Cinema 2011 #42: Beastly

Falling in line with the Spring/Summer collection of seemingly unstoppable marketing of leftover emo clothing to teenage girls in the Twilight trend, Beastly, based on the teen novel by Alex Finn, is a mercifully short reimagining of the classic French fairytale La belle et la bête, best known to English-speaking audiences as Beauty and the Beast. Fewer Angela Lansbury voiced teapots, more heroin chic stylings, this version casts number four on the list of Hollywood heartthrobs Alex Pettyfer as all-round douchebag Kyle, the pretty-boy with a heart of mould. His mean-spirited and self-promoting behaviour catches the eye of classmate and witch Kendra (Mary-Kate Olsen), who quickly curses Special K, taking his screen idol looks and giving him a year to find someone to love him, or else he’ll stay this way forever. Beastly aims to attract all manner of high schoolers with the addition of Vanessa Hudgens, as the beauty in the bunch, the daughter of a junkie named Lindy, with a heart of gold and IQ to match.

The film itself, by director Daniel Barnz, is dull and tedious, even at a mere 86-minute runtime, and numerous problems and issues present themselves throughout. First and foremost is Kyle’s unflappable following in the high school he attends in Manhattan. He’s literally the most obnoxious character you’re likely to see on screen this year, winning over his adoring fans by making quasi-fascist claims to cleanse the school of ugos and fuglies, all in the name of environmentalism. Pettyfer, carving a nascent career out of taking his shirt off, has neither the charisma nor even the presence to pull this off. Furthermore, we’re supposed to be agog when they reveal his hideous transformation into hideous beast. In the book, it’s classic fangs and fur, but here they opt for some sort of edgy boyish Blofeld, with a few piercings and tattoos to give him that yob sheen. And to be honest, he still looks like he could be a poster boy, granted for Marilyn Manson’s new fragrance.

Cinema 2011 #34: Sucker Punch

In the 90s, all dressed up in OshKosh B’gosh, off my face on the effervescent dust found crumbling inside a Refresher, and thinking that the highest form of wit was repeatedly making statements, followed by an audibly mid-Atlantic Not, I used to break the 10th commandment. Yes, forgive me lord, for I have sinned. I coveted my neighbour’s goods – I wanted Streets of Rage to be mine. It’s difficult these days, to see just why this game, a 32-bit Sega Megadrive linear-beat-‘em-up, held such a thrall over me, and why I’d long to play, bashing buttons and baddies, to the point of inducing a rose-tinted burning in my thumbs. But I generally only got to watch, as my neighbor would endlessly punch, kick, die, continue, win, lose, and fall off the side of the lift in level 7.

Watching Sucker Punch, the latest CGI opus from 300-director Zack Snyder, sent me back to that living room, with its chintz chairs, yellowing doilies and browning Granny Smith slices. There I was, watching a video-game, with characters equipped with massive machine guns and chop-socky martial arts skills, battling giant ninjas, tik-tok zombie Germans in World War I, a horde of knights and their hot-tempered dragon and bullet train full of zealous robots on Saturn in the springtime. And yet again, I didn’t get to play.

And that’s where it all went wrong for me, in this, the most self-indulgent film of 2011. Looking like a mash up of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Moulin Rouge, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, and every Saturday morning cartoon you’ve ever seen, it’s a stylised mess, the equivalent of a CGI Mardi Gras, with cinematographic affectation and unforgivably 2D characters. For mash get smash, and that’s just what Sucker Punch does, smashing together a plot with Inception like dreamscapes with mind-boggling action sequences that look like they’ve been edited by a Ritalin deprived 14 year-old on crack.