DARK SHADOWS

“Dark Shadows” is the eighth collaboration between director Tim Burton and star Johnny Depp and the combination that once regularly produced cinematic gold together, has recently started to look tired and uninspired.  With the exception of the absolute masterpiece that is “Sweeney Todd”, the recent pairings of Burton and Depp have failed to ignite the screen like they once did.  Films such as “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory” and “Alice In Wonderland” do not hold a candle to classics like “Edward Scissorhands” or “Ed Wood”, or even “Sleepy Hollow”.  Even “The Corpse Bride”, which is a film I admittedly enjoyed, fails to have the magic of Burton’s films previous.  So will their latest collaboration, an adaptation of a long running vampire soap opera of the same name, continue this downward spiral or will it regain some of the lost magic?

Moving from England to America, young Barnabas Collins follows his mother and father who come to the new world to start a fishing business in Maine.  By the time Barnabas has grown up, the business has became so successful that the port town is named after the family, “Collinsport”, and the family’s wealth has afforded them the opportunity to build a massive mansion named “Collinswood”.  During this time, Barnabas meets the love of his life, Josette, and the two plan to marry.  However this plan is soon thwarted by Angelique, a young maid who Barnabas once had a brief affair with and who also, unbeknownst to him, is a witch.  After being spurred by the news of the upcoming nuptials, Angelique places a curse upon the whole Collins family.  She then goes about killing Barnabas’s parents and makes Josette throw herself off of a cliff to her death.  To ensure Barnabas’s suffering is eternal, the witch then turns the grieving man into a vampire and has him encased in a coffin that is to stay buried for the next 200 years.

When his coffin is finally discovered and excavated, the year is 1972, and the world is a completely different place from the one Barnabas was forcibly removed from.  After feeding on the local townsfolk, Barnabas sets out to find his fishing business almost bankrupt, and his fabulous mansion home, Collinswood, more or less in ruins.  He enters the mansion and discovers that some of his kin have still survived.  Living in the house is the matriarch of the family, Elizabeth Collins Stoddard, her daughter Carolyn, Elizabeth’s brother Roger and his son David, as well as David’s live-in psychiatrist Dr. Julia Hoffman.  The family has also just hired a governess for David named Victoria, who has just moved into the mansion and is also the spitting image of Barnabas’s lost love Josette.  Finally, the last person living on the premises is the always drunk caretaker Willie.  Barnabas explains to his family just who he is and that he plans to bring Collinsport back to the glory days it once knew, while restoring Collinswood back to its original beauty.  This activity soon reaches the awareness of Angelique, who still lives, and upon learning that Barnabas has risen from the grave, she decides to rid him and his family of this earth once and for all.

 Very early on during the development of this film, alarm bells started ringing in regards to whether or not the film would work.  In early interviews, Burton himself explained that the tone of the film was going to be very tricky and he was not sure whether or not he could make it successful.  This sounded like an artist who didn’t have a complete vision of what he wanted in his head, or if he did, was doubting his vision which gave me a reason to be concerned.  However Burton has appeared to be prophetic about the tone, as it was clearly something that the marketing people have struggled with.  For the record I believe that “Dark Shadows” has been very poorly marketed with both the posters and especially the trailer not representing the true tone of the finished product.  In fact it was because of the trailer that I thought that this film was headed to be a disaster, as it was sold as a “fish out of water” comedy, and while that is certainly a part of the film, it really only takes up a minor part of the film’s running time.  The film just isn’t as jokey as the trailer made it out to be, and while I wouldn’t call the film dark by any stretch, the tone isn’t as light as the trailer suggested.  Instead the film works more like the soap opera it is based, with big melodramatic moments filled with suspense, action and yes, laughs.

While the film is loaded with characters, the main thrust of the story has to do with the dark love affair between Barnabas and Angelique, and as such these characters dominate the majority of the screen time.  Johnny Depp is in top form as Barnabas Collins and he once again proves just how great a physical actor he is, giving his vampire character a very distinctive walk, as well as being very expressive with his claw like hands.  I really enjoyed his performance a lot (it recalls other great vampire characters from classics such as the 1931 version of “Dracula” and the silent “Nosferatu”), as he didn’t go as campy with the role as I feared he might, he actually keeps Barnabas quite grounded.  In fact the only problem I had with the Barnabas character was that sometimes the dark make-up that defined his gaunt cheekbones were a bit overdone, especially during scenes of daylight.  While all of the performances within the film are slightly heightened above reality, I really enjoyed some of Depp’s more grandeur soap-opera like line readings (“And…fight…I…shall!”).  Eva Green is luminous as always, she is just a stunning woman to look at, and Burton gives her every opportunity to look gorgeous.  Unfortunately she does not command the screen as well as Depp and as such the chemistry between the two feels far too forced.  Of all the characters, Angelique is played a little too big, and feels a bit over the top at times.  What I did love about the Angelique character was her “broken doll” appearance towards the end of the film.  It is so well done and for me was the visual highlight of the film.

The rest of the cast all handled their roles admirably although some suffer due to the limited screen time of their characters.  Chloe Moretz as Carolyn probably suffers the most and she is almost wasted here in a thankless role.  She has proven herself as a very capable actress in the past (with roles in “Hugo” and especially “Let Me In”), but I believe this may be the worst performance that I have seen her give.  However, the script doesn’t give her much to do.  It was fantastic to finally see Michelle Pfeiffer in another Tim Burton film, because the last time she gave us her fantastic rendition of Catwoman in “Batman Returns”.  While her turn in “Dark Shadows” may not infect the world of pop culture like her Catwoman did, she still gives a great and strong performance as Elizabeth.  She is still as gorgeous as ever and seeing her brandishing a shotgun in the finale was super cool.  Although he had limited work to do in the film, I really liked Jonny Lee Miller’s turn as the slimy and shady Roger, he always impressed when he was on screen.  As usual Helena Bonham Carter gives an odd but rewarding performance as the doctor who may have ulterior motives, but again doesn’t have a load of screen time.  Australian actress Bella Heathcote is great in the dual roles of Josette and Victoria but her character seems to do a disappearing act more than any of the others in the film.  While she has a fair amount of screen time, there are large chunks of the film where her character is just missing, and she only seems to re-emerge when her character can service the plot.  However when she is on screen she displays a charming presence and she has good chemistry with Johnny Depp too.  

The actors actually do a great job with what they have been given which sadly is not much.  Seth Grahame-Smith’s screenplay is definitely the weak point of the film.  While the dialogue gets a pass mark, it is the structure of the film that needed work.  Things seem to happen just out of the blue in this film with no foreshadowing, especially in the mad finale.  Also as I mentioned earlier, characters have a habit of coming and going, showing up when they can move the plot forward only to disappear again.  The other strange thing in “Dark Shadows” is the weird sexual perversion to it.  Now I have not seen the soap opera that the film is based on, so am not sure whether it existed their previous, but it is certainly unique to any Tim Burton film that I have seen (and I have seen them all), so I am attributing it Grahame-Smith’s script.  From this comes one of the most unbelievable and out-of-place fellatio scenes I have ever seen.  Granted the scene is played for laughs, but “Dark Shadows” was not the film for the scene, it is terrible and needed to be trimmed from the final film.

Typical for a Tim Burton film, “Dark Shadows” looks wonderful.  The gothic setting just suits his visual style to a “T” and in this regard he does not disappoint.  After the visual green screen mess of “Alice In Wonderland” it was great seeing the Burton style in full effect once again.  The opening pre-credits scene is classic Burton and is when the film is at its darkest, and it is a shame that once the film switches to 1972 that darkness is then lost.  The cinematography from Bruno Delbonnel is outstanding (he followed this project by shooting the new Coen Brothers film “Inside Llewyn Davis”) and a special mention must go to the costume designer Colleen Atwood.  Truthfully this is a not an aspect I notice a hell of a lot (except if it is bad) when I watch films, but her work here is so grand it is impossible to ignore.

After re-reading this review I have realized that it is not easy to work out what I actually thought of “Dark Shadows”, and well, I ended up having a really great time with it.  I thought the film was a lot of fun, I know that it has its flaws, but the film is certainly not a bad film let alone the disaster I was expecting it to be.  I absolutely loved the crazy finale (which I know a lot of critics despise) and never once felt the running time passing, which is always a good sign.  While it is not as good as the early Burton / Depp collaborations (it doesn’t come close to “Sweeney Todd” either), it is much better than “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory” and the train wreck that is “Alice in Wonderland”. 

While I thoroughly enjoyed “Dark Shadows” (and look forward to watching it again soon), I do hope that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp separate for a while and recharge their creative batteries.  Burton’s next film is the stop-motion “Frankenweenie” which Depp is not involved in, with the live action follow up rumored to be the sequel to his 1988 classic “Bettlejuice” (although sadly Grahame-Smith is scheduled to be scripting that too), so it may indeed by awhile until we see another collaboration between the two.  In any case, I love the latest work from this talented pairing, flaws and all.

 3.5 Stars. 

 

THE AVENGERS

Even though I am a fan of Joss Whedon (I was a big fan of “Buffy”), my anticipation for his “Avengers” film was strangely non-existent.  Truthfully I am not sure why that was, maybe I am just burnt out by the constant barrage of superhero movies that seem to be forced on us these days.  Every week there appears to be a new one and the good ones are few and far between.  Even though I usually do end up seeing these films in the long run, I no longer anticipate them.  In the case of “The Avengers” it had an even harder task to catch my eye because even when I was collecting comics I was never into “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes”.  It wasn’t until the strong word of mouth regarding the film’s excellence started to hit that I decided to take a trip to the cinema to check it out.

The plot of the film is all kinds of silly as disgraced god Loki (Tom Hiddleston) heads to Earth to steal the all-powerful Tesseract (Hydra’s secret weapon that is found at the end of “Captain America”) to help him open a portal to another dimension where he plans to let an alien race invade and destroy the Earth as revenge against his brother Thor.  The threat is so mighty that one hero is not enough to save the day so Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), leader of S.H.I.E.L.D brings together The Avengers which consists of Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).  Even with their combined power will it be enough to thwart Loki’s insidious plan?

After reading nothing but positive reviews and hearing nothing but good things in regards to “The Avengers”, you can imagine my surprise when I found the first 30-45 minutes of the film to be terrible and incredibly plodding.  It is within this time that the team is put together as we go from one character to the next as each is convinced to join, but it is all so boring.  It doesn’t feel cohesive at all, rather it is like we are watching short films on each character, but it just takes the film too long to get going.  In fact not to harp on the point but I actually found these scenes to actually be embarrassing.

However once the team is assembled the film improves dramatically and Whedon hits his strides.  He has always been known for his creative dialogue and the verbal exchanges he creates between these super-heroes as their egos are challenged are often very funny as the group bickers, taunts and ribs one another.  Robert Downey Jr. has a field day in these scenes particularly when he appears to be trying to set off Dr. Banner’s transformation into The Hulk.

One thing that I particularly enjoyed about “The Avengers” was that Whedon infused the film with a fun tone and atmosphere.  Too often these days comic book movies tend to be skewed towards the dark and serious but Whedon remembers that these stories are meant to be entertaining and fun, and an escape from the real world.  As such, the film never takes itself too seriously which works in its favour.

With a huge roster of characters you would think that some of them would be short-changed but Whedon does an exceptional job of giving each of them their own moments.  Without a doubt, Thor gets the best line in the film with regards to his “adopted” brother but they all get a moment to shine.  The only character who doesn’t seem to fit is Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye .  While I like Renner as an actor, he may be a little too intense for the world that Whedon has created here, and he does seem a little off, and also has the least to do.

Having the flamboyant and charismatic Robert Downey Jr. in the cast you would assume that this would be Iron Man’s movie, but surprisingly it is Mark Ruffalo’s rendition of The Hulk (he is the third actor to play the role now in three tries) that steals the picture.  I say surprisingly because Marvel has had two cracks at making individual Hulk movies and they just haven’t got it right (that said, I do love the Eric Bana / Ang Lee version), but Whedon has got it spot on here.  He knows just how to make the Hulk work, he is a character full of angst, anger and violence but he is also quite funny and The Hulk has a couple of laugh out loud moments within the film.  The first is a moment after a fight that he has been battling alongside Thor, while the other is one of the most violent yet hilarious things I’ve seen in a comic book movie towards Loki.  Both moments are very small but it is moments like these that make “The Avengers” special.  As I said, Mark Ruffalo plays the Hulk this time around and he does a fantastic job especially when he is his alter ego, Bruce Banner.  His scenes with Downey Jr. are a highlight.  Ruffalo also portrayed the character when he was The Hulk via motion capture, so Ruffalo is quite present in the performance of the Hulk as well.

Everyone else plays their roles admirably with Scarlett Johansson looking incredibly sexy as Black Window, and while Loki himself may be a bit of a limp villain, I very much liked Tom Hiddleston’s performance in the role.  I felt he was much better here than he was in the same role for “Thor”.  The only acting letdown in the film is Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury.  I have never been a fan of Jackson’s portrayal of Fury, it has just never seemed right.  Fury was always a tough son of a bitch who was always gruff and grouchy, however Jackson portrays him so flatly that he comes across as boring and he gives the man no strength at all.

Another spot where Whedon earns top marks is during the finale when all of the action kicks in.  Although the action has an epic feel to it, Whedon has confined it basically to within one city block to make it feel more intimate.  It is only about these characters fighting against the odds and not those who will be affected if they fail.  Thankfully Whedon knows how to shoot these action scenes effectively and unlike the recent “The Hunger Games” doesn’t resort to the use of shaky cam, which shock horror, gives the audience the ability to see and understand everything that is going on.

Finally I have to say that enough is enough with the Stan Lee cameos in these Marvel films.  What used to be cool, has now become groan inducing and when his cameo appeared near the end of “The Avengers” I seriously rolled my eyes.  Give it a rest guys, that joke is done!

Overall with the exception of the terrible opening 45 minutes, I found Joss Whedon’s “The Avengers” to be a superior superhero film.  While it still hasn’t ousted “Spiderman 2” as my favourite comic book movie, it was very good indeed.  The surprising hilarity of The Hulk stole the film for me and I was very impressed (and thankful) for the overall fun tone of the film.  While I still think that “The Avengers” is overrated, it is still an easy recommendation.

3.5 Stars.

STRANGE CIRCUS

 It is time to review another Sion Sono film, and this time I have chosen his 2005 film “Strange Circus”, a film that is extreme to the fullest filled with sex, madness, incest, revenge and of course a circus.  It is also a bloody good film too.

Let me start by mentioning that “Strange Circus” deals with a lot of disturbing things so those who are easily offended should probably stop reading now.  The film is about a young girl named Mitsuko who suffers horribly at the hand of her father, who is also the principal of the school she attends.  Sadly Mitsuko is regularly raped and molested by her father, but along with that, he disturbingly locks the young girl in a cello case which has a special hole in it so she is forced to watch her father and mother, Sayuri, have sex.  So regular is the abuse that Mitsuko has to start to believe that she is her mother and that she is enjoying the rape, just to endure the pain she is really going through.  One day in a moment that should have saved the young girl, Sayuri walks in on her husband and daughter.  In an instant her mind snaps at the horror she has just witnessed, but instead of helping Mitsuko, she becomes upset and jealous of her daughter and from this day on she too starts abusing the girl, but in a physical manner, constantly beating on her when she is upset with her.  During one of these fights, this time over a lost earring, Mitsuko accidently pushes her mother which causes her to fall down some stairs.  She hits her head and ends up dying from the blow.  Traumatized by the guilt, Mitsuko believes that it is her duty to take her mother’s place in the world and continues to accept the abuse of her father.  However once her grades start dramatically falling at school, it is like it is finally too much for her and Mitsuko decides to jump from the roof of the school in an attempt to take her own life.  However such is her luck, that she survives the fall but ends up paralyzed from the hips down.  What has this girl done to deserve such a life?

It is actually this point in the film that it takes a drastic shift as we find out that what we are watching is actually the work of a famous writer named Taeko, and this is her latest story.  She is met by her publishers as they see how she is going with her new manuscript as her deadline is coming up within a couple of weeks.  She is nearly finished, but the company decides to give Taeko an assistant, Yuji, to make sure she delivers by the due date.  After noticing that Taeko is in a wheelchair herself, and looking into her story in more depth, Yuji begins to wonder if what she is writing is autobiographical.  Is Taeko actually Mitsuko all grown up?  Yuji decides to find out once and for all but is he prepared for the answer he is going to get? 

Of all of the films that I have watched so far from director Sion Sono, “Strange Circus” is the most successful in achieving what it originally sets out to do.  It is a film that all at once disturbs us, makes us think, and even entertains us.  The circus of the title is literally the circus of the mind, as right at the start of the film, the ringleader looks directly at the camera and invites us on stage, thus giving us a look inside the mind of this sad and abused little girl (or is it?).  The film is basically separated into thirds, and the first third where we are witness to the atrocities put upon this young girl is thankfully treated very seriously and does not wink at the audience at all.  As such this part of the film is probably the strongest portion of the film.  It is incredibly disturbing as it is about a young girl being sexually abused by her father and about how this abuse infects her mind, so it is never going to be an easy watch.  Depending on how this material was handled there was a chance that the subject matter could be used for exploitative purposes but thankfully Sono respects his characters (and actors) and handles the material very realistically.  Speaking of the actors, Sono is able to get around putting his young child actor into any disturbing situations by the using the plot device where Mitsuko sees herself as her mother during the abuse.  As such whenever these scenes are taking place, Masumi Miyazaki (who plays Sayuri, the mother) fills the role of Mitsuko.  Visually this segment of the film is quite amazing as when we are in the mind of the girl, a lot of the images we are witness to are very surreal and more like representations of what has happened rather than exactly what is happening.  The colour red is used extensively (maybe a little predictably) with the blood painted walls of the school being a standout.

When we realize that what we have just witnessed is actually just a story that a famous author, Taeko, is writing, we are then thrown into the real world and visually the film becomes a little subdued.  Again Masumi Miyazaki plays the role of Taeko, which helps in the confusion of identities within the film, and in this section Sono let’s her go a little bit closer to the edge of madness as it is obvious right from the get-go that something is amiss with the novelist.  It is here that I should commend Miyazaki for her performance(s) in the film because within the three roles she plays she is able to create three amazing and quite different characters.  Throughout the film she is taken to a number of dark places that must have been hard to perform, but she does so admirably giving them a weight and seriousness to them.  She also has a lot of fun with the role of Taeko who, like I just mentioned, may not be all there.  It is within this section that the insane qualities that we have come to know from a Sion Sono film begin to rear their heads.  

Another performance that I have to mention is that of Issei Ishida who plays the quiet and shy assistant Yuji.  He really gives a brilliantly nuanced performance and it is probably my favourite from any Sion Sono film.  Without giving away anything that happens in the final third of the film, what I will say is that Yuji’s character goes through quite the transformation before the film’s end where he is no longer the meek, shy and timid character he appears at the beginning.  Ishida makes both extremes of Yuji’s character seem so believable, although I do think he was more comfortable within the role when he is the shy assistant (looking like he has just walked out of a J-Pop band).  While I always complain that Sono lets his actors overact, if there was one person who could be accused of this in “Strange Circus” it is Ishida.  He is right on the edge, so close to going over it in terms of overacting, but personally I think he does a brilliant job of staying on the right side.

If you think that the film starts to go a little insane in the second third, well hold onto your set, because it goes bat-shit crazy for the finale, as true identities are revealed and revenge is sought.  While this is the kind of stuff you expect from a Sono film, it is actually this third that brings the quality of the film down a little.  Do not get me wrong, it is incredibly entertaining, but it starts to work with the lowest common denominator in terms of gore and horror.  It starts to be less about the mind and more about blood.  Like I said, very entertaining but a little cliché despite how insane it all is.  There are also some incredibly poor and cheap looking special effects that really take you out of the film in this section, they just are not believable at all, in fact I was surprised at just how poor they were.  It is within this section that the visual splendor kicks off again, with the colour red being highlighted once more (mainly from the huge amounts of blood being spilt).

“Strange Circus” brings to mind two other filmmakers and their work, David Lynch and Takashi Miike.  While Sono is always being compared to countrymen Miike, “Strange Circus” is actually the first film that I thought truly resembled Miike’s style especially visually and editorially (there is a scene at the end that almost seems like a direct lift from Miike’s “Ichi The Killer”).   The similarities to Lynch have to do with his obsession with the mind and how it can hide something horrible a person has done or been done to them, in an attempt to continue to live a normal life.  This is ultimately what “Strange Circus” looks at, the life-long damage to a person (both physically and mentally) after being regularly abused.  While on the outside everything may look fine, within it could be a whole different story.  Another director that I was regularly thinking about while watching “Strange Circus” was Pedro Almodovar.  While the film is nowhere near as polished as his films, the melodramatic elements of the plot where similar, as well as the fact that I felt that Sono truly loved these demented characters he had created in a way that Almodovar himself does in his own films.

Overall, I was mightily impressed by “Strange Circus”.  I was happy to see that it tackled the themes of incest and sexual abuse very seriously, while also telling the insane story of an erotic novelist.  The film does end up becoming incredibly bloody but for those who like their cinema to be of the dark variety, I do not hesitate to recommend Sion Sono’s “Strange Circus”.  It is a great film that if not for a few hiccups near the finale, would have almost been a classic.

4 Stars.