HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA is the delightful sequel to the charming 2012 kids animated movie.  It brings together most of the creative and voice team of the original for a story that feels organic in its progression.  In the first film, Dracula (Adam Sandler) struggled to accept that his beloved daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) had fallen in love with a human interloper (Andy Samberg) in his monster hotel.  In the sequel, the kids have gotten married and Drac is a grandpa to cute little Dennis. Problem is, Dennis doesn't appear to be a monster at all.  And so, a concerned Mavis wants to take him to live in the human world, much to Drac and his son-in-law's horror.

For much of the movie we see Drac take the kid on a road-trip to discover his inner monster, with laughably negligible impact. Turns out the monsters aren't really that monstrous anymore, partly through old age, and just plain old assimilation.  Pretty soon, Drac comes to believe that Mavis is right.  But at a last hurrah birthday party for Dennis, Drac's father Vlad (a brilliant cameo by Mel Brooks) comes to town. This infamously hard-ball monster is aghast that his son-in-law is human, just as the human grandparents are happy the kid is "normal".  

There's lots of social commentary in here about the difficulty of being accepted as a mixed-race or non-straight kid.  The difference between tolerating something and truly accepting it.  The difficulty of being understood by both sides and the pressure to please parents and grandparents.  And that's to be applauded. But aside from all that, the movie really works at the level of great animation, and superb imaginative comedy. The scenes of vampire bat flight are beautifully animated, and there are some lovely throw-away visual jokes (such as Drac giving the Invisible Man a purple nurple). Finally, what I love in this movie, as in the original, is its heart.  This is just a straightforwardly joyously warm-hearted movie that makes you want to hug your family and embrace glorious diversity.  Kudos to all involved.

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 2 has a running time of 89 minutes and is rated PG.  The movie is on global release.

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA is, like PARANORMAN, an absolutely lovely, beautifully drawn, heart-warming children's animation film that pays homage to horror film history.  Adam Sandler plays Count Dracula, so scarred my the peasant mob killing his beloved wife, that he turns his castle into a hotel for ghouls and monsters to protect them from the nasty humans in the outside world. His extreme protection irks his teenage daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez) and when she meets a stray backpacker called Jonathan (Andy Samberg) the Count is torn between protecting his daughter from the outside world, and protecting the backpacker from the monsters at the hotel.  So ensues some wonderful comedy, with the Count loosening up under Jonathan's influence, and Mavis tentatively entering her first romance.  Ultimately, the movie plays a request for tolerance but it moves us because of its loving rendering of a father-daughter relationship.  As an out and out daddy's girl myself, I fell in love with it.  Kudos to director Genndy Tartakovsky (DEXTER'S LABORATORY) for his gonzo animation style, raucous sense of humour and genuine heart.  This is simply an adorable film.

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA played Toronto 2012 and is on release in Australia, Israel, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, the USA, Japan, Argentina, Hungary, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ireland and the UK. It opens on October 18th in the Czech Republic, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania and Sweden; on October 25th in Germany, Kuwait, Ukraine and Spain; on November 2nd in Iceland; on November 8th in Denmark, Italy and Poland; on November 19th in Vietnam; on November 23rd in Finland, Indonesia, Macedonia and Turkey; on December 5th in Thailand, Greece, Singapore and India; on December 19th in Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal; on  January 7th in Hong Kong and Taiwan and on February 13th in France. 

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA has a running time of 91 minutes and is rated PG in the USA.

Random DVD Round-Up 2 - GROWN-UPS

GROWN-UPS is an alleged warm-hearted comedy that utterly fails to entertain on any level. 

The conceit is that four school-friends, now grown-up, come together at the funeral of their beloved school sports coach, and spend the weekend together in a vacation home. Their lives have taken them in different directions. Adam Sandler's character has turned into a big name Hollywood name, and is married to a glamorous fashion designer (Salma Hayek). Meanwhile Kevin James' character has ended up a small-time employee, much to his own shame. The movie is meant to be about how these friends rediscover their friendship and what really matters in life. It's meant to be about how our kids have become spoiled by Tivo and video games and need to just run around in the mud sometimes. All laudable aims. 

But in terms of execution, the fact that this flick was directed by Dennis Dugan (YOU DON'T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN, BIG DADDY, HAPPY GILMORE) and co-written with Fred Wolf (THE HOUSE BUNNY, LITTLE NICKY) tells you all you need to know about the crass humour and crude narrative arcs that the characters are sent on. I didn't invest in any of the characters, and so didn't care about their enlightenment. I didn't buy into the fashion designer ditching her Milan show - her heart melting with surprising ease. Even worse, I hated the so-called attempts at comedy. What happened to Maria Bello's career that she takes a part where her only job is to provide a "gag" about her toddler still drinking breast milk? Am I really meant to laugh at a grown man falling into mud? And what dirt do SNL has-beens David Spade and Rob Schneider have on Adam Sandler that he keep casting them in his films? 

 Still, it's far more watchable than COUPLE'S RETREAT. 

 GROWN UPS was released in summer 2010 and is available to rent and own.

PAUL BLART: MALL COP - harmless, disposable fun

Steve Carr, director of DADDY DAY CARE and ARE WE DONE YET?, has produced an utterly disposable, utterly ridiculous family action movie that succeeds purely because of the innate like-ability of Kevin James. James plays a love-able loser: fat, hypoglycemic, lame sense of humour, but a heart of gold. The audience wills him to win at every turn, whether that means getting the girl of his dreams, putting down the obnoxious watch salesman, or foiling the robbery that's taking place in his mall. The action is tame, the humour tamer, but the movie is surprisingly watchable and you can't but help have a smile on your face at the end. It's no INDIANA JONES, but for a harmless afternoon family DVD session, perfect.

PAUL BLART: MALL COP opened earlier this year in the US, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, Venezuela, Australia and Singapore, the UK, Egypt, the UAE, Iceland and Spain. It opens on April 9th in Portugal; on April 17th in Belgium, Brazil and Romania; on April 23rd in Kazakhstan, Russia and Sweden; and in Estonia on July 10th.

I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK AND LARRY - an equal opportunities offender

The box-office success of Adam Sandler is proof of sinister forces at work. MR DEEDS, LITTLE NICKY, HAPPY GILMORE, CLICK.... These are all juvenile, piss-poor attempts at comedy in which a dick-head offends a bunch of people but is redeemed in the final reel, thus winning the heart of the hot chick. THE WEDDING SINGER is the exception to the rule: the genuine warmth of Drew Barrymore offset the Sandler curse. And, of course, PUNCH DRUNK LOVE brilliantly channelled Sandler's infantile aggression into a pathological rom-com. But, in general, to paraphrase the great George Costanza, I never feel the urge to get down on my knees and thank God that I know Adam Sandler and have access to his dementia.

No sir, Adam Sandler is not my bag. But I never thought he would produce a movie that would actually be offensive. Evidently, I was wrong.

I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK AND LARRY is an alleged comedy in which two heterosexual men pretend to be gay partners so that if one dies the other can inherit his pension benefits. The movie affects politically correct intentions. It wants to show us how two straight guys become more sympathetic to the gay cause by experiencing bigotry first hand. But in reality, the only thing that's politically correct about I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK AND LARRY is the fact that it's an equal opportunities offender. Straight men are misogynistic, reactionary bigots. Gay men are flamboyant fairies who listen to musicals and sing Gloria Gaynor songs. There's nothing cuter on a woman that a play-boy bunny outfit. Naturally, we leave the most offensive scene to serial offender, Rob Schneider, who hasn't even got the balls to be credited on this flick. Schneider dons fake teeth, a wig, face-paint and a hokey accent to do the most offensive impression of a Japanese man since Mr Yunioshi in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S.

I NOW PRONOUNCE YOU CHUCK AND LARRY is already on release in the US, Greece, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Australia, Egypt, Belgium, France, Portugal, Thailand, Hungary, Russia, Brazil, Italy, Turkey, Hong Kong, Slovakia, Lithuania, Spain, the Philippines, Argentina, the Czech Republic, Singapore, Iceland, Poland and the UK. It opens in Germany, Slovakia, Denmark, Estonia, Mexico, Norway and Sweden next weekend. It opens in Israel on October 4th, in Bulgaria on October 12th and in Finland on November 16th.

HITCH - formulaic rom-com saved by Will Smith

HITCH is a paint-by-numbers romantic-comedy featuring Will Smith and Eva Mendes, Kevin James and Carmen Diaz-lite, Amber Valetta. Smith plays a “date doctor” who specialises in coaching men with low self-esteem on how to appear attractive to their dream-women. He is helping the earnest, sweet, but unattractive Kevin-James-character win the misunderstood social butterfly Amber-Valetta-character over. Cue lots of “odd couple” type jokes. Meanwhile he is also wooing the Eva-Mendes character. This chick has a lot of trust issues, and is also the gossip columnist who exposes the James-Valetta relationship. Cue lots of comedy-misunderstandings.

Now, I have nothing against romantic comedies per se. It just so happens that the majority of romantic-comedies produced by Hollywood studios are formulaic superficial nonsense, usually designed as vehicles for some cute star and directed by a talentless hack. In addition, they mostly have plots that rely on key members of the cast forming ridiculous misunderstandings of each other’s motives and actions that in the real world would be cleared up in a second, but in the tortuous world of celluloid dating take a more marketable ninety minutes to unravel. In the case of HITCH, the hack director is Andy Tennant, who seems to specialise in these disposable comedies. (I submit that monstrously flawed Reese Witherspoon-Josh Lucas vehicle, SWEET HOME ALABAMA into evidence for the prosecution.)

Having said all this, I actually rather enjoyed HITCH and that is down to one factor alone: Will Smith. It is testament to how charming Will Smith is that he can single-handedly sell you a movie that is the utterly formulaic. In fact, he is so charming that he can almost makes us believe that men would actually pay the “date doctor” to learn cheesy lines like, “life is not the amount of breaths you take, it's the moments that take your breath away.” Or that women would be impressed by lines like: “Never lie, steal, cheat, or drink. But if you must lie, lie in the arms of the one you love. If you must steal, steal away from bad company. If you must cheat, cheat death. And if you must drink, drink in the moments that take your breath away.” As you can see from these *choice* quotations, HITCH is a really schmaltzy movie. Its appeal rests solely on casting Will Smith in the lead role. I think that alone just about saves it from the trashcan of cinematic history. But, it’s a close call.

HITCH is already on release in the US, Germany and Austria and opens in the UK today. It opens in France next week.