Movie of the Week: Dark Shadows
May. 18th, 2012 02:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaceyJohnny Depp is very pretty, even in vampire makeup, but sadly I saw this movie yesterday and have already forgotten most of it. It wasn't convincing. Now, OK, I know it's a movie about an 18th century vampire returning to his old family home and encountering the witch who cursed him into a coffin for 2 centuries. I appreciate there's nothing 'real' in this movie at all, but - see, this is the thing - even the maddest fantasy movie has to feel authentic within its own reality. You have to believe Superman can fly and you have to believe that a hungry vampire is dangerous. I wasn't looking for cosmic truths, but a bit of verisimilitude would have gone a long way!
I was left feeling neither shaken nor stirred, and if it was supposed to be funny, it totally missed the mark for me. Just watch the trailer and you'll see all the best bits in 30 seconds tops.
Then spend the time you saved by going to see The Avenger movie (again).
I was left feeling neither shaken nor stirred, and if it was supposed to be funny, it totally missed the mark for me. Just watch the trailer and you'll see all the best bits in 30 seconds tops.
Then spend the time you saved by going to see The Avenger movie (again).
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Date: May. 20th, 2012 01:24 pm (UTC)I nearly wet myself at the Michael Jackson-ion tableau, although no one else laughed at that so maybe it was just my own twisted imagination. (People other than me were actually laughing throughout, so it's not as if I was the only one in the theatre who thought the film was fuuny. Just no one else laughed at that particular spot.)
But, yeah, this one definitely fits into the 'different strokes for different folks' category.
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Date: May. 20th, 2012 03:39 pm (UTC)Do you remember the original TV series? Do you think it makes a difference for those who do? I don't recall ever seeing it over here - but it could have been that period in the 70s when I didn't have a TV.
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Date: May. 20th, 2012 04:54 pm (UTC)And it was BAAAAD. A friend Stateside said she's been watching the DVDs slowly but surely (via Netflix), and there are places where you can see the zipper in a monster's costume, the flats that were used as the set's stone walls shake when someone slammed a door, the shadow of the microphone swinging against a backdrop, sometimes even the microphone itself. Oh, and the fakeness of the blood. It was all pretty much of a piss-take. I bet it was a total hoot to be one of the actors on that thing.
I also think there are a lot of things 'in the background' of the movie that reference back to growing up in the US in the 70s....which I did.
In essence, the movie is a spoof of a spoof, which makes some aspects of it unavoidably obscure.
All that said, a movie has to be able to stand alone without the viewer having necessarily seen the TV show or grown up in the locale and era.
I'd say that perhaps that was a fail...except that a lot of the people in the theatre today were laughing, including some teenagers. So maybe when you went, you happened to have a theatre full of people like you, for whom it just wasn't your cup of tea. Whereas I got lucky. Because if I couldn't have chuckled and even laughed outloud pretty frequently, I might've exploded. (I do try to be polite and not LOL when no one else is doing so.)
So. I don't know how helpful that analysis is. I think we'll simply have to stick to the 'different strokes for different folks' theory. :-D
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Date: May. 20th, 2012 05:14 pm (UTC)