Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are snuggled warmly in their comfort zone in the chilly horror-comedy Dark Shadows, their eighth collaboration as director and star, respectively, and their weakest by far.
You don’t need to know a thing about the late-1960s Dark Shadows TV series that provides the inspiration. Tonally, thematically, visually, you’ve seen this movie before, with its oddball characters, skies in varying shades of gray and a foreboding sense of gothic mystery. No one gets challenged here; no one gets pushed.
It’s actually a wonder that Depp hasn’t played a vampire before; still, his long-undead Barnabas Collins, who’s been buried alive for nearly two centuries and suddenly finds himself back in his insular Maine hometown in 1972, fits squarely within his well-honed on-screen persona. He thinks he’s quite the charmer, but he’s actually a bit awkward, and that contradiction provides the main source of humor.
Photo courtesy of Warner
Or at least, it’s supposed to.
The script from Seth Grahame-Smith (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) allows its family full of weirdos to shine intermittently but they rarely interact with each other; each functions in his or her own self-consciously quirky bubble. Too often, Dark Shadows is crammed with hacky, obvious, fish-out-of-water gags, as Barnabas tries to make sense of this strange new world. He struggles to understand modern romance as he courts the family’s delicate, wide-eyed nanny and hopes to fit in by smoking pot with the local hippies. And how is this tiny Karen Carpenter person singing to him from inside the television set? Ho ho!
At the same time, Dark Shadows feels too languid, bogged down as it is with an obsessive eye for period costumes (the work of Colleen Atwood) and interior details rather than offering anything resembling an engaging story. And by the time Burton finally puts his patented flair for visual effects to its best use, in a climactic showdown between Barnabas and the witch who cursed him (the va-va-voomy Eva Green), it’s too late.
Photo courtesy of Warner
A little background here: As a child, Barnabas and his wealthy family sailed from England in 1750 and founded the fishing village of Collinsport in coastal Maine. They spent 15 years building the grand Collinwood Manor, where a maid named Angelique (Green) loved Barnabas passionately, but he never returned her affections. Because she felt scorned — and happened to be a witch — she turned him into a vampire, chained him up and stuck him in a coffin in the ground. Nearly 200 years later, a construction crew unearths him and sets him free.
When he stumbles back to his once-stately home, he finds it falling apart, along with the fishing empire that has been conquered by a competitor named Angel (Green, again). The few family members who remain are random and reclusive: matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer), the only one who knows his true identity; her weasel of a brother, Roger (Jonny Lee Miller); her rebellious teen daughter, Carolyn (Chloe Grace Moretz); and Roger’s 10-year-old son David (Gully McGrath), who sees dead people. There’s also David’s perpetually drunk psychiatrist, Dr Julia Hoffman (Burton regular Helena Bonham Carter); the home’s beleaguered caretaker, Willie (Jackie Earle Haley); and the new governess, Victoria (Bella Heathcote), who bears a striking resemblance to Barnabas’ long-ago love and has a few secrets of her own.
That’s a lot of exposition, huh? And the film itself takes awhile to get going as it establishes all those characters and back stories. Once there, it seems to have nowhere to go — out of the shadows or into the light, it doesn’t really matter either way.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s