Dark Shadows (Tim Burton)

[eternity]

Director: Tim Burton


imdb

[eternity]

This is the Fruit Striped Gum of movies. It begins wonderfully, the first half hour is brilliantly insane, almost a return to form for Tim Burton. It's all just disjointed scenes and subplots swirling around an eighteenth century vampire in a "groovy," hyperstylized 1970s New England. It works really well. Until it doesn't. The movie takes a sudden nose dive and ceases to be enjoyable or even technically impressive, as if everybody stopped caring all at once. Suddenly, the script is boring, Burton stopped trying to direct, and the actors, particularly the dreadful although especially beautiful Bella Heathcote, seem really bored.

I really wanted to like this, and I was. Too bad in the end, it's pretty wretched.

[MadMan]

Bummer to hear that. I'm still going to check this out, mostly because I watched the old show back when repeats of it aired on Sci-Fi Channel before it became SFY.

[Boner M]

Echoing eternity's thoughts completely. Starts off vaguely promising and Beetlejuice-y, but then becomes a complete mess. I kinda suspect that much of the development of the romance between Heathcote and Depp was left on the cutting room floor, considering how much of a deadweight the former is.

Also, what's the point of a fish-out-of-water comedy that pits two bygone eras against each other? I suppose iPad/Lady Gaga gags would've been equally tiring, but that doesn't make stuff like Depp strolling by Superfly on a cinema marquee any less feeble.

[eternity]

Echoing eternity's thoughts completely. Starts off vaguely promising and Beetlejuice-y, but then becomes a complete mess. I kinda suspect that much of the development of the romance between Heathcote and Depp was left on the cutting room floor, considering how much of a deadweight the former is.

Also, what's the point of a fish-out-of-water comedy that pits two bygone eras against each other? I suppose iPad/Lady Gaga gags would've been equally tiring, but that doesn't make stuff like Depp strolling by Superfly on a cinema marquee any less feeble.

Burton's direction was able to sell a lot of that for me. It's obviously lazy, but every "Aha!" joke is very well timed. Every semi-inappropriate musical choice worked perfectly for me too.

[Kiusagi]

I owe this film for reminding me The Carpenters existed and were awesome.

[lovejuice]

A pretty bad movie, but as an ex-Burton fanboy, I can't bring myself to hate it. The movie feels like Burton's honest attempt to return to his earlier, darker, weirder days -- before he became "Hot Topic" Tim Burton. Imo, there is almost an attempt to alienate the audiences, to show us who he really is, and his vision of the modern Gothic before that's got distorted by the Twilight crowd.

[Spun Lepton]

This is the Fruit Striped Gum of movies. It begins wonderfully, the first half hour is brilliantly insane, almost a return to form for Tim Burton. It's all just disjointed scenes and subplots swirling around an eighteenth century vampire in a "groovy," hyperstylized 1970s New England. It works really well. Until it doesn't. The movie takes a sudden nose dive and ceases to be enjoyable or even technically impressive, as if everybody stopped caring all at once. Suddenly, the script is boring, Burton stopped trying to direct, and the actors, particularly the dreadful although especially beautiful Bella Heathcote, seem really bored.

I really wanted to like this, and I was. Too bad in the end, it's pretty wretched.

This is pretty much on-the-nose.