conservative throughout, lets these scenes play out in broad sit-com style.

That doesn't mean there's no fun to be had at The Muppets.  For one thing, the return of the lovable Muppets themselves is certainly welcome, even though it's odd not to hear Jim Henson's and Frank Oz's voices coming from Kermit and Piggy (it's the same feeling you get watching one of the modern day Looney Toons shorts that don't have Mel Blanc's legendary vocals).  There are also some clever celebrity cameos, like Emily Blunt as Piggy's assistant and Zach Galifianakis as a member of the show audience.  (And also more than a few utter throwaways, like appearances by Selena Gomez and Modern Family's Rico Rodriguez.)  Chris Cooper even gets to rap, quite possibly the last thing anyone ever expected to see him do on screen.

The Muppets is harmless and mildly enjoyable, with the emphasis on "mild."  It's the anti-Hugo:  one may be too Tiffany for many kids, while the other is a little too happy to be Wal-Mart.

REAL STEEL wants to be loved so much, it practically walks the audience members to their cars and offers to give them all a lift home.  And yet, the packed house I saw it with could only offer the movie a smattering of applause at the end, and no cheers at all for its supposedly titanic robot-vs-robot bouts.  That's the price the picture bears for being assembled out of a crate of movie spare parts.

In John Gatins's script (from an earlier incarnation credited to Dan Gilroy and Jeremy Leven, and based originally on a Richard Matheson short story), the time is very slightly in the future, which looks exactly like the present except that boxers have been replaced by giant mechanical robots who can fight endlessly and be repaired (usually) when their Rock-em-Sock-em pieces are knocked off.  The robots are "trained" by humans, one of whom is Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman).  Charlie is a figure out of a thousand movies:  an ex-boxer himself, he owes money everywhere, is completely irresponsible, especially to the sweet-yet-tough gym owner (Evangline Lilly) who loves him but knows she can't count on him, and still nourishes dreams of the big time.

Years earlier, Charlie had abandoned his wife and young son for his life on the road, and as Real Steel begins, he finds out that his ex-wife has died, and if he'll just sign the proper papers, his very rich ex-sister-in-law (Hope Davis, in a truly thankless role) and her tycoon hubby (James Rebhorn) will adopt the boy.  Charlie is happy enough to go along, in exchange for enough cash to buy a new robot.  BUT, because the wealthy brother-in-law wants an untroubled vacation in Tuscany, first Charlie will have to take in young Max (Dakota Goyo) for the summer.  Naturally, the two of them are unwilling companions at first; naturally, when Charlie's expensive new robot is blown up due to Charlie's greed, it's Max who finds Atom, a rusting wreck of a 'bot who can take a punch but has no skills; naturally, a reluctant Charlie is talked into training Atom; naturally, Atom begins to win.  And did I mention that early on, we're told that the number one unbeaten robot boxer in the world is Zeus, who's owned by a refugee from an episode of Nikita (Olga Fonda, I guess one of the lesser known Fondas) and trained by the sinister Tak Mashido (Karl Yune)?

All the cliches that were assembled to make Real Steel wouldn't be such a problem if the movie at least had some fun with them, but the picture is painfully earnest and undeveloped (Zeus's evil team doesn't even get to do anything dastardly).  The gradually thawing relationship between Charlie and Max follows its predetermined path (omigosh, what will happen when Max finds out Charlie took money in exchange for giving up custody?), as Charlie gains principles and becomes a better human being.  Even though the movie's entire reason for existing is that its fighters are made of metal instead of flesh, the fights themselves follow exactly the rules that go back (at least) to Sylvester Stallone 35 years ago:  our hero must take an unbelievable amount of punishment for round after round ("No one can survive this!"), until finally the feared opponent tires him/itself out, and that's when the hero has one shot, just one shot, to score a stunning knockout.  

Gatins' s script is completely uninspired, and the best that can be said about Shawn Levy's direction is that it isn't as egregious as the work he's done on sappy comedies like Cheaper By the Dozen and the Steve Martin Pink Panther remake.  His Night at the Museum pictures weren't classics, but at least they made some clever use of their gimmicks; this one is just loud, and it wears its sentimentality too much on its sleeve.  (The movie was produced by DreamWorks, and like a lot of movies and TV shows produced but not directed by Steven Spielberg, it often feels like a wannabe Spielberg picture.)

There are a lot of capable actors in this thing, none of them at their best.  Jackman just coasts on his star power, and Goyo's performance screams "child actor."  The robots do better, and there's some very effective melding of actual animatronic machinery with CG animation.  The picture has an A-list cinematographer in Mauro Fiore of Avatar, and Danny Elfman supplied the rousing score, so it all looks and sounds impeccable; however none of that can make it any less empty.

Real Steel is inoffensive, and it'll please some people and make some money (although it may well need foreign revenues to pay for its enormous cost).  It's an example, though, of that increasing Hollywood phenomenon:  an imaginative idea filmed with no imagination at all.

Beware the credit "Screen Story by."  It means that whatever the original source material for a movie may have been, it's essentially been abandoned, looted for a single story element that's now attached to an entirely different script.  In the case of MONTE CARLO, Kelly Bowe gets the dreaded credit, and indeed, as has been recounted, the film that's just been released is only tangentially related to the novel "Headhunters" that was originally placed into development.  That movie, which would have starred Nicole Kidman (she retains a producer credit here), was about adult American women who cynically pretend to be heiresses in Europe in order to attract husbands.  Monte Carlo, on the other hand, is a tweener romantic farce about three girls (an 18-year old and a pair of 21-year olds) who get to indulge in wish-fulfillment when it turns out the youngest of them is the identical twin to a bitchy English heiress; along the way, they find true love.  

Just reading the WGA credits for Monte Carlo provides a lesson in studio development:  Bowe and co-screenwriter April Blair are chiefly known (?) for a Jessica Simpson vehicle called Major Movie Star; farther down the credit line is Maria Maggenti, best remembered for the gay-themed romance The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls In Love; and handling the transition from one version to the other is director/co-writer Thomas Bezucha, who last made The Family Stone.  What they've collectively come up with is the story of Grace (Selena Gomez), a small-town Texas waitress who's been saving all her life for a post-high school week in Europe with her best buddy, fellow waitress Emma (Katie Cassidy), who's a little older and yearning for better things; at the last minute, Grace's parents force her to take along her stepsister Meg (Leighton Meester), who's sheltered, reserved and snobby, and therefore not great company.

After a dreary first day in Paris, they accidentally discover that Grace is a virtual clone of British tabloid queen Cordelia Winthrop Scott, whose character is about as original as her name.  Since the trio conveniently overhear that Cordelia is planning to skip a charity benefit in Monte Carlo that's been planned around her, they decide to have Grace take her place.  This allows Grace and Meg to find hunky clean-cut beaus, a rich one for Grace and a glamorous drifter to loosen up Meg (once we know that Emma's got her own hunky clean-cut beau at home, played no less by Glee's Cory Monteith, it's clear that she'll be the character who finds out There's No Place Like Home).  

If you changed the clothes slightly, Monte Carlo could easily have been filmed in 1954, when the fantasy was called Three Coins In the Fountain or How To Marry a Millionaire.  As in Roman Holiday (1953) the main sign of hedonism is when one character hops on a Vespa.  Calming things down even further, the need to attract Gomez's Disney Channel audience meant that the script had to be strenuously scrubbed to achieve a PG rating (the girls don't so much as take a sip of alcohol, much less use a dirty word), so none of the romances get farther than a chaste kiss. 

All of this could have been OK if the patched-together script had any cleverness, or the wish-fulfillment some charm, but it's all totally routine.  Worse:  it turned out to be a very bad idea to create a Selena Gomez vehicle where she has to simulate a British accent; she's barely convincing playing an American.  Cassidy and Meester fare better (Meester, in particular, badly needs to get her hands on a decent script after The Roommate and this), but not enough to disguise the movie's dreariness.  Monte Carlo doesn't even do a good job of depicting the relationshp between the 3 girls; it's sad but accurate to say that it falls behind the Sisterhood Of the Traveling Pants series in that respect.  Bezucha's Family Stone was overrated, and he does nothing here either visually or with the actors to suggest he's got as-yet-hidden capabilities.

Monte Carlo is harmless, and if you need to park a 11 year-old girl in front of the TV for 2 hours without doing her any damage (except in an aesthetic sense), this will do the trick.  Just don't expect her to be particularly enchanted, or even entertained.

(MONTE CARLO - 20th Century Fox - PG - 109 minutes- Director:  Thomas Bezucha - Script:  Bezucha, April Blair, Maria Maggenti - Cast:  Selena Gomez, Leighton Meester, Katie Cassidy, Cory Monteith, Luke Bracey, Pierre Boulanger, Andie McDowell, Catherine Tate, Brett Cullen - Wide Release)

People complain that Hollywood doesn't take risks, but Universal went and hired the director of Alvin and the Chipmunks to make a movie about a musical-minded, free-spirit digitally animated character who upturns the life of an ordinary guy... talk about pushing the envelope!  (In fairness, Alvin was a chipmunk singer, while EB is a bunny who plays the drums, so you couldn't actually confuse the two.  And Alvin had brothers.)  Facetiousness aside, the only hit Universal's had in the past couple of years was Despicable Me, and so the new HOP is not only produced by the Despicable production company, but it combines strains from Alvin, Despicable and Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory for a hybrid that's predictably synthetic but mildly, inoffensively entertaining.  

In the mythology of Hop, the Easter Bunny is a hereditary title, passed to the next generation along with magic powers and control of a giant candy factory.  (Which is located on Easter Island--there's wit for you!)  The visuals of the factory look like the Everlasting Gobstopper room must be just around the next corner, but instead of Oompa-Loompas, the menial labor is performed by chicks, who act more or less like the Minions in Despicable Me.  The current Bunny In Chief (voice of Hugh Laurie) has an untrustworthy chicken assistant (Hank Azaria), who schemes to take over when Bunny's plan to turn over things to his son EB (Russell Brand) are scuttled when EB flees to LA so he can pursue his dream of being a drummer instead of running the family business.  By now, you're probably wondering who wrote this thing:  script by Cinco Paul, Ken Dauno (both of whom also wrote Despicable Me) and Brian Lynch.

In a year that's given us Mars Needs Moms and Wimpy Kid 2, Hop is at least moderately pleasant to watch.  Brand is actually a good choice as an animated lead--obviously the PG rating doesn't let him do much of what he normally does, but he has the ability to make his lines sound a bit spontaneous. The humans, though, are utterly bland:  Marsden, who was--sorry--charming as the clueless Prince in Enchanted, can't get anything going here, and even reliable actors like Gary Cole and Ellizabeth Perkins are left hanging.  Don't ask about the cameos by Hugh Hefner (bunnies, get it?  I said BUNNIES) and David Hasselhoff.

A Hollywood irony:  although the whole focal point of Hop is Easter (albeit a totally non-sectarian one that according to the dialogue started 4000 years ago), Universal clearly didn't have any faith in the picture competing with Fox's Rio, which opens April 16.  So Hop is reaching theatres 3 weeks before the holiday, and will probably be mostly gone by the time that day arrives.  It's never too soon for the kids to learn about release schedules.  (For more on what goes into movie scheduling, see Mitch Metcalf's article here.)

(HOP - Universal - PG - 95 min. - Director:  Tim Hill - Script:  Cinco Paul, Ken Duano, Brian Lynch - Cast:  Russell Brand, James Marsden, Hugh Laurie, Hank Azaria - Wide Release)

Not Even For Free

It was a feel-good story last weekend when the expensive shambles called Sucker Punch went down, defeated by the relatively low-budget family comedy DIARY OF A WIMPY KID:  RODRICK RULES.  (Mitch Metcalf's weekend boxoffice roundup is here.)  The story would have been better, though, if Wimpy 2 were any good.

The new film is, of course, a sequel to last year's Diary of a Wimpy Kid, based on Jeff Kinney's series of bestselling children's books.  Wimpy did well enough ($75M worldwide on a $20M pre-marketing budget--although less than $12M of that was outside the US) to compel another entry, and this one confirms that the series is a genuine franchise for Fox as long as they keep the budgets low.

I'm describing the movie as though it's merely a piece of business--but that's because it's the way the picture has been made.  Directed by David Bowers in his live-action debut (he had previously directed the cartoons Astro Boy and Flushed Away), and written by TV veterans Gabe Sachs and Jeff Judah, the film feels like a tired sitcom from 1987.  Our hero is Greg (Zachary Gordon), whose parents (the utterly wasted Rachael Harris and Steve Zahn) are clueless to the point of emotional dissociation, whose younger brother (played by twins) is hopelessly spoiled, and whose older brother Rodrick (Devon Bostick) amuses himself with sadistic torments.  The plot, such as it is, has Greg with his first crush (naturally on an angelically blond girl played by Peyton List), while he tries to endure life with his family.  Spoiler Alert, folks, but will you be shocked if I tell you that Rodrick doesn't turn out to be such a bad guy after all, and that the cute blonde girl really likes Greg?  And that along the way, we get an assortment of mild bodily function humor?

The only thing even mildly distinctive about the Wimpy Kid movies is the fact that Greg's diary includes cartoon drawings of the people in his life, and they occasionally come briefly to life.  But there's no attempt to do any more with the animation than the first film did, despite the fact that they hired an animation guy to direct the sequel.  Live action makes up the vast bulk of the movie, and it's shockingly over-lit and ugly to watch, considering that the cinematographer is Jack N Green, who did lovely work for Clint Eastwood on films like Unforgiven and Bridges of Madison County.  The rote editing by Troy Takaki is less surprising, given that his recent credits include The Bounty Hunter and Fool's Gold.

Of course, the target audience for this stuff could care less about the subtleties of cinematography and editing; as long as a comedy provides some poop and vomit jokes, and a story where everyone gets what's coming to them, they'll eat their popcorn and laugh when prompted.  It's just a little sad, in an era of Pixar and Rango, where "family entertainment" can be as smart and textured as any other kind, to see young audiences treated as though they have no taste.  Of course, it prepares them for later years when they'll discover that older audiences are often treated the same way.

(DIARY OF A WIMPY KID:  RODRICK RULES - 20th Century Fox - PG - 99 min. - Director:  David Bowers - Script:  Gabe Sachs & Jeff Judah, based on the novels by Jeff Kinney - Cast:  Zachary Gordon, Devon Bostick, Rachael Harris, Steve Zahn, Peyton List - Wide Release)