Entry 5: RE: "Shadows" - Sleepy (and) Hollow

Posted by: Bradley Redder

To put it bluntly, I'd say Tim Burton is just a hack. I'll agree with you on Sweeney Todd, but only up to a certain point. I think it's a solid film, but it's one I don't think I'll ever find reason to revisit. It just feels so mechanical, like Burton directed half of it on Xanax. I don't recall much camera movement, which made it feel like Burton literally just set up a few cameras at a stage performance. I actually decided after seeing that film that I'd much rather see an interesting failure than a boring success, which is what I would call Sweeney Todd.

As for a line connecting Burton's films... They all seem to deal with a radical outcast, often very bizarre-looking. But I agree with you. He doesn't ever really seem to say anything about these characters of his. Despite the make-up, they feel flat. Barnabas, Wonka, what I remember of Sweeney, whoever you'd say the main character of Alice is... They're all just kind of boring, if not while watching them, then certainly when the movie ends.

To be perfectly honest, I really wouldn't even call many of Burton's early films masterpieces, or even very good for that matter. Pee-Wee, Ed Wood, and Edward Scissorhands are great; Beetlejuice, Mars Attacks!, and Sleepy Hollow are fun, but his Batman films are brutally dull. I remember loving them as a kid, but revisiting them as an adult is almost impossible. I tried to watch Batman a few years ago, and dozed off four or five times before I just gave up on it, and Returns is no better. Whatever credit he built up in the first half of his career has long been exhausted by Planet of the Apes and the last decade of boring redundancy.

The real shame is that he is at a point in his career where he could probably do anything he wants. He thinks he's so weird? He could make the trippiest, most disturbing, off the wall film imaginable, and he'd get a $100 million budget. But instead he takes $150 million and makes Dark Shadows! Why? Why did it need to cost that much? What did he even spend that money on? It looks good, but Jesus. It's obnoxious that his least imaginative film probably has the highest production budget... And it's a fucking comedy! I think you're right when you say that he's so focused on visual style that everything else suffers. I actually made the Johnny-Depp-as-Barnabas face when I saw the budget. It's mind-blowing. I would be willing to bet that each scene in Dark Shadows could have financed a half dozen funnier, more heartfelt comedies than Burton's film. What an asshole.

Entry 4: RE: "Shadows" - It's all in the script.

Posted by: Chad Van Alstin

Let's talk about Tim Burton's other recent work for a second. I think we can both agree that Dark Shadows is absolutely better than Alice; a film that I'd say has little redeeming value at all. Without discussing each film individually, I'd have to say that the only recent film I enjoyed by Tim Burton was Sweeney Todd (2007).

The visuals in Sweeney Todd are quite typical of Burton, but the film also has a decent script. I wouldn't say it's a perfect movie, but I certainly enjoyed it. However,  it's still not on par with earlier Burton works, many of which I would consider to be masterpieces.

I think the problem with Tim Burton is that he works so hard to give his films a distinct visual style that other aspects of the film suffer. Having now just re-watched Frankenweenie, it's plain to see that it's a beautiful looking short film. However, the excellent direction and photography are backed up with a solid screenplay.

So, maybe a lot of Tim Burton films suffer due to the writing -- often he isn't even credited as a screenwriter on his projects. Still, if it is the case that he has little input on scripts, then why does every other aspect of the film seem to be meticulously crafted by him?

It's strange. Auteur Theory, as I understand it, means that the director has a level of control over every aspect of the filmmaking process. It seems like Tim Burton is screaming to be an auteur with his control over cast and visuals, but the scripts have too much variety to really give him a distinct voice.

Yes, they all deal with similar subject matter, but they don't all have the same tone or feel. The dialogue in each film, the story structure in each, feels too different from film-to-film to really give Burton a set definition. 

Entry 3: RE: "Shadows" - Burton in Blunderland

Posted by: Bradley Redder

The first minute has to be making fun of Burton and Dark Shadows.

Before I say anything, I will reiterate the last line of your post: Henry Selick directed Nightmare Before Christmas. That always bothers me when Tim Burton gets the credit for that. And the upcoming  Frankenweenie is even more annoying, mimicking the stop-motion style of Selick with computer animation while surely destroying his brilliant short film. My brother and I used to rent the original Frankenweenie all the time at the Video Loft, a video store shaped like a barn, for some reason. My dad didn't care because it was only like fifty cents to rent it. When we found out that store was closing, we immediately hopped in the car, in the middle of having dinner, to go buy that VHS tape, and it is still one of my favorites to this day. So sad that Burton feels the need to revisit it in this way. But anyway...

I half agree with just about everything you said. I think we both derive the same conclusions when we look at Burton's steady decline from creative genius to... whatever you call him now; I just think you're more optimistic about him than I am. Since the relatively underrated Sleepy Hollow, up until the egregious eyesore that is Alice in Wonderland (why would you do that to your wife?), I went into his films wanting to like them, love them even. But I've gotten disappointment after disappointment, and I'm pretty sure what I was watching was the well running dry. Each of the films in between those have at least a few moments of grace, even the equally visually antagonistic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had some heart. But with these last two films, I just really haven't cared if I was going to like them. I was open to enjoying them, but expected nothing from them, and ultimately got nothing from them.

The auteur question is relevant... People seem to still love him, though I have to imagine even the die-hardest Burton/Depp fans won't really find anything worth defending in Dark Shadows. I will say that you can still definitely spot a Burton film from outside the theater, with that trademark "Gothic" blue tint to everything, but do I think he is actually expressing anything personal anymore? No. Not at all. And the last ten years of shit make me wonder if he ever really was, or if he just accidentally made a few great films. Nowadays he just feels redundant. I get the impression that when people ask him what he's really like, he not only feels obligated to respond, "I'm pretty weird," but that he also actually believes it. Unfortunately outside of obnoxious, sometimes even intolerable visuals, his work is about as ordinary as it gets. It's all conventional, as you say... There's no creepy subtext, or quirky laughs. Just Johnny Depp and seventeen pounds of make-up hiding the gaping void where a true character should lie.

I also don't know if I was quite as taken by the visuals in Dark Shadows. Sure, it had the Burton look, which I would hope he has perfected by now. It did look good, but it didn't really have the interesting compositions that something like Edward Scissorhands had. It all just seemed to be in service of nothing. I think Burton was at his best when he was doing homemade effects and props, like in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, another vastly underrated treat. Lately he just uses digital backdrops and CGI, which are so completely lifeless... they lack the craftsmanship and care that his earlier films were overflowing with. 

Which brings me to the humor. While some of it was clever dialogue, a disturbing amount of it was CGI-based, a real pet-peeve of mine. Actually, pet-peeve makes it sound like it's just a little annoying. Let me rephrase: I hate CGI in comedy. Hate it. It has absolutely no place in comedy. It should be outlawed. I can't believe producers don't automatically pass when they see anything CGI related in a comedy script. Great comedy is based in honesty, whether it's physical comedy or verbal jokes, it has to feel true to be funny. I don't want to laugh at the idea of somebody doing a face-plant, I want to see it happen. CGI-based comedy is like writing an IOU when all I really want is the twenty dollars you owe me in cash. I can't do anything with it. It's boring. And it's depressing that somebody that used to be so in tune with that idea has steered himself so far off course.

As for Frankenweenie, just watch the short film HERE!

Entry 2: RE: "Shadows" - An Auteur No More.

Posted by: Chad Van Alstin

What has Tim Burton become? The man who gave us completely original works like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands has really lost his way. I know that Burton gets a lot of flack in the media already, but movies like Dark Shadows are the reason why.

While I think this time around the visuals were spot-on, Dark Shadows still lacks that subtle, black, humor that once made Burton's films so interesting. Instead it's just more conventional humor, and it doesn't fit with the film's gothic tone very well at all.

The sheer quirky, weird, nature of Burton's previous films are what made people laugh -- awkwardly. This time around all we're given is classic gags about people from the past being confused by television, lava lamps, and other modern technology. It's all been done before, and it isn't done well enough this time around to be that funny.

The visual flair that made me love Tim Burton's classic work is in Dark Shadows, but everything else that I came to enjoy about his movies doesn't make the cut. At one time you could watch a movie and tell, even if you had no idea what you were seeing, that it was a Tim Burton movie. He seemed to have his own distinct, auteur, style at one point. He really doesn't anymore.

I still think he's a very talented filmmaker, but his recent movies seem to leave me wanting so much more. I'm hoping that Frankenweenie is a return to form for Burton; however, the trailer leads me to believe it may just be an attempt to build upon the legacy of Nightmare Before Christmas -- a film often credited to Burton, instead of director Henry Selick.

Entry 1: RE: "Shadows" - Mercifully Mundane

Posted by: Bradley Redder

If there's one compliment I can absolutely give to Tim Burton concerning the sometimes visually enchanting but ultimately flat Dark Shadows, it's that at least it isn't this...

So bravo to whoever talked him down from caking more make-up onto Johnny Depp, and to Tim Burton for what I'm sure was a tough decision to demonstrate any level of reserve in the matter. I really do appreciate it.

I noticed that in addition to having nearly identical reviews, we both also chose the two photos available on Google that show the startled, confused, wide-eyed look that Depp seems to give throughout the film. I don't know about you, but I selected that because I imagine that to be the look on my own face while watching most of Dark Shadows. What was this supposed to be? I'll agree with you on the prologue... Could have been a great start to a different film, but then we go to present day where Burton sets this up as a comedy and yet has Depp's Barnabas randomly murdering people. I never really settled into it, though even if he had established and controlled the tone, I'm sure I would have still been left floundering by his meandering approach to narrative. It was as if he adapted one scene from thirty-five different episodes of the TV series and just mashed them together in no discernible order.

And is my lack of interest in recent characters just a phase I'm going through on my own? What is going on? Am I becoming apathetic or are movies just not delivering the goods? Who are these people, and why should I care about anything they do? Barnabas is interesting as long as he's trying to figure out the modern world, but when he figures it out all too quickly, but then still has trouble sometimes when it's convenient, he's pretty boring. Michelle Pfeiffer's character is all but useless, more of a plot device than anything else. And why waste Chloe Moretz with this trash? She was able to pull off a phenomenal wicked goth vampire in Matt Reeves' Let Me In a few years ago, so why not give her more to do than dance around to period rock songs and morph into a werewolf in the end and give the weirdest line reading so far this year... "Yeah, I'm a wolf. Deal with it... Woof!" And all in close-up! Yikes.

I will say Eva Green gets to have some fun as a witch or something, delivering her lines with mischievous delight, especially when she starts calling the basket case five year-old a little bastard at the end while trying to kill him. I had no idea the film was going to go that far off the rails in the final twenty minutes, misfiring in just about every way, but at least Eva was able to contribute some malicious laughs, and some cleavage (Joss Whedon, take note). But I'm giving the credit to her, because Burton seemed to have no idea how to make this film consistently funny, choosing convoluted plot construction over good, clean laughs. When Barnabas says, "Gather the horses!" and Pfeiffer says, "We don't have horses. We have a Chevy," shouldn't that cue the driving lessons montage? It would be playing it safe, but I could have gotten behind it because at least it would be playing at all.

Chad's Take: "Dark Shadows" (2012) - 2 Stars

Tim Burton's Dark Shadows is a visually stunning film; however, I'm afraid it's hard to find reason to praise the movie beyond that. Where Dark Shadows starts out strong, providing an excellent beginning to a would-be gothic classic, it soon fizzles into something that walks the line between mediocre and below average.

I am tempted to start this review by giving a plot synopsis, but I'm actually really confused by the film's narrative. There's something about a witch, Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green), who has placed an evil curse over the Collins family, a once prominent name in the New England business world. Angelique's most notable act of evil comes when she turns former lover Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) into an immortal vampire.

The Collins family made their wealth by dominating the Maine seafood business; this was of course until Angelique's curses helped her competing line gain a competitive edge. Yes, Ms. Bouchard's primary motivation appears to come from her desire to sell quality fish products.

Brad's Take: Dark Shadows - **

Dark Shadows begins as a comedy that isn't all that funny and ends as a thriller that isn't all that thrilling. Tim Burton's new Johnny Depp make-up showcase is as routine as it gets, pinning the actor under so much artifice that it's a testament to his talent, and maybe even a cry for help from the actor himself, that he manages to make anything of the drab material placed before him. Such has their working relationship been for the past decade; why should this be any different?

A real Who Cares? plot, if I've ever seen one, Shadows has Depp playing Barnabas Collins, a wealthy 18th century fishery heir who spurns the advances of the sexy witch of a housekeeper, Angelique (Eva Green), and is cursed into vampirism and locked in a buried coffin until dug up two centuries later in 1972. There, then, he tries to revive the family business, only to find Angie his chief rival. From there the tame antics ensue. I'm not sure if Burton thought a waterfront seafood cannery operation was an ironic choice of focus for a Gothic vampire "comedy," or if it is a leftover relic from the campy 70s television show, but whatever the reason it should have been scrapped in the second draft. But fear not, for Burton does not linger on any one thing long enough for it to become too boring in and of itself... he leaves that for the film as a whole.

I don't know if it's just me, or if it's a recent trend that characters seem to lack dimension unless you're wearing silly glasses, but Dark Shadows had me desperate for someone to grasp onto. Each character, including Depp's Barnabas, is crudely drawn, only demanding our attention when they are saying something funny, which isn't nearly often enough to justify a running time approaching two hours. And most of the comedy stems from pointing out anachronisms between the two centuries, and Barney's antiquated rhetoric as he describes everyday objects: "Curious terrain," he says while skeptically prodding a street with the toe of his shoe. I don't know how that comes across in print, but it did force a chuckle from me. Like it or not, them's the jokes in Dark Shadows.

I have not seen the original show on which this film is based, but it feels to me that it misses the mark. Similar to other recent adaptations of campy, decades-old television shows, like 2010's A-Team, Burton's Dark Shadows feels like he doesn't understand his source material, or what strange combination of charm and camp made it appealing to anybody. That or he does know and chose to ignore it. Again, I say that without ever having seen the original, but if the show was anything like the film, I can't imagine why anyone would ask for a $150 million dollar CGI fueled film adaptation forty years later but, unfortunately for us, somebody did... And Tim Burton delivered.

This Week's Movie - 5/14-5/20

Posted by: Bradley Redder

Dark Shadows
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Seth Grahame-Smith
Starring Johnny Depp, Eva Green, Michelle Pfeiffer, Chloe Grace-Moretz, Bella Heathcote, Jackie Earle Haley, Helena Bonham Carter







Apologies for posting the announcement for this week's movie so late. We've been dreading the idea of committing to Tim Burton's Dark Shadows, but unfortunately there aren't really any other options. So there it is. Neither of us are looking forward to it, but for some reason I have an odd feeling I might actually enjoy it, despite the fact that I have gone unimpressed with Burton's films since the beautiful cinematography and mild charm of 1999's Sleepy Hollow. So hopefully he will break his streak, because anyone who endured the past week of this blog knows that I could use a good movie.

Watch the trailer below right now, and watch this blog all week for reviews and discussion of Dark Shadows...