Twilight Goes To Hogwarts For The Unimpressive Vampire Academy

The Good: One or two lines, Special effects/fight sequences are fine
The Bad: Lousy characters, Dull plot, Excessive exposition, Nothing at all superlative in the acting.
The Basics: Vampire Academy is hardly an original or interesting concept that makes for a predictably disappointing film.


As much of the geek world prepares for Divergence to hit theaters tomorrow night (you can put Shailene Woodley in every major film based on teen lit this year, but you can’t guarantee an audience will turn out other than the already loyal fans), I decided it was about time to take in the last cinematic failure in the genre: Vampire Academy. Ever since Beautiful Creatures (reviewed here!) underperformed at the box office, films based on teen fantasy literature have proven to be utterly unreliable. The fad, it seems, is over. Vampire Academy lucked out in that it was greenlit when films based on teen fantasy literature were reliable cash cows. Vampire Academy was lucky because the story is so without spark, originality, cleverness or intrigue that it was pretty much destined to be the box office flop it was; outside those who were already fans, there is no obvious appeal to Vampire Academy.

It is worth noting up front that I have not read the book (or any in the series) upon which Vampire Academy is based. Also at the top, I think it’s worth noting that there is something in especially bad taste about Vampire Academy making a snarky reference to The Twilight Saga (reviewed here!) early on; for all its faults, The Twilight Saga made a commercially-viable genre that led to the success of the books in the Vampire Academy series. In other words, Vampire Academy owes a debt to Twilight, so mocking it outright early in the movie seems churlish. To its credit, Vampire Academy is a bit darker than Twilight; to its detriment, Vampire Academy is much more girlish (in the worst implications of such): an absurd amount of dialogue is about boys, melodramatic relationship analysis, and fashion/beauty. While it is understandable that the first film in a series has to establish the universe of the franchise, Vampire Academy has a painful amount of exposition . . . presented in gruesomely obvious ways.

Two years after a car accident and a year after leaving The Academy, Lissa and Rose are on the run from vampires who want Lissa to return to St. Vladimir’s Academy. Caught by Dimitri Belikov, Rose (the half-vampire Dhampir) and Lissa (the princess of the peaceful vampires, the Moroi) return to St. Vladimir’s Academy to find it under attack by the ruthless Strigoi vampires. Rose, the guardian of the royal Lissa, is alarmed that one of her favorite administrator, Ms. Karp, is no longer at the Academy. While her peers wonder how Lissa fed while on the run for the year, Rose continues to see through the eyes of the Princess. Rose is able to rush to Lissa’s side when Lissa discovers a dead animal hanging outside her dorm.

When a message in blood is placed on the wall of her dorm room, Lissa decides to fight and use magic. Rose commits to practicing her combat after the Queen embarrasses Lissa publicly and her time with Dimirti begins to pay off. Lissa begins to use her magic to compel others to do her bidding pretty constantly, which leads to nightmares that Rose shares. It also unlocks in Rose memories of Ms. Karp warning Rose to get Lissa out of St. Vladimir’s. Lissa continues to compel her enemies on the Board at the Academy even as she tries to use her magic to save people and creatures near death (not quite resurrection). Rose works to figure out who is behind the conspiracy to keep Lissa from the throne by working with Christian (Lissa’s ex) and Dimitri to put together the pieces before Lissa goes over to the dark side irreversibly.

Vampire Academy is just bad, plain and simple. Perhaps it is the fact that I’ve been rewatching Veronica Mars (reviewed here!) constantly to prepare for the film version, but Rose comes across as particularly whiny, insubstantial and not at all clever or smart. Moreover, for all the bitching people have about Twilight, those films did not have the obligatory teen girl shopping scene (which Vampire Academy has). The trip to the mall in Vampire Academy, along with all the boy talk and big dance scene dramatically undermine the darkness that precedes and follows the brighter-lit scenes.

Vampire Academy is devoid of spark and character. Zoey Deutch as Rose Hathaway delivers fast, snippy lines that are reminiscent of Buffy The Vampire Slayer (reviewed here!), save that they play without real wit or double entendre. Rose is the mistress of the single entendre and Lissa is vacuous and dull. Vampire Academy’s cast is fleshed out with an array of entirely unmemorable nonentity secondary characters. Mia Rinaldi is a particularly uninteresting, whiny antagonist who has more in common with a Plastic than Victoria (from Twilight). Mia is both monolithic and dull (despite the fact that she would not, supposedly, kill a cat).

If the villains – Mia and Kirova – are bland and hardly menacing, Rose is just ridiculous. While the film’s obligatory (near) sex scene (which results in a PG-13 amount of clothing removal alone) is the result of a love spell, Rose is not particularly strong even when not the victim of magic. As well, Lissa is not at all smart. Tortured by the one person she cannot use her magic compulsion on – because he is blind and compulsion requires line-of-sight to perform – Lissa is compelled to use her magic to heal the film’s true villain. When the scene came up, my thought instantly was, “Why doesn’t Lissa heal the blind guy so she can then compel him to stop torturing him?” It seems like curing blindness would be nothing compared to the person she is expected to heal.

Beyond the minutiae, the big picture of Vampire Academy is that the premise is dull and unoriginal. The story is essentially a struggle for the throne of a secret society/culture and the stakes are hardly big enough to draw in viewers who did not come to the work already indoctrinated. Do we care which whiny girl might become Queen when Tatiana’s term is done? Not really, no. Do we understand how the apparently psychotic Strigoi have survived in the real (brightly lit) world for thousands of years? That’s not made as clear as Lissa’s unlimited spending ability.

On the acting front, Vampire Academy is adequate, but unremarkable. Established performers like Gabriel Byrne and Olga Kurylenko overshadow leads Zoey Deutch, Lucy Fry, and Danila Kozlovsky (Dimitri). Kozlovsky and Deutch have no real on-screen chemistry and all of young men at St. Vladimir’s are entirely white bread. Deutch manages the fight scenes well, but the rest of the time, her acting seems to mostly be opening her eyes wide in shock or making moon eyes at Koszlovsky. Lucy Fry plays Lyssa like the archetypal teen girl from any vacuous romantic comedy as opposed to a character that has any depth, growth or supernatural intensity.

Ultimately, Vampire Academy is a giggly, goofy film that is utterly unworthy watching; for any audience. While there might be more books in the series, this is a film franchise not worth continuing; there is no incentive to return to the insultingly underwhelming world populated by characters who embody the worst stereotypes of young women and mix it with ridiculous fantasy elements.

For other films based on teen lit, please check out my reviews of:
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
The Harry Potter Saga
The Mortal Instruments: City Of Bone

2/10

For other film reviews, please check out my Movie Review Index Page for an organized listing.

© 2014 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Just Like Other Romantic Comedies, JUST Like Them: Just Like Heaven

The Good: It's always nice to see Rosalind Chao getting work
The Bad: Mediocre acting, Dull characters, VERY predictable plot, not truly funny
The Basics: Reese Witherspoon returns to her acting form in a film that is unremarkable, unchallenging and unfunny with Just Like Heaven.


Having been subjected to the dismal waste of celluloid Just My Luck, I tried to recover my sense of love for America by taking in another romantic comedy. Having enjoyed Reese Witherspoon in Walk The Line (reviewed here!), I thought I'd check out Just Like Heaven. It had Donal Logue and Rosalind Chao, so I thought "How bad can it be?" Here's the thing, Just Like Heaven is not terrible, but it's predictable, weak on character, poorly acted and in almost every way unsurprising and/or unremarkable.

Elizabeth Masterson is a doctor in San Francisco who is working her way up the hospital chain of command through dedication, sacrifice and competence. After an especially exhausting shift, she is driving home and in an accident with a truck. David Abbott, lost after his wife left him, finds an apartment to sublet in San Francisco where he now finds himself. David, however soon discovers a problem; the apartment is occupied. Elizabeth appears to David, declaring the apartment is hers and the two try to figure out who she is (she does not remember everything), why she is appearing like a ghost and why only David can see her. With the help of his friend/therapist Jack and resident ghost expert Darryl, the pair tries to figure out how to send the spirit on its way.

Just Like Heaven is billed as a romantic comedy and I find that to be something of a misnomer; comedy implies funny and romantic implies genuine connection to me. This movie is not funny and it does not seem like it is trying terribly hard for humor or when it does, it is going for the most obvious and hackneyed concepts of humor. So, for example, one of the only overt moments where the movie tried to garner a laugh involved Elizabeth trying to prevent David from drinking alcohol and her solution was to "possess" him. This results in actor Mark Ruffalo flailing around with a sense of physical comedy roughly akin to [insert the name of the least funny interpreter of reality through physical comedy you can think of, I'm running dry on this one]. I laughed more watching "Nixon" than watching Just Like Heaven.

As for the romantic aspect of Just Like Heaven, the movie suffers because actors Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo have no on-screen chemistry. Most of the movie is spent with the two arguing and that whole "adversaries turned romantic interest" thing has gotten about as tired as blonde leading ladies. Yes, they're everywhere, but the real surprise is when one impresses us. Just Like Heaven, like the returned-to-blonde Witherspoon underwhelm in this department.

The supporting performances are as good as they can be. Rosalind Chao has no real room to work as Elizabeth's mentor at the hospital, Grace. She adequately portrays a medical professional and a friend. Similarly, Donal Logue fits the "male sidekick" role of Jack well, though the idea that his character is involved in the mental health field stretches suspension of disbelief.

Jon Heder, high off the success of Napoleon Dynamite (panned here!), plays a remarkably similar role as Darryl in this movie. Heder seems bored and his character is dull, appearing only at plot-convenient moments to say things that serve the plot. Darryl is not innovative or especially fleshed out and Heder's portrayal of him is evokes only the feeling that the actor does not care to add anything to the flat character on the page. Heder does nothing distinctive to make Darryl his own and the performance falls flat.

Similarly, Mark Ruffalo continues to underwhelm me. I saw him first in Rumor Has It . . . and was unimpressed. Ruffalo struck me then as the flavor of the year as far as Hollywood-good-looking actors who were getting cast in things without any real regard for talents. As with that Jennifer Aniston movie, Ruffalo has no real chemistry with Witherspoon on-screen, making their romantic association a bit of a stretch. Having seen Ruffalo now in a few things, I am convinced that he is the new Chris Sarandon.

While a lot of the movie hinges on Ruffalo's bland performance, this is billed as a Reese Witherspoon movie and she bears the brunt of some of its failure. Witherspoon was terribly cast for Just Like Heaven. I'm not saying that she can't do light, pointless romantic comedies that we can figure out from the trailer, but she can't pull off some acting challenges yet. Her portrayal of a medical professional that opens the movie is utterly unbelievable. From the moment Witherspoon opens her mouth, I'm not convinced she's a doctor. She is not convincing and that failure ruptures the tire early on; the movie isn't going anywhere good from that point on.

Mark Waters directs Just Like Heaven and there is little to say about his directing. It keeps the pace reasonable enough that it moves like a romantic comedy. I suppose the failure here is either in the writing or his direction; if it's a comedy, it's not written funny enough. If it's a drama, it's not filmed seriously enough. Either way, it's disappointing.

Had I reviewed this film last night after watching that abysmal Lindsay Lohan movie, I might have knocked it up in the rating, but by the harsh light of day, this truly is a below average movie.

For other works with Mark Ruffalo, be sure to visit my reviews of:
The Avengers
Date Night
Shutter Island
The Kids Are All Right
Where The Wild Things Are
Rumor Has It . . .
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

4/10

Check out how this film stacks up against others by visiting my Movie Review Index Page for a listing from best to worst!

© 2012, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Say What You Will About It, Mean Girls Is Close-Enough To Perfect To Rave About!

The Good: Funny, Good character development, Decent directoral style, Generally good acting, Social commentary
The Bad: Minutia
The Basics: Funny and near-perfect, Mean Girls lives up to its hype as a wonderful comedy about high school cliques and those who challenge them.


For those who do not read my many movie reviews, it takes a lot for me to rate a film a ten out of ten, but there are occasional films that might not be absolutely perfect that get very close to that rating. Mean Girls is one of those films.

Truth be told, I had been hearing positive hype about Mean Girls for years. Had I known it was directed by Mark Waters, who bored me with one of the worst films in recent years, Ghost Of Girlfriends Past (reviewed here!) and left me underwhelmed with Just Like Heaven, I probably would not have been as excited about taking in the movie, regardless of the hype. Fortunately, while going through my wife's DVD collection to find a movie we could watch for the night, I was psyched to find she had Mean Girls! And watching it, Waters redeemed himself for his other movies. Mean Girls lives up to its hype as a wonderful comedy with actual social commentary, making its points well with humor and style.

Cady Heron was homeschooled by her parents, as she was raised in the wilds of Africa and at age sixteen is sent off to public high school in the midwest. There, Cady is befriended by the outcast Janis Ian and her gay friend, Damian. Janis tries to help Cady navigate the cliques, but despite her best efforts, Cady is noticed by the Plastics. The Plastics are the junior girls who represent the most popular, elite and mean clique at the school. When Regina George allows Cady into the Plastics, Janis encourages her so that Janis can get the dirt on the Plastics and break up the powerful Junior trio.

This plan appeals to Cady when she finds herself instantly attracted to Aaron, who is Regina's ex-boyfriend. Dating ex's of the clique members is strictly prohibited, a fact which leaves Cady disappointed and willing to scheme against Regina. To stop Cady, Regina begins making moves on Aaron - while cheating on him - and Cady tries to win over Aaron, destroy Regina and avoid being a mathlete. Regina, however, soon learns of Cady's duplicity when Aaron breaks up with her and seeks to ruin Cady.

What Mean Girls does so well is capture the look, feel and tensions of high school, while making commentaries that are more adult than childish. Peripheral characters, like Regina's mother who tries desperately to be a part of her daughter's clique, garner a great number of laughs which makes for a much richer movie; not all of the pressure is on Cady to get the laughs. In fact, Cady plays the straightman to virtually every other character and as a result, it is easy to empathize with her. She, like the older viewers, is detached from the society of the high school. As a result, she is the ideal vehicle for the fish-out-of-water type comedy that makes up Mean Girls.

This is done quite creatively when Waters and writers Rosalind Wiseman and Tina Fey illustrate Cady's viewpoint; she juxtaposes animal behavior she witnessed in Africa with behavior she sees in the high school. These occasional flights of fancy throughout the movie might cause viewers to recall Ally McBeal and the analogy is not a bad one, as there is at least one moment where Cady imagines something that is taken back seconds after it happens that is not the result of any sense of social commentary. Still, watching the performers in the film suddenly begin prowling around like wild animals and leap upon one another shakes up the movie when it finds itself in danger of slowing down.

In addition, the writers shake up the traditional high school teen movie by defying some of the paradigms, most notably in how Cady eliminates the competition with Regina as leader of the Plastics. Cady seeks to simple take Regina down a peg without realizing what effect that is most likely to have and there is a wonderful moment where Cady ends up as the new alpha and because the character has become so corrupted by her plan at that point, this does not phase her (her friend, Janis, makes this explicit and it works wonderfully in the film).

What works as well is the way Janis Ian and Cady play off one another; Janis is motivated by her own desire for revenge for a past incident and she uses Cady much the way Regina uses Aaron. Ironically, both Janis and Regina react similarly when their pawns (Cady and Aaron, respectively) rebel. As well, while young people might instantly see the Plastics as antagonists (or desirable, for those so programmed), older viewers are likely to see the high school layout and see that this is just one clique among many and not be as judgmental in the way the writers and directors hope we will be.

But what fans are equally likely to enjoy is the fact that the movie is genuinely funny. The dialogue is wonderful and both captures the young dialect and comments on it. Near the very beginning there is a great moment when Cady and Regina are talking and Regina uses "shut up!" as a reactive colloquialism and Cady stares at her blank-faced and says, "I didn't say anything." It's funny and well-timed.

Mean Girls is arguably known best as a Lindsay Lohan vehicle and this film does give the bright-eyed young woman her chance to shine. She rises to the occasion and delivers a performance that is surprisingly mature and also able to keep a fresh sense of comic timing to it. She is able to deliver an appropriately quizzical look that sells her character perfectly and her pauses and deadpan deliveries keep the movie funny.

Lohan is not the only talent in the movie, though. Amanda Seyfried has one of the best deliveries as the dimwitted Plastic, Karen. She plays the fool perfectly and she plays off Lacey Chabert's Gretchen wonderfully. Lizzie Caplan plays her usual outsider character as Janis Ian, but she is unrelenting in Mean Girls, giving her performance a darker edge than many of her other roles. And Rachel McAdam's performance as Regina is so good that it made it clear how she was cast for The Time Traveler's Wife (reviewed here!)!

The adult cast is led by Saturday Night Live alums Tina Fey, Tim Meadows, and Amy Poehler, which makes sense as this is a Lorne Michael production. Poehler gets to do her usual over-the-top schtick as Regina's mother and her sense of physical comedy is wonderful. By contrast, Meadows carries a great deal of his humor with deadpan, more subtle deliveries. Fey mixes a more serious role as Cady's teacher, Ms. Norbury, with a few out-of-school scenes where she is able to play the social-awkward card.

The mix is wonderful and the result is a strong comedy that has great repeatability for teens and adults alike. When it is not making social comedy, it is funny and when the humor fades, it actually makes one care about the characters on screen. What more could one ask for?

For other works with Lizzy Caplan, be sure to visit my reviews of:
New Girl - Season 1
Hot Tub Time Machine
True Blood - Season 1
Cloverfield
Orange County
Freaks And Geeks

9/10

Check out other film reviews by me at my Movie Review Index Page!

© 2012, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Worse Than We Had Predicted, Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past Is Unredeemably Bad!

The Good: Soundtrack
The Bad: Acting, Plot predictability, Direction, Character development, Continuity contradictions.
The Basics: Utterly unredeemable, Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past is a terrible film that reinforces negative stereotypes about women and treats men badly, too. No entertainment value.


My wife and I have different tastes in movies, but it seems like lately I have been picking more winners. Indeed, she was concerned she would fall asleep during X-Men Origins: Wolverine, yet squeezed my hand at all of the shocking moments and after begrudging me (quietly) the two hour drive and hour wait in line to a screening of Star Trek eagerly talked about it with me and anyone who would listen. But from the previews, she was eager to see Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past. As she observed afterward, "even people who went in with low expectations will be disappointed."

She is right; I went in figuring that the best moments were in the trailer and the irony of that is that some of the best moments stay in the trailer. The trailers had moments cut from the final film and the result is even less funny than the concept. But if you want to save yourself time and money, here is the simplest possible explanation of Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past: women are idiots and sluts, men are dogs who refuse to take responsibility for their actions. That's not me saying that, it is the message that comes through loud and clear in the film and those who like good chick flicks will cringe at how bad this is both as a "chick flick" and as a film in general.

Connor Mead is a photographer who shoots women in their underwear and who is not tied to any one woman. In fact, as he works to seduce a new singer, he breaks up with his three latest prior conquests, then abandons his latest chick for his brother's wedding where he has bedded all but one of the bridesmaids in the past. As Connor tries to convince his brother, Paul, to flee marrying Sandra, he is reunited with the arguable love of his life, Jenny. Jenny continues to reject Connor and Connor looks to hook up with the last bridesmaid at the wedding.

This is when Connor and Paul's dead uncle Wayne appears to Connor and tells him he will be visited by three ghosts, who will teach him a lesson on love. Connor is soon visited by the Ghost of Girlfriends Past, who illustrates to him how poorly he has treated women, then reminds him of the relationship he had with Jenny and how he left after the first time they made love. As Connor wrestles with the understanding he might have left the love of his life walk out in the past, Paul and Sandra get cold feet and Connor must apply his newfound heart to saving the imperiled couple.

Sometimes, simplest is best: Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past is stupid and insulting. My apparent generalization before is, unfortunately, not a generalization. Women in the film are treated atrociously and the men are little better, but certainly no worse. There is an undertone of misogyny in the way Connor treats women like objects, but they not only let him, they encourage him. Then they act like surprised idiots when he abandons them the way he abandoned everyone else. The height of this sickness is arguably reached at the beginning when the new up-and-coming superstar witnesses Connor treat three women poorly, encourages him to bed her and allows herself to be seduced with the line "come to papa" (which is much grosser in context than it sounds out of). This, however, is "arguably" the low point for women being treated badly by themselves (because, again, women in this film are sluts and/or idiots) because later a woman responds to Uncle Wayne by approaching him with the line, "She might not be into that kind of thing, but I am!"

But the most important idiot, er, woman, is Jenny. Jenny appears as a strong female character from the outset, rejecting Connor and keeping him at arm's length. We soon see why; despite a childhood together, when she rejected Connor at a middle school dance, Connor became a misogynistic dog. Ten years later, he woos her only to leave her. The stupidity here in Jenny takes the form that she let him in to begin with, despite correctly analyzing his tendencies, and that she still pines for him now. Jenny's whole catchphrase throughout the movie in relation to Connor is "not as dumb as he looks, folks." The problem is, Jenny IS! Seeing him again turns Jenny into mush, which helps reinforce the old concept that women want the bad boy and the project.

This is, unfortunately, not the only message being reinforced throughout the movie. The positive message is a remarkably conservative "fidelity pays off and everyone ends up with who they are 'supposed' to" message, all within a heterosexual and ethnically conservative sensibility. As a result, as the movie ends with people pairing off, the film's two most recognizable ethnic characters make a love connection and the viewer is afforded one final cringe in a movie filled with them. Sandra is a neurotic caricature of a bride and this reinforces, like many of the movie's other messages, that women live entirely for the bridal day and that this is the socially appropriate way for them to be . . . neurotic.

As well, men are dogs, but that is okay as long as someday they settle down. This is reinforced pretty obviously by Connor and Uncle Wayne, but the more troubling message is that men refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Connor only bucks this trend in the final moments of the movie, but his character is such a ridiculous trainwreck anyway (I'd mention the specific moment in the last minutes that was so ridiculous that it did not fit, but I'd ruin it for the one person reading who did not see the movie trailer, because the trailer DID show virtually the entire movie) that it is hard to care.

The most problematic aspect of Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past is that the Dickensian message being spread in it is unfortunately inapplicable in the specific circumstances. Connor is learning a Very Valuable Lesson about the strength of love. He learns the lesson in time to try to save the romance between Sandra and Paul and pursue Jenny at arguably the last moment he will have to get her. The thing is, Sandra and Paul's romance is beleaguered on the eve of their wedding not because they suddenly learn a new fact about each other, but because their fundamentals are not solid and that fact upsets Sandra to a ridiculous extent. In other words, Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past annoyingly supports a romance that is not firm enough to survive on its own because it is not a decent romance. Only in the movies do people lie to one another up to the wedding day, have a real conflict about that and salvage the wedding day. In the real world, people come clean early, delay the wedding or don't get married, more often than films show any of those consequences.

As for the acting, this is not the Jennifer Garner of Catch And Release and my wife is convinced that Matthew McConaughey is trying to be Adam Sandler in his role as Connor Mead. Either way, they have utterly no chemistry on screen. The only other noteworthy acting comment would be that Lacey Chabert appears to be contractually obligated to give her teeth screen time in every moment of the film. No performer in this film ought to be proud of the final result.

There are a few good lines in Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past, but for every good line, there is a cringer and one that reinforces a negative stereotype. And for those who want to write it off as "just a movie," I'd argue this is how prejudice, sexism, misogyny and outdated gender roles persist. Of course, keeping women dumb and skanky works for those dogly men, so . . .

For other films with Emma Stone, please check out my reviews of:
The Help
Crazy Stupid Love.
Friends With Benefits
Easy A
Marmaduke
Zombieland

1.5/10

For other movie reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2011, 2010, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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