RECOMMENDED

“Dark Shadows” is a weirdly tender mash note to the pop culture of 1972, the year after the vampiric soap opera ended its five-year run, but also when the young Tim Burton would have been all of fourteen years old. It’s great fun, when things aren’t exploding, burning or bursting into flame. While the illustrator-director’s dreams of dead things are often taken as his most personal expression—partly because of how many dead things there are in his work—”Dark Shadows” feels somehow joyful, somehow more “personal” than most of his movies. It feels… felt. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

RECOMMENDED

Puerto Rico, 1960. Everyone is insane, everyone is a maniac. Period. The Eisenhower era tumbles tightly to an end up north across the water. Here, it’s humid and there’s rum. There is ludic cynicism—”The average guy don’t rock the boat because they want to get on it”—and there is brittle contempt—”A liberal is a commie with a college education thinking Negro thoughts.” There is also Gonzo avant la lettre in this period piece: “You’re giving me fear!”/”You’re high, you fool!” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s my fault for going in hoping for “The Proposition”-meets-”Starship Troopers.” Instead, generic title begets generic results in the tepid “Cowboys & Aliens,” brisk professionalism of a middling order. Jon Favreau’s first film since the congenially scatty “Iron Man 2,” from a script credited to Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman & Damon Lindelof; Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby; and Steve Oedekerk, demonstrates that craft takes you only so far. (The ampersand in screen credits indicates writers who worked together as teams; the ampersand in “Cowboys & Aliens” is more mysterious.) The opening scene of spirited splatter from our supposed hero, an alien or Starman or Man With No Name or amnesiac (Daniel Craig) is promising. Craig plays terse and rugged well enough, but the sly twinkle of his best acting is absent (“Fateless,” “The Mother,” “Enduring Love,” “Love is the Devil”). Almost like a so-so movie by co-producer Ron Howard, “Cowboys & Aliens” is turgid without messy bits to keep it interesting, slick without the sleekness of high style. (Cinematographer Matthew Libatique has done better work in “Black Swan,” “Iron Man” and “Josie and the Pussycats.”) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Welcome to Dirt. Paydirt, I’d bet. Gore Verbinski’s first animated feature, “Rango,” promised to be strange-o after early teasers offered cryptic, semi-lysergic glimpses of the journey of a scrawny, tomatillo-headed chameleon voiced by Johnny Depp. But a spaghetti western that’s “Yojimbo” meets “Chinatown,” with splendid, not always slangy references to other movies and art? Highly unlikely but thoroughly enjoyable, and of a more toothsome sort of quirk than the last installments of the Verbinski-Depp “Pirates” trilogy.  A lizard with no name is cast from comfortable terrarium life into the parched desert, and finds his way to a tiny town filled with tiny, parched animal citizenry in the desert. The city’s buildings, sometimes only glimpsed for a flash, are crafted from trash you’d find along the side of the highway: the post office a red-flagged US MAIL home delivery box; a frontier shitter fashioned from a Pepto-Bismol bottle. Depp’s awed-by-the-world vocalizations of Rango’s unstemmable interior monologue, externalized, are inspired throwaways, with lines like “I appreciate the puttanesca myself but I’m not sure a child would” referencing both the pasta source of the movie’s key genre as well as the adult gags that will sail over the heads of children, after the fashion of good, classic Warner Bros. cartoons. What do you do with lines like “I’m actually one of the few men with a maiden name” or “You missin’ yer mama’s mango?” Or “What’s a aquifer?” “Well, for aqua.” Laugh, or wait for the next one that will make you laugh. Read the rest of this entry »

“Heavy” is what Angelina Jolie calls “The Lives of Others,” the first American film by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. “Florian is probably one of the most intelligent human beings I have ever met in my life,” she states in the press notes for “The Tourist.” A remake of Jérôme Salle’s “Anthony Zimmer” (2005), this is decidedly not heavy and not heady. Both of von Donnersmarck’s films are about secret-keepers and their chasers. “The Lives of Others” (2007) recreated the East Berlin of the 1980s under Stasi surveillance. Set in the deluxe quarters of Venice as surveilled by Scotland Yard, “The Tourist” riffs on seventies cinema and trips on its Janus-like ambivalence as a star vehicle. The screenplay by von Donnersmarck, Christopher McQuarrie (“The Usual Suspects,” “Valkyrie”) and Julian Fellowes (“Gosford Park”) suffers from semi-coherent dabbling in tones of homage and parody. Elise (Jolie) is an impossibly well-dressed Economics Specialist in the Financial Crimes Division of Scotland Yard who went undercover for a year as the lover of Alexander Pearce, the accountant of a casino and brothel mogul sought in fourteen countries. She fell into true, not tactical love but no longer knows what he looks like after he spent twenty million for plastic surgery. Her spying-on-her supervisor is unsure further pursuit adds up. The odds are less than one in a hundred that an investigation costing eight million has yet to recover the 744 million Pearce owes in back taxes. “The Tourist” is cavalier about currency: the above amounts vary between dollars, pounds and euros in the dialogue, which also includes a cute, flirty parsing of “ravenous” versus “ravishing.” Johnny Depp goes by the name of Frank Tupelo, a math teacher from Madison Community College in Wisconsin who is touring Europe because his girlfriend left him or because his wife died. Read the rest of this entry »

Tom DiCillo directs a useful, if unspecial documentary about the L.A. rock band The Doors. His perceptive narration is read by Johnny Depp and illustrated with concert clips, TV broadcasts and about forty tracks. Known for indie dramas and comedies, from “Living in Oblivion” to “Delirious,” DiCillo has more recently directed four episodes of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.” He commits misdemeanors of form in “When You’re Strange.” Restricting himself to footage shot between 1966 and 1971 is a dubious purism, maybe like the band’s (almost) never selling a song for a TV commercial, as attested in the film’s last line. This chronicle lifts too many scenes from “Hwy: An American Pastoral,” a film Paul Ferrara shot in 1969 with the group’s singer-poet Jim Morrison driving around the desert. DiCillo only cites the source of these useless interludes in the end credits. Until then, Morrison looks like a Morrison look-alike, especially when he listens to a radio news bulletin announcing his 1971 death in a Paris bathtub at age 27. I’d rather see more of the earlier film Morrison made that got him a “D” at UCLA film school. Besides his inert montages, NYU grad DiCillo edits corny symbols with extreme close-ups of lit matches. For a cultural essay on sixties psychedelia, “When You’re Strange” needs more context about the country’s rock and poetry scenes. It’s interesting to learn that The Living Theater altered Morrison’s showmanship. And it’s odd to see all the cops standing around him on stage at concerts, but to salute this ostentatious substance-abuser for “constantly challenging censorship,” as DiCillo does in his press notes, is taking more than poetic license with his legal messes. With Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore. 90m. (Bill Stamets)

“When You’re Strange” opens Friday at the Davis.

By Ray Pride

Some movie reviews don’t want “Public Enemies” to be the film that it is.

“Time is luck,” a character says in “Miami Vice,” and that’s become a deep theme in Michael Mann’s carry-case of notions about work, rivalry, crime, law and how masculinity is defined by men in action. Even more so than in earlier films, “Public Enemies,” a portrait of the last short sharp burst of independent criminals like John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) robbing banks in the midst of the Great Depression, Mann works from implication more than explanation. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Alex Gibney’s “Gonzo: The Life And Work Of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson” captures the good doctor in his younger days, before madness filled the corners and crannies. Gibney’s responsible for some piercing, essential documentaries, such as “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and the Oscar-winning “Taxi to the Dark Side,” as well as “No End in Sight” (as producer). While it’s a strong choice to downplay the diminished years of Thompson, some early imagery attempting to make the 1960s parallel with the madness of the early twenty-first century is superficial. Yet in orotund readings from Thompson pal (and alter ego as well as fellow son of the Commonwealth of Kentucky) Johnny Depp and in recordings of Thompson at his gonzo-est, “Gonzo” sings the body lysergic. At the end of the movie, a lovely skyrocket ascends the sky in honor of the forthcoming Fourth of July. “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me”: maybe not a philosophy, but certainly a life. With Gary Hart, George McGovern, Jann Wenner, Jimmy Buffett, Jimmy Carter. 119m. (Ray Pride)