Stuffing the archives is a slow and sometimes seemingly pointless task, but with Evan Rachel Wood‘s birthday and her new film, King of California, both looming, it seemed the right time for this re-posted review of Pretty Persuasion, originally published upon its theatrical release in 2005. To wit:

Director Marcos Siega’s Pretty
Persuasion has a streak of originality a mile long and about an
inch deep. A sort of forked-tongue, high school mash-up of Clueless and To Die
For, with the respective if disparate quality of each of those films
canceling each other out in a tidal wave of tangy smirk, it serves as a
bracing, in-your-face reminder that creativity and quality need not be mutually
exclusive.

Thirteen‘s
Evan Rachel Wood, above left), a self-involved and casually cruel diva-in-training given to
proclamations like, “I’m tolerant of all races, but I’m glad I was born white.”
The daughter of a successful but zonked and anti-Semitic businessman (James
Woods, chewing scenery in a frequently open bathrobe) with an equally out-there
new trophy wife (Jaime King), Kimberly attends Roxbury High School, an elite
Beverly Hills private institution, and it’s no surprise given her surroundings
and preternatural maturity and influence that she wants to be an actress — or,
more to the point, a celebrity. Orbiting around Kimberly are two satellites,
her dim best friend Brittany Wells (Elizabeth Harnois, above right) and naïve newcomer Randa
Azzouni (Adi Schnall, above center), an Arab girl whom Kimberly takes under her wing with a
doting sanctimoniousness.

To advance her popular agenda, Kimberly hatches a
plot to frame their nebbishy English instructor, Percy Anderson (Ron
Livingston), for sexual molestation. As the accusation moves toward trial, the
scheme ensnares local lesbian reporter Emily Klein (Jane Krakowski) and
Brittany’s boyfriend Troy (Stark Sands) in an expanding daisy chain of
blackmail, double-crosses and back-biting (large portions of the third act seem
nipped from Wild Things).

The young Wood’s work as Kimberly is undeniably the
stuff of a major talent, but it comes in the service of empty vehicle of
flattened emotional affect. Director Siega cut his teeth on music videos and
Miramax’s Underclassman,
but never elevates Pretty
Persuasion to anything more than the sum of its arch,
self-satisfied parts. (Incidentally, the music, by Gilad Benamram, is a
straight-up rip-off of Angelo Badalamenti’s work on Twin Peaks.)

This may not always be Siega’s fault. Skander
Halim’s script is a real mouthful; at times delightfully bitchy, it touches on
a wide swath of hot-button issues and topics, and like, say, Donnie Darko, hearteningly
shows the cruel underbelly of adolescent life in a way that mainstream studio
films do not, and also the way that teens craftily exploit one another’s
obliviousness. Any and all sort of relation to the outside world, though, rings
false and willfully strident. The movie likes to “shock” with lewd and
politically incorrect off-the-cuff remarks, 15-year-old Kimberly’s sexual favor
brokering and a scene with Woods diddling himself.

The problem is that this none of this ever comes
across as anything more than superficial. That would be fine were Pretty Persuasion a much
broader comedy. But the movie flails, rowdily and flagrantly, in its efforts to
infuse drama into the proceedings, and by the time a death occurs and
ostensibly genuine tears are shed during the third act, one can barely stand to watch. (Samuel Goldwyn/Roadside Attractions, R, 110 mins.)

Well, it’s a quarter ’til one in the morning and I just heard some strange noise outside, so it seems as good a time as any to re-post a review of the recent remake of The Amityville Horror, originally published upon its theatrical release in 2005 by a now-defunct (and deservedly so) publication. To wit:

The curtains billow early and often in The Amityville Horror, a self-serious
fright flick, full of all the familiar genre touchstones, that tries to play up
a classy, non-fiction pedigree, but ironically comes off as more dunderheaded
and wildly implausible than any number of slapdash, generic horror siblings. A
nastily forceful and artless rehash of movies both much better (The Shining) and just as bad (Hide and Seek), The Amityville Horror is a remake of the 1979 film starring James
Brolin and Margot Kidder, and based on a true story — “the true story” the title card trumpets (like it’s a friggin’
chronicling of the Revolutionary War or something). It jabs at the audience
insistently from the get-go, mixing earsplitting sound design and ghoulish and
gory visual smash-cuts picked up off the cutting room floors of various Nine
Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson music videos.

The film is set in 1975 in the Deer
Park suburbs of Long Island.
Contractor George Lutz (a buff, bearded Ryan Reynolds) has found love with
Kathy (Melissa George), and with her comes a ready-made family consisting of
three kids — surly pre-teen Billy, young daughter Chelsea and little,
perpetually dewy-eyed Michael — since Kathy’s first husband has passed away.
When they find an expansive fix-’er-upper on the edge of town for a song, they
wonder what the catch is. Come to find out that in the house scruffy, bearded
Ronald DeFeo shotgunned to death six family members — his parents and four
siblings — in their sleep, supposedly under instruction from demons. Never ones
to pass up a deal, however, the Lutz clan rolls the die (wink, wink) and moves
in anyway. Bad idea… George’s grasp on reality becomes more and more tenuous
(as evidenced by Reynolds’ bloodshot contacts), and he starts hearing messages
to kill his family. Chelsea, meanwhile, falls under the dangerous sway of dead
little Jodie DeFeo, for some reason not stopping to ask her about the bullet
hole in her head.

The concept of horror on display in The Amityville Horror is a loose one, applied arbitrarily to
whatever works in the moment, be it a vaguely anthropomorphized house,
apparitions of rotting-faced dead girls or bloody, tortured visages and ripped
open ribcages. Mostly, though, it merely means sound effects editors paid by
the decibel. Scott Kosar’s script never manages to rise too far above
preposterousness, be it in big scenes (separate scenes of confrontation for the
children when Rachel Nichols’ pin-up stoner babysitter meets an unfortunate
fate) or small (a ridiculous expository microfiche headline, “DeFeo kills
family after 28 days,” meant to give parallel urgency to the current
proceedings).

Meanwhile, director Andrew Douglas — yet another esteemed
commercial veteran making his feature debut — doesn’t have the requisite dark,
foreboding flair to match The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre remake, another Kosar adaptation exec-produced by Michael
Bay. The result is a movie with game efforts from Reynolds and George, and a
few early effective passages, but one whose finale is so stupid as to
completely erase any trace remembrances of tangible emotional consequences. The
only lasting horror in The Amityville
Horror is in what it takes from your wallet. (MGM/Dimension, R, 83
minutes)