BATMAN BEGINS

New this week:

Dracula Untold—It’s hard to believe that there are any versions of the Dracula myth that remain untold. There have been earlier origin stories—the slightly underrated Dracula 2000 offered a particularly audacious and amusing one, for instance. But this may just be the first Dracula movie to suggest that the Count embraced vampirism in a spirit of noble self-sacrifice.

Set in the 1400s, Dracula Untold depicts Vlad Dracula, played by the pleasantly studly Welshman Luke Evans, as a gallant warrior-prince who loves his waiflike wife (Sarah Gadon) and his stouthearted son (Art Parkinson). Sure, he used to be called “Vlad the Impaler” for his treatment of his enemies, but now he just wants to protect his beloved Transylvania from the Ottoman Turks, by whom he was enslaved as a Janissary when he was a boy. He’s a reformed impaler, you see.

When the Turks show up at his castle, in the middle of Easter dinner no less, demanding, along with their usual monetary tribute, a new legion of boy slaves including Vlad’s own son, the Prince takes to a mountain cave where he once had an encounter with an ancient, desiccated vampire (Charles Dance). This old fiend gives him vampiric powers sufficient to bedevil the Turks, and if he can refrain from slaking his thirst for blood for three days, he’ll become human again, no harm no foul.

Everything goes smoothly. Vlad, family and country live happily ever after.

Just kidding. All manner of melodrama ensues. It’s about as historically convincing as a Ren Faire, but then, unlike life probably was in actual medieval times, Ren Faires can be fun.

So, despite a few missteps, is Dracula Untold. Some of its flourishes are grandly over-the-top—Dracula doesn’t just turn into a bat here, but a whole swarm of bats—and all are unembarrassed. At one point a groveling character says “Yes, Master”; at another a character flings back his head and howls “Nooooo!” These clichés are executed with no apparent irony, and the audience snickers a little. But we keep on watching.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day—If you’ve seen Steve Carell’s encounter with the very fake-looking kangaroo in the TV ads, it’s understandable if you’re dreading taking your kids to this movie. Not to worry, Disney’s adaptation of Judith Viorst’s 1972 children’s book favorite is nothing special, but it’s a lot better than its own marketing makes it look.

Alexander, the third of four kids, undergoes various humiliations and social catastrophes on his 12th birthday, and so do his older siblings and parents. Jennifer Garner and Steve Carell are funny as his impatient working Mom and his unemployed, doggedly optimistic Dad. Ed Oxenbould has an everykid naturalness as Alexander, Dylan Minnette is his confident older brother, and Kerris Dorsey, wonderful as Brad Pitt’s daughter in Moneyball, is his theatrical older sister. I liked how they didn’t mindlessly bicker; without pushy sentimentality, the ensemble manages to suggest a loving family.

Plenty of the gags in Alexander don’t work, but plenty do, and director Miguel Arteta sets a relaxed pace and tone that allows the charm of the actors to get across. And the Disney-ish atmosphere isn’t too oppressive—this is, at any rate, the first Disney movie I can recall with an overt penis joke.

The lesson that Alexander arrives at, of course, is that any day among loved ones in which nobody ends up at the morgue or in the hospital or in jail is a wonderful, beautiful, not bad, very good day. You can’t start teaching that soon enough.

JANE'S ADDICTION

The mid-‘90s were salad days for Jane Austen fans. 1995 alone saw the release of screen adaptations of Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, as well as Clueless, that splendid modern-dress teen-comedy adaptation of Emma; a more straightforward version of Emma hit screens the following year.

But ’95 is a banner year for Austen freaks above all, perhaps, because of the BBC television version of Pride and Prejudice, starring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. Much as I like Firth, I personally prefer the 2005 big-screen version, with Keira Knightly as Elizabeth Bennett and Matthew MacFayden as Darcy. But Austen fanatics, I understand, overwhelmingly prefer Firth’s dour interpretation.

This is certainly the case with Jane Hayes, the heroine of the new film Austenland. Jane (Keri Russell), an American who sleeps in a bedroom full of 18th-Century-style kitsch, owns a cardboard cutout of Firth in his Darcy get-up—a departing boyfriend punches this two-dimensional rival in the kisser.

Now in her 30s, Jane’s pretty sure that her Austen fixation isn’t getting her anywhere. Nonetheless, she invests her meager life savings on a trip to England, to a theme resort in a beautiful country manor that offers an immersion in period role-playing for Austen freaks, with actors playing variously dashing or snobbish or buffoonish types in the author’s vein. Once Jane gets there—after walking through the terminal at Heathrow in Regency drag—the Boss Lady (Jane Seymour) coldly makes it clear that her budget package puts her squarely in “poor relation” territory in terms of the experience.

In other words, though unwittingly, she finds herself in the position of an Austen heroine. And like such a heroine, she soon finds potential romance—both with a “stable boy” (Bret McKenzie) and with a starchy, Darcy-ish “officer” (J. J. Feild). But where, if at all, does fantasy end and true love begin?

Based on a 2007 novel by Shannon Hale, Austenland was co-written (with Hale) and directed by Jerusha Hess, half of the husband-and-wife team that made Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre and the underrated Gentlemen Broncos. The theme—American Anglophilia—is a promising one for an eccentric romantic comedy. It’s even a bit timely, considering the recent Yank media preoccupation with the new Whelp of Windsor.

The movie also has the benefit of beautiful Keri Russell, an actress who isn’t used as often or as well as she could be—her last real triumph was in Adrienne Shelly’s superb Waitress in 2007. Russell isn’t showy, but there’s a directness to her, and she has an open, responsive romantic manner. In her scenes with the guys here, Jane wears a living-in-the-moment smile of delight simply that something is going on in her life, and she’s quite beguiling.

Russell also rescues the film from utter triviality. Magnificent as Jane Austen’s novels are, there’s something irritating about modern women using these stories, in which near-powerless women can be banished to scorn and irrelevance if they fail to obtain a marriage, as fantasy fodder—willingly embracing social strictures to which Austen, with all her briliance and imagination, had little choice but to conform.

I don’t know if Hale’s novel touches on this, but in the movie it shows up only tacitly, in the liberating use of Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” on the soundtrack, and more importantly in the way Russell’s Jane seems to recoil from even play-acting these situations once she’s in them. (A friend of mine went to Afghanistan as a journalist, and was surprised at how demeaning she found the requirement that she keep her head covered.)

Russell can’t save Austenland, sad to say. After a pretty amusing initial setup, the film just doesn’t come together. Much of the comedy in the Hess pictures arises from a sort of wobbly, not-firing-on-all-cylinders timing to the gags. It can be devastatingly funny when it works, as in Napoleon Dynamite, or in the rather hilarious amateur play sequence in Austenland. But this comic style is always in danger of deflating, and it does so, big time, in Austenland’s homestretch.

The later scenes, which try to resolve the romance through various revelations and declarations, fall with a thud. They aren’t funny, they aren’t romantic, for me they weren’t even fully coherent. And they’re only poignant in an external sense—you feel a little bad for the actors, trying like crazy to make this stuff work, while Hess’s camera stares unhelpfully at them.

Austenland is a mess, and for me it failed altogether as a romance, but it’s by no means without laughs. Aside from Russell’s performance, my favorite aspect of the film is the performance of Jennifer Coolidge as Elizabeth Charming, a game middle-aged party girl who befriends Jane. Elizabeth Charming doesn’t know the difference between Jane Austen and Austin, Texas; she went to the resort because she knows the Empire dresses will show her figure off to good advantage.

But she dives right into the spirit of the resort, spouting ridiculous improvisation in an absurd accent, and trying to get everyone involved in the fun. Miss Charming is shameless, but she’s just trying to help things along, and the same could be said for Coolidge.