DARK SHADOWS: You’ll Have to Imagine Us On a Better Day

Dark Shadows (2012) – Directed by Tim Burton – Starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green, Jackie Earle Haley, Jonny Lee Miller, Chloë Grace Moretz, Bella Heathcote, Christopher Lee, and Alice Cooper.

“These people might be freaks and weirdos, but don’t freak and weirdos deserve to be happy, too?”

That quote does not come from DARK SHADOWS, which takes the title for being the worst Tim Burton movie made to date, but rather from Derrick Ferguson on the Better in the Dark #129 podcast. In episode #129, Derrick and Tom Deja hold a Director’s Court on the career of Tim Burton. (And if you like Burton, or movies, or good conversation, you should be listening to the BITD podcast; I’m listening to #129 right now as I write this review.) They released this episode back prior to the release of DARK SHADOWS so they don’t discuss this latest Burton/Depp team-up but it’s all the better they don’t because DARK SHADOWS is as bad a movie as a major talent like Tim Burton could ever hope to release.

At the end of the film, Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcote) has been turned into a vampire by Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp). He calls her Victoria and she corrects him, telling him her name is, “Josette,” which was the name of the original love of Barnabas’ life, who looks just like Maggie Evans, which is Victoria Winters’ real name. The person I saw the movie with asked me if we were supposed to think Victoria had become Josette, or if she had always been Josette.

My answer?

I don’t care.

I don’t. DARK SHADOWS is brutal, awful, bad film making. If it was just a bad movie, I wouldn’t freak out because bad movies happen all the time. What’s unforgivable about SHADOWS is that it’s a poorly made film and a director with all of Burton’s talent should not be making fundamentally flawed movies. He can make bad movies but not poorly made ones, and DARK SHADOWS has so many problems that I felt like Burton turned in his film and then someone who hates him re-cut it to make it as stupid as possible.

There are problems with tone and narrative here, and I’ll start with tone.

DARK SHADOWS has no idea what it wants to be. It’s ostensibly a horror-comedy, but it’s neither scary nor funny. Really, it’s a bad comedy because there’s very little attempt to do anything horror-related, at all, beyond the “mob captures the monster at his castle” sequence early in the film. There’s an attempt to have a love plot going on, but it’s barely touched upon and it’s given lip service instead of active proof. Barnabas falls in love with Victoria because she looks like Josette.

That’s it.

He has much more passion with Angelique (Eva Green), even though he doesn’t love her. Heck, he has more passion with Dr. Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter) than he has with Victoria, which isn’t a bad thing because Victoria looks like she’s 16.

Right, so I’m now listening to the portion of the BITD podcast where they touch on the unseen DARK SHADOWS and Tom Deja makes the point that Johnny Depp’s Barnabas looks like (based on the TV commercials) it’s another role where Depp’s conception of the character is all artifice. Without seeing the movie, Tom has rather nailed it, but the artifice critique really applies to the whole film – you know, except for the actually being clever part. Things just happen here and then disappear and you get the feeling they just happen because they make a good scene or have a good visual and not because they add to the film’s narrative. There’s no consistency here, in feel or story.

For instance, the movie opens two centuries ago and we get the whole back story of Barnabas not being in love with Angelique, and Angelique actually being a witch, and casting spells that sends his real love off a cliff. She curses him with becoming a vampire and then turns the town against him, sticking him in a coffin. Great.

We cut to the present and spend a good amount of time introducing Maggie Evans/Victoria Winters in 1972. First, she’s on a train, then she gets a ride from some hippies, then she ends up at Collinwood where she gets hired to play governess to David Collins, a young kid who thinks he can talk to his dead mom. Pretty clearly, the film has set up Barnabas and Victoria to be the two leads of the film because it’s taken all this time introducing them.

It’s rather curious, then, when Victoria then proceeds to largely disappear from the film for huge chunks of time.

What?

The love story is never really developed; they’re both drawn to each other and that’s apparently all the film has to say about love.

And that’s where the film falters in terms of character. Barnabas is a monster, but not because he’s a vampire with a pale look, but because (in the past) he’s screwing Angelique without being in love with her. Angelique’s rage is lit when she tells Barnabas she wants to hear that he loves her, but Barnabas refuses, and says that wouldn’t be true. Now, that alone doesn’t make him a monster because lots of guys sleep with women they don’t love, but when you add in the fact that Barnabas lives in the house and Angelique works there as an employee of the family, things get a bit trickier.

Still, not wholly a bad guy at this point. But cut to the present where he falls in love with Victoria, and then proceeds to have sex with Dr. Hoffman and Angelique on the side. He slaughters the workers who free him from his coffin and the hippies who help him understand the contemporary world, but the film treats these events as coldly as Barnabas does. At the end of the film, Barnabas tells Angelique that her curse is that she’s incapable of love, but she’s not. Her love is misguided, but there’s no indication at all that Angelique was anything but in love with Barnabas back in the 18th century. Her problem isn’t that she cannot love, but that she cannot move on from who she believes to be her one, true love.

Think back to Derrick’s quote up at the top of this review. He perfectly encapsulates the heart of Tim Burton’s movies, but there’s no heart in DARK SHADOWS. The Collins’ family endures, but there’s no sense of family here. The mom (Michelle Pfeiffer) is the hard matriarch overseeing the downfall of the family business. Her brother (Jonny Lee Miller) is a letch, who eyes the newly arrived Victoria like a piece of meat to be humped, but then never, ever talks to her. Mom’s daughter Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz) is an angry, isolated teen who wants to run away. And the brother’s son (Gulliver McGrath) talks to his dead mom and no one believes him. They are dysfunctional and the film ultimately tries to bind them through their supernatural abilities: David talks to the dead, Barnabas is a vampire, and Carolyn is a werewolf (which comes out of nowhere), and Michelle Pfeiffer is, um, a mom?

DARK SHADOWS tries to draw a line about who’s the actual monster because David’s father chooses to leave Collinwood with a huge sum of cash instead of acting like David’s dad, but the film hasn’t taken the time to make them seem like real people, so I don’t care.

Carolyn’s status as a werewolf is a good example of things just happening. It comes out of nowhere, which is just as bad as things going nowhere. When Barnabas returns, he decides he’s going to restore the family’s business to its former glory. So he goes and hypnotizes Christopher Lee and then they have a ceremony where they open the factory and then … nada. The next time the cannery plays any role in the film of note is when Angelique blows it up.

The film probably should have set itself up as a total Barnabas vs. Angelique film because that’s where the film clearly wants to go. Eva Green is her usual gorgeous self (I have a fondness for black boots and she rocks that look deliciously) and her character provides the wildness to counter Barnabas’ bland exterior. That whole opening sequence with Victoria is time they should have spent with Angelique.

DARK SHADOWS has two positive things going for it. The first is the look of the town, which is fantastic. The second is the mid-film appearance by Alice Cooper an the use of my favorite Cooper song of all time (which is also one of my favorite overall songs of all time), “Ballad of Dwight Fry.” The song integrates wonderfully with the story during this sequence (including Carolyn speaking the little girl’s part of the song) and gives the film some much needed life, and is the only real evidence of any ingenuity from the film makers.

The theater I saw the movie in actually had a decent crowd, but there were no rumblings of approval on the way out the door. People shuffled out either complaining about the film or silently, shuffling back to the light like disappointed zombies. Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have both made bad movies in the past, but this time around they failed at the simplest aspects of storytelling.

Simply put, DARK SHADOWS is a poorly made movie, and the worst of Tim Burton’s long, illustrious career.

CASINO ROYALE (2006): The World’s Gonna Know You Died Scratching My Balls

Casino Royale (2006) – The 21st James Bond Film; The 1st Daniel Craig Film – Directed by Martin Campbell – Starring Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Giancarlo Giannini, Jeffrey Wright, Simon Abkarian, Jesper Christensen, and Judi Dench.

When I first watched CASINO ROYALE back in 2006, the first thing I said to someone about the movie was, “That’s the Bond movie I’ve always wanted to see.” Combining a global plot with an intimate character arc, CASINO reboots the Bond franchise by taking us back to the first days of James Bond (Daniel Craig) as 007. Largely gone are the gadgets, Moneypenny, Q, shaken-not-stirred, the signature theme music, the ridiculous henchman, the comedic ally, and the Hollywood-ized casting that came to the fore in the Pierce Brosnan films. In it’s place we have a straightforward action/espionage film with a villain whose interest lies in making money far more than ruling the world.

And it’s brilliant.

CASINO ROYALE is not only my favorite James Bond film, not only in the pantheon of all-time action movies, but it’s also flat out one of my favorite movies of all time.

Clocking in at almost two-and-a-half hours, CASINO ROYALE manages to tell a large story without losing sight of the character arc of its protagonist. This is the first Bond film with a Bond still finding himself as a man and an agent. While he’s still cool, he’s not unflappable. He makes mistakes but he doggedly keeps pushing forward. He is very much the “blunt instrument” that M accuses him of being while dressing him down for an act that causes the British government public discomfort.

The movie opens in black and white, as we see Bond waiting for Dryden, an MI6 section chief in his office. Dryden tells Bond he isn’t worried because Bond doesn’t have “double-O” status because you need two confirmed kills to gain it. Intercut with the Dryden-Bond showdown is an incredibly physical fight between Bond and Dryden’s contact in a bathroom. Bond kills the contact for kill #1 and then Dryden for kill #2. Smartly, the film moves from the assasination of Dryden, back to the final killshot of his contact, which becomes the famous “barrel sequence,” then we’re into the titles, and when we come out the other side, we see a computer screen telling us that he’s “007 status confirmed.” It’s smart filmmaking that rewards you for paying attention. This isn’t to suggest that CASINO ROYALE is Memento or Mulholland Drive, but it will reward you for paying attention to the craft that went into its production.

When we next see Bond, he’s in Madagascar and working with a much greener agent to capture a bomb maker. We get this huge parkour chase sequence (with the bomb maker being played by Sebastian Foucan, one of parkour’s founders) through the city that winds through a construction site and ends at the Nambutu foreign embassy. It’s a fantastic sequence that highlights the raw physicality of Craig’s Bond. His target runs over obstacles and squeezes through tiny holes while Bond runs through them, combining his power with his intelligence to continually close the distance on the target. At the embassy we see that his intelligence has limits; far from being invincible, Craig’s Bond makes plenty of mistakes, like he does at the end of the sequence when he kills the bomb maker inside embassy grounds and in plain sight of a security camera.

The Brosnan Bond films did a solid job of plugging the Bond franchise into the contemporary political scene and CASINO continues this trend. Bond’s killing of the bomb maker causes all sorts of grief for M (still played by the awesomely bad-ass Judi Dench) as his assassination makes the papers back home. M is furious at the duplicitous nature of the lawmakers who want results and purposely don’t ask about their methods, and furious at Bond for being so stupid.

The relationship between M and Bond is different than it’s ever been this time around. With Brosnan’s Bond, Dench’s M was also a bad-ass, but there was always the sense that, relative to their fields, they were both at the top of their profession. Dench’s M actually has to prove herself to Bond in GOLDENEYE but this becomes mutual respect as the series progresses. In CASINO, M is clearly the superior, and her admonishing of Bond is much more … I hesitate to use the word “maternal” because I think I want to use it just because M’s a woman and Bond’s a man, but her attitude towards Bond is one-part taskmaster, one-part shepherd. “They want your head,” she tells him sternly. “I’m considering giving it to them.”

“Next time I’ll shoot the camera first,” he tells her flatly. You can forget, I think, just how humorous CASINO can occasionally be if you haven’t watched it in a while because the film, as a whole, is so serious. Craig’s usually delivers his quips in a serious monotone, which helps to keep the film and character grounded.

M wants Bond to see “the big picture” in light of his actions in Madagascar but at the end of the film, after Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) is dead and Bond coldly tells M he doesn’t need anymore time off because “the mission is over and the bitch is dead,” you can see a look on M’s face that says she’s a bit wary of what she’s just created.

CASINO plays with your expectations of what a Bond movie “should be” a bit here and there, both for comedic effect and to highlight how this film is going in a new direction. When Bond first meets Vesper, she tells him, “I’m the money” and he dryly replies that she’s “worth every penny of it.” Later, when a bartender asks him if he wants his martini “shaken or stirred,” Bond angrily snaps back, “Does it look like I give a damn?”

The main storyline in CASINO involves Bond playing in a high stakes poker game that bad guy Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) puts on to recover the money he lost when Bond stopped his agent from blowing up a jet in Miami. Le Chiffre short sells stocks and then hires people to do bad things to profit from rebuying the stock at a much lower price. When Bond stops the bomb, the shares of the jet’s manufacturer don’t fall, and Le Chiffre ends up being out $100 million. Give or take. The poker game is his chance to make his money back.

The problem with his scheme is that he’s investing other people’s money, and that’s where the real problem for him lies. He takes money from international terrorists and invests it and they’re understandably torqued when Le Chiffre’s “low risk” investing strategies cost them their money. A bunch of African terrorists show up in Montenegro to rough him up a bit and Bond ends up killing them when they recognize him as a threat. The fight between the men and Bond (with Vesper caught in the middle) is another rough, physical, brutal fight down a stairwell inside the casino. Bond kills both terrorists but the fight takes his toll on him. Where a previous Bond might be bothered most by the blood on his clothes, Craig’s Bond clearly needs time to come down from what he’s just done. Guzzling liquor as he undresses back in his room, Bond needs time to compose himself before returning to the table to continue the game.

Moving parallel to the poker game plot is Bond’s developing relationship with Vesper, an agent from the Treasury who’s been assigned to the mission. She’s authorized $10 million to go into Bond’s account for the poker game buy-in and she can authorize $5 million more if she deems it a wise investment. Craig and Eva Green have fantastic chemistry. The dinner scene aboard a high-speed luxury train is one of the best back-and-forths in the franchise. There’s a mutual attraction between them but Lynd makes a point to tell Bond that this will be a business trip. After they pop-psychoanalyze each other, Lynd asks him, “How was your lamb?”

“Skewered,” he answers with a droll smile.

Vesper ends up betraying Bond in the end. She’s a double agent, working for the organization that employs Le Chiffre. Her boyfriend was held hostage by the group and they coerced her into working for them to get the money. What’s nice is that because Lynd isn’t a professional at all of this, her tears are real when she sees Bond kill the two African terrorists. The filmmakers have managed to make all of her actions consistent with both her growing attraction to Bond and her ultimate betrayal. It’s a quiet but powerful performance by Green, and the relationship between Vesper and Bond grows naturally through the film so you feel her betrayal all the more when it comes (even if you know it’s probably coming).

At the helm for the first time since GOLDENEYE is Martin Campbell and once again he delivers stellar work. It’s top notch directing from start to finish from Campbell.

David Arnold is back to score his fourth straight Bond movie and once again he’s fantastic, too. He’s hamstrung a bit by the decision to not use the classic Bond theme until the end credits, but he co-wrote the title song, “You Know My Name” with Chris Cornell and uses an orchestrated version of the song throughout the film to serve as a substitute theme for Bond. It works extremely well and sounds reminiscent enough of the classic Bond theme that, unlike GOLDENEYE, you’re not constantly waiting for it to show up. It’s a great rock song, too, and the opening titles (designed by Daniel Kleinman) are spectacular. I love the colorful brightness of the sequence, which stand in contrast to the film’s muted (though well-lit) palette. Both song and title sequence are among the best in the franchise’s history.

CASINO ROYALE is a triumph from start to finish.