New in bargain theaters this week, a slew of movies aimed at teens and tweens, and an Oscar winner in a version expurgated to be more appropriate for them. ---
The King's Speech took home multiple 2011 Oscars, including Best Picture, for its story of the stammer-afflicted British prince (Best Actor Colin Firth) and his relationship with an unconventional speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush). In a controversial move, the R-rated version that won all the accolades was pulled from theaters in favor of a PG-13 version with fewer swears. If you're getting less of the movie, it only seems fair to pay less.
The rest of this week's offerings seem interchangeably targeted mostly at adolescents. Justin Bieber: Never Say Never offers a 3-D concert-slash-biography of the angelic pop star; Beastly soggily adapts the young-adult novel giving a contemporary spin to the Beauty and the Beast tale; and Red Riding Hood also provides a new spin on an old legend, and does so even more ineptly than Beastly.
Varying only in that it targeted teen boys rather than teen girls, I Am Number Four also adapts a young adult novel, this one about an alien refugee on earth (Alex Pettyfer, also in Beastly) trying to evade the creatures who want to kill him. He's blandly annoying enough that I kind of sympathize with the killer creatures.