Movie Review - TEEN BEACH MOVIE

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I have to admit--I was excited when I heard about Disney's Teen Beach Movie. Though corny by today's standards (or any standards, for that matter), I used to watch the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello movies as a kid. Born in the sixties, I loved the costumes, dance and music of my parents' teenaged years. I also watched Annette on the old Mickey Mouse Club black and white re-runs, so it was cool to see what she did afterward. The last beach movie released was 1987's Back to the Beach, which I loved, because in addition to being a blast from the past, Lori Laughlin played Frankie and Annette's daughter. Back to the Beach was campy and silly and featured Pee Wee Herman singing "Bird is the Word"; what more could you ask?

When my eight year old daughters started extreme fangirling on High School Musical, I thought I should see what it was all about. I was pleasantly surprised. I even went to the theatre to see the third one with them and really enjoyed it. While the storylines left something to be desired, the music and dance scenes were impressive. My daughters didn't have to twist my arm to get me to watch Camp Rock, or Lemonade Mouth either. So when I read about Teen Beach Movie I was interested. My daughter insisted it was like Grease and she was all "been there, done that". Even though I insisted it was more like Beach Blanket Bingo than Grease, she remains steadfast in her claim, refusing to take even a peek at Beach Blanket Bingo, headstrong almost-fourteen-year-old that she is, which is frustrating as this means I am unable to educate her on the finer points of popular culture on which I thrive.

Teen Beach Movie is surprisingly entertaining to watch. In the movie, Brady and Mac (short for Mackenzie) are in love. Mac lives with her grandfather on the beach, but she must go back to the city with her stuck-up aunt to attend private school for the rest of her education. Because Mac's deceased mother wanted her to be the best she could be, Mac feels a duty to go with her aunt, even if it means breaking up with Brady to do so. Mac is a surfer, better than most of the boy-surfers out there, and she has been looking forward to surfing the forty-foot waves brought on by the coming storm, but surfing them would mean missing her plane. She awakes on the day she is to leave to see that her grandfather's surfboard, the one always hanging from the rafters, is propped against the wall instead, and she decides to go for one last surf. Worried she may drown, Brady takes a Jet Ski out to save her. They both get pulled down by the waves and come up for air in the sixties, and soon realize they are actually in the beach movie, West Side Story, that Brady idolizes and knows by heart. The movie is about the love story between a surfer boy and biker girl who fall in love and unite the two gangs against stereotypical bad guys to save the day, but when the surfer boy falls for Mac and the biker girl falls for Brady instead of each other, they have a problem.

The music in Teen Beach Movie is pop-based with a retro flavour, and I'm not embarrassed to admit that there are a few I wouldn't be above adding to my playlist. The acting is okay, but it's what you would expect from an old time beach movie, that is to say, over the top. Ross Lynch as Brady is perfect as the lovelorn puppy dog who would be lost without his girl. Maia Mitchell is cute as Mac, but her character suffers from a case of she-doth-protest-too-much until she gets acquainted with Grace Phipps' character, the girl biker, Lela and they become besties. Garrett Clayton plays the role of Tanner with vapid charm, though he looks a little too much like Zac Efron for comfort. The final surprise in this movie was seeing Kent Boyd of So You Think You Can Dance fame as Rascal, and while his acting is overblown (again, as you would expect from a beach movie), he was one of my favourites from the show and it was great to see him post SYTYCD, though I would have liked for his part to be a little bigger. He might have been good in either male lead. For sure he has the legs for it.

While Teen Beach Movie is not one of those movies I could watch again and again (like I do Men in Black, Legally Blonde, or Kate and Leopold, for example), it is quite enjoyable as a parody of the original movies. The song and dance numbers--though they may occur randomly as Mac points out--are entertaining, and the jokes--like how everyone goes surfing and emerges with dry hair--are kind of funny. There are some laugh-out-loud moments, and some borrowing from similar movies (Brady's lifejacket fades from existence like Marty McFly's siblings from the photograph in Back to the Future, and there's a baby-doll sleepover scene like the "Sandra Dee" number in Grease, that comes off as a sort of mashup between "Sandra Dee" and "Summer Loving"), though I did miss watching my daughters try to dance along with the cast when they teach the moves during commercial breaks. Nevertheless, Teen Beach Movie is great entertainment for the kids as an introduction to a long-extinct genre, and memorable nostalgia for their parents. The hour and forty-five minutes I invested in watching the movie was time well spent.

About the Author

Elise Abram, English teacher and former archaeologist, has been writing for as long as she can remember, but it wasn't until she was asked to teach Writer's Craft in 2001 that she began to seriously write. Her first novel, THE GUARDIAN, was partially published as a Twitter novel a few summers back (and may be accessed at @RKLOGYprof). Nearly ten years after its inception Abram decided it was time to stop shopping around with traditional publication houses and publish PHASE SHIFT on her own.

Download PHASE SHIFT for the price of a tweet. Visit http://www.eliseabram.com, click on the button, tweet or Facebook about my novel and download it for FREE!

WE'RE THE MILLERS - Movie Review

In We're the Millers, Jason Sudeikis plays David, a drug dealer who is robbed and must smuggle a large shipment of marijuana in from Mexico to repay his supplier. After seeing how the police react to a family in an RV, David decides the best way to get the job done is to hire people to play his family as cover. Getting the drugs into the States proves to be the least of David's problems. It's not until they arrive stateside that his troubles begin. Little does he know, he's been sent on a suicide mission. He doesn't so much as pick up the drugs as steal them and spends the rest of the movie on the run from the actual smuggler and supplier and trying to avoid capture by the DEA agent the "family" has befriended along the way.

We're the Millers is an okay movie, once you get past the vulgar language and graphic grossness (I think I may have scarred my 14 year old girls with the full-on deformed male frontal shots). While there's no overt sex, there is a sort of comedic scene between 18 year old Kenny (played by Will Poulter), his teenaged "sister" Casey (played by Emma Roberts) and his "mother" Rose/Sarah (played by Jennifer Aniston), that is as uncomfortable (watching it as a parent with her children) as it is funny. We're the Millers is on par with Grown-ups and Bridesmaids in its bawdy humour--remember the blue pee scene in Grown-ups and the diarrhea attack in Bridesmaids?--that is to say, unrefined. While a tarantula bite on the testicles is nothing to laugh about, Millers milks it for all its worth. Equally disturbing is the scene in which the a Mexican policeman's expectation of a bribe is confused with the expectation of oral sex, compounded by the discussion in which David convinces Kenny that he must take one for the team and satisfy the officer.

Jason Sudeikis plays the part of David with initial cool detachment, but, as you might expect, he mellows toward the end and realizes that he does, in fact, have some responsibility for his adopted family. Jennifer Aniston is more believable as the caring matriarch than the down and out stripper. Emma Roberts and Will Poulter play their parts--the battle-worn street kid with a heart of gold and the virgin ingénue--with stereotypical demeanour. It was nice to see Kathryn Hahn and Molly Quinn in the parts of the DEA agent's wife and daughter. I've liked Kathryn Hahn since her Crossing Jordan days and enjoyed the way she plays the sexually frustrated prim-and-proper wife. I also really like Molly Quinn in her role as Alexis Castle, but her talent was underutilized in this movie, where she's asked to do nothing but look as innocent as Poulter's character, which she does, but it's not enough for her to shine.

I went to see We're the Millers because it was either that or The Butler playing at my local theatre and neither my husband or kids were interested in a heavy, historical docu-pic, but I wasn't disappointed. We're the Millers is a lighthearted, funny movie that had me laughing out loud at times and squirming at others. It's mostly potty humour with a little quick and clever repartee mixed in, but it's a movie that shouldn't disappoint. 

About the Author

Elise Abram, English teacher and former archaeologist, has been writing for as long as she can remember, but it wasn’t until she was asked to teach Writer’s Craft in 2001 that she began to write seriously. Her first novel, THE GUARDIAN was partially published as a Twitter novel a few summers back (and may be accessed at @RKLOGYprof). Nearly ten years after its inception Abram decided it was time to stop shopping around with traditional publication houses and publish PHASE SHIFT on her own.

Download PHASE SHIFT for the price of a tweet. Visit http://www.eliseabram.com, click on the button, tweet or Facebook about my novel and download it for FREE!

Critique of "Star Trek: Into Darkness"

Warning: Spoilers follow.

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I've been a Star Trek fan for as long as I can remember, so devout a fan, in fact, that the first time I heard of the JJ Abrams re-boot, I thought it was sacrilege. And then I watched it. In light of the cancellation of Deep Space Nine and the failure of Enterprise, 2009's Star Trek brought a breath of fresh air to the franchise.

After the vacuum in which there was no new Trek after the original series ended, I looked forward to the first Trek movie with anticipation. After watching it, I didn't know what to make of it. Any new Trek is good Trek, I argued, but I loathed calling the new Trek good Trek. Then the second movie premiered and I went, in spite of the first, and was blown away. The Wrath of Khan was the best epic epi of Star Trek ever. I think I must've seen it a dozen times or more in the emptiness between it and The Search for Spock, only to be disappointed once more. The third movie in the franchise was too short and too proscribed. A mistake had been made in killing Spock and the purpose of The Search for Spock was an ends to a means--to put the canon right.

By contrast, The Voyage Home shined because it was a return to the two things Trek does best--the buddy relationship between Kirk and Spock (made better by Spock's newfound struggle with humanity/vulcanry) and time travel. After movie number four, the original flavour of Trek would not return until movie seven, Final Contact. This movie, capitalizing on the popularity of The Next Generation series, was a winner as it was as good as TNG's best television episodes. The movies that followed never, in my opinion, recaptured the camaraderie and adventure that made the series such a hit.

On the heels of TNG movies came a slew of television series linked to the Trek franchise. Deep Space Nine played out in mediocrity alongside a bland Final Contact and lacklustre Andromeda, followed by a struggling Enterprise, and it seemed like the franchise--and Gene Roddenbery's future ideal--had petered out.

Then came the 2009 re-boot, followed by 2013's Into Darkness. I went to see it because, like all other Trek movies, it was Star Trek. The reviews were mixed, everything from amazing and that it was a must see to nothing special, and that it recycled several episodes of the original Trek. While the movie does recycle many original Trek ideas, such as the characters of Khan, and Carol Marcus, as well as a conveniently placed zombie tribble, Into Darkness is amazingly fun. In it, the crew is sent to kill the character we later learn is Khan Noonian Singh in a deserted area on Kronos, the Klingon home world, without starting a war. Talked out of the hit by Spock, Kirk and crew are targeted by Marcus' father as a part of a cover-up to hide the fact that Khan had been working with The Federation to develop a type of photon torpedo. It turns out the torpedoes disguise stasis pods for Khan's eugenically engineered mates, and Kirk and his gang emerge victorious, thwarting the evil Marcus senior, and securing Khan and group back in their stasis pods, ready to be set afloat on the SS Botany Bay where they will be found by Kirk et al in the original Trek timeline.

I enjoyed the re-invention of the Khan character, seeing the start of Kirk's relationship with Carol Marcus, and the cameos by both the tribble and Leonard Nimoy as the elder Spock. It is interesting how the roles of Kirk and Spock are switched for the retake of Wrath’s critical warp core scene. This time it is Kirk who asks about the status of the ship and Spock who answers "Out of danger," as well as shouting "Khan!" with more emotion than you’d think a Vulcan could ever muster. I know Kirk is supposed to be the star of the series, but the Spock character, pioneered by Leonard Nimoy and wonderfully interpreted by Zachary Quinto, in my mind, has become my favourite and most important Trek character by far. I love the chemistry between Spock and Uhura as well. Though Kirk still has a lot of growing up to do, this movie helps the character travel down that road by miles from where he was at the end of the first movie.

Into Darkness is a fine addition to the popular Trek canon. I look forward to seeing it again when it comes out on DVD as well as where JJ Abrams will “boldly go” with the franchise in the next movie.

About the Author
Elise Abram, English teacher and former archaeologist, has been writing for as long as she can remember, but it wasn’t until she was asked to teach Writer’s Craft in 2001 that she began to write seriously. Her first novel, THE GUARDIAN was partially published as a Twitter novel a few summers back (and may be accessed at @RKLOGYprof). Nearly ten years after its inception Abram decided it was time to stop shopping around with traditional publication houses and publish PHASE SHIFT on her own.

Download PHASE SHIFT for the price of a tweet. Visit http://www.eliseabram.com, click on the button, tweet or Facebook about my novel and download it for FREE!