Last but not beast -- Beastly (2011)

Squarely aimed to appeal to Twilight fans looking for more Paranormal Teen Romance, Beastly is a modern retelling of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s “Beauty and the Beast” set in a posh New York prep school. While the idea of taking a classic fairy tale that has already received a pretty definitive update and melding it with pretty girls wanting sullen boys seems colossally wrongheaded, Beastly honestly isn’t as bad as it could be. That’s not to say that it’s not absolutely gosh-awful, because it is, but it’s gosh awful in exactly the right ways and wraps in a wonderfully slight 86 minutes, making for a delightfully gaudy and trashy slice of “teen” entertainment, as perceived entirely by marketing.

Beastly, as its title suggests, follows the story of the Beast, played by Kyle Kingston (Alex Pettyfer), an obscenely wealthy and vain son of a famous, parentally-distant newscaster (Beastly’s angle is to blame Kyle’s jerkwad nature on his daddy issues, which it works tirelessly in the first half of the movie before dropping entirely in the second). Kyle wins the presidency of some thinly-described school club, and celebrates by publicly humiliating the piercing- and tattoo-laden school “witch,” Kendra (Mary Kate Olsen. Yes, that Mary Kate Olsen), for being a pug-fugly heifer-face, or something to that effect. Kendra responds by turning the pretty boy Kyle into an equally piercing- and tattoo-laden creature of so-called ugliness, though by allowing him to keep his washboard physique and slender build, Kendra effectively makes Kyle a Suicide Boy.

Billboard Dad, this ain't.

Of course, Kyle and his father will have nothing to do with his new, alternative look, and he’s given a private condo overlooking the Hudson, so that he may be spared the humiliation of being seen by other, equally-shallow classmates. In fact, the only person who showed Kyle any non-fake affection before his transformation is the humble, down-to-earth Lindy (Vanessa Hudgens), who attends the prep school on scholarship, tipping the audience off that, because she’s not of privilege, she’s an actually decent human being. Kyle seeks Lindy out and saves her from a murderous drug dealer, letting her stay under his roof until the whole thing blows over. At first, Lindy doesn’t take to him, and balks at his attempts to buy her affection with increasingly-expensive gifts, but as he opens his heart to her, she begins to see his kinder and gentler side, and then it’s all over but the crying (which a friend of mine actually did during our most recent viewing).

You may have noticed my many oblique references to the many material goods featured in the movie. This is because Beastly is, first and foremost, lifestyle porn. I was honestly blown away by the constant name-dropping of expensive brands like Dolce & Gabbona, Prada, and more, as well as the pie-in-the-sky wealth on prominent display by nearly every character, including and up to Kyle’s sky loft condo, which must cost more in one month than I make in one year.

Love conquers all, especially if you're a bad boy with Jay-Z levels of expendable income.

The second thing Beastly is, or wants to be, is a movie about the Teen Experience; it valiantly attempts to punch up its workaday screenplay with modern, “hip” flourishes, and could not sound more forced if Diablo Cody stuck her head in midway through and began rambling on about Sonic Youth and her hamburger phone. Characters—grown characters—arbitrarily start speaking in “teen”-sounding neologisms (describing someone as “tool-y), and several important, plot-related shots are predicated on text messages, darting across the screen in a see-through montage promising dramatic heft (“Can’t be there 2nite. :(” The heart reels).

Combining white privilege, American teenagers, angsty romance, and wrapping it in a fairy tale guise sounds like the most surefire recipe for disaster that Man could possibly invent, but for some twisted, indefensible reason, it kinda worked for me. The over-the-top wealth and gratuitous “teen” vernacular works well with the fairy tale story, helping solidify the notion that the whole movie is a folk tale, but a modern one. Beastly doesn’t feel anymore “real” than Beauty and the Beast must have sounded to its original audience, but its heightened, exaggerated telling works well for the story, in the same way a pet-stained rug can, in the right venue, straight-facedly be presented as modern art.

In the weirdest, peanut-butter-and-sardines way, Beastly kinda, sorta works, though having a few drinks before viewing can't hurt.

In terms of the acting, there’s nothing abrasively “bad” about Beastly, though I’m certain there’s little that can be truthfully described as “good.” Both Pettyfur and Hudgens bring little insight and depth to their characters (beauty isn’t the only thing skin-deep), but their aggressively bland performances truly, honestly contribute to the above fairy tale stylization. More active and altogether interesting are Kyle’s blind tutor Will (Neil Patrick Harris) and live-in maid Zola (Lisa Gay Hamilton), who both act as cyphers for Lumiere and Mrs. Potts from the Disney version, respectively. Since both actors realize that most of the audience will not care one iota for their collective existence, they give comically broad performances that don’t necessarily gel well with everyone else in the movie, but still entertain nonetheless.

For reasons my brain will never, ever feel good about, I actually enjoyed Beastly, in a sort of avante garde, tongue-in-cheek way. I will never own it on DVD, and my enjoyment and recommendation comes with a big ol’ asterisk, but if seen for what it is (or, perhaps, what it isn’t), Beastly is a satisfying, amusing exercise in the realm of so-bad-it’s-hilarious filmmaking.

Diversion 2.0 Thirty Day Movie Challenge -- Day 21

Day 21 – A Sequel/Remake/Reboot that Wasn’t Worth the Celluloid it Was Filmed On

Great movie sequels are a wonderful thing, building on the triumphs of their predecessors and taking their respective franchises to new heights. However, it is more often the case that movie sequels are pretty terrible, filled with banal plots and stupid attempts to duplicate their forbearers' success. Sometimes, in the case of today’s entry, the project can even fail to miss the appeal of the series entirely.

Terminator Salvation (2009)

Another summer tentpole flick from 2009, Terminator Salvation is the yang to Star Trek’s yin. While the latter was a fun blend of popcorn thrills and underlying humor, Terminator Salvation is a mud-and-bronze-colored slog through the joyless, super-cereal world of the late 2000’s- and early 2010’s-era Hollywood blockbuster. Movies that aren’t at least partially overly-grim cannot be taken seriously these days, especially as a franchise-extending sequel priced at over $100 million. Didn’t you get the memo?

Terminator Salvation takes place in 2018, following the conclusion of 2003’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (a film which I did not see, but never mind). The movie harbors something of a dual-protagonist storyline, alternating between John Connor (Christian Bale), leader of the human resistance after the military program Skynet launched a nuclear holocaust in 2004; and Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a convict on death row executed that same year, but wakes up fourteen years later during the post-apocalypse. Connor needs to convince the humans to rally behind him and fight the machines, while Wright wants to figure out why he’s even there in the first place.

To me, Terminator Salvation represents everything that is wrong with the modern summer escapist movie. First, the film is obsessed with being “dark” and “gritty,” as though, by depicting its events as unsmilingly as it can, it will gain greater dramatic credibility. This may be true for an independent film, or film meant to show a realistic portrayal of war (Black Hawk Down wouldn’t have been nearly as good if it hadn’t been so dour), but this is a movie about time-travelling killer robots. It’s supposed stupid; it really is. However, like a middle school kid desperately trying to have “attitude” by wearing baggy clothes, smoking, and listening to Limp Bizkit, its cool-guy refusal to acknowledge how ridiculous it actually is proves absolutely fatal to any charms it may have.

Hoping for more "Hasta la vista, baby?" Boy, did you pick the wrong movie to see.

As an extension of this criticism, what the hell is up with this film’s color palette? I get it, it’s the post-apocalypse—does that mean that everything has to be the exact same shade of sunbaked asshole-brown? Hell, even the first two movies made their dark, oppressed-looking future appear more interesting than this movie, which looks like it was shot on-location on the set of The Book of Eli.

Lastly, as yet another continuation of the Why So Serious train of thought, Terminator Salvation simply isn’t any fun to watch. I’m generally pretty forgiving towards empty-headed films, as long as they provide me with a good time; if the movie isn’t too egregiously dumb and painful (Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen), standard-issue thrills, chills, and laughs are almost always enough to carry it through to a mild recommendation (Thor). Terminator Salvation isn’t interested in entertaining me; it wants to impress me with its story, and its deeper meanings, and how epic it all is. You know that Terminator 2 wanted me to do? Stand in slack-jawed awe at how cool Arnold Schwarzenegger was, with a close second being Linda Hamilton’s one-handed shotgun technique near the end of the film. Flippin’ sweet.

Terminator Salvation lacks anything flippin’ sweet about it, just like too many ostensibly “entertaining” popcorn flicks out there.

Diversion 2.0 Thirty Day Movie Challenge -- Day 7

Day 7 – A Movie from Your Childhood That You Hated

It’s tempting to always look through childhood memories with rose-colored glasses, but sometimes this can be a big, fat lie. Kids struggle to get by just as much as anyone, and there’s a good chance that your time as a young’n wasn’t all sunshine and butterflies either. It’s with this mindset that we’re looking at a film from my childhood that, frankly, wasn’t worth my time, let alone how often I rewatched it.

Rock-A-Doodle (1991)

Don Bluth was once a legend in animation. Reared by the Disney studios in the 60’s before famously leaving, due to the Mouse House’s obvious down-the-tubes progress, Bluth has created some of Gen Y’s best-loved animation classics, such The Land Before Time, An American Tail, and All Dogs Go To Heaven. His work during the 80’s lit a fire under Disney’s ass the likes it hadn’t felt since the 50’s, and arguably contributed to its eventual about-face in quality. Diversion 2.0 even did a cross-over blog with Popped Density to cover his work, and his place in history is doubtlessly secure.

I don’t really care for him that much.

It’s not as though I’ve never seen a Don Bluth film I like. On the contrary, I enjoyed the hell out of The Land Before Time, and even liked parts of An American Tail (though once I saw Fievel Goes West, that movie went right out the window). I’ll also acknowledge the level of artistry he was bringing to the table at a time when Disney was looking to cut corners in as many places as possible. There are just several elements to his films that drive me up the wall.

Bluth's tale of rags-to-riches-to-rags is a torrid, fascinating one. It's a shame a guy so talented should have produced something like A Troll in Central Park.

For one, Bluth animation has certain legacy issues that I’ve never, ever found attractive. It’s mostly small, silly things that don’t gel well with me, most notably, the big, flouncy movements that give every character the sensation of moving underwater. I’m also not a big fan of the effects animation he uses, and find the smoke trails, water splashes, and goopy stuff in his movies rather off-putting. Lastly, while Bluth isn’t too bad with his main characters, the guy is absolutely terrible with child actors—be it a main character or a supporting role, the man is simply incapable of creating a compelling, non-obnoxious child character in any of his movies (minus Judith Barsi, but that says more about her talents than Bluth’s).

Which leads us to Rock-A-Doodle. Bluth’s previous projects before Rock-A-Doodle, while sometimes annoying or flawed, were all ultimately worthwhile films. With Rock-A-Doodle, Bluth had begun to slide from the side of artistry and passion to, well, his later work. As woeful as those products may be, however, there are none that frost my cookies more than Rock-A-Doodle. It’s stupid, overambitious, and proudly shows-off the worst qualities in Bluth’s animation. I’ve harped on it before, but, dammit, I’m about to do it again.

Awww, here it goes!

A recap for those fortunate enough to have missed this film. Rock-A-Doodle tells the story of Chanticleer (Glen Campbell), a rooster whose job it is to wake the sun with his country-western twang. This generally pisses off the Grand Duke of Owls (Christopher Plummer), who’d just as soon have everything dark and gloomy. The Duke hires a thug to prevent Chanticleer from crowing one day, and the barnyard is shocked—SHOCKED—when the sun comes up without his assistance. Dejected, Chanticleer leaves for The City, and, after six months of rain and darkness, the farm animals decide that, hey, maybe that rooster guy was good for something after all.

The movie then Tarantino’s us, and we find that the opening five or so minutes of footage have been a storybook read to an insufferable snot rag named Edmond (Toby Scott Ganger), whose overlong sleeves, Davy Crockett hat, and “r”-deficient speech pattern all but guarantee us that this character was built by a committee to be cute and loveable. Edmond’s mom is called away to help with the recent flood, and after trying to call for Chanticleer, Edmond is visited by the Grand Duke of Owls and turned into a kitten for eating purposes. Just when it looks like Edmond won’t make it to puberty outside of an owl pellet, he is saved by Patou (Phil Harris), a dog who wears tennis shoes for his bunions. Edmond chases the owl away with a flashlight, and he and the rest of the farm animals strike out on a quest to find Chanticleer, apologize, and get him to crow so that everyone can go back to singing Johnny Nash.

Baby come back!

There are many reasons to rag on this movie, and I’ve already started on one. Seriously, I can’t understate how much I despise Edmond. On top of his character design and poor vocal performance, I find his woe-is-me-I’m-too-little personality rather irksome. Sure, it’s a character flaw that he’s meant to overcome, but, far from making him sympathetic, it turns me off to him completely. Edmond is a perfect storm of character tics that bug me: ugly-looking animation, badly conceived character personality, and grating voice acting, and I’ve yet to find a character in all of cinema who gets my ire up as much as him.

The supporting cast doesn’t fare much better. Edmond is joined by Snipes (Eddie Deezen), a magpie who keeps finding creative, obnoxious ways to eat, and Peepers (Sandy Duncan), a bespectacled mouse with a superior intellect and a holier-than-thou attitude. Even the affable, pleasant voice of Phil Harris is wasted on Patou, whose shoe-tying bit gets old after the second of 37 mentions. On the villain’s side is Hunch (Charles Nelson Riley), a skittish, hyper-active sidekick with a penchant for getting maimed and yelling VERY LOUDLY. And on, and on, and on.

No two people are not obnoxious in this shot.

Lastly (for my own sake), the story just makes no damn sense. Edmond’s live-action world is clearly a regular, human-type place, so why is the City populated with chorus girl chickens and frog club bouncers? Did the Grand Duke’s magic turn everyone into animals? How long has it actually been raining, and is it dark the whole time or just overcast? Perhaps the whole thing is a dream, but what’s with the ending, where Chanticleer, Patou, and the rest of the gang take Edmond to the animated farm? Are we watching him being committed?

Oh yeah, and the music sucks. Let’s not even talk about it.

Am I being harder on this movie than I should? Probably. I’m just bitter, though, for being forced to watch it in daycare as often as I did; the lady hardly bothered to swap out the tape for a different one, let alone buy anything new, so I became quite familiar with tales of Frontier Edmond and the Search for the Elvis Impersonator. Too many repeated viewings can ruin any movie, even a good one, and watching a crappy movie ad nauseum the way I did turned it into a form of Chinese water torture. The next time anyone tries to tell you what a master of animation Don Bluth is, and that he should be directing all of Disney’s new features, remind them of Rock-A-Doodle.

Diversion 2.0 Thirty Day Movie Challenge -- Day 2

Day 2: A Movie You Hate (Or Just Plain Really, Really Don't Like)

As a general rule, I try to avoid watching movies that I have a fairly good idea I will not like. This way, I save money and, more importantly, time, because an awful movie is an hour and a half of my life I will never get back. However, there are certain occasions when I will rent an ostensibly terrible movie to see exactly how bad it is. Sometimes I get lucky and am pleasantly surprised, and others I should have been careful what I wished for. Today’s entry is about the latter.

I Love You, Beth Cooper (2009)

Rest assured that I did not pay to see this movie, but gah the hour that I did spend watching it still weighs heavily on my heart (I ducked out halfway through to buy groceries, and was immensely disappointed when I returned and it wasn’t over yet). Beth Cooper is coming-of-age high school comedy about a socially inept young man named Denis Cooverman (Paul Rust). Denis, like most nerdy kids in movies like this, fosters an unrequited affection for the school popular girl, the eponymous Beth Cooper (Hayden Panettiere), and, during his valedictorian speech, confesses his love for dear ol’ Beth in front of the whole graduating body. The rest of the film concerns the wa-acky hijinks between Denis and his friend Rich Munsch (Jack T. Carpenter) as they buy alcohol underage, duck Beth’s toolbox boyfriend, Kevin (Shawn Roberts), and do other, stupid crap that could only happen in a movie about what Chris Columbus thinks happens to high schoolers on graduation day (avoid a herd of stampeding cattle, crash a Hummer through the wall of a house, etc).

Based on the novel of the same name by former The Simpsons writer Larry Doyle, I Love You, Beth Cooper is a nigh-unendurable slog through umpteen, outdated high school clichés, miserable, unfunny sight gag “humor,” and flat, unlikable characters (with one small exception). I’m a bit at a loss; I’ve enjoyed Chris Columbus’ previous work on the Home Alone series and the first two Harry Potter movies, but the entire project feels like a parody of high school comedies, akin more to Not Another Teen Movie, but without the benefit of lines like “You’ll lose the bet, but you’ll learn a valuable lesson.” Columbus’s cartoony, slapstick approach to filmmaking may have worked for a movie about Macaulay Culkin repelling the likes of Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci, but it falls incredibly short when shoehorned into a teen comedy from 2009. Warwick Davis-short.

Yep, there they all are. The costuming should tell you everything you'll ever need to know about any of these characters.

The acting doesn’t fare much better. Hayden Panettiere flounders in her attempts to play a rebellious girl who doesn’t give a flying f@$# about anything, while poor Paul Rust is stuck doing his best Michael Cera impression for the entirety of the film. Beth’s group of Plastics-esque wing women (Lauren London and Lauren Storm) aren’t given much to do other than “pout and look hot,” while Kevin and his gaggle of cronies flex their muscles, pop their collars, and generally act like they’re treating the entire film as an audition for Crabbe and Goyle. The one (1) bright spot of the whole picture is Jack T. Carpenter as Rich, who uses his character’s closeted-gayness to provide the film with some bloody energy and charisma, and the film’s best scene comes from a montage involving Rich near the two-thirds mark.

Honestly, I’m making I Love You, Beth Cooper sound like an average, everyday bad movie, when, in fact, it’s as if someone took the University scenes from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and made an entire film out of them. The entire production seems hateful towards its audience, and the awful story, insipid dialogue, and turgid feel of the whole goings-on is terrible enough to qualify as a natural disaster. The effort it takes to stoop as low as it does from minute to minute is Herculean, and I might actually be proud of Columbus for squeezing off such a colossal turd, if only I didn’t want to beat him about the face with a copy of Mean Girls for doing so.

Here In This Diary -- Diary of a Mad Black Woman

Our first foray into the realm of Tyler Perry is Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Perry’s breakout hit based on his play of the same name. Though the film has received considerable commercial acclaim, it has not been met so kindly by critics—Roger Ebert gave the movie one-and-a-half stars in his review, noting that it’s a fine character drama with good work from the actors involved, but Madea and all of her scenes brought the drama to a screeching halt. This review was met by several accusations of racism and intolerance; readers claimed that he was a white man who could not possibly identify with all of the elements touched on in the film, and therefore was not qualified to review the film on the basis of not “getting it.” I think these comments miss the point, though: Diary of a Mad Black Woman is a movie with some serious tone-juggling issues. It’s also a ham-fisted, poorly-written, treacley mess, but we’ll get to that in a bit.

Diary starts with Helen MacCarter (Kimberly Ellis) and her husband Charles (Steve Harris) attending some dinner party in his honor. Helen’s internal monologue (the titular "Diary" portion of the movie) tells us that they’ve been married 18 years, and that they look perfect, but that things are different behind closed doors. The next day, Helen comes home to find all of her clothes in boxes and being put into a U-Haul. Charles informs her that he is divorcing her so that he can spend more time with Brenda (Lisa Marcos), his Other Woman who also had two of his kids.

Distraught and alienated from her family, Helen goes to the only person she can think of: her grandma Madea (Tyler Perry), a tough-talkin’, cantankerous lady who loves her granddaughter and doesn’t stand for Charles abandoning her. They go to Charles’ house, where they vandalize Brenda’s clothes and Madea chainsaws Charles’ furniture in half (seriously).

Remember, this is a weighty character drama.

After they get out of jail somehow, Madea has a cookout at her house (to celebrate her house arrest, no doubt), where Helen runs into Orlando, the driver of the U-Haul. Helen throws her drink in his face, but later (three minutes later, to be exact) apologizes, and stares longingly at him while he dances with other cookout attendees.

Meanwhile, we find out that Charles used to run drugs, and one of his former pushers needs legal assistance. Meanwhile meanwhile, Helen gets a job at a restaurant. One night, when she needs a ride home, who should come up to her but Orlando! He offers to take her out to a small jazz café, and the two share a small, tender moment, despite Helen’s constant accusations and mistrust of Orlando’s intentions. Slowly, but surely (as played out by a slow motion Walk On The Beach montage), Helen and Orlando grow closer, and Helen decides to let Charles have all of the property in the divorce.

Uh-oh, they hate each other almost immediately upon meeting. I wonder what's going to happen to them?

At the trial, Charles loses the case, and his former pusher shoots him while being lead to prison, leaving Charles paralyzed. Helen puts Orlando on hold, and leaves to take care of Charles during his paralysis. One night, after Charles mouths-off to her yet again (this guy's douchiness is overplayed to almost comedic effect), she decides to act out her rage on Charles for what he did to her, and, during what is surely the most effed-up scene in the film, she throws him face-down into a bathtub and does all sorts of ugly crap to him. With the help of Madea and doing some soul searching, though, Helen decides to forgive Charles, and take care of him while he recovers. Charles ends up making a full recovery thanks to Helen, but then Helen serves him the divorce papers, then runs back to Orlando, where they decide to get married.

From a one-sentence plot synopsis perspective (“Black woman learns how to be her own person in the wake of an ugly divorce”), Diary of a Mad Black Woman isn’t so bad. On an execution level, however, it’s soppy, pretentious, and as uneven as the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

This is what sympathetic protagonists do, right after forgiven their wrongdoers in favor of a better man.

My biggest problem with the movie is not Madea (which surprised me greatly), but Helen. Helen begins the film as, essentially, a spoiled rich girl, living off of her husband’s considerable wealth and without any practical work experience. “You men are all alike!” she shrieks at Orlando as he drives her aimlessly around in their U-Haul, “You’re always thinking of yourselves!” Yeah Orlando! I mean, you were telling her that you needed to drop her off somewhere because you had another job you need to be at in a few hours! Willikers! There’s a point where she visits her mom in a nursing home, and her mother tells her to go out and get a job. “Oh mama,” she smiles sadly, “I can’t do that. I’m not strong like you.” What?!!!??! You can’t get a job because you’re not strong enough?!! Through all of her raging, screaming, pouting, and acting hopeless, there is very little room for sympathy with Helen.

My second-biggest problem (though it truly was a close second) is the completely off-balance tone of this movie. Bouts of heady drama and potential character development are regularly derailed by moments that play out like deleted scenes from The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, with Perry working double-time as Madea and her waaaaaacky womanizing, reefer-smoking brother Joe. Just when the viewer is grounded into the reality of the characters, Madea shoots a warning shot from her handgun into the ceiling, or pulls a chainsaw from outta bumf@$% nowhere and slices a grand piano in half.

Matter fact, my favorite portion of the movie also suffered from this problem. A secondary side-plot involves Brian (Tyler Perry, in a regular role), Madea’s nephew and representative to Helen during the divorce. Brian’s wife, Debrah (Tamara Taylor) is a junkie, and Brian struggles with how to deal with raising his children in a “proper” home and look after Debrah. It’s a neat little bit, with both actors mercifully absent of stupid dialogue, and whose deus ex machine conflict resolution is exactly 300% less satisfying than it should have been, given the buildup.

The most interesting, satisfying story in this movie has all of five minutes devoted to it.

Speaking of crappy dialogue, this one gets a paragraph by itself. Tyler Perry has gained millions of followers through his stories, but I wonder how many he gained from his awful, insipid, clichéd lines. Things like:

• “She’s not going to get into drugs by singing.”
• “Tell that to my heart.”

• “Dear diary: most days I don’t want to get out of bed, but I do.”

• “He was my fairy tale.”

• “In a way, I thank Charles. If he hadn’t been such a terrible man to me, I wouldn’t have known what a good one feels like.”

• “I can love you passed the pain."

Again, these aren't during any of Madea's wacky comedy bits (it almost would have helped if they were), but during crucial, dramatic scenes, spoken to pretentious, weighty string music. When the romantic tension in your love story can be bested by something like All Dogs Go to Heaven, you may have a problem on your hands.

Characterization in Diary is pretty sketchy throughout. The movie tries way too hard to make Charles unsympathetic; not only does he hit his wife, but he also left her for another woman who had his kids. And he threw her out of the house! But wait! He also used to be a drug dealer! And is just plain mean and nasty throughout the whole film! He’s a bad guy, no doubt about it! Orlando practically wears a T-shirt with the label “Knight in Shining Armor,” and is an boring and underdeveloped as you would expect from a Perfect Man (though Shemar Moore’s performance goes a long way towards actually making him seem charming and relatable).

Moore is the only one in the movie who doesn't play his character as though he were in an After School Special, though even he can't overcome the clunky dialogue.

Diary of a Mad Black Woman could have been worse, but it also could have been a hell of a lot better. It’s a shame that the movie’s intentions of making Helen a sympathetic character fall so flat, otherwise the film might have worked, if only a little. As it stands, the whole project feels like 75% Spoiled Rich Kid Grows Up story, 20% antics with Madea and the Viagra-packing Joe, and 5% actual, decent movie. For my money, eating my way through that much junk to get to so little goodness is a waste of time.

PS - Because misery loves company, here's the link to Jordyn's entry on Message in a Bottle.

War! What is it good for? – Prom Wars

Lord knows why we watched it, and even still why I'm writing about it, but this past weekend my friend Jordyn and I rented a movie called Prom Wars. We also rented Caveman with Ringo Starr, which should give you an idea of what the weekend was like. But I digress. Prom Wars isn't necessarily as bad as a teen comedy titled "Prom Wars" could be, though only marginally so, and for that I suppose I'm slightly grateful.

Prom Wars is about three prep schools (as the Napoleon Dynamite-esque moving sketchbook credits tell us): Selby and Lancaster, two all-boys schools, and an all-girls school whose name escapes me (let's call it Katherine Heigl Elementary). The main plot concerns Percy and Diana, two students who are dating. In the opening scene, Percy, who is from Selby, finds out that Diana had previously slept with a toolbox student from Langford, then gets drunk and chews her out before finally getting right-crossed and dumped.

She throws a mean right hook, Diana.

Through a series of happenstances that are both unmemorable and unremembered by me, Diana convinces the student body of Heigl (which is uniformly made up of attractive, short skirt and Chuck Taylor-wearing alterna-hotties (did I mention this is actually an indie flick?)) that they should make the two guy schools compete for who can take them to prom.

The resulting movie is the story (and montages) of the nerd-heavy Selby taking on the jocko taco Lancaster; the two schools compete in everything from arm wrestling to chess to a climactic paintball match. All the while, Percy and Diana continue to liaison and negotiate over the terms of the "war." The sets looks expensive and the characters are all garbed in Hogwarts-style boarding school uniforms, giving the impression that the movie could just as easily have been called White People Throw Money at Each Other.

Some of the competitions are actually fairly creative.

All of this sounds like an eye-gouging good time, right? Well, put down the tar and feathers, you Mob Song chorus members, you, because it's not that bad (just almost so). The leads in this movie are actually pretty good, particularly Raviv Ullman (of "Phil of the Future" pseudo-fame) and Alia Shawkat, who are both reasonably charming and fairly sympathetic, which is a feat considering how ridiculous this story is.

The expensive set I mentioned earlier also helps distinguish from other high school teen comedies in the genre. The movie has a slightly quirky edge that helped me get passed some of the clichés; it may be damning it with faint praise, but I never really felt compelled to leave the room in disgust, which is worth something in my book. It doesn't hurt that I actually did laugh in a couple places. A couple.

The cast, especially Ullman (pictured), go a long way to making the material seem less insipid than it actually it.

You're probably wondering why on Earth I am being so bloody generous to a movie that is at best mildly entertaining and at worst email-checkingly dull. I suppose it's because I've seen how deep and dark the rabbit hole goes; right before we went to the movie store, Jordyn watched I Love You Beth Cooper. Oh sweet mustache, that is an awful, awful movie. Awful in its clichéd and sketchy characters. Awful in its predictable plotline (not predictable as in "I bet this is what happens right now;" predictable as in "Wouldn't it be terrible if this actually happens right now?"). Awful in the notion that someone thought people would be entertained by it. Prom Wars definitely has issues, such as an ultimately forgettable story and characters (including an unrequited affection subplot that I could not tell you about even if you offered me one of these fabulously expensive sets), but it's not as absolutely terrible as Beth Cooper, where there was seriously a point where I had to go to Safeway for soda because I simply couldn't stand it.

Prom Wars could be worse. A LOT worse.

And this is ultimately what Prom Wars is: not quite the worst bad movie you've ever seen. I never felt like I was killing my brain cells like I was during Miss March, and I found it easier to swallow than other teen comedies like Van Wilder or the like. Movies like these make great drinking game movies; they're not terribly painful, they're pretty short, and they're readily available on NetFlix Instant Queue. In fact, I'll close this entry with a Prom Wars drinking game I thought up this afternoon:

Drink every time:

• The words "Victory" or "Defeat" flash onscreen
  
• The two little kids from the beginning have a scene
  
• Someone makes a not-so-veiled comment at one of the characters' sexuality (you'll know who)
  
• Percy and Diana meet somewhere incognito
  

And for added schnockticity, include every time:

• A scene is gratuitously in slow motion
  
• Percy's little sister is in a scene
  

La'chaim!