Beautiful Creatures (2013)

I’m calling it the “Vonnegut Rule.” Anytime a teen drama needs to quickly illustrate its hero is a cool-sensitive outsider, he will be seen reading Vonnegut. Always “Slaughter House Five.” We get that scene moments into “Beautiful Creatures,” another YA adaptation about teens amongst supernatural angst and humanity-ending danger. Our reader is Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich), a high schooler with a DOA mom and MIA dad who falls for the new girl (Alice Englert) in class, because she’s witchy, and has, in fact, invaded Ethan’s dreams for months: Violent memories not his own. I know nothing of the books. But writer/director Richard LaGravenese’s movie peaks midway with a family dining room table fight that literally sends table and room spinning as one silent cousin sits, eating. (Why can’t the film be about him?) The remainder is blasé and anticlimactic, with part of the cast –- Emma Thompson -– camping it up “Batman” TV style, and the rest –- Ehrenreich and Englert –- crying over doomed love, all of them wrestling Southern accents that come and go, often in a single scene. Read some Vonnegut instead, eh? C

Ginger and Rosa (2013)

In 1962 London BFF girls “Ginger and Rosa” (Elle Fanning of “Super 8” and newcomer Alice Englert) do that teen thing that many teens do: Piss on chores and curfew, dabble in romances, and smoke. They also strain under paranoia from the Cuban Missile Crisis and a far closer atomic bomb of the emotional kind involving Ginger’s anarchist dad and fragile mom (Alessandro Nivola and Christina Hendricks). Despite the obvious turn, I won’t spill details, but director/writer Sally Potter (“Orlando”) lights the fuse early. Porter has a beautiful-looking film here, picture-wise, and perfects the myriad details of teens from clothes to petty jealousies. But it’s also top heavy with too many Jiminy Crickets for Ginger. Annette Bening plays a leftist with no purpose in life but to dispel advise to our gal, and the same is true of Ginger’s gay godparents (Timothy Spall and Oliver Platt). More so, the only time a radio plays, it bears only doom and gloom like some Orsen Welles production. (TV, movies, nor newspapers figure at all.) All that said, Fanning is spectacular, a Yank going Brit on screen, and as flawlessly as Streep did Thatcher. B