'Beautiful Creatures' review: Full of love, not that pretty
Matt Pais, @mattpais  RedEye movie critic  February 13, 2013
**1/2 (out of four)  Among many reasons the “Twilight” movie
franchise didn’t work, Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Bella
(Kristen Stewart) make lousy characters, separately and
together. Be it the script, the performances, whatever: The
couple personified “blah.”  That’s not the case in “Beautiful
Creatures,” the latest big-screen adaptation of a popular teen
novel, this one by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl.  Ethan (Alden
Ehrenreich) is an ordinary teenager starting his junior year and
longing to get out of small-town Gatlin, S.C. New girl in town
Lena (Alice Englert) is a caster—essentially a witch, though
that’s not the preferred term—and, like Edward’s take on Bella,
she fears she may hurt Ethan if he gets too close.  But the
passion of teen romance trumps inhibitions or otherworldly
power-based rules, and Ethan and Lena can’t imagine being more
than a few feet apart. He envies her tr