Beastly is a harbinger of Twilight knockoffs to come

This is how I imagine the sales pitch meeting . “ It ’s like crepuscle meets She ’s All That , but with a gritty , urban feel and a cameo by an Olsen twin ! ” Beastly is an unpaired new paint - by - numbers teenage literary genre moving-picture show , a farrago of stilted romanticism and gothic revulsion . Its lineage can be hound flat back to Twilight . It ’s going to be the first in a long business line of movies and tv set that will channel Stephenie Meyer ’s lamia classic and make teen sexuality scary again .

Beastly ’s establishing shots are so stylized and exaggerated that you think at first you ’re find out a movie like Heathers or Election . We see the idealized , half - clothe body of supermodels splosh on the walls of every New York City skyscraper , then whizz along through the doors of glimmer private schooltime to see an election speech from our supermodelly Cuban sandwich Kyle ( Alex Pettyfer ) . The upshot of Kyle ’s delivery , which is supposed to get him made president of the “ green council , ” is essentially that he ’s hot and rich and that ’s what everybody likes so just give in and vote crassly . “ Embrace the suck ” is his election motto . Like I said , it ’s so exaggerated that it feels like irony .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Neo6W1f7hyY

But it ’s not . reverse out Kyle really is just flagrantly dazed and rich , the pampered son of a TV news lynchpin . And the gothy little girl who glared at him during his speech really is a witch . An Olsen twin witch ! She ’s wee-wee off that he ’s always making playfulness of “ horrible ” hoi polloi – which this movie limit as tattooed hippie , mass of color , the handicapped , and the poor . So she roll a spell that turns him “ frightful , ” complete with grimace piercings , scar , and weird tattoo on his brow that say “ embrace suction . ” If he does n’t find somebody to love him in his ugly state in one yr , he ’ll stick around all tattooey forever .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcUDRWncQws

Does n’t that voice weirdly like the setup to She ’s All That ? That was the classic 1990s teen love affair flick where the popular guy takes a dare where he ’ll hit on the unearthly , ugly chick and if she agrees to go to promenade with him he wins . Except in Beastly , he wins if he can get the frightful chick to like him when he ’s ugly too ! Because yeah , the premiss is that the only someone who will love Kyle now is an “ ugly ” young woman named Lindy ( Vanessa Hudgens ) with an immigrant , drug addict pop who lives in the poor part of town .

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Kyle ’s dad ca n’t deal with his cursed , unworthy son , so he stick him in a Brooklyn flat – oh , repugnance ! – with a Jamaican amah and a unreasoning tutor ( Neil Patrick Harris , the only good thing in this movie ) . So yes , the film ’s ugli are now all together , and Kyle stalks Lindy until he ’s able to save her from some form of cloudy drug deal survive incorrect with her pappa . At which item he demands that her pappa “ give her ” to him “ for base hit . ” Yeah , it ’s a very Twilighty moment , except it make even less sense . Why would her dad just hand his nearly - grownup girl over to a random bozo on the street ? And why would she go ?

And there ’s your romance setup – Kyle has a few calendar month left to seduce the jailed Lindy by construct her a greenhouse and showing her that he ’s really nice under the piercings . It ’s all reasonably creepy-crawly , peculiarly when you consider his motives ( to become pretty again ) and his method ( he ’s productive so he can put Lindy up in his swank digs and force back her out to the rural area sign for romancing ) . Again , this whole manipulate - the - ignorant - young lady plot has the impression of Twilight , except that Kyle is supposed to be the opposite of Edward in damage of his hotness quotient . Though of course of study he is hot , which is demonstrated over and over in the many unnecessary scene of Pettyfer write shirtlessly in his garret . ( Yes he has a garret . ) Also , Lindy is a lot more clueless than Bella .

In a world of Facebook hookups and downloadable erotica , how do you reinvent Romance language ? As the Twilight phenomenon proves , you do it by figure out a cagy way to make sex scary and perplexing again . No wonder the mediaeval touches work so well here .

Bark Watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8PLpXvhtlc

This coming weekend make for two young teenage gothic tales to the dramatics , too : Red Riding Hood ( send by Catherine Hardwicke , who also directed the first Twilight movie ) , and a new version of Jane Eyre that ’s in limited U.S. release . Jane Eyre is essentially the template for all these stories : A vulnerable char , trapped by circumstance in a deep homo ’s broody business firm , finds herself swept away by said man even though she knows there ’s something terrifying that haunts him . In the guinea pig of Jane Eyre , the terrifying matter is Rochester ’s crazy wife , freaking out in the attic . And the fact that he would leave her in the garret is passably scary too .

Twilight and Beastly dilute right on to the chase and make the men into monster – though misunderstood ones , like the original gothic monster boytoy Beast from Beauty and the Beast . The level is , these are moving-picture show that want to remystify gender . Along the way , they make men scary and woman vulnerable again , even though we live in a world where grammatical gender part have become a lot more complicated than that .

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