As Dracula, Adam Sandler Is Required To Suck

HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA 

(Dir. Genndy Tartakovsky, 2012)

Those who have been waiting for a new fix of animated Adam Sandler hi-jinks - it’s been ten years since EIGHT CRAZY NIGHTS after all - will surely overdose on his hammy take on Dracula in HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA, the new 3D CGI spectacle from the studio that brought you THE SMURFS.

Sandler, who also executive produced, does the typical Bela Lugosi impression for the voice of the famous vampire, except that he denies ever saying “bleh-bleh-bleh,” plays the ukulele, and can bust out a rhyme, you know, if the occasion calls for MC Dracula.

As the owner and creator of the lavish Hotel Transylvania, a vacation place only for monsters, Sandler’s Dracula is preparing for the 118th birthday of his precocious daughter Mavis (Selena Gomez), when trouble arrives in the form of an airheaded backpacking teenager named Jonathan (SNL's Andy Samberg).

Dracula does what he can as an overprotective father to shield Mavis from the intruding human, but she feels what screenwriters Peter Baynham, Robert Smigel (a Sandler collaborator since their SNL days), along with director Genndy Tartakovsky who did a re-write, insist on calling a “zing” (love at first site) for the wacky kid. Not sure why, she’s a hundred years older than him and should know better than to fall for such a doofus, but, oh well.

The huge cast of supporting celebrity voices features Frankenstein's Monster (Kevin James) and his wife Eunice (a more annoying than usual Fran Drescher, but that description fits almost everybody here), Wayne and Wanda Werewolf (Steve Buscemi and Molly Shannon), and the party-monster Murray the Mummy (Cee Lo Green).

There’s also Griffin the Invisible Man, voiced by Sandler’s old fellow SNL buddy David Spade, who is a good example of how each of the classic creatures are just one joke characters, and the joke isn’t funny in the first place.

In fact none of HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA is funny, despite how energetic and over-the-top it is. It could have something to do with the sizable percentage of pee, poop, and fart jokes that take the place of wit. At least there’s only a few pop culture references, but the ones that are there (a Dave Matthews mention, a viewing of TWILIGHT on an iPad) are huge groaners.

The animation is fine but not especially inspired, and there’s no sense of stakes (I’m not making a vampire joke here) in the story-line, since we know Samberg’s Jonathan is no threat to anybody, and Sandler’s Dracula is really a good guy with a big heart who will see the light. Yawn.

By the way isn’t natural light supposed to kill vampires? The big over-caffeinated chase scene finale takes place in the pure sunlight of the morning, and Dracula only gets a little singed.

The ending has Samberg and Sandler show off their rap skills to a big obnoxious auto-tuned pop song, capping 90 minutes of crap aptly. My nephews (ages 8, 14, and 15), who I took to the screening, said they liked it, but I seriously doubt it will take up much space in their memory.

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Blu Ray Review: MYSTERY TRAIN (1989)

MYSTERY TRAIN (Dir. Jim Jarmusch, 1989)

There are several notable elements that Quentin Tarantino took to the bank a few years later heavily on display in Jim Jarmusch’s 3rd feature film MYSTERY TRAIN, now out on a special edition DVD / Blu ray courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

First off, there’s the non linear story-line that gives us three different scenarios that happen at the same time from different perspectives.

Second, there’s the hipster soundtrack that posits Elvis Presley (of course, it being a Memphis movie), Otis Redding, and the Bar-Kays to decorate the film’s scrappy edges. Third, there’s an ultra hip disc jockey who is heard throughout the movie (think: Steven Wright in RESERVOIR DOGS) spinning that cool soundtrack - Jarmusch regular Tom Waits does the duty here. Fourth, there’s Steve Buscemi.

MYSTERY TRAIN is an independent gem that was for a long time endangered to be a forgotten film. This spiffy new Criterion Collection edition not only saves it from that fate; it presents it as the classic that anybody who saw it in the last 20 years knew it was all along.

It’s a movie in which the locale is as much a character as any of its cast. Memphis comes off as a ghost town with dilapidated buildings, dive bars, and a very decrepit hotel – the Arcade Hotel which was raized the year after the film finished shooting. All 3 separate storylines, the names of which are “Far From Yokohama”, “A Ghost”, and “Lost In Space”, take place on the same hot night in Memphis, Tennessee.

In the first story, Youki Kudoh and Masatoshi Nagase play a young couple on somewhat of a religious pilgrimage – they want to visit the old stomping grounds of the King of Rock and Roll and his minions. Their tour of Sun studios tasks them and they constantly bicker about who’s better: Carl Perkins or Elvis Presley.

The next narrative involves Nicoletta Brasch as a recent widow stranded in Memphis while escorting her husband's coffin back to Italy. At a diner she listens to a creepy Tom Noonan telling a story about the ghost of Elvis and later with Elizabeth Bracco as a woman fleeing an abusive ex she re-tells the story. Bracco reacts harshly: “Is this the one where the guy has to go to Graceland and it turns out to be Elvis? I think I’ve heard this a hundred times. I think almost everybody in Memphis has picked up Elvis’s ghost hitchhiking.”

In the third storyline, Steve Buscemi, Joe Strummer (of the Clash), and Rick Aviles navigate through a drunken criminal night ending up at the same hotel as the previous protagonists. The ghost of Elvis lingers as Strummer is referred to as “Elvis” much to his chagrin: “Don't call me Elvis! If you can't use my proper name, why don't you try 'Carl Perkins, Jr.' or something?”


 

The details concerning a gunshot that is heard in the preceding stories are made clear in the final story and with it the arc is complete. As the night clerk and bellboy of the Arcade Hotel, Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Cinqué Lee are the most consistent characters in the movie – they encounter all the movie’s players in all 3 scenarios and handle them with memorable flair. “Mystery Train” concerns the intertwining stories of foreigners in a quintessential American city.

Like in many of his other films Jarmusch comes off like an American film maker who makes foreign films about America. In my humble opinion this is his best.

Bonus features or as Criterion calls them – Supplements: A rambling but highly amusing Q & A with Jarmusch in lieu of a commentary (his words there not mine) and a couple of cool featurettes including a documentary on the film’s locations and Memphis's musical history and on-set photos by Masayoshi Sukita. 

There’s also an excerpt (19 min.) of a 2001 documentary on Screamin’ Jay Hawkins entitled “I Put a Spell on Me”. All excellent extras on an essential indie classic.

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Michael Cera Is The Putz *And* The Poseur

YOUTH IN REVOLT (Dir. Miguel Arteta, 2009)







It's funny that Michael Cera has reportedly been the lone holdout for the prospects of an Arrested Development movie since he's never quite left the character of awkward yet lovable George-Michael Bluth behind. 



Cera has never shown us that he has any versatility, yet his trademark hangdog nervousness coupled with his particular brand of soft spoken sarcasm, has worked nicely in several movie comedies in the last few years - SUPERBAD being the best of those.



As Nick Twisp, that same Cera persona is on display in YOUTH IN REVOLT, but here there is sort of a promise of a twist to that persona in the form of a bad boy alter ego named François Dillinger.



Unfortunately apart from a pencil thin mustache and an always present dangling cigarette in his lips, François is still the same Cera. He makes taunting risque comments to Twisp and acts according to the domino-effect accident-prone nature of the script, but it's still the same Cera. Sigh. Couldn't he have even just attempted an accent?




Cera affects François for the express reason of wooing the girl of his dreams (Portia Doubleday) - a neighbor in the trailer park his family fled to. Though we are introduced to Cera's Twisp by way of a masturbation scene, he fancies himself a well read intellectual who loves Frank Sinatra and in Doubleday he feels he's met his match. He longs to break away from the white trash world of his divorced mother (Jean Smart) who's shacked up with a scuzzy trucker (Jack Galifinakis), so he plots to get his real father (Steve Buscemi) to get a job and relocate so he can be close to the girl he loves. 



François appears to be the key to set this in motion. 



Mix in reliable character actors Fred Willard, M. Emmet Walsh, Mary Kay Place, and Ray Liotta (as yet again an asshole cop) and this all plays as quirk by the numbers - "Independent Teen Angst Movie" it could be called. To jazz up these stale elements there's jaunty animation that looks like it was pilfered from Nickolodeon and Justin Long as Doubleday's laid back hallucinogenic mushroom providing brother. 



YOUTH IN REVOLT was filmed a few years ago and possibly shelved because the producers (the Weinstein Brothers) sensed there was a lack of a strong hook to this material. Its release in early January seems to support this. The film has likable people, songs, and story strands but Cera feels severely miscast to the ultimate detriment of the movie. 



Unless Cera's got some major character deconstruction surprises coming anytime soon, here's hoping he reconsiders reprising George-Michael Bluth in the afore mentioned Arrested Development movie. I mean, c'mon! It's the only role he seems to have really played since.

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