Dark Shadows (4/5 Stars)

Death to Hippies

 It may surprise you in this age of vampire saturation that director Tim Burton, the reigning godfather of cinematic spookiness, has never done a vampire movie before. “Dark Shadows,” is his first. The same goes for his frequent collaborator, Johnny Depp. He has been pale and gothic plenty of times but he has never actually sucked blood. He does it well, or at least he does it better than they do it in “Twilight.”

The vampire in question is Barnabas Collins, the son of a very wealthy fishmonger merchant. Circa 1772, the father founded a fishing colony in New England, named it Collinswood, and built a huge gothic mansion on a really big hill overlooking the sea. Barnabas had a youthful fling with the housemaid, but never committed, instead marrying a woman of more noble birth. Unfortunately for him, the maid was a witch. Out of mad love, she killed his parents, murdered his wife, and turned him into a vampire. Then after he still refused her advances, she revealed to the townspeople his accursed nature and they buried him alive in a coffin in the middle of the woods. There he stayed wide-awake for two hundred years. In 1972, a modern day construction crew accidentally uncovered Barnabas’ coffin. Barnabas, always so polite, apologizes before murdering everyone. He was so very thirsty.

 If any of this seems like kind of heavy stuff to you, you wouldn’t be Tim Burton. To a guy like that, this is the set up of a comedy. Well, sort of. I wouldn’t exactly call Tim Burton a comedian. But there are plenty of small jokes. Mostly fish-out-of-water stuff involving the interaction between gothic horror and hippies. Sort of like Scooby Doo in reverse. Now that I think of it, Scooby Doo wasn’t all that funny either, but I still liked it. And this movie too. I liked this movie.

 At this point in my Tim Burton fandom, I have decided it is okay to overlook the things he has always been bad at because he does other things so well. For instance, with any other director, I would be dismayed if they spent so much time doing remakes and adaptations. Tim Burton does almost nothing else. (“Alice in Wonderland” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” “Sweeney Todd”). But this is okay, because Burton has consistently proven that when he is not following an already completely worked out story, what we generally end up with is a narrative mess (“Mars Attacks!” “Planet of the Apes” “Sleepy Hollow”). What he excels at though is art direction, makeup, costumes, etc. and in this he can be considered one of the best.

 “Dark Shadows,” is apparently a remake of a 70s soap opera melodrama. I bet it was really bad. Anyway, its basic story affords Burton a chance to put his trademark look on something he has no business sticking his dreadfully macabre hands on: flower power. You’ve never seen hippiedom look so pale and haunted. We are at the point probably where we tend to take for granted the amount of vision and effort Burton puts into the look of his movies. This movie, just like his others, is ridiculously gorgeous. The best parts of the movie involve the juxtaposition of the ancient occult Barnabas with beanbags, disco balls, and a van full of hippies. My favorite scene takes place around a campfire where Barnabas describes being locked in his coffin for 200 years and other horrors. All the hippies think he is really deep and weird and stuff. I can only imagine that this might parallel what Tim Burton faced in the 70s when he was growing up. He seems not made for that time. I bet he really got a kick out of having Barnabas murder all the hippies at the end of the scene for no particular reason. I know I did.

 Artistic direction in a Tim Burton doesn’t end with inanimate objects. The actors themselves are cast because they look like they belong in a Tim Burton movie. The perfect example of this is Helena Bonham Carter with her bone-white complexion and large eyes. Nobody looks better undead. Then there is Michelle Pfieffer, that most skeletal of beauties. Chloe Grace Moretz appears in her first Tim Burton movie and fits right in as well. A nice surprise is the witch, played by Eva Green. She is not one someone would expect to see in this type of movie. Her abnormal attractiveness is more suited for normal movies. She was after all a very good Bond Girl in “Casino Royale.” But notice the way she smiles just a little too widely or the way she swivels her head on that just a little too long of a neck of hers. As a witch, her beauty is only skin-deep and she has found a way to play that really well.

 Of course, nobody is better at downplaying attractiveness than Johnny Depp who has basically made a career out of it. What him and Burton seem to have completely in common is a strong aversion to sensuality. It is a rather common theme in their movies (Edward Scissorhands, Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd). Having said that, this movie has plenty of sex in it, or at least plenty for a Tim Burton movie. (Vampire sex it must be said is incredibly violent. I wonder if that’s a modern evolution of the character or whether all the old books described it as such as well.) That doesn’t mean that anyone besides the witch is enjoying it though. Depp in particular is as stiff as possible about it like he always is, which I have always found humorous and still do.

 One more thing about Depp must be mentioned: his extravagant vocabulary. It’s ridiculously first-rate and has been for about a decade in almost every movie he has been in (Pirates of the Caribbean, Rango, Rum Diary etc.) As all these movies have different writers I am beginning to think that Depp must be smuggling a thesaurus to work each day and punching up his lines.
 

The Avengers (3/5 Stars)

It’s Okay!

 I never read comic books as a kid nor did I have a ton of video games, but I did own action figures, mostly Star Wars and Legos. Action figures, unlike books and video games, do not come with their own story lines so kids had to use their imaginations in order to have fun. I do not recall any particular story of mine that is worth repeating suffice to say they all had one thing in common: continual cartoonish violence. You know the kind where you take two action figures and you harmlessly smack them against each other and make kablooie noises. I remember it fondly in that odd nostalgic way people tend to glorify the stupidity of children (or innocence, either one), but I would not insist on making a feature film out of it, which, I would argue is essentially what “The Avengers,” is: A story composed of the kind of action sequences I would have come up with when I was ten years old....and had access to several hundred million dollars.

Don’t get me wrong. “The Avengers,” is okay and I must admit I haven’t the slightest idea how they could have made it better. It seems fated to be mediocre due to the cast of characters that are included. The Avengers are composed of Iron Man/Tony Stark (played by Robert Downey Jr.) a genius mechanic/billionaire who wears an indestructible suit that can fly and has plenty of machine guns and missiles. Then there is the Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff (played by Scarlett Johansson) who is good at martial arts and uses pistols. Then there is Hawkeye/Clint Barton (played by Jeremy Renner) who is good at archery. Then there is The Hulk/Bruce Banner (played by Mark Ruffalo) who is a brilliant scientist who involuntary turns into an uncontrollable green monster with unlimited strength whenever he gets angry. Then there is Thor (played by Chris Hemsworth) who is an immortal demi-god with an all-powerful hammer that can summon lightning storms. Finally, there is Captain America/Steve Rogers (played by Chris Evans). He has a patriotic uniform and a nifty shield. It should be fairly obvious that these superheroes aren’t exactly equal. I mean Captain America may be strong, but not as strong as the Hulk, and he can’t fly like Iron Man, and he has no ability for stealth like the Black Widow, and he has no long range ability like Hawkeye, and he isn’t educated like Bruce Banner or Tony Stark. In fact, he really doesn’t know anything about the last fifty years because he was cryogenically frozen during that time. (He is otherwise their leader though.) Contrast that with Thor, who as an indestructible and immortal god should be able to beat the tar out of every other Avenger in every scenario. The presence of a superhero such as Thor also requires the story to have a super-villain with an almost equal amount of power as him. Enter his brother, the semi-god Loki and an army of mean-looking aliens with supposedly superior technology.

The movie stages two rather huge battle sequences. One takes place on a flying aircraft carrier (largest waste of taxpayer money EVER) and another in Midtown Manhattan. Besides the death of one person, it may surprise you that nobody else gets seriously hurt or dies. No superheroes, no military personnel, and no civilians end the movie with anything more than the faintest scrapes, cuts, or bruises. In fact, I would argue the greatest special effect used during the full scale destruction of a completely inhabited Manhattan is the framing of the shots in such a way that we never actually see anybody getting hurt. This sense of total unreality is what reminded me of playing with plastic toys as a kid. Nothing is real. Otherwise Tony Stark would be dead ground meat in his fancy suit after every battle he is in. And can the Hulk really survive a multitude of rockets launched point blank into his face without a single blemish occurring?

 For some reason it has become increasingly difficult for blockbusters to achieve the very reason they exist: to excite and thrill. It is not hard to have violence that is exciting. It simply must include actual danger or actual pain or the threat of actual pain. To demonstrate how little you need, take a look at the movie, “Black Swan.” In particular, the scene where the main character notices a cut near her nail cuticle, tries to fix it, and accidentally pulls off a strip of her skin. When I watched that it made me recoil. Why then would Thor knocking Iron Man 100 feet into the air with his magic hammer have little to no effect at all? Well, because it results in nothing but a dazed look. It must not have hurt. A movie with action sequences that have no effect on the characters is not exciting. It is desensitizing. Pretty soon it does not matter how big the explosions are, all I recognize is their impotence. What is more, when I do not understand how things happen, I stop caring pretty soon if they happen at all. I don’t get how Iron Man can survive all the blows he takes. I don’t understand how The Hulk can beat up a floating leviathan one thousand times his size. And will someone please tell me how the hell Scarlett Johansson can beat up burly men three times her size. She has no muscles. None.

 I suppose some of this has to do with the MPAA. There is this strange rule out there that allows PG-13 movies all the gunfire, explosions, and metropolitan destruction they want just as long as you do not see anybody getting hurt. However, if you wanted to see a man realistically cut off his own arm like James Franco does in “127 Hours” you would get an R rating. In effect, violence is morally okay just as long as you don’t show the consequences of it. Oh, will someone think of the children. They are our future. But unreal hammed up violence is not in itself bad. I’ve seen plenty of movies I loved that worked just like that. The best of director Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Planet Terror, Machete, Desperado) excels in that sort of thing. The difference though is that these movies are fun exploitation movies that don’t give us a bunch of scenes containing impassioned speeches about the importance of it all. “The Avengers,” needs to be more uniform in its purpose. If you are going to make the action sequences ridiculous then make the characters and dialogue ridiculous, and do it the whole way through. And please no intended-to-be-taken-seriously-patriotism. This country deserves better than that. “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol” was a great action movie. So, for that matter, was “Black Dynamite.” “The Avengers,” works best when it treats itself like it should: a joke. There are enough self-referential and belittling jabs that make the movie pretty funny throughout its run time. Quite a lot of these are provided by the best character, Tony Stark, played brilliantly as always by Robert Downey Jr. Mark Ruffalo, the nth incarnation of Bruce Banner, does a solid job as well. I still wish Thor’s weakness was stupidity and not arrogance (see my review of “Thor”) and I never saw Captain America’s movie so I guess I missed the part where it makes sense for our symbol against Nazism be a guy that looks like the poster child for Aryan machismo. Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner like most interesting actors continue their star rising descent into less interesting movies.

Bernie (3/5 Stars)

There is at least one thing we know for certain. Bernie Tiede shot Majorie Nugent, an eighty three year old woman in the back four times, than stuffed her lifeless corpse in a freezer where it stayed for the next nine months. Why he did it is a lot less clear, and amazingly, whether he deserves to be punished for it is also up for debate in this new “comedy” directed by Richard Linklater and starring Jack Black as the title character.

This story is based on events that took place in the small town of Carthage, Texas in the 1990s. The movie even has most of the townspeople of Carthage cast as themselves. They interact with the movie stars who are playing the principal characters and give interviews directly to the camera at other times. So this movie has a novel structure as a half documentary, half movie. It is more weird than effective though and leaves a plenty to be explained and uncovered. 

The story deserves to be on the same newspaper page as “Man bites dog.” Bernie Tiede was just the nicest guy. Everyone loved him. He was the town’s assistant funeral director. His employer describes him as the most qualified employee he had ever had. He taught sunday school. He sang in the church choir. He directed and starred in town plays. He made a habit of giving gifts to everyone he met. He even would visit widows after the funerals of their husbands and console them with flowers. One such widow was  Majorie Nugent, played here by Shirley Maclaine. In addition to being his ultimate victim, she also happened to be the richest person in town.

Majorie had no friends and had not spoken anyone in her family for years. Her sister plays herself in the movie and describes her as a hateful mean person. Bernie basically became her one and only friend. They started doing everything together, even going on trips and cruises to exotic places, (always first class.) Bernie started doing everything for her. She fired her entire household staff. At one point she rewrote her will to give everything to Bernie. Over time it became just her and Bernie in that big house of hers.

Was it romantic? Well, probably not. Bernie was a closet homosexual. The police found several videotapes of him having sex with local married men when they raided his house. Anyway, one day, for no real reason (to hear Bernie tell it), Bernie killed her. Nobody noticed for nine months. In the meantime, Bernie started giving away all of her money. He bought people cars, financed local businesses, and donated a new wing to the local church. In all, it is estimated that he spent 1 million of her money on the townspeople of Carthage. (He never really got around to paying off his own credit cards with her money though.) Finally Majorie's stockbroker became suspicious and got the police to search the house. They found her stiff corpse in a freezer in the garage. Bernie confessed. When they asked him why he never disposed of the body, he said he wanted to give her a respectable funeral someday.

The town district attorney, Danny Buck, had the case transferred to a different town because he feared Bernie wouldn’t get a fair trial. Townspeople started telling him that a local jury would never convict Bernie. “You people are aware that he confessed, you know,” a tired Danny Buck says. Bernie was convicted and is spending life in prison. He teaches four classes and does a lot of good work in the big house now. Apparently people really like him there too. 

The movie isn’t really that funny. This is mostly because it is rather tough to make a joke out of the actual murder of an elderly woman. Her not being a nice person never quite makes it okay. Bad behavior can usually be mined for laughs without any real problems, but there is a line, and this movie crosses it. 

This movie would make a fine double feature with Jim Carrey’s superior “I Love You, Phillip Morris,” another true story of a closeted homosexual from Texas that was just the nicest guy and sang in the church choir and went and stole millions of dollars. What that movie accomplishes and "Bernie" doesn’t is provide some decent motivation for the events that occurred. I thought I basically understood the Jim Carrey character. I never found out who the real "Bernie" was. Sometimes it seems like we are seeing something on the screen that couldn’t have possibly have happened the way it did. For instance, after shooting the old lady, Bernie cries over her dead body. Did that really happen? If so, how do we know exactly how he reacted? These are vague areas that cry out for a treatment usually reserved for an Errol Morris documentary, which is at least clearer about what is uncertain.

Apparently just after shooting her, Bernie went to the dress rehearsal of the town musical he was directing. Ironically it was a production of the “Music Man,” and Bernie played the lead role as the charming con artist that dupes a small town into giving him a bunch of money. Is Bernie a confidence man? The movie never takes a strong stand on this subject and the possibility is only hinted at. In fact, the only person this movie really does not seem to approve of completely is the district attorney, Danny Buck. Matthew McCounaghey plays him in caricature as a slick egotistical sensationalist. His portrayal is debatable to say the least. Bernie killed a woman. I think we could say Danny Buck was justified in prosecuting him in court over it.

An opportunity missed here is an exploration of the tragic elements of this story. This is the second movie based on a true story about closet homosexuals in Texas that end up doing terrible things. I think you can make an argument that the crimes they commit are linked to the marginalization of homosexuality in Texan society. In “I Love You, Phillip Morris,” the man’s wife bluntly asks a doctor if the gay thing and stealing is related. I would argue that it is in the sense that lying everyday to everyone about an essential part of one’s identity will probably aid a person’s ability to lie in general. What was Bernie doing accompanying little old ladies? He was a very nice man who apparently everyone liked. Did he not deserve love or marriage? Bernie’s reasons for being nice to Majorie Nugent in the first place was that he had noticed how she was so lonely. (The money was there as well but that does not seem like his entire motivation.) As a gay man in Texas, he would have probably known quite a bit about that.