I recently spent a little quality time at my local megaplex. What I found there wasn't entirely pleasant, but I suppose it could have been worse.
There were no half-naked couples rolling around in the aisles, nor did I observe any baby laxative being snorted in the bathroom. At no time did a bloody fight spontaneously erupt between audience members encroaching upon each other's armrests. The most serious breach of conduct I witnessed was a lone guy chatting on his cell phone during the movie's opening credits, moments after that ubiquitous announcement asking everyone to shut up and enjoy the show.
The ugly stuff, as it turned out, was up on the screen and in the audience's reaction to it. The movie was Alpha Dog, a film about a bunch of bad-behaving, wannabe gangstas. And, judging by the sounds of amusement and robust approval on all sides of me, the indisputable highlight of this film was the moment when one of the characters squats on the floor of a rival's swanky home and, in the tradition of animals marking their territory everywhere, proceeds to take a big, steamy dump on the living room carpet. The trousers come down and the crowd goes wild — and if there's an instructive metaphor to be found in that cause-and-effect, I'll have to leave it for others to discover.
Loosely based on a true story (and aren't they all these days?), Alpha Dog assaults us with a gaggle of mostly middle-class white kids who aggressively imitate black gangsta culture even as vile racist garbage spews from their pretty little mouths. These are the mixed-up sons and daughters of Southern California suburbia, spending their time getting high, having sex with whoever's handy, zoning out on video games and, whenever they're really bored (which is most of the time), indulging in really bad behavior. Mostly though, as Alpha Dog has it, these kids just sit around looking attractive, in appropriately thuggish or slutty poses, as if they're passing time waiting for a callback on The O.C.
Over the course of Alpha Dog's 122 minutes, the characters do some pretty atrocious things — they grope and humiliate one another in an endless series of pointless power games, throw each other through plate glass windows and consume massive amounts of drugs, all under the watchful gaze of patron saint Pacino beaming down from the Scarface poster on the wall. But we are almost never tempted to think of these thuglets as anything other than actors, acting.
They preen and flutter, occasionally chewing the scenery in ridiculous displays of bulging eyes and twitchy gestures, but we rarely believe a moment of it. Despite the surface similarities, there's very little connection between these characters and the equally errant kids of something genuinely scary like, say, Larry Clark's Kids. Clark's crew may not have actually been the scum of the earth they pretended to be on screen, but at least it felt real.
The director here is Nick Cassavetes, whose dad, John, once upon a time turned bad behavior into groundbreaking cinema. The younger Cassavetes doesn't seem particularly committed to much of anything, though, blithely bouncing from horrendously sappy exercises like The Notebook to the faux-edginess of Alpha Dog. There are some half-hearted attempts at serious social commentary here — the film throws in a sprinkling of failed parents, while opening with grainy home movies of sweet-faced toddlers (set to a plaintive "Over the Rainbow") as if to suggest how easily even the most innocent babe goes bad — but mostly Alpha Dog just seems interested in ogling its hot young stars doing naughty things.
Flitting from gratuitous slo-mo and split-screen effects to inexplicable quasi-documentary interludes (where characters are identified as "witnesses," just to make sure we know it's all going to end badly), Alpha Dog is just the sort of shallow titillation that might well have Cassavetes' pop spinning in his grave.
A movie like Alpha Dog leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. And so I exited the auditorium where the dirty dogs ran wild and proceeded across the hall in search of animals of a less disagreeable sort, including an adorable pig, talking sheep, horses, cows and rodents.
Charlotte's Web — the latest big screen adaptation of E.B. White's classic children's book — turns out to have charm and whimsy to spare, but it's not without its own appreciation of the darker aspects of nature's way. Like the book, the movie doesn't shy from the blunter facts of barnyard life, beginning with its cute little porcine hero's seemingly inevitable fate as Christmas dinner (an end driven home with periodic cutaways to a backyard smokehouse that might as well be the gas chambers at Dachau).
An interspecies three-way love story between a spider, a pig and a human (strictly platonic, though, so no worries), Charlotte's Web takes place in a "deeply ordinary place," a sleepy rural community populated by good, decent folks who bake pies, do their homework and attend church regularly. There's an order to things — the first rule of order being that animals, regardless of how cute, become the food on our plates — and that order is thrown way out of whack when young Fern (Dakota Fanning) and kindly spider Charlotte make it their mission to save Wilbur, a guileless Gump of a piglet, from the chopping block. There are no villains here per se, just the way of the world, which goes a long way toward explaining why the lessons of Charlotte's Web remain so resonant, both for children and adults.
The film does pretty things up bit, but not to a fault. The main offender is Charlotte herself — the noble spider initially despised by the other animals as being "yucky," but who eventually dazzles everyone with her inner beauty. As it turns out, the movie goes a little overboard making that inner beauty visible. Voiced by America's Sweetheart herself, Julia Roberts, Charlotte becomes an overly stylized CGI creation with two large come-hither eyes making her look like a multi-legged manatee. (You might not even notice her other eyes since they're designed to look like inoffensively symmetrical henna markings.) She's a slightly strained blend of the creepy and cuddly, sucking the blood out of flies but making sure to say grace before every meal.
The other digital effects here are mostly very good and surprisingly tasteful, fitting right in with the simple, unpretentious feel of the movie. Yes, a few obligatory fart jokes do insinuate themselves into the proceedings (and yes, that's Steve Buscemi's voice you hear, typecast once again as the rat), but the movie survives that, too.
The characters of Charlotte's Web, human and animal alike, inhabit a world where it's easy to believe that the extraordinary dwells in every moment, that a pig really can be radiant, a spider beautiful, a rat trustworthy. And each and every one of them has better manners and more to say than the animals in Alpha Dog.
