If Warm Bodies is a sly mockery of everything Stephanie Meyer started when she wrote Twilight and assisted in its transition from novel to screen, then what can we make of Beautiful Creatures? The lesson here, I think, is that not every post-Twilight YA movie will improve on the formula; in point of fact, some of them will wallow in it. Beautiful Creatures, lacking all of the heart and wit Levine brought to his own spin on the young adult blueprint, blithely tumbles into the latter category; it’s almost impossible to enjoy even on a trashy, so-bad-it’s-good level, though bless Jeremy Irons and Emma Thompson for trying to bring the film to that sort of plateau.…
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G-S-T Double Take Review…The Words
Editor’s note: The Double Take series has been on hold for a while now, but today marks the return of this two-sided format of perspectives. Here, Bill Graham and Andrew Crump both offer their two cents on the freshly released literary drama, The Words. By Bill Graham: The lesson in The Words isn’t that first-time writer/directors can get in over their heads but that a solid editor might make the difference between a film that gets sidetracked in its own convolution and something worthwhile. The bulk of the narrative plays out with struggling writer Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper) trying to make ends meet with his wife Dora (Zoë Saldana) rooting him…