Burton and Depp keep on Burtoning and Depping in...Dark Shadows!

That's understandable. Unfortunate movies have been a component of many otherwise lovely evenings I've experienced.

I've seen plenty with this group, I'm used to it :)

So I saw Dark Shadows tonight and it-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

so
fucking
boring

otm. worst movie i've paid to see in the theater in a long time. hugely disappointing, even relative to other recent burton flicks.

It's totally understandable to think this movie boring or just plain bad, but how anyone could fail to see this is nowhere within earshot of the megaton disaster that was Alice in Wonderland is beyond me.

oh it's miles better than Alice

Dark Shadows has Alice Cooper doing 70's Alice; Alice in Wonderland only has junkie Alice which = massive fail on all levels

burton's filmmaking, while perfectly competent or more, feels completely anonymous and uninspired. all the CGI landscapes are so predictable and dispiriting. they could have hired any competent director, added some goth trappings, and it would probably be about the same.

it's kind of sad that the best parts of this film were all the cheap-but-funny fish-out-of-water gags.

it's also kind of sad that we're measuring this film's artistic success against alice in wonderland. i will probably never see a movie directed by this shell of a filmmaker again.

This just didn't have a reason for existing. Sweeney Todd did.

Dark Shadows just seemed to miss the point: the fish out of water gag should be like 5 minutes of the movie, at best. You can't make a whole movie out of that.

but how anyone could fail to see this is nowhere within earshot of the megaton disaster that was Alice in Wonderland is beyond me.

i know i'm in the minority on this, but i think alice in wonderland has a kind of casual pride in complete junkiness that makes its many sins seem sort of irrelevant. i took it as a cheap, dumb children's cartoon and was happy just to see distorted versions of crispin glover and HBC camping it up at the margins. it's a failure, of course, but it at least moves quickly from one colorful bit of nonsense to the next - never lets things drag the way dark shadows does.

Alice makes me so IA I can't even begin to say how much I hated it

the nihilism in it was just, ugh...maybe I'm too sensitive but it was just downright offensive

I look forward to watching Lucy once again pull the football away upon the arrival of Frankenweenie.

Dark Shadows just seemed to miss the point: the fish out of water gag should be like 5 minutes of the movie, at best. You can't make a whole movie out of that.

otm, and worse, the fish-out-of-water bits weren't funny even on the first pass. why beat a dead joke into the ground?

so many missed opportunities. stuffy old vampire twit asking a surly mod teen for dating advice: that should be funny, right? no! it was dumb and boring because the script and character interactions were wretched - and we never barnabus him trying to woo his beloved anyway. burton didn't spend any time developing the lead couple's romance. we were simply meant to gather from depp's tragically furrowed glances that true love (i.e., big eyes and pancake makeup) would eventually conquer all. what's a soap opera without some romantic complication? ten bucks down the drain, apparently.

"we never barnabus him" = "we never saw barnabus"

lol

You never her.

I barnabused right after I left that stupid barnabusing movie

the thing about burton's recent (hell, at this point most of his) movies is that while they retain all these signifiers of "weirdness" and "originality" (those tend to me the words that come up on press junkets) they seem so terribly devoid of anything surprising or inventive.

which is why his films are def. tending toward the discount rack at hot topic.

stuff w/ HBC character was uncomfortably misogynistic no? HBC gives JD unexpected BJ --> HBC stealing JD's essence --> JD kills HBC in horrible fashion, and we're supposed to cheer.

spoilers or whatevs, not that anybody cares.

I walked in expecting it to be terrible and ended up rather enjoying it. I mean, it's a mess. But it was pretty and funny enough. I guess Burton's twee goth stuff holds some kind of inherent appeal for me. Surprised by how raunchy it was however. Tone-wise, weird juxtaposition between goofy childishness and blow-jobs...

yeah it was weirdly raunchy.

BTW i had no fucking idea that dark shadows was a failing soap that decided to add a vampire after a year! that's wild.

(i knew it was a soap, i just figured it was about vampires from the beginning. maybe the sudden revelation that chloe moretz is a werewolf was an homage to the way the original show just tossed in a new element when things were getting stale.)

The last Tim Burton film I thought was of any value was The Corpse Bride, and before that Big Fish. Dark Shadows looked appealing from the trailer, but it's taking a beating here. I'll probably wait for video.

amateurist, you're dumping spoilers all over this piece like a leaky garbage bag.

trust me, it won't matter to anyone.

BTW i had no fucking idea that dark shadows was a failing soap that decided to add a vampire after a year! that's wild.

That's interesting trivia! I had no idea. Just think what could've been had Passions really taken off.

HBC stealing JD's essence --> JD kills HBC in horrible fashion, and we're supposed to cheer.

um, rather than cheer, i felt we were supposed to see that barnabus' treatment of julia replicated/inverted angela's treatment of barnabus, and i never for a moment thought that spoiler spoiler spoiler.

spoilers spoilers here be spoilers i guess

hmmm, i wonder how that scene was intended to play. i think we were supposed to be amused by it, maybe a little horrified, but ultimately sympathetic to barnabas who after all is the protagonist. if we were supposed to wonder about our identification with barnabas maybe burton could have made that clearer?

The last Tim Burton film I thought was of any value was The Corpse Bride, and before that Big Fish. Dark Shadows looked appealing from the trailer, but it's taking a beating here. I'll probably wait for video.

jeez, the corpse bride has its moments but is such a sad, pale shadow of the nightmare before christmas. and big fish is too mawkish by half (at least). i kind of like sweeney todd, but the last burton feature i can endorse without reservation is sleepy hollow, going back some 8 films and 13 years.

pfft to you and your mawkish, I <3 Big Fish

unreservedly love Sweeney Todd

PFFT PFFT PFFT

except sweeney todd is pretty okay

pffffffffffffffffffffft

I like fish out of water stuff. It's hackey and has been done a million times, but honestly, what hasn't?

Haven't seen this yet tho.

wd put perm stake thru movie vampires, kidz.

but HBC will surely be back for the sequel!

the nihilism in Alice was about the only thing that movie had going for it

I still wish they'd gone whole hog and had a hero/villain inversion where it was revealed that the White Queen was actually treacling Wonderland to death and the Red Queen's tyranny was the only thing keeping the realm alive, making the story more about balancing the forces than eradicating the evil. Maybe then they wouldn't have felt the need to shoehorn in the fucking fudderwacken.

(Basically I wanted that movie to end with Alice committing a violent pogrom against the White Queen's forces while sobbing her eyes out, eventually waking up back in the real world shaken, upset, and wholly mistrustful of authority and power. So yeah, the nihilism it had didn't bother me so much.)

The trailer for Frankenweenie actually makes it look halfway decent.

There was a nice DS moment in Pfeiffer's interview of the governess, where she's trying to ferret out if she's a lefty freak, asking "What do you think of the war?" "I don't watch TV." Seems left over from an earlier, smarter script.

The trailer for Frankenweenie actually makes it look halfway decent.

― heated debate over derpy hooves (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Wednesday, May 23, 2012 9:30 AM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i know! but won't be fooled again etc.

and we never barnabus him

This is still cracking me up.

I pushed to go see this based on the trailer and a got a friend sort of excited about seeing it, but now I really don't want to go see it and she still does and I'm probably going to wind up seeing it.

How can I prepare myself to Barnabus this?

get drunk

and take heart that Alice Cooper appears halfway through to break the monotony

it's not intolerable or anything, it's mildly amusing. in other words, barnabusing it is strictly optional.

it's better than Big Fish.

The trailer for Frankenweenie actually makes it look halfway decent.

"I swear I won't pull it away this time, Charlie Brown. Honest."

exactly.

although i kind of initially read that as "i swear i'll pull out this time"

So Lucy was a tranny.

worst reboot ever.

Pee-Nuts

As we speak...a new generation of fangirls is applying Rule 34 to Peanuts, and probably every other cartoon with which you grew up.