Film Review - Dark Shadows

 Director
Tim Burton
Cast
Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green, Jackie Earle Haley, Jonny Lee Miller, Chloe Grace Moretz, Bella Heathcote, Gully McGrath, Ray Shirley, Christopher Lee, Alice Cooper

Review:

The latest '60s/'70s TV show to get all dressed up as a fancy, big-budget feature film, Dark Shadows sinks its teeth half-way into its potentially meaty material but hesitates to go all the way. With an oddball premise that's right up his alley, director Tim Burton has stylish fun with a morally-and-time-warped family visited by an undead 18th century relative, as does Johnny Depp in the role of the antique British-accented vampire. But the humor slithers between the clever and the sophomoric and the film too often seems willing to settle for mild humor at the expense of hippie-era mores instead of pursuing the palpable temptation to become genuinely twisted. Still, with its central bloodsucker vs. witch rivalry and Depp in one of his patented bizarre roles, this has all the ear and tooth marks of an early summer winner for Warner Bros.

Reportedly, as a child Depp's obsession with the elegant, well-spoken, romantically haunted central character, Barnabas Collins, was deep to the point of being all-consuming. Unsurprisingly, the teenaged Burton was also a devotee of Dan Curtis's daily afternoon show, which ran on ABC from 1966-71 and amassed 1,225 individual episodes. This eighth collaboration between the actor and director affords Depp the opportunity to once again don unusual makeup and hair styles to become the white-faced, plaster-maned vampire who rejoins the living in 1972 after having been entombed for nearly 200 years.

Film Review - Men in Black III

 Production year: 2012
Country: USA
Cert (UK): PG
Runtime: 105 mins
Directors: Barry Sonnenfeld
Cast: Alice Eve, Emma Thompson, Jemaine Clement, Josh Brolin, Kevin Covais, Michael Stuhlbarg, Nicole Scherzinger, RJ Smith-Tillman, Rip Torn, Tommy Lee Jones, Will Smith

Review:

One of the funniest movies of the 1990s, the first Men in Black was a frightening, intriguing variation on vampire-chasing, ghost-busting comedies, starring Tommy Lee Jones as Agent K, a senior operative of a top-secret government agency that monitors the activities of extraterrestrial aliens. "At any one time there are 1,500 aliens on Earth," he tells his new sidekick, Agent J (Will Smith), adding, "Most of them are here in Manhattan." Seeing it was about as refreshing and surprising as attending the opening of the first ever McDonald's. The disappointing 2002 sequel, Men in Black II, was a painful affair, about as much fun as eating your 500th Big Mac.

Now after a 10-year gap, Jones and Smith reprise their double act of taciturn, imperturbable K and fast-talking, streetwise J in the 3D Men in Black III. Etan Cohen (an Israeli-born screenwriter) has turned in a screenplay that takes the franchise in another direction, that of the time-travel flick. The moderately enjoyable movie begins as a parody of the Hannibal Lecter series with the vicious alien Boris the Animal (Jemaine Clement) sprung from his top-security jail on the moon to pursue his nemesis, Agent K, on Earth. A time machine takes both back to 1969, whence Agent J follows them, and ultimately the trail leads to Cape Canaveral and the Apollo 11 moon shot that year. Along the way there is some amusing fun of a conventional sort involving an encounter with Andy Warhol (I'll leave you to guess whether he's an alien or another Man in Black). The 3D enhances two spectacular sequences in high places – one at the top of the Chrysler Building, the other above the capsule of the Apollo 11. They'll have acrophobes shielding their eyes the way they did when Tom Cruise scaled the Burj Khalifa in Dubai for Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol.