The Prototype of Salt of Fatty Acid – the Dark Shadows review

I am three minutes in Dark Shadows and I hate it. I hate the stylized visuals. I hate Johnny Depp’s look. I hate Johnny Depp’s voice-over. I hate the clunky exposition and I wonder why I ever though that Tim Burton was an original and talented filmmaker. But then Burton shifts away from Johhny Depp’s character. And for a good five minutes I’m enjoying my pants off. A young woman (the Australian actress Bella Heatchcote) travels from New York to Maine, by train at first and then hitchhiking with a bunch of hippies. And on the soundtrack there is the gorgeous song Nights in White Satin, by The Moody Blues. You can’t get more period (early 70s) than this and I am sold. For five minutes or so.

Because after five minutes Burton returns to Depp’s vampire Barnabas Collins, yet another boring variation on Jack Sparrow. Collins returns to his family estate, having spent two hundred years buried in a locked coffin. The rest of the film is an incredibly boring selection of random events, while Collins tries to restore the family fishing business to glory and settle a score with with Eva Green, who turned him into a vampire in the first place.

Dark Shadows is based on a 1960s soap opera of dubious quality, but with some cult following. And boy, is Dark Shadows the prototype of salt of fatty acid. We meet an abundance of characters, each of which with secrets and hidden agendas: Matriarch Michelle Pfeiffer, rebellious teen Chloe Moretz, perpetually drunk psychiatrist Helena Bonham Carter, playboy Johnny Lee Miller and troubled kid Gulliver McGrath.

Burton’s storytelling is also textbook lubricating grease. Events occur randomly and without logical or necessary connection. Implausible, improbable impossible and essentially pointless, sudden character revelations are always noticed by a dumbstruck person in the background.

For most of its running time, I was bored to death by Dark Shadows. All the more infuriating then, that there are actually a number of decent and half-decent jokes in the film, most of which have to do with the culture clash between the 18^th and the late 20^th century that Barnabas Collins is experiencing. In order not to spoil the little that is good about this film I will not mention them here.

After this film, with vivid and horrified memories of Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Sweeney Todd (2007 still lingering in my mind I call upon movie producers everywhere to take Tim Burton’s camera away from him until he comes up with an idea that is as good and original as Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood or even Mars Attacks! Also he must not be allowed to cast either Johnny Depp or his partner Helena Bonham Carter in any of his upcoming projects. There was a time when these parings of actors and director were inspiring the persons involved to great creativity, but in the last ten years they have produced nothing but tasteless re-hash.

But, in order not to end on a downer. The bit with The Moody Blues on the soundtrack is really good.

Trailer Tuesday: The Shadow of Prometheus’ Huntsman Diaries

Dark Shadows

Dir. Tim Burton. Starring: Johnny Depp, Eva Green, Chloe Moretz, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jackie Earle Haley, Helena Bonham Carter & Christopher Lee.

Dutch release date: May 10, 2012

 

Prometheus

Dir. Ridley Scott. Starring: Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Michael Fassbender & Guy Pearce

Dutch release date: May 31, 2012

 

Snow White and the Huntsman

Dir. Rupert Sanders. Starring:  Charlize Theron (again), Kristen Stewart, Chris Hemsworth, Sam Claflin and a bunch of British guys as the seven dwarves.

Dutch release date: June 7, 2012

 

Chernobyl Diaries

Dir. Bradley Parker. Starring: Jesse McCartney, Jonathan Sadowski & Olivia Dudley

Dutch release date: TBA

Friday Movie News Flash Update Blog-message

I am one day late, but that doesn’t keep me from posting what we’ve learned this week, like:

 

Javier Bardem is blond (in Bond)!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sin City 2 will be filmed this summer!

Wes Anderson’s new film Moonrise Kingdom will open Cannes 2012!

A first image of Jack Sparrow and Armie Hammer in The Lone Ranger!

And for the Marvel geeks:

Krees and Skrulls are not in Loki’s Army!

 

Gervais vs. Hollywood – Round Three?

Well, that was a bit of a pity. I had hoped He would do something radical. Something out-of-the-box. Something so much larger than life that not only would he not be invited back to the Golden Globes, he would not be allowed back in LA. Or in America.

But instead he toned it down. More of the same but a bit less vicious. If the best joke of the evening is made by Madonna then…

Not that he wasn’t funny. The thing about Jodie Foster was even very funny. But I am thinking: why bother? Why even come back if this is all you’re going to do? Is it the money? Did he want to hang out with Johnny Depp? It sure seemed like it; they were best buddies on stage, in an ill-written and worse rehearsed throwback at last year. Did he take bribes? Was he given tickets to see Madonna live? That is not a bribe! Why not? Because it is not 1985!

It is just such a shame, a waste of hype and anticipation. And perhaps that was the key. The joke, this year, was not on HFPA, not onHollywood, not on stars. The joke was on us.

 

The opening monologue and the bit with Johnny Depp

The bit with Madonna, starting at 1:50

 

As to the winners of the awards: who cares? It is only the Golden Globes. You just google it if you really want to know.

Dumas for Dummy’s – the The Three Musketeers review

The new version of The Three Musketeers is by far the Dumbest Film of 2011. And I don’t mean dumb as in ‘incoherent’ (Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides) ‘ridiculous’ (Sucker Punch) or ‘non-sensical’ (The Green Lantern). I mean dumb as in: not smart enough for special education. It is the mentally handicapped nephew of such fare as The Man in the Iron Mask or The Musketeer. Or better still: it treats its audiences as a bunch of Simple Jack’s.

This is Dumas-for-Dummy’s, or for very young kids. Director Paul W.S. Anderson (from Resident Evil and Alien vs. Predator, and absolutely not to be confused with Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of Magnolia) offers 110 minutes of show-and-tell: everything is shown, explained and repeated, so as to make sure that four-year old children will understand the plot. Fine. If this were a kids film. But it is not. It’s got a PG13 rating in America, and a 12 in The Netherlands. There is an amount of nasty violence and low necklines that is most certainly not appropriate for toddlers.

So if Anderson tried to do a ‘Robert Rodriguez’ (successfully switching from ultra-violent to kids films) he clearly failed. If he wants to make an ultra-light, breezy and entertaining blockbuster, then he partially succeeded. For when you’re not bugged out by the film’s simple-mindedness, there are still some things to enjoy. Machine gun equipped airships, for instance. And stunt casting.

Anderson has hired a whole bunch of talented actors to do relatively little, relatively good. Christoph Waltz for instance, as cardinal Richelieu. Milla Jovovich – the director’s wife – as a ninja version of Milady de Winter. Mads Mikkelsen as the one-eyed baddy Rochefort. But the best joke is a cheeky reference to the film that The Three Musketeers wants to be: Pirates of the Carribean. Whereas Gore Verbinski’s Pirates films were hindered by the bland wetness of their protagonist Orlando Bloom, Anderson’s movie benefits from that same Bloom’s wondrously bizarre turn-out as the Duke of Buckingham. The actor certainly has a field-day playing a bad guy, and if he’d been given more screen time he could have been to this flick what Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow was to Pirates.

There is also too little screen time for the actual musketeers, Athos, Aramis and Porthos, who are decently cast (Matthew MacFadyen, Luke Evans and Ray Stevenson). The kid playing D’Artagnan (Logan Lerman) is a disaster. Unsympathetic is a euphemism. Creep gives him too much credit. Compared to the thespically-challenged Lerman, Bloom’s performance in Pirates was Oscar-worthy. But he has Justin Bieber hair, so he’s probably there to draw in that part of the target audience that consists of thirteen year old girls.

There is one thing Anderson did do very good. He has understood that 3D is not (yet) a story-telling device. It is for pointing and throwing things at the audience, and nothing more.

Paul W.S. Anderson’s The Three Musketeers. You know what? Despite being incredibly dumb, and an insult to Dumas, and in 3D, I moderately enjoyed myself for the length of its running time.

Hurray! Trailers!

The Raven

A Se7en-like adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe poem about a bird tapping on the window? Why not if it has John Cusack starring and it is directed by theu guy who did V for Vendetta.

Dir. James McTeigue. Starring: John Cusack, Luke Evans, Alice Eve & Brendan Gleeson.

Release date: March 9 (USA)

Hugo

Martin Scorsese making a kids’ film in 3D? Either the world has gone raving mad or this is the best idea ever. Probably something in between.

Dir. Martin Scorsese. Starring: Johnny Depp, Chloe Moretz, Jude Law, Christoper Lee, Emily Mortimer, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ben Kingsley, Ray Winstone, Asa Butterfield & Michael Stuhlbarg. Wow.

Release date: February 16 (NL)

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The last book that made me cry, by Jonathan Safran Foer. The adaptation of his other novel – Everything is Illuminated-  was a bit of a downer. Let’s hope for more with this one.

Dir. Stephen Daldry. Starring: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, John Goodman, Max von Sydow, James Gandolfini, Jeffrey Wright & Thomas Horn.

Release date: February 9 (NL)

the Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides review

 Okay. So I did not go in to see a good film. I got in to be entertained. It should not be difficult. I am a fan. I love the original movie. I immensely enjoyed the sequels (although I am well aware that they are flawed). I used to don Jack Sparrow costumes at Hall’o’ween, Mardi Gras and a number of other fancy dress occasions. I am, possibly the easiest person to please when it comes to making a fourth Pirates of the Carribean film.

I don’t expect much sense or realism in the plot. I do not expect Great Acting, or deep psychology. I just want captain Jack, stupid action, great naval battles and scary monster villains. And I was sorely disappointed by Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides. I am not going to write an essayistic review here. I will keep it to a list.

BEWARE: SPOILERS

The Big List Of 25 Things Wrong With Pirates 4 That Need Not Be Wrong With It:

1. The film has no protagonist. Johnny Depp’s Sparrow is the closest thing to it, but since he is this unfathomable, more or less lightly immoral person he cannot carry the story. And the story is not even about him in the first place.
2. I don’t know who the story is about? Is it about Penelope Cruz’ character Angelica, trying to save her father Blackbeard (Ian McShane)? Is it about Blackbeard, trying to trick fate and a prophecy about his death? Is it about the missionary and the mermaid (much better as a porn title by the way)? Is it about Barbossa seeking revenge for his lost leg? What are these Spanish people doing there?
3. I don’t know what the story is about. Three groups of people are trying to get to the Fountain of Youth first, but why? Apart from the Blackbeard/Angelica group, why do these people look for a life elixir? What, in other words, is the significance?
4. There is a boring Cadiz set prologue introducing Spanish people we don’t get to see again until the climax. Compare that to the opening of the first film, which gave us the central characters immediately, or the maddeningly breathtaking opening of the third film, which set the tone and raised the stakes immensely.
5. The London part is boring, even though it is almost all action and taking place in the most original setting of the film, in relation to the original trilogy.
6. What is Keith Richards doing there, and why does he disappear?
7. Supporting actors in the ships’ crew are immediately forgettable. One was called Scrum I guess. Remember Cotton, Pintel and Ragetti?
8. The love story that replaces that of William Turner and Elizabeth Swann only starts after an hour and gets way to little attention to be interesting, believable or significant.
9. The second part of the film takes place entirely on land. That’s just wrong for a Pirates film.
10. All the action scenes are interchangeable and boring and have nothing of the fun and wit of the previous films.
11. The music is just the original theme, on repeat and too loud. Annoying rather than arousing.
12. The villain is not scary. “Blackbeard, the pirate all other pirates fear”? He does not come close to Barbossa or Davy Jones.
13. So you’ve got a pirate ship that can shoot fire, an English Royal Navy ship and a fleet of three Spanish ships and there is not a single naval battle.
14. Somewhere before the start of the film Blackbeard apparently sank the Black Pearl in a battle in which Barbossa lost his leg. Now that I would have liked to see. Instead I just get talk.
15. People talk half the time of stuff that happened before the film. Why not make a film about that? It seems more interesting than anything in this flick.
16. Penelope Cruz.
17. Mermaids composed of bad CGI.
18. Zombies that don’t do anything.
19. 3D that adds nothing, but just darkens the screen. Terrible if you’ve got that many night scenes.
20. Penelope Cruz.
21. Spanish people talking English to Penelope Cruz, even though her character in the film is Spanish as well.
22. Stupid dialogue and talky scenes holding back the skimmy plot.
23. Johnny Depp behaving like an idiot, rather than like an outlaw from a different realm of reality.
24. Penelope Cruz.
25. But the worst thing of all this is: I don’t expect the plot to make sense. I don’t expect a deeper meaning or a contribution to the history of cinema. The acting need not be amazing. I can even deal with Penelope Cruz. As long as I am entertained. And I was not entertained.

Please Johnny. Don’t do it again indeed.

How can you make a film about pirates, mermaids, zombies, treasure and tropical islands and make it boring? This was boring. It lasted just over two hours, much shorter than any of the previous films, but it felt so long. Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides (dir. Rob Marshall) is an example of lazy, cash-in, uninspired filmmaking. Disrespectful not to serious critics, but to the fans that made Disney and Bruckheimer 3 billion(!) dollars in the past, and now just want to entertained with a breezy light summer action flick. Outrageous.

Dumber than ever, but still pretty furious – the Fast Five review

So, we’re not talking about a major piece of art. This is not one of those films that will go down in history as the must see classic. It does not change the course of film history and there won’t be any books written about it. But Fast Five, the fifth installment in the Fast & Furious franchise is good enough fun. Sure, the plot is bonkers and no-one involved in the film has ever had a single lesson in line-reading, let alone acting, but I enjoyed myself.

Paul Walker is the Orlando Bloom to Vin Diesel’s Johnny Depp in the series, which means that the first one is totally uninteresting and the second one is completely unbelievable, but that together they spark just enough chemistry to keep you on their side. Even though they are ruthless criminals with no consideration whatsoever concerning the collateral damage of their actions, whether human or material.

Ridiculous plot? Check. Fugitive criminals are hunted down to Rio de Janeiro (somehow these movies never take place in Helsinki or Anchorage) where, even if they have been found by FBI bloodhound Dwayne Johnson (formerly known as The Rock), they still proceed planning the biggest heist of their careers: stealing a hundred million dollars from a Brazilian drug lord who has the money stashed in a police station. And of all these improbabilities the one that struck me most was: how come that every Brazilian street junkie pays for their drugs in American dollars?

Johnson keeps telling his subordinates: don’t let them get into cars. But hey, once they finally do get into cars – and that takes ages unfortunately – nothing else matters. Narrative logic, character development, proper dialogue, the laws of physics…

Once the action moves into the cars everything is okay. Director Justin Lin is one his third Fast & Furious film and by now really knows how to shoot fast cars, while they are driving really fast. So what ensues is a rollercoaster ride for thrill junkies. And one of the few films I saw this year that might even have benefited from a 3D conversion. Yeah, that is still me talking. 

Instantaneously forgettable, but completely compelling entertainment then.

More Comedy than Western – the Rango review

Rango is a film made by film buffs, and presumably for film buffs. It fires more obvious and less obvious references to other films at the audience than a keen viewer can keep up with. Nonetheless, it is not a very good film buff’s film. But it is a good comedy.

Against the film can be said that the references are too obvious to produce any sense of pride in a geek, once they are noticed. And yet the casual viewer may miss many cues, especially those that matter. Rango references a great number of westerns, swashbucklers and adventure films but its central plot premise is a mixture between Chinatown and For A Fistfull of Dollars. And The Muppets. Especially the first two do not belong to the category “films that everyone has seen at some point in their lives”.

Furthermore: Rango is not a really good film buff’s film. ‘Cause: what fun is there in watching a film for the sake of seeing what films the director has seen that you also happen to know? Film buff’s films like these are not a guilty pleasure. They are pedantic exercises in faux-elitism. The true guilty pleasure is to spot similarities between (moments in) films that were never intended to be there in the first place. But in Rango there is no space for such moments, so crowded is it with obvious, intended references to director Gore Verbinski’s DVD collection.

Verbinski (mostly know for the first three Pirates of the Carribean films) apparently wanted to make a film buff’s film, but failed to do so. In the same way that he wanted to make a western: Rango is so western that it stops being one. You cannot make a western and reference Sergio Leone, the man who practically killed the genre by loving it too much and choking its last breath out of it in a just-too-strong embrace. It took the western twenty years to recover from Once Upon a Time in the West, and in the meantime the stories westerns told moved to science fiction; most notably to Star Wars and Back to the Future. If you reference Leone you cannot be making a western, in the same way that you cannot reference Disney as Shrek did, and make a fairytale film at the same time. Shrek is not a fairytale, as Rango is not a western.

But like Shrek, Rango is a lot of fun. A whole lot of fun. The idea of a lonely thespian chameleon with an identity crisis (and literally no name) accidentally finding himself in a dusty western town in need of a hero is comedy gold. And with Johnny Depp voicing that chameleon – and his Pirates nemesis Bill Nighy voicing opponent Rattlesnake Jake – such comedy gold can be converted into the hard cash of plenty laughter. Especially when you add a chorus of mariachi owls and such lines as “stay in school, eat your veggies and burn all books that are not Shakespeare.”

In short, Rango looks like a film made form the left-overs from all Hollywood cutting floors. Like its protagonist it does not know what it wants to be. But its journey towards finding out what it is – really funny and bittersweet – is captivating. By the way: the film also boasts the most beautiful computer animation I’ve seen in years and its excellent action sequences form a strong argument against 3D.

Did Ricky Gervais go too far? Or was he just funnyas hell?

“I’m not going to do this a second time anyway.” Ricky Gervais delivered a spicy opening monologue, and some brutal introductions, when he hosted the Golden Globes in 2010. They weren’t gonna ask him back for a second time, right? Wrong.

 

Much has been said about Gervais’ over the top performance last week, but fact of the matter is, the HFPA (Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organizers of the Golden Globes) knew what they were paying for. “I warned them” giggled a content Gervais at the end of his opening. Surprised that the HFPA did not think he had gone too far the first time, Gervais pushed the limit even further this year.

Result: in four minutes Gervais managed to insult Charlie Sheen, Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, everyone working on The Tourist and Sex and the City 2, the HFPA, Cher, The ‘Church’ of Scientology, John Travolta and Tom Cruise (implicitly) Hugh Hefner and Hugh Hefner’s fiancée. Midway through the show Gervais disappeared for an hour, sparking online rumors that he had been fired ‘live’. But then he returned, closing of the show with a ‘thank you’ to God, ‘for making me an atheist.’ I’m not sure how (or: if) James Franco and Anne Hathaway plan to top that when they host the Oscars later this year.

 

But did Gervais go too far? Robert Downey Jr. thought so. But then again, he got the full load of Gervais sarcasm. Tim Allen and even the always polite Tom Hanks weren’t amused. Steve Buscemi was scared shitless when Gervais mentioned Boardwalk Empire, and very relieved when it proved not to be a target. But Robert de Niro and Chris Noth were having a great time, and Johnny Depp was a sport. Humor is subjective, and perhaps we can judge Gervais only by his own standards. He seems to have a pretty clear idea of them.