Dark Shadows (Tim Burton, 2012)

On paper, Dark Shadows should be a stirring return to form for Tim Burton. Like Beetlejuice, its focus on one main set limits Burton's arty leanings even as it allows him to pour all of his expressionistic flair into his chosen location, maximizing his moody design instead of diluting it across too big an area. And like Edward Scissorhands, it then drags that isolated, anachronistic, black-and-white setting into a candy-colored "normal" world, having fun with the juxtaposition. After the fine but flat Sweeney Todd and the out-of-control Alice in Wonderland, this could have been just what Burton needed to get back on track.

Instead, it marks a low point for a career that already includes the 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes and the aforementioned take on Lewis Carroll. Based on the late-'60s soap opera of the same name, Dark Shadows concerns one Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp, obviously), the heir to a fortune and family legacy until a witch whose love he spurned (Eva Green) took everything from him, turned him into a vampire and buried him alive for eternal torment. Accidentally unearthed in 1972, Barnabas must restore his cursed descendants to the rightful Collins legacy while acclimating to a changed world.

And by "acclimate," I mean be the butt of a series of unfunny jokes that attempt to play on the cultural disconnect between a man from the end of the 18th century and a society in the wake of the Love Generation. But Depp overplays Barnabas, bypassing soap opera melodrama for the outright lunacy of his recent collaborations with the director. This breaks an already isolated character from reality completely, so that his wonder at a woman doctor (Helena Bonham Carter, again, obviously) or a lava lamp become less the outbursts of a confused man out of time than the eccentricities of a weirdo.

Furthermore, for a film that seeks to wring humor out of a man from the past entering the present, Dark Shadows makes a major misstep in retaining the time period of the original soap. What was contemporary in the series is now itself outdated and unfamiliar to the young adult audience being targeted. I myself was thrown almost instantly by Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcote, who also plays Barnabas' wife back in the 1790s) answering a classified ad A) in a newspaper, period and B) that called for a governess, a word I don't believe I've ever heard outside of a Brontë novel. Even the music cues hold practically nothing for a modern crowd. Alice Cooper guests as himself and plays two songs, only one of which nearly anyone under 30 has a decent chance of having heard, while the Moody Blues and T.Rex also feature to satisfy Burton's own nostalgia at the expense of any relatability.

The entire cast is hobbled by this awkward campiness and self-absorption. Michelle Pfeiffer, who aded such seductive flair to Catwoman in Burton's Batman Returns, has apparently been deemed too old to do anything but be a starched matriarch, so removed that she registers only momentary surprise at the seismic shocks of learning that a vampire is in the family and that the witch who made him is now her business rival. Chloë Moretz is disturbingly sexualized, while Heathcote is left as limp as a boned fish to be virginal enticement for Barnabas. It's not right to say that Carter and Depp are on autopilot, as autopilot connotes stability and mechanized competence. They continue to get worse and worse under Burton's direction: Carter grows ever more haughty and unapproachable, while Depp...Jesus, where to to start. For one thing, he ports over his Michael Jackson-esque appearance from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, his use of umbrellas and large sunglasses during daylight hours making him look more like the King of Pop than the Count of Transylvania. He cannot speak without drawing out each syllable and flexing his fingers in Lugosi fashion. The joke wears thin at once, and this rates with the last Pirates of the Caribbean movie as his worst work. As for Green, who seemed poised for stardom only a few years ago before she backed away from Hollywood in discomfort, this is what brought her back? As Angelique, her responsibilities include looking pretty and throwing tantrums. The first she does with considerable aplomb, the latter she does with the same loopy yet bored energy of everyone else who must sit captive to Depp's lack of restraint.

If Dark Shadows plays like a mashup of Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, the Burton film it most routinely recalls is Sleepy Hollow. There is of course nothing wrong with this; Sleepy Hollow was perhaps the last great auterist piece Burton made (he would make the more emotionally poignant but visually subdued Big Fish four years later). Collinwood, the stately manor built by Barnabas' parents is atmospheric even when it's meant to convey joy and the prosperity and opportunity of the New World. And when Barnabas reawakens and finds his home in cobwebbed decay, its gargantuan size and dilapidated, faded glory serves as its own mausoleum. And then Burton has to go and ruin it with CGI. Burton was never as good with the aid of computers as he was without it. Take Sleepy Hollow: the biggest explosion of Burton's quirks falls visually flat only when dodgy CGI enters the picture. Its classical, even old-fashioned, effects elsewhere have a beauty to them I haven't seen in any of the director's subsequent large-scale works. Collinwood is the only thing with gravity in the film, and the climax dully throws that out in the window for an over-the-top magic fight that saps what little edge remained within the home's immaculately crafted but poorly tended walls.

The greatest weakness of Burton's "re-imaginings" of pre-existing works is how little imagination he can muster in his approach. Narratively, he takes properties and makes them nominally darker in a search for some emotional truth, ironically making, without fail, less engaging and affecting movies than those he adapts. Visually, Burton has bypassed merely repeating his style—an auterist trademark, not a crime—into crafting a one-gloom-fits-all mise-en-scène that makes all his films these days interchangeable. I still love too many of the director's movies to quit him entirely, and I'd hoped that Alice in Wonderland represented rock bottom. But then, the only way to know if someone has truly hit their lowest point is if they subsequently improve. After Alice I contented myself saying Burton couldn't get any worse. I will not tempt fate a second time.

Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011)

For the six people out there who still love 3D, Hugo will be the film of the year. To be sure, no other film from any year is so well-suited for the format. Concerning the earliest days of cinema, where the medium still oscillated between kitschy gimmick and potential artform, Hugo was directed by Martin Scorsese, a director fascinated by the artifice of cinema and how its inherent falsity can nevertheless draw in a viewer like no other art. This makes 3D doubly appropriate, and as much as I loathe the tackiness of even the supposedly advanced iteration of the technology that is already flaming out brilliantly, Hugo makes such inventive and striking use of 3D that I hate what Scorsese's done as much as I love it. Hugo is too ambitious to make any money, but even so; could the director pump some life back into 3D just as it seemed we were free of this headache that comes once every three decades?

Set in the vast Parisien train station Gare Montparnasse in the early '30s, Hugo follows its titular hero (Asa Butterfield), the orphaned child of a clockmaker, as he moves within the walls of station winding its various timekeepers and swiping meals from oblivious vendors. He also collects gears to repair a rusted automaton his father (Jude Law) brought home before he died in a museum fire, hoping that continuing his father's work will somehow bring the man back in some form. But when an old toy vendor (Ben Kingsley) catches him trying to steal parts from one of his wind-up mice, Hugo finds himself thrust into a deeper story of embitterment and rejuvenation, one that holds the key to his own issues even as it plunges him into a whole new world.

Scorsese delights with his new toy, but the space he gives to objects already made distinct by the 3D effect is magical. Steam and mist hang in the air in ethereal clouds, while gears turn all around the lad as he snakes through the station's inner workings. The inherently shallow visual range of 3D only encourages the director to use even more close-ups and extreme close-ups than usual, which Thelma Schoonmaker throws together in what must surely be the best-edited family film of all time. The 3D gives the film its usual illusory effect, but where so many are trying to make the format seem legitimate and artistic, Scorsese actively uses it for cheap effect, whether opening on snow flurries that float out into the audience or pushing out the faces of those in close-up. In so doing, he uses 3D to remind the audience of the film's "filmness," of the fact that it's fake yet enchanting.

This becomes important when Hugo grows close to the toy seller's granddaughter, Isabel (Chloë Moretz), who has been forbidden from seeing any movies. Hugo sneaks her into Safety Last!, that masterful Harold Lloyd picture, and she marvels with fright and elation at the man's precarious stunts, scarcely able to believe her eyes. When clues lead the two to believe that her grandfather might have made films as well, Scorsese visualizes their research with clips from the earliest of cinema, especially the Lumière brothers' film Train Pulling into a Station, which seems so simple today but famously terrified audiences who feared the train would come through the screen and crush them. In that 50-second short is Scorsese's whole approach to 3D, that of a clearly fake image turned to verisimilitude by the sheer magic of cinema.

Of course, it was not the Lumières who brought wonder to cinema, and it turns out that the old, bitter grandfather tending to his failing toy shop is actually Georges Méliès, the first great dreamer of cinema, the first one to truly test the properties of film and how its sideshow attraction nature could actually be the foundation for artistry, not a hurdle to overcome. From his films comes the blockbuster, with its use, for better and worse, of special effects to dazzle rather than deepen. Naturally, 3D becomes but one of the tricks that can, in theory at least, make film more tactile to audiences, and seeing Méliès' own A Trip to the Moon converted to 3D is one of the most bizarrely fitting approaches to film history I've ever seen, and I cannot believe I just wrote that.

Hugo gradually shifts from the story of a boy trying to find himself to one of that lad attempting to save an old man from self-made ruin, but I found the film remarkably cogent in its unexpected progression. Even the asides to the other characters who populate Scorsese's sandbox of a train station do not significantly alter the momentum. Besides, their subplots converge neatly into the ultimate theme, which sublimates Hugo's quest to retain his father into a story of realizing one's self, regardless of age. Even the film's villain, a hobbled WWI veteran turned officious station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), gets the chance to find some measure of happiness and fulfillment. He, Hugo and Méliès have all suffered some kind of debilitating setback, but finding their various loves in life, be they people or projects (or both), can make them whole again.

I have some minor quibbles with Hugo. Moretz, despite being the best and most mature child actor in a generation, gets saddled with vocabulary words that too preciously play on her intelligence. Robert Richardson's cinematography is gorgeous and works fluidly with the 3D, but I'm somewhat over our strange orange and teal fascination when it comes to color tones. Nevertheless, Hugo is a delight, and as personal in its own way as Mean Streets. Scorsese's passion for film preservation comes to the fore in the final act, and judging from the astonished response of the children in my screening to those ambitious old silents, the need for protecting and showing these films to new generations is a cultural imperative, which shouldn't be as hard as it seems. (I've seen some dismissing Scorsese's cinephilia here as academic, but the pleasures of people like Méliès or Lloyd are anything but dry and intellectual.) Movies unlock purpose for so many in this film, and it comes as no surprise that the key that sets it all in motion should be in the shape of a heart.

Let Me In

For the foreseeable future, I will be contributing regular pieces for my friend Sasha James' blog The Final Girl Project. Compared to the more long-winded posts here, these pieces will be more concise, a full review, excluding a brief plot summary placed in its own section, will only run about 400-500 words. For any movie I've not yet reviewed, I plan to cross-post here with a longer article...eventually (I've still not gotten around to supplementing my Jackie Brown review).

However, I'm linking my review for Matt Reeves' unexpectedly wonderful remake of the haunting Let the Right One In, one of my favorite films of the preceding decade, because I don't think I have much to add to it. Much of what I wrote in my review of Tomas Alfredson's original applies to Reeves' film as well, but key differences make them divergent and equally worthy in their own ways. I did not care for Reeves' Cloverfield despite the valid excuses for its paper-thin writing, bludgeoning post-9/11 culture commentary and infuriating direction, but this movie is as far as you can get from that glorified mess. The clear link that bonds the two is, of course, a love of monster movies, but where Cloverfield was about the monster in blatantly symbolic terms, Let Me In connects with the monster, tries to understand it. In the process, it sees the evil in all of us. I still prefer Let the Right One In, but I was pleasantly surprised by this movie and look forward to revisiting it often.

So, please, check out my review at Final Girl Project, and also take a look at Matthew Zoller Seitz's spot-on praise for the best sequence of the film, and one of the best of any 2010 movie.