Free Room for Chores Indeed
Since leaving the world of radio a few months ago, I’ve gone nuts living back at home. The arrangement made sense while I was trying to make a go of […]
I’m not sure how Tim Burton still has a career. He hasn’t directed a movie that received better-than-mixed reviews since Ed Wood. His films, while rarely financial bombs, don’t do particularly well at the box office. And he isn’t Jewish. In fact, the only thing I can think of that has kept Tim Burton around like a lingering fart is his friendship with Johnny Depp. And when I say “friendship”, I mean “my parents were married for 25 years and loved one another and I think Tim and Johnny would demolish them at The Newlywed Game because the relationship they share make my parents’ union appear to have all the intimacy of a frat boy cumming across an anonymous freshman’s face by comparison.”
But we aren’t here to discuss facials. We’re here to discuss Dark Shadows and what a massive piece of shit it looks like. Depp plays Barnabas Collins, a vampire who’s released upon the 1970s after 200 years of imprisonment in a coffin. Which is fantastic for us, because the fish out of water premise is the pinnacle of comedy. That’s why Perfect Strangers is mentioned in the same breath with other hilarious greats like Seinfeld and Taxi. Actually, I can think of one gag Dark Shadows could run with that’d make me laugh, but I bet Johnny Depp would get pissy if the script called for Barnabas to express shock that he can no longer purchase and own black people.
I hope Dark Shadows tanks. Yes, we live in America. Yes, it’s a land of fat, stupid blobs with poor taste and poorer bank accounts and in 20 years we’ll all be owned by the Chinese. But, in this moment, while the eagle still flies high, let’s stand proud against such predictable fare and skip Dark Shadows to send a message. Or, go see Dark Shadows, as long as you promise to protest Battleship next week. Anyone buying a ticket to that one should be sterilized as a precautionary measure.
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Djvexd on May 12, 2012
I normally try to give a smart ass quip or post here. However I need to make a Depp observation. I have noticed lately that in his everlasting quest to take completely extreme roles he has actually narrowed his range and honestly alot of his characters since Jack Sparrow and Willy Wanker have been noticably similar. (Ebert Off) That being said I just watched The Rum Diary from Netflix and must say, I need some fucking adrenachrome now.
Heezy on May 13, 2012
I actually went to see this movie. Not because I like Tim Burton or Johnny Depp, but because I thought “retro vampire meets war of the roses” sounded kind of interesting.
Basically, there is always something wrong with a Tim Burton movie. He’s always doing something a little different than everyone else in Hollywood, but he’s also blatantly fucking up something.
In this movie, all the characters are fun, and the actors all do a decent job. Johnny Depp and Michelle Pfeiffer have a few great scenes together as their characters try to figure out how distant relatives become a family again, despite one being a vampire who build the family fortune and the other being the living descendant who has barely kept the family business out of bankruptcy.
Otherwise, the story is a shitty, inexplicable love triangle. There’s no explanation of how Depp fell out of love with the movie’s antagonist/witch, and how the reincarnated love of his life ever became the love of his life. I looked up the reason this movie was made, and what I found out is that Dark Shadows is a shitty sci-fi soap opera that aired on ABC in the early 70s. I had totally blocked out my memories of watching that piece of shit on the Sci-Fi Channel when that cable network first launched in the 90s (man, those fuckers were cheap back then– they couldn’t even afford re-runs of ST:TNG). But there is a cult following that still lingers today, and Johnny Depp is one of those obsessed fans. He apparently went around as a kid before he was famous pretending to be Barnabas Collins, so for him this project really was a labor of love. I have no idea what Burton’s connection to the 70s show is, but I imagine he would’ve let Edward Scissorhands give him a handjob just to get another shot to make a movie with Depp (who really is awesome in this flick– just wait to catch snippets of his performance on TNT in a couple years).