Short Cut Movie Review: The Lone Ranger

A Short Cut Movie Review is normally less than 400 words, but in some cases may go slightly over. This is my attempt to keep writing about as many films as I see without getting bogged down with trying to find more to say. They are meant to be brief snapshots of my reaction to a movie without too much depth.

Not nearly as bad as I was expecting (not to be mistaken for an endorsement) was Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger. I was expecting Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End levels of awfulness, but it rose to the middling heights of The Curse of the Black Pearl. It does most of what you’d expect from an update of a classic TV and radio show beloved by the Boomers. It throws in lots of big action set pieces, impossible stunts, a poop joke, and a lame attempt at making it seem less exploitative of American Indians, but as long as it’s got Johnny Depp running around in a ridiculous getup and makeup acting all Looney Toons, it’s sort of undermining itself.

Dark Shadows Movie Review

I’ll say off the bat that I was primed to severely dislike Dark Shadows, Tim Burton’s updating of the 1960s daytime soap opera about a gothic manor in Maine with strange supernatural occurrences. I have been less than enthusiastic – to put it diplomatically – about most of Burton’s work in the last ten years. When I think back on his career as a director, what I’ve enjoyed most are his films that are straight comedies. He has a real knack for the bizarrely funny and whimsically macabre. I think of Beetlejuice, Mars Attacks!, and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure as his most enjoyable features. Recent films like Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Alice in Wonderland have been simply odd, overblown and bloated. Then there was the matter of the advertising for Dark Shadows, which I thought made it look like a 1970s kitsch piece featuring yet another in a long and increasingly exhaustive series of offbeat Johnny Depp performances (his eighth in collaboration with Burton). Imagine my immense surprise to find a lighthearted homage to a TV series that Burton and Depp both claim to have loved as children.

Horror Classic Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street

A seminal horror film that I probably didn't see in its entirety until sometime after I'd seen the next two or three in the series. It was a little before more time, but I must have seen bits and pieces on TV growing up. Yes, Freddy scared me as a kid and I wasn't so much afraid to go to sleep as I was afraid that I might already be sleeping and he could appear at any time.

Click here for a list of all other films reviewed and considered for this October 2012 series of horror reviews.

Wes Craven’s knack as a director has always been his ability to get under your skin. His Last House on the Left has faced accusations of being nihilistic and depraved, but there’s no denying that it awakens a primal visceral reaction in people. When A Nightmare on Elm Street was released in 1984, he once again put himself out there as a filmmaker who could grab an audience in a stranglehold and not let go for 90 minutes. In the process he helped usher in a new era of horror filmmaking with the killer as surrogate protagonist. People could connect to Fred Krueger in ways not possible with Jason or Michael Myers or Leatherface. Freddy’s wisecracking and ironic wit was the precursor to films like Child’s Play and even Scream, Wes Craven’s own post-modern homage to slasher films.

Rango Movie Review

I think Gore Verbinski has found his true calling as a director. I don’t know why I didn’t see it from the Pirate of the Caribbean movies, but he is most suited to directing animated adventures. After all, the exploits of Captain Jack Sparrow are nothing but cartoon action using live actors amid a whole bunch of CGI. But last year’s Rango, Verbinski’s first stab at an animated feature, is a marvelous little gem of a movie.

Johnny Depp gives full life and voice to the title character, a chameleon who gets lost in the desert and unwittingly becomes sheriff to a dying town replete with rats, muskrats, lizards, tortoises and other desert vermin. It begins with Rango staging heroic plays and tableaux with literally lifeless supporting characters. This is because he’s a pet in a diorama being transported by car along the highway. It suddenly occurs to him that in order for his stories to be more interesting, to give his eponymous hero more depth of character, there needs to be an ironic twist that flings his protagonist into an unexpected situation. Then what do you know? His cubicle home gets flung from the car and smashes on the highway leaving him to fend for himself in the desert.

Once Upon a Time in Mexico Movie Review

The third film in Robert Rodríguez’s “Mariachi” trilogy takes its title, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, as an homage to Sergio Leone. The title reputedly suggested by friend Quentin Tarantino, who told him that this was his “Dollars” trilogy (in reference to Leone’s three spaghetti westerns featuring Clint Eastwood, the third of which is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and in which Once Upon a Time in the West plays no part). None of that matters, though, because Rodríguez and Tarantino love to riff on the culture of coolness. They love being in the know and they love to throw little tidbits in for their fans who are also ‘in the know’.

More Actors Deserving of Oscars

Last year I threw together a list of some contemporary screen actors who I feel are more than deserving of an Oscar, but have yet to win. They are all still reasonably young, although the Hollywood shelf life of actresses tends to be much shorter, so Laura Linney and Julianne Moore may come up short despite the 7 nominations between them.

Today I present a second list of screen actors still currently appearing in feature films who are also deserving of an Oscar one day. The nine actors I've listed below have 15 acting nominations between them, but not a single win (well, one has a win for screenplay).

In his 26 years making feature films, Johnny Depp has provided us with countless indelible characters including the Mad Hatter (Alice in Wonderland), Edward Scissorhands, Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean (receiving his first of 3 Oscar nominations for the first film in that series), Willy Wonka (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), Donnie Brasco, Ichabod Crane (Sleepy Hollow), Raoul Duke (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), Ed Wood, Don Juan DeMarco, and Cry-Baby. He has worked with Tim Burton 7 times, as well as renowned directors such as Terry Gilliam, Mike Newell, Lasse Hallström, Roman Polanski, John Waters and Michael Mann. It's remarkable to me that it took until 2004 for his first nod from the Academy, but not at all surprising that he's since received two more nominations. His roles are often flashy, but still not the kind the Academy tends to reward. I'd expect to see him continue to garner nominations, but not at all surprised if they end up handing him an Honorary Oscar in about 25 years' time.

The Tourist Movie Review: Old Hollywood Style Glamour and Mystery

There are European directors who toil away for years before attaining any Hollywood recognition and many of them go on to successful State-side careers. Very rarely a director strikes it big with his debut. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for his first feature film, the brilliant The Lives of Others. Now you can see his follow-up, The Tourist, a star vehicle for Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie. It is decidedly mainstream, albeit with what many would call a European sensibility.

With Christopher McQuarrie, who penned The Usual Suspects, as one of the credited screenwriters (along with von Donnersmarck and Gosford Park scribe Julian Fellowes) it may come as no surprise that the plot harbors a few secrets and maybe a twist, which you’ll see coming a mile away if you’re even remotely well-versed in the tropes of the spy genre, as Frank Tupelo (Depp’s character) is.

Alice in Wonderland Movie Review: Tim Burton's Hit and Miss streak Continues with Another Dud

I should admit up front that somehow I’ve managed to get through more than 30 years of life without ever having seen any adaptation of or read either of Lewis Carroll’s books Alices Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass, both of which provide the source material for Tim Burton’s latest, Alice in Wonderland. A little bit of nosing around the Internet led me to discover that both books generally form the basis for most iterations of the story, that they are deemed members of the genre of literary nonsense, and that Burton wanted to imbue the story with a narrative thread that would make it easier to connect with Alice and other characters.

That’s all well and good, but somehow Burton has directed a film completely absent any sense of joy or wonder, the latter of which I would say is a necessary component to a story entitled Alice in Wonderland. The screenplay (competently written by Linda Woolverton) seems to be capitalizing on the previous decade’s fascination with fantasy/adventure stories featuring a Chosen One tasked to save the world (a trend started by The Lord of the Rings). Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is prophesied to wield the sword of destiny (or some such hooey) to kill the dreaded Jabberwocky (voiced all too briefly by Christopher Lee) in order to save Underland (turns out Alice misunderstood the name once upon a time) from the clutches of the Red Queen.

One of the major changes to the original stories is the much expanded role of the Mad Hatter, which gives Johnny Depp the space to create yet another bizarre character to add to his growing pantheon. He does a fine job, switching emotions and vocal characterizations at the drop of a hat (ha ha!) to illuminate the sheer insanity of the character. However, the real centerpiece of acting is Helena Bonham Carter, perhaps by virtue of the fact that there’s so much to relish in the character of the Red Queen. Every time she shouts, “Off with the head!” she seems to find a new way to express the joy she feels at her power and the frustration at being nothing more than a feared tyrant. Crispin Glover also makes a notable appearance as the Red Queen’s dastardly and obedient enforcer.

In an attempt to provide pathos to the narrative and a protagonist we care about, the story opens with six-year-old Alice waking in the night to another bad dream featuring a white rabbit and blue caterpillar. Her loving father indulges these fantasies and helps her return to restful slumber. Flash forward 13 years. Alice’s father is dead, and her mother has all but arranged her marriage to a sniveling bore of a creature. And in case you didn’t pick up on Alice’s predominant character trait during the intro, Woolverton’s script hammers the point home with as much nuance as a sledgehammer to the skull: Alice refuses to wear a corset and stockings; during a staid dance routine she bumps into others because she was contemplating the clouds; she is too distracted by a rabbit in the garden to pay attention to a lecture from her future mother-in-law. Do you get it? Alice is a dreamer NOT MEANT FOR THIS WORLD of stuffy British attitudes and rules.

Perhaps the story will enthrall you in ways it failed to for me. That being the case, I will turn my attention to what I believe is the film’s most glaring misstep which is the visual scheme. Burton has always been a master at creating an on-screen feast for the eyes and he certainly earns his pay in that respect here. But his overreliance on CG effects to create about 75 percent of what you see is the biggest failure. Much of the effects work looks cheap. There is nothing here on the level of what Peter Jackson achieved with The Lord of the Rings or King Kong or James Cameron with Avatar.

With the exception of Alice and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), incidentally the least interesting characters in the film, everything that moves is at least partially altered by CGI. This includes the Mad Hatter whose eyes have been enlarged and Glover’s legs have been abnormally stretched to make Stayne taller, giving him an unnatural gait as he walks and mounts his horse. With so much CG on the screen I’m left asking myself why the film wasn’t simply made as an animated film. The answer is perhaps because Disney (which financed and distributed the film) has been there and done that. But if it had been made as a CG animated film, which is essentially what it is anyway with a few live actors thrown in for good measure, or even better as stop-motion it might have been much better. Imagine what this film could have been given the gothic vision Burton brought to A Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride.

As it is the CG characters are not meant to be animated as far as the story is concerned, in the sense of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but to replace the difficult to render physical characters. But then we end up with a muddled mash of animation that doesn’t look real and live actors interacting with things I kept recognizing were not actually there on set.

I must say that the one exception is the Red Queen, who I think has a great look to her. With her oversized head and small body she’s been made to resemble a toddler – a perfect fit for her petulant personality. And the effects rendered on Carter don’t distract from the performance or the character, but rather enhance it, unlike most of the others.

Burton might be better off sticking with what he has always been quite successful at in the past: traditional effects used in more original stories that allow him the freedom to impress his unique vision onto the story. I’m thinking of films like Big Fish and Edward Scissorhands. His least successful films (from this critical standpoint) have been those drawn from established works of fiction such as Charlie and the Cocolate Factory, Planet of the Apes and this newest offering. When you see this white rabbit disappear, I advise you not to follow it down the hole.