“Dear Diary … DION!!! Oh Help!!! I’m so excited, I think I’ll just DIE!!! I was runnin’ around, chokin’ and cryin’ and yellin’ and screamin’. Wow wow cute cute CUTE!! you woulda died how he said ‘dum didla dum didla dum didla dum.’ I was rolling over inside, I was cryin’, I love him so much … ”
– Pamela Des Barres, diary entry, May 9, 1962
“I have always listened to Dion’s voice. It’s inside my body and my head forever.”
— Lou Reed
One of the great pleasures of pop music is surrendering all consciousness to it: Falling asleep to a voice drifting from the radio, the speakers, the headphones can make you feel as if it’s soaking into your very bones. In all of pop music, there are many, many voices I’m happy to fall asleep to. But somewhere at the top of the list is Dion.
As most casual listeners know it, the story of Dion DiMucci goes like this: Born in the Bronx in 1939, he was first the lead singer of the late-era doo-wop outfit Dion and the Belmonts and later a solo rock ‘n’ roll star with the early-’60s urban-swagger hits “Runaround Sue,” “The Wanderer” and “Ruby Baby.” He dropped off the map around the time of the British Invasion and reappeared in 1968 with the top-10 hit “Abraham, Martin and John,” after which he disappeared again.
If you listen to the story told by the charts — never a good idea, but we all do it sometimes — that’s pretty much the story of Dion. But the voice that slips into my dreams belongs not solely to the chart-marking Dion but also to another, secret Dion, an artist who sang in the margins when practically no one (in his home country, at least) was listening. This Dion was an Italian-American New York tough guy influenced less by Frank Sinatra than by Hank Williams, who was his earliest and greatest idol. The finger-popping city sound of Dion and the Belmonts is magnificent, but Dion, a city kid by birth, knew intuitively that his sound came from deep in the country. And that’s why, when I listen to Dion, even in the dead center of summer, with steaming city sidewalks right outside my window, I always smell fresh air, and I breathe it in.
- – - – - – - – - – - -
What does a city kid ever really know about the country? Dion couldn’t answer that question himself. At age 13 he heard Williams on a radio show and fell in love. “I’d sing ‘Honky Tonk Blues’ or ‘Jambalaya’ on the stoop,” Dion told Anthony DeCurtis in the New York Times. “My friends would go, ‘What’s honky-tonk blues?’ I’d go, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, what’s jambalaya?’ ‘I don’t know.’ I didn’t know what they were, but they sounded so good coming out of my mouth.”
But you don’t need to work too hard to figure out why a city kid like Dion would fall for Hank Williams. Dion lived in a tough neighborhood — he ran with a gang called the Fordham Baldies — and he knew the code of the street backward and forward. (He used heroin for 15 years, starting at age 14, and his father, a lackadaisical and largely unemployed puppeteer, taught him how to shoplift.) What kind of music do you make when it’s OK to sing about your feelings but not to talk about them? Dion’s first hit single, the 1958 “I Wonder Why,” made with the incomparable Belmonts (Angelo D’Aleo, Freddie Milano and Carlo Mastrangelo), is by no means a country record, but it holds the answer.
Opening with the fusillade of word-sounds that’s the currency of doo-wop — the rat-a-tat that cupid’s bow would make if it were a submachine gun — “I Wonder Why” busts out of the gate. The Belmonts swing through a few bars of scatted harmony, talking to us partly in words but mostly in pictures of sounds; the clitter-clink of a toylike piano kicks in. The song’s charm is instantaneous and vital. And then Dion appears, and forget how fantastically beautiful he looked at the time, with his sea-crest pompadour and daydreamy eyes: Here, he’s the sound of a heartthrob.
How could any girl even think of doing him wrong? And yet it’s his central worry. “When I’m away, I wonder what you do/I wonder why, I’m sure you’re always true.” He sings of doubt as if it were the glue that makes love work, and his conviction is strong. “I wonder why I love you like I do/Is it because I think you love me too?” For all the creamy smoothness of his vocals, he approaches this particular problem with the stance of a street tough. His assessment of what’s worrying him is immediate and direct, not overwrought. He doesn’t milk the song for sympathy — you can almost see his brow furrowed as he tries to figure the damn girl out — which is precisely what makes it so affecting.
Like so much of the greatest pop music, and that includes country music, “I Wonder Why” is a simple song about complicated feelings. Although Dion and the Belmonts’ later “A Teenager in Love” (1959) and “Where or When” (1960) were bigger hits, it’s easy to see why “I Wonder Why” is so often cited as one of the most exhilarating doo-wop records ever made. But it was also one that edged up against the end of the doo-wop era, an era that had been shaped most significantly by black vocal groups of the ’40s and ’50s like the Ink Spots and the Platters. By 1961 Dion, more interested in exploring the limits of rock ‘n’ roll than the nuances of vocal harmonizing, split (amicably) with the Belmonts to make rock records on his own. (They would record together again over the years, and the Belmonts went on to make one of the great treasures of doo-wop, the 1973 valentine “Cigars Acappella Candy.”)
Dion recorded a string of hits through 1963, among them a tomcat-cool cover of the Drifters’ “Ruby Baby” (1963). But before that, he’d hit with the double whammy of “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer,” released just months apart at the tail end of 1961. These two songs came to define his reputation more than any others, and there are some good reasons for that. “Runaround Sue,” a warning about a girl who’s no good, served up by a guy whom you suspect might not be much better, is a cautionary rumination on the passions and fickle behavior that devil rock ‘n’ roll can incite. My earliest response to the song, which I must have first heard as a toddler? Sign me up! “Runaround Sue” is about a very bad girl, one whom Dion, in his velvet tones, paints so deliciously — a Rubens vixen, a Titian hottie, a Goya go-go girl — that she’s irresistible to men and women alike. What guy wouldn’t want to meet her? What girl wouldn’t want to be her? (She probably wears eyeliner!) “Runaround Sue” enfolds nothing as lofty as the idea of living a good life or reaching for your dreams. It is simply about the possibility — so much more delectable than the reality — of being very, very bad.
“The Wanderer” is “Runaround Sue’s” natural twin, a song about the male counterpart to an inconstant girl. This is the kind of guy who’ll never settle down; “I hug ‘em and I squeeze ‘em, they don’t even know my name.” Dion sings the words brazenly; the melody is pure ’50s stripper music, and he’s the beefcake on the menu. Dion doesn’t allow a scrap of doubt to creep into his vocals. He doesn’t need it, with lyrics like “With my two fists of iron, I’m goin’ nowhere” — although Dion has said that the last part of the lyric was supposed to be “and a bottle of beer,” which was changed only because the song wouldn’t have gotten on the radio otherwise. Even so, the singer is always the butt of the joke — “The Wanderer” is all self-deprecation, wrapped up with a Chippendale’s bow tie. And as a companion to “Runaround Sue,” “The Wanderer” is perfect, highlighting the gentlemanly honor of the earlier song. After all, Dion may be tough on his Runaround Sue, but he affords her endless measures of glamour. His Wanderer is a tattooed boy toy, so pumped up on his own desirability that you actually start to wonder: Does he have trouble getting it up?
And still, you love them both. How can you not?
- – - – - – - – - – - -
If we’re reckoning by those almighty Billboard charts, Dion’s story as one of the most extraordinary singers of rock ‘n’ roll pretty much ends there, save for his brief resurgence with the 1968 “Abraham, Martin and John,” a gorgeous, mournful paean to fallen heroes that resonated with its audience at the time. By 1968, Dion had kicked his heroin and drinking habits. (He also had a spiritual reawakening, returning to the Roman Catholic faith in which he was raised; in the 1980s he recorded several inspirational albums.) He had been recording right along through the ’60s, and the material from that era shows that he in no way clung to his old teen-idol image. If anything, he was gunning to escape it.
Dion may not have had hits through most of the ’60s and ’70s. But I’m convinced that some of his best singing appears on the “lost” records Dion made during those years, the ones that casual followers of rock ‘n’ roll aren’t likely to know. Dion has recorded a wealth of material over the years, and continues to make new records. There are certain albums, like the 1976 “Streetheart” or the 1971 “You’re Not Alone” that sound unshaped and undistinguished. The best route to mining the unheralded glory of Dion — especially considering that so many Dion records are now out of print — is to pick up either the two-disc retrospective of Dion’s years at Columbia (1962 to 1968) “The Road I’m On,” or better yet, the three-disc Capitol set “Dion: King of the New York Streets.”
To understand the Dion of the ’60s and ’70s, all you have to do is trace the route back to Hank Williams. Like Williams, Dion could turn out a ballad as smooth as lemon chiffon pie or an egg cream (take your pick), and slip in a jagged, tear-drop-shaped note of melancholy just when you least expected it. Although he was never a country singer, Dion didn’t shy away from the raw emotion of country, and some of his blues recordings are equal to (or better than) anything the bands of the British Invasion imported back to these shores.
Dion was recording Willie Dixon blues numbers like the now-standard “Spoonful” in 1965. English musicians may have been noodling around with the blues for years, but in 1965, how many white American pop singers, least of all one who’d been a teen idol just two years before, gave two cents about Willie Dixon? Dion wasn’t any sort of blues pioneer, but it’s important to note that he didn’t change his singing or his choice of material simply to follow trends: He followed nothing but his own internal compass, set in place long before “I Wonder Why” or “The Wanderer” hit the charts. And when he covered Dylan numbers like “Baby, I’m in the Mood for You” (1965), he never made the mistake of imitating him: He always sounded, unmistakably, like Dion.
And his use of drugs and alcohol notwithstanding, he also sounded better and better — or, at the very least, more seasoned and more intriguing. By 1964, the straightforward confidence of the teen heartthrob was yesterday’s news. Against the rubbery chords of “Spoonful,” Dion nuzzles right up to eroticism, practically working himself into a dream state. The song’s sexual, narcotic and even religious metaphors are indistinguishable and intertwined. “Just a little spoon of your precious love will satisfy my soul,” Dion growls, like a man in the desert crawling toward a soda-fountain mirage. Dion was no doubt in the middle of his own personal desert at the time; if this rubbed-raw “Spoonful” is one of its legacies, we should both treasure it, and be happy he got out.
It was only natural that Dion would become a folkie of sorts in the ’60s, but his good instincts seemed to keep him away from the messy unctuousness that marked so much of the genre. His 1969 version of Tom Paxton’s “I Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound” is trance-inducingly gorgeous. The song is simply but beautifully arranged, with a central motif of Byrds-like guitars that seem to hover and flutter in the air like golden ribbons. Dion’s singing, dusky and sweet, is wonderful, but the wholeness of the song is testament to Dion’s skill as a musician: In the old days, he had been a teen idol who could not only sing but also play guitar, and he knew how songs should be put together.
If the public wasn’t buying the records, there were always a select few who were listening. Dion’s lush, jangling 1966 “My Girl the Month of May” reads like a cross between a Beach Boys love song and an old English ballad (“Your eyes are like green water/Your hair is long and flowing”). It seems even more like the latter in the version that Fairport Convention recorded in 1972 — another case of Englishmen (and women) recognizing the value and beauty of American music while it languishes, washed up, on its own shores.
Thank God, then, for Englishmen who love their Dion. The British label Ace has released a number of long-lost Dion LPs, among them the superb 1975 Phil Spector-produced “Born to Be With You.” The record was never released in the states, allegedly because of Spector-related legal tangles. And Dion himself doesn’t care much for it. When British journalist Tom Cox, a great fan of the record, asked Dion about the record in the London Daily Telegraph, Dion said, “I don’t think we ever really finished that. It kind of majored on the minors. A lot of the focus went on the show-business thing and not enough went on the music.”
The downside of working with a megalomaniac genius like Spector notwithstanding, musicians may not always be the best judges of their own work. But sometimes other musicians are very good at spotting the genius in an underappreciated work. For the record, Pete Townshend has named “Born to Be With You” his favorite album, ever.
And Dion’s singing on the title track alone is remarkable. The story of a man coming to realize where home is, “Born to Be With You” virtually shivers with tenderness, and not the easy kind — the kind born of loads of hard living and loneliness.
Dion might have made a similar record if he’d had an easier life — but it wouldn’t have been the same record. Dion, now 62, lives in Florida with his wife of more than 30 years, Susan, recording and performing when the mood strikes him, but no longer allowing his career to determine the rhythm of his life. “I want to rock till I drop,” Dion has said. “I love rock and roll music. It keeps you young.”
And it can work the same trick on us: In her memoir “I’m With the Band,” groupie extraordinaire Pamela Des Barres tells of her first big rock ‘n’ roll crush. She wore a heart around her neck that said “Dion 4-ever.” I don’t think Lou Reed ever had one of those (although with Lou, you never know), but he definitely understands the sentiment. Once a singer like Dion gets to you, he’s inside your body and your head forever.
This is the hardest piece I’ve ever had to write for Salon: my last.
When Joyce Millman — at the time just an acquaintance, but more than that a pop-music and television critic I’d long admired — contacted me sometime in early 1996 about the possibility of writing for a new publication she and a bunch of other San Francisco Examiner exiles were starting, I was intrigued. Until I found out the publication was online only. At the time, I was a full-time magazine copy editor by day and a freelance writer by night: If it wasn’t in print, it wasn’t real.
At that point, we didn’t yet know just how old Old Media really was. But the idea of transferring the skills and principles of Old Media onto the Web intrigued me. And even if Salon, as an online-only magazine, wasn’t “real,” the money its founder, David Talbot, was willing to pay its writers, was — the fees weren’t princely, but definitely fair, particularly for a start-up. So I made one tiny leap as a freelancer in 1996 that turned into a bigger one three years later, when I was hired at Salon full-time. My friends at the business magazine, in Boston, where I was working at the time — a job I loved but was ready to leave — urged me to rethink my decision. Salon was a start-up; it wasn’t stable. I might move to New York, where David was assembling an East Coast staff, and it could all fall apart the next day.
It didn’t, and it hasn’t, though no publication — online or in print — has had an easy time of it these past few years. When I was a journalism student in the 1980s, if you had told me that by 2010 it would be nearly impossible for a smart, experienced professional to make a living wage as a journalist or editor, I’d have accepted it only if you’d told me that by that time, we’d also be zooming around in flying cars, like the Jetsons. Journalism, as a profession, is in danger of dying; I’m still waiting for that flying car. And lest you think I’m going to hijack this space for a speech about the death of film criticism, I need to say that, realistically, the world could survive without full-time movie critics. But if dedicated, disciplined, paid journalists disappear, we’re headed for some very dark times.
Over the years Salon has strived to make a place for serious writers, editors and journalists, and it continues to do so. I’m astounded when I stop to think about the number of superb, conscientious editors with whom I’ve had the pleasure to work, and the many, many terrific, challenging writers with whom I’ve been honored to share space. They’ve humbled me and, I hope, made me better. Salon has also, I must note, always made a place for film criticism, even in times when other outlets were scaling back. In granting me this space — and in allowing me the pleasure of working with the kindest, grooviest and most generous colleague imaginable, Andrew O’Hehir — Salon has made me the most fortunate of movie critics, and even as I move on to a new adventure elsewhere on the Web, my gratitude won’t diminish.
What I’ve written so far is largely about me. But here’s where it becomes all about you. People who are paid to write can gas on all they want about the decline of their profession, but even then we sometimes forget that we’re only half of the equation. We’re nothing without readers, and at Salon I’ve found a truly passionate, engaged, challenging audience. You have often inspired me, and I hope I’ve done you justice.
So this is where, with wholly inadequate words, I say thank you: To those who have read me faithfully or even just casually; to those who have written to me personally over the years, widening my world more than you can even imagine; to those who’ve taken the time and care to leave thoughtful, well-reasoned comments instead of just doing the asshole drive-by; to those who have stolen from me (theft is the sincerest form of flattery); and most of all, to those of you who have disagreed with me, often passionately. Because as I’ve said more times than I can count, criticism isn’t about consensus, it’s about engagement. And so bravo, and brava, to you all.
Many of us who fancied ourselves sophisticated in 1981 freely mocked “Clash of the Titans” at the time of its theatrical release: A hokey-looking fantasy that plays fast and loose with Greek mythology, starring a well-oiled Harry Hamlin as brave warrior Perseus and Laurence Olivier as his top-god father, Zeus? No thanks. We were too busy oohing and ahhing over the prim aesthetics of “Chariots of Fire” to fall for anything so obviously fake as a flying white horse.
Since then, many of us have seen the error of our ways, and we now know what little kids who were dazzled by watching “Clash of the Titans” on TV (it was a staple of HBO in the early days) have always known. Directed by Desmond Davis and with stop-motion special effects by the great Ray Harryhausen, the first “Clash of the Titans” is an unself-conscious treasure of fantasy filmmaking. Harryhausen’s creatures — from his feathery-winged Pegasus to his fearsome yet sympathetic sea beast the Kraken — are low-tech by today’s standards. Yet within their specially created universe, they’re wholly alive, not disposable. Their fantastically unreal qualities demand a measure of engagement from the viewer, and it’s that engagement — not the amount of money or time spent on their creation — that gives them life.
Say goodbye to all that with the new 3-D “Clash of the Titans,” in which Sam Worthington’s Perseus struts around importantly in a Utilikilt, Pegasus is something of an afterthought (and is black instead of white), and Zeus and Hades are played by the Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee versions of Olivier, Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes. And unlike the original — which, in a crazy stroke of genius, allowed Shakespearean thespians like Claire Bloom and Maggie Smith, plus Bond babe Ursula Andress, to mix it up as jealous goddesses — the new “Clash of the Titans” is frightfully low on babes. Gemma Arterton and Alexa Davalos — as, respectively, Io and Andromeda, the two beauties who vie for Perseus’ stolid soldier’s heart — are comely enough, but there’s no sensuous glow about them. They’re eye candy, not enchantresses.
Of course, lamenting that the old “Clash” is so much better than the new one will take us only so far. Any remake has to stand on its own merits. That said, “Clash of the Titans” still sucks. The story — the script is by Travis Beacham, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi — is unruly and unnecessarily complicated: Perseus may be the son of Zeus, but he’s been raised by human parents (played all too briefly in the movie’s early scenes by Pete Postlethwaite and Elizabeth McGovern). When they’re killed by Hades, god of the underworld, he stomps around for a bit, looking angry. Then he decides to lead a mission, with the help of some hotshot soldiers from Argos (the hottest of these is played by Mads Mikkelson; less hot is gangly, confused-looking Nicholas Hoult), to defeat the god who killed his family. Meanwhile, Neeson’s Zeus (clad in a sizzling-white, headache-inducing suit of armor) and Fiennes’ Hades (scowling as he sports the ever-popular bald head with long fringe look) duke it out over something or other. And Perseus and his crew get on with the business of fending off giant scorpions, beheading the serpent-tressed Medusa (a CGI creature modeled from the face and form of fashion model Natalia Vodianova) and, ultimately, sending the Kraken packin’.
The Kraken is big all right, and his design — a small, turtlish head perched on a gargantuan body — owes a debt, as so many modern movie creatures do, to H.R. Giger’s design for “Alien.” But this Kraken is disappointing; there’s no glamour or mystery to him. He’s overscaled and underwhelming, and even in 3-D, he lacks dimension. The director of “Clash of the Titans” is kooky Frenchman Louis Leterrier, and based on some of the intentionally over-the-top pictures he’s made in the past (including the gorgeously melodramatic “Danny the Dog”), he isn’t necessarily a bad choice to breathe new life into an old favorite. But the picture is loaded with dimwitted proving-your-manhood dialogue — “This isn’t your fight!” one of Perseus’ girlies exclaims, to which he responds, with all the expressiveness of a green-plastic army man, “Someone has to take a stand!” — and not even the picture’s aggressive special effects are enough to distract us from it. “Clash of the Titans” was converted to 3-D after it was completed, and I wonder if it wouldn’t be more enjoyable as a straightforward 2-D feature: The use of 3-D renders the action muddier and more indistinct than it might otherwise be, and the movie’s fantasy vistas, of seaside cliffs and rugged desertlike terrain, don’t look particularly distinctive in the retrofitted format.
The fact that some genius at Warner Bros. decided that a 2-D “Clash of the Titans” just wouldn’t be good enough for movie audiences — or, more likely, recognized that the extra dough moviegoers have to fork over for 3-D glasses would dramatically pad the grosses — suggests that Hollywood thinks it’s got us just where it wants us. We want spectacle at the movies, as we always have; we want action and drama and escape.
But what about everything Hollywood, with movies like this “Clash of the Titans,” is failing to give us? The movie is big all right. But where’s the magic? And where, dare I ask, is the eroticism? We barely get a kiss between Worthington and Arterton, not that I particularly wanted one. On the other hand, in the original, we see the spirit of Andromeda (played by Judy Bowker) being carried off in a golden cage by a winged beastie, as her left-behind body sleeps behind a sheer, sparkly curtain. The image is lush, unsettling, dreamily evocative. The new “Clash of the Titans” is supposed to stand for progress, and the promise of huge profits, as we purportedly stand at the forefront of a 3-D revolution. Instead it’s a symbol of everything we’ve lost. But at least it reminds us that our 2-D dreams can’t be so easily replaced.
Movies based on Nicholas Sparks’ novels have gotten a bad name, and unfairly so: As source material they’ve at least helped prolong the life of an endangered movie species, the romantic melodrama. Pictures like “Nights in Rodanthe,” “Dear John” and “The Notebook” may have their flaws, but in cineplexes crowded with carelessly made action pictures and, increasingly, flashy-but-empty 3-D features, they at least cling to some tatters of a movie tradition forged by Douglas Sirk and Max Ophuls.
But not all Sparks adaptations are created equal, and the latest, “The Last Song,” is less equal than most. There are a few decent performances here, most notably that of Greg Kinnear as Steve, a grizzled, beleaguered, divorced dad. But “The Last Song” — which was directed by Julie Ann Robinson, from a screenplay by Sparks and Jeff van Wie — doesn’t even work as passable, tear-loosening melodrama, and the predictable plot mechanics aren’t what make it insufferable. The big problem is Miley Cyrus.
It wasn’t so long ago that Cyrus, as normal preteen/pop star Hannah Montana, became a megastar among the sparkly purse set. And even though plenty of us may have rolled our eyes at Cyrus and her alter-ego character, there’s only so much criticism you can level at a child performer: Cyrus was a cute enough kid, and the reasons for Hannah Montana’s popularity were understandable. Young singers and actresses are by their nature unformed: It’s OK to be somewhat critical of their abilities, but part of their appeal is the idea that they’re still on their way to becoming something more.
But Cyrus is now 17, playing in the tougher arena of grown-ups, and her performance in “The Last Song” suggests she has two expressions at her disposal: Pouty and scowly. Three, if you count squinty. Cyrus plays grumpy high school graduate Ronnie (Miley Cyrus), who spends the summer at her dad’s beach house in Georgia sulking, grumbling and generally making her poor father’s life miserable. And for this she’ll be rewarded by meeting a nice, hunky blond boy, Will (Liam Hemsworth), who genuinely likes her and also happens to be rich. Conflicts will of course ensue.
When I wrote about “Hannah Montana: The Movie” last year, I couldn’t help noticing Cyrus’ vaguely blowsy quality — she seemed to have bypassed dewy, carefree teenage youth and was instead hurtling toward three-kids-and-a-McMansion matronliness. Still, she could just about pass as a kid, in a movie aimed at a pretty young audience. It seemed prudent to give her the benefit of the doubt.
But the suffering she causes in “The Last Song” is just too much. Cyrus’ speaking voice is deep instead of squeaky, which is usually a plus. But this isn’t a throaty purr we’re talking about; it’s more like a three-packs-a-day growl, and it’s gratingly unpleasant. Her diction is a slurry mess, and she speaks every line with an implicit sneer, as if everything, even the script of the movie she’s starring in, is beneath her consideration. Her expression is perpetually bored and restless, as if the only thing she’s got on her mind is getting back to her walk-in closet to assess her vast kingdom of tank tops. This is a performance with all the elegance of a bitten fingernail.
Maybe I’m expecting too much of Cyrus. But “The Last Song” rests heavily on her alleged appeal, and I can’t remember the last time I came across such a singularly charmless teenage performer. I hesitate to even use the word “actress,” because what Cyrus projects here is an unvarnished haughtiness that’s wholly disconnected from the troubled-but-feisty character she’s supposed to be playing. Even as poor pops Kinnear suffers nobly for the camera, Cyrus barrels through the movie as if she were the only person in it. She’s all ego and no alter, although we should probably be grateful we’re not dealing with a split personality here. Please, one is enough.
Despite the outlandish success of the “Shrek” movies, there’s often a sad, also-ran vibe to DreamWorks’ animated movies. “A Shark’s Tale,” “Bee Movie,” Monsters vs. Aliens”: These movies aren’t terrible, and they’re probably reasonably enjoyable for kids. But they’re also, as the English would say, just a little too keen. With their pop-culture references stacked sky-high, their too-cute yet not cute enough characters, they’re tap-dancing as hard as they can to dazzle us with their wit and sophistication, as if to distract us from noticing that they’re so low on charm.
With “How to Train Your Dragon” — which was directed by Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders and adapted from the book by Cressida Cowell — DreamWorks has managed to loosen the screws, at least a little. The writers — a team including DeBlois, Adam F. Goldberg, Chris Sanders, Peter Tolan — have focused more on the story than on loading it with hyper gags, and as a result the movie is both more relaxed and more focused than, for instance, DreamWorks Animation’s last picture, the cluttered and scattershot “Monsters vs. Aliens.” Hiccup (the voice of Jay Baruchel) is a brainy young Viking lad, living in a Viking village that must always be on the lookout for dangerous dragons. Hiccup’s father, the burly, bushy-bearded Stoick the Vast (Gerard Butler), is a brave dragon hunter, and the expectation is that Hiccup will follow in his footsteps. But Hiccup isn’t very good at slaying dragons. And when, one day, he encounters a wounded beastie who’s easy prey, he just can’t bring himself to do the deed. This is a good thing, because the young dragon — whom he names Toothless — becomes a loyal companion who teaches Hiccup that dragons aren’t to be feared and conquered but understood: There are benefits to sharing the world with them, instead of trying to wipe them from the face of the earth.
The picture has a tidy moral, for those who look for such things. It shows, gently enough, that received wisdom should always be questioned, and creatures (or, by extension, people) we might think of as foreign and scary are really much like us. “Everything we know about you guys is wrong,” Hiccup marvels as he comes to learn that Toothless has some very generous food-sharing impulses (he regurgitates a half-eaten fish and nudges it in Hiccup’s direction) and will fall asleep instantly if he’s scratched in a certain way.
“I looked at him, and I saw myself,” Hiccup says of Toothless in a particularly revelatory moment, though I’d hesitate to put too strict a geopolitical reading on “How to Train Your Dragon”: The formerly misunderstood dragons end up as Viking pets — beloved ones, but pets just the same. Beyond its easy-on-the-psyche message, the picture is reasonably pretty to look at. It was designed to be seen in 3-D, which means we often see Hiccup on Toothless’ back, swooping through the air above cloud-laced mountains and through artfully chiseled valleys. In one striking scene the two find themselves part of an air-traffic clog of fellow dragons of all shapes, sizes and varieties, all on their way to a mysterious somewhere.
“How to Train Your Dragon” is low on belabored gags, which makes sitting through it relatively painless (although you’ll have to suspend disbelief enough to reconcile all those Scottish accents tumbling out of Viking mouths — in addition to Butler’s voice, we also hear Craig Ferguson’s). The movie also has a strange, grim twist at the end that’s treated a little too blithely. And it reaffirms a recurring DreamWorks weakness: With one exception, the character design is uninspired. When you’ve seen one scrappy little Viking ragamuffin with a bulbous nose and half-moon smile, you’ve seen them all.
But then there’s Toothless: He may be a dragon, but with his rounded paws and panther-shaped head, there’s also something of the house cat in him — he has the same proportions of civilized dignity and wildness, as well as a tendency to express his affection in offhanded ways. (Remember that regurgitated fish?) Toothless has black Naugahyde skin that makes you want to reach out and touch it; his glowing green eyes are mischievous and appraising but not wholly unfriendly. And he doesn’t speak, which means that Hiccup — and we — must read his expression, the tilt of his ears, the way he swishes his tail, to know what he’s thinking, and even then we can’t be 100 percent sure. Toothless has the one precious ingredient that’s missing from so many of Hollywood’s contemporary animated characters: an air of mystery. For once, instead of spelling everything out for us with constant chatter, DreamWorks has gotten the knack of leaving something unsaid.
It was entirely possible to be a teenage girl in 1975 and have no idea who the Runaways were. But even if you’d never heard them, you wouldn’t have had any trouble understanding what the Runaways were about: This was a bunch of tough-looking Los Angeles girls who may have been brought together by a sleazy, exploitative impresario named Kim Fowley. Nonetheless, their raggedly sensuous sound was a “no” rather than an acquiescent “yes,” the sound of not waiting around for life to happen. They were neither the first nor the last all-girl outfit to refuse to wait around — the Shangri-Las had gotten there before, and Sleater-Kinney would come later, to name just two. But the Runaways’ brash charisma was specific to its era: With their jagged feathered hair and satin jumpsuits, they were girls you wanted to be, less sugar and spice than glamour and sweat.
Floria Sigismondi’s “The Runaways” tells a somewhat fictionalized version of the band’s story. But even though there’s always some rock ‘n’ roll wanker — usually a guy — on hand to volunteer, “I was on the scene, and that’s not how it went down,” the best rock ‘n’ roll movies are less about strict authenticity than about capturing a vibe. And “The Runaways” gets the vibe just right, from its opening shot: As the girl who will become the Runaways’ lead singer, a superfoxy, Bowie-loving 15-year-old sunshine-blonde named Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), sneaks around with her twin sister, Marie (Riley Keough), to meet up with some boys, a drop of her menstrual blood hits the pavement. Shortly thereafter, the girls change from their schoolgirl knee-socks and wedgie sandals into glittery, neck-breaking platform shoes they’ve “borrowed” from their mom. These are girls who, to borrow a line Paul Westerberg put into a song many years later, are aching to be.
From there, Sigismondi — who also wrote the screenplay, partly adapted from Currie’s candid and entertaining memoir “Neon Angel” — traces the band’s rise and inevitable implosion, including a scene in which the young Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) totes her guitar to see the school music teacher (played by Robert Romanus, Damone in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”). After unsuccessfully trying to get her to strum a few chords of “On Top of Old Smokey,” he informs her that girls don’t play electric guitar, and you can imagine how well that goes over. Jett, obviously, persists, but the members of the band — including lead guitarist Lita Ford (Scout Taylor-Compton) and Sandy West (Stella Maeve); a fifth character named Robin (Alia Shawkat) was invented for the movie, as a way around legal restrictions surrounding the portrayal of the band’s real-life bassist, Jackie Fox — find their way to one another only with the help of skeezeball genius Fowley. As Michael Shannon plays him — almost too well — Fowley is a greasy, lizardlike operator whose single facial expression is a half-sneer, half-scowl. He rules the band by abuse: He calls the girls his “dogs” and sends them out on grueling tours without giving them enough money for food, let alone paying them an actual wage.
But even though Sigismondi doesn’t exactly gloss over Fowley’s creepitude — and even though it goes without saying that in real life, the Runaways made far too little money off their brief but blazing run, which included a deal with Mercury Records — she recognizes that focusing too much on Fowley’s exploitation of the girls would turn the movie into his story instead of theirs, focusing on their victimhood rather than their triumph. “The Runaways” is, as you’d expect, a portrait of excess, including lots of sex, drugs and rampaging groupies. But its bigger focus is on the transformative powers of rock ‘n’ roll. When Fowley strides up to Cherie in a L.A. club and croons, “I like your style,” he’s picking up on the exact out-of-sight radio signal she’s striving to send: Cherie looks great in her satiny outfit and homemade shag haircut, but it’s her attitude — her half-bored, half-expectant pout — that pushes the look into the stratosphere. Fanning’s Cherie has a “don’t mess with me” aura, but with a great deal of softness around the edges. Sigismondi is extremely conscious of the line between dewy teenage innocence and the hard-edged, used-up look that can take its place seemingly overnight.
Sigismondi — who has directed music videos for the White Stripes and Marilyn Manson — elides some parts of the band’s story and compresses others, but she keeps deft control of the picture’s overall tone: She doesn’t downplay young Cherie’s suffering, caused partly by family problems and partly by just growing up too fast, but she doesn’t waste time playing junior shrink, either. Benoît Debie’s cinematography is L.A.-tawdry when it needs to be and exuberantly glossy when the story calls for it. It is also, in places, beautifully moody and tender, particularly in the affectionate sex scene between Currie and Jett. In her book, Currie writes very simply, and with great protectiveness, about her relationship with Jett: “It ran deep, and at times she was the only one that kept me sane … How do I explain about a person that was my best friend, someone I would confide in like a sister, someone who to me became a strong, sexual attraction? Well, it’s easy … I can leave it by saying that I had moments with a friend that quake me to this day.” In the film, there’s no explicit seduction scene, not even a muted one: Sigismondi instead shows Jett and Currie almost literally drifting toward each other, bathed in low light. The sequence is brushed with tenderness and a druggy, blissed-out eroticism. Sigismondi doesn’t infantilize her subjects by making it look as if they’re merely cuddling, like coy schoolgirls. And the fact that Currie is wearing roller skates makes the moment even more touching: They’re one last vestige of little-girl innocence.
My hunch is that a lot of viewers who have watched Fanning grow up in the movies — many, but probably not all, of them men — are going to feel uncomfortable seeing her in a role that eroticizes her so frankly. But I think that discomfort speaks to the noisy shout of freedom that the Runaways sounded themselves: At what point is a little girl allowed to be not just a young woman, but her own person? Someday she’s going to demand the keys to the car, and not just literally.
That unspoken restlessness is everywhere in “The Runaways,” in the way Stewart captures Jett’s slightly hunched, long-legged stride, and in the way Fanning’s Cherie takes the stage during a show in Japan, wearing a creamy satin bustier and stockings, to sing the band’s jailbait-heartbreaker anthem “Cherry Bomb.” As the real Cherie Currie did, Fanning (who does her own singing in the film) wraps the microphone cord around her leg, only to unwrap it and whip it around again, a snake-charmer routine that’s also an obvious challenge: You think you want this, but can you handle it? That challenge isn’t just a sexual come-on: It’s a basic question about how to move forward the business of living. Teenagers aren’t ready for life, which is exactly why they want to jump in and get on with things. “The Runaways” is all about taking that leap — and being OK with the bruises after the inevitable fall.
Sam Worthington in "Clash of the Titans."(Credit: Jay Maidment) 
Miley Cyrus in "The Last Song." 
Hiccup and Toothless the dragon 
Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning star in The Runaways, a Sundance Films production. 