Hairspray (2007)

Written at the time of the film's release...

Hairspray (Adam Shankman, 2007) I'm not big on musicals. Rarely are they better than their source material and the songs, more often than not, are filler with "Moon/June" lyrics that fail to impress. My idea of clever musicals are "Guys and Dolls" and "The Music Man" that carry their music fantasies with a little bit of arrogant panache, daring you to not take it as seriously as regular dialog. My expectations of musicals are pretty low (which is good, I think, as it gves them more of a chance), and my expectations of "Hairspray"—despite rave reviews of the stage version that debuted *huzzah* in Seattle—were quite low. You just knew that a musical of "Hairspray" wouldn't be as edgy as the John Waters original. It was going to have to be neutered to be made "safe."

Plus, it has John Travolta in it. I can't remember a John Travolta* movie where I was impressed with him. I was probably going in with the wrong attitude.

Because I enjoyed the Hell out of it. Word is that the movie version is a bit more stream-lined and a lot less camp than its stage-version. That may have helped, because "Hairspray" (the musical; the movie) is joyously anarchic, popping balloons gleefully as it goes—maybe laying it on a bit thick, as it goes—but as an expression of the freeing power of rock n' roll, few movies can top it. Especially the serious ones.

The year: 1962, pre-Kennedy assassination (it would have to be) in segregated Baltimore. For Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky—this girl needs to work more), life is surviving school in time to get home to watch "The Corny Collins Show" (with James Marsden, going full-wattage cheese), a dance party television show, featuring her dancing dreamboat Link Larkin (Zac Efron, not quite legitimizing the hysteria over him). Her dreams come true when one of the teen-dancers takes a leave of absence ("Nine months," she doesn't need to explain) giving Tracy and her blond twig girlfriend Penny Pingleton (Amanda Bynes) a chance to audition. She has many obstacles: station owner Velma von Tussle (Michelle Pfeiffer, whom my wife described as "voluptuously hideous"—yes, indeed**), and her parents, Wilbur and Edna Turnblad (Christopher Walken and John Travolta).

Now, here I must stop. Christopher Walken rarely fails to please, but it's a too-rare treat to see him sing-and-dance, which he obviously loves. And Travolta, in drag and dressed in a fat suit with a raspy ovah-the-"twop" Maryland accent?

He's great. Except for his accent slipping during the songs, he's damned near pitch-perfect, doing dance moves weighed down in prosthetics (and in high-heels no less), and providing a sympathetic life-force to the proceedings. Everybody's terrific in it, including old guys Paul Dooley and Jerry Stiller (who played Tracy's dad in Waters' original). 

Then there's Queen Latifah, who plays the "fill-in" host on Corny Collins' once-a-month "Negro Day"—the black dancers cordoned off from the white dancers by a rope partition—proving once again she is the Rock n' Roll Renaissance woman, who can rise above bad material, and soars with the good.

But it'd all be naught if not for the songs (well-staged with choreography-friendly directing by Shankman that recalls past movie musicals) by Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman. Shaiman's ear for 60's rock styles is flawless and the words by Wittman and Shaiman are clever and sassy and occasionally downright rude.

Original "Hairspray" auteur John Waters even shows up (in an early cameo as a flasher) and there are quick appearances by the director, Shaiman and Stillman and the original's star Ricki Lake. Word is that he's working on a screenplay for a sequel.*** If the product is half as fun as this singing step-child of his work, it will be a must-see.

* Since writing this, I remember I thought he did an extraordinary job of carrying Nicolas Cage's tic's in Face/Off.

** Pfeiffer has a torchy song—"Miss Baltimore Crabs"—that she vamps though in such high-style that it catches one off-guard...until one remembers "Oh yeah...Susie Diamond."

 

 

*** Hairspray 2: White Lipstick was in the planning stages with a screenplay written by Waters, and preliminary cast mentioned , but in the words of director Adam Shankman "it got scrapped" and added “It's ok, I was so happy with the first one; let's leave well enough alone.”

Dark Shadows (2012)

Written at the time of the film's bloody resurrection...

Camping Vamps and Risible Damp
or
"What Strange Terrain is This?"

"Dark Shadows" has been a cult favorite for Baby-Boomers for more than 40 years (ouch!), long before it was fashionable to have vampires as fodder for young adults. The ABC soap opera ran for several seasons of afternoons replacing the standard plot-lines of cheating spouses and long-lost family secrets with long-buried family relatives—that often didn't stay buried—and a full range of gothic ghoulery that plundered every horror story in the crypt-library, including vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein-ish monsters, time-travel, parallel dimensions and ghost stories. Why, they even robbed from "The Crucible" and "The Turn of the Screw" and got people interested in the I-Ching, for howling out loud. In fact, I kept expecting the fern in their front hallway to turn into Chthulu!

It was a TV habit of mine when I was a kid, timed perfectly to be the after-school tonic for a parochial school education, an occult chaser for the catechism, all those crucifixes I was surrounded by during the day being used for other purposes. It was also a fixation for Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, Burton digging the horror genre and Depp grooving on the character of Barnabas Collins (played by the late—or is he?—Jonathan Frid, who puts in a very brief cameo here along with a couple of other cast-mates), the reluctant vampire who pursued hearts, rather than the blood that pumped through them. The result of their dual obsessions is this version of Dark Shadows, produced by Depp, directed by Burton.

"It is said that blood is thicker than water," narrates Barnabas Collins (Depp), over the strains of Robert Colbert's alto flute-through-echoplex composition "The Secret Room" from the original series. "It binds us, confines us, curses us." For a moment, things are fairly serious as the 18th century story of young Collins scion Barnabas is unearthed, with his spurning of the witch Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green) and her subsequent dark revenge, killing the Collins elders, forcing the suicide of Barnabas' love Josette and turning him into an eternally cursed vampire. She subsequently sets the townsfolk on the monster who chain him into a coffin and bury him for all eternity.

Depp and Burton get it right at the beginning: Barnabas learns his fate.

The worst-laid plans of mages and men...Eternity is cut short around 1972 as the construction of a new McDonald's in Collinswood unearths Barnabas and he lays waste to a construction crew (who must have been getting overtime working at night!) with an explanatory "You have no idea how thirsty I am!" 

On a parallel course, Maggie Evans (Bella Heathcote, the latest in a long line of Burton ingenues with thin necks topped by big heads with huge eyes and "big" hair) is on a train to Collinswood where she has applied for a job as a governess to young David Collins (Gulliver McGrath), who is having psychological issues from the disappearance of his mother at sea. Abruptly, she decides to change her name to Victoria Winters, indicating a past she wants to run away from, as The Moody Blues tune "Knights in White Satin" burbles over the soundtrack. Hey, Burton may be onto something here. The combining of '70's kitsch and some of its more mordant songs with the gothic mood of "Dark Shadows" works well, setting the tone of the series and the morbid fascination my generation had with it. Can "Don't Fear the Reaper" be far behind?

Then, things get a little weird. She's picked up by a VW van of hippies, and there's some stoned comedy about how they're so wasted, and Vicky is cool, man, and it's easy laughs and you wish it was more clever. It becomes apparent quickly that Burton will be playing this for laughs, which is fine (he always does to a certain extent), but the original material is already so melodramatic and over-the-top that the humor undercuts the effectiveness of what drama there is that ekes through the dramatic stares and the vamping poses. "Dark Shadows" was always "camp" entertainment in the broad sense, but to broaden it even further nullifies whatever chills and thrills can be drained from it. This is why Frid's performance on the show was such an anchor for it—he played it absolutely straight, and in fact, ramrod-stiff; you didn't make fun of Barnabas for fear of his wrath—or his breaking down in tears.

Depp's Barnabas is tortured, of course, but risibly so (in a performance that's a combination of Frid's formality, some Max Schreck thrown in, and a bit of Ed Wood cast-mate Martin Landau's incarnation of Bela Lugosi). And there's the "otherness" factor that Depp brings to so many of his roles, as if he's in a different movie from everybody else—he walks through it, and everybody reacts, usually comedically and derisively. In part, that's the point: it ties in with Burton's feelings growing up as being an outsider-geek, looking on at the rest of the world that he found strange, while it found him odd (and there's a mirroring through-line of humor throughout the film of Barnabas, out of his time, observing to some horror the eccentricities of 1970's life, that reflects it).*

But Collinwood's odd family doesn't bat an eye when Victoria shows up and doesn't react to the disrepair of the gothic Collinwood mansion or to David's assertion that he speaks to his dead mother, and she follows quite readily when the ghost of Josette appears floating down the hallways, whispering "He's coming..." Barnabas' arrival, in Victorian array and the palest of skin, and the oddest of manners only brings up temporary suspicions, but the matriarch of the house (Michelle Pfeiffer, who played Burton's Catwoman) readily accepts him as family, even after revealing his vampirism. The cast is uniformly fine, gamely being archly camp throughout, but the one performer who's best at it is Green, who clearly relishes the villainess role and has fun with it, taking it in some very odd, even poignant places.

It looks great. Burton's films always do, with a superb design sense and his knack for picking terrific, seemingly impossible angles to shoot from. But, like a lot of Burton films, it tends to fall apart in story, snatching hasty explanations and Deus ex machina to get out of trouble, or to provide the director with a bizarre concept that may seem right in retrospective sub-context, but that comes out of nowhere, randomly and jarringly. One has to stop, back-track, only to realize that, no, this has never been mentioned before, and why now?

One suspects it's a whim, a passing "wouldn't-it-be-crazy-if" thought passed between Depp and Burton as they geek out, rocking in their corners, internal logic no longer mattering as much as a superficial entertaining notion. As such, Dark Shadows accomplished their goals. Yeah, it's entertaining, but highly insubstantial, a mere spirit of a movie.

"Yes, yes" I hear you cry. "But, don't you think it was better than the OLD "Dark Shadows"? I mean, have you seen it lately?"

In truth, I have.

My frustration with Burton is not that he desecrated the memory of a classic television show—even with the air fragrant with the nostalgic scent of Mom's Apple Pie, I'm not convinced that "Dark Shadows" was anything more than a quickly put-together variation of soap programming with elements of gothic romance/horror tossed onto it. No, my problem with Burton's version is that he didn't try to make it better, but chose to just mock the absurdity of it. Not much sticking your neck out there, even for a vampire movie. 

But, then, maybe he didn't try because he already saw what happened when somebody did try to do it semi-seriously. That someone being show creator Dan Curtis.

House of Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis, 1970) Filmed while the soap-opera was still running (and so a lot of cast-members "disappeared" for 29 days from the taping). They dragged out the "big-guns" and did a 2 hour version of the "Barnabas Arrives at Collinwood" storyline with Jonathan Frid's character withheld from sight—except for his black onyx ringed hand—until he shows up as the "lost Collins cousin from England." He meets nanny Maggie Evans (Katheryn Leigh Scott), who bears an uncanny resemblance to his lost-love Josette, Dr. Julia Hoffman's (Grayson Hall) attempts at curing him, then, in a fit of jealousy, reneging, turning him into his aged 200 year old self (make-up by the amazing Dick Smith), and a vampire-hunt that ends in a lot of Collins-family vampires. The first is Carolyn Stoddard (Nancy Barrett) who's blond, pretty, and looks good in the Hammer label of diaphanous lingerie, so a lot of screen-time is given to her—poster-acreage, too—even though Barrett was not the most skilled of actresses. The soap languished through repeated exposition and lingering looks in its story-line Monday through Thursdays and put all the "good stuff" on cliffhanger Fridays, and so, compressing it all in one movie makes the movie feel camp and hysterical. Still, once the movie gets going, Curtis starts to be a bit more free with the camera and compositions—it's like half-way through he realized he wasn't dealing with the old studio RCA TK46's anymore and could do something beyond waist-level. Still, in such a quick time-frame, the story doesn't coagulate too well and makes you realize that long-form eased the mis-match of gothic romance and horror.

Night of Dark Shadows (Dan Curtis 1971) House of Dark Shadows made money, enough to green-light a sequel and, as the television series had been canceled, a newly unencumbered Curtis started on a direct sequel to the earlier film. Jonathan Frid, worried about the curse of type-casting, bowed out of participating. But, the story of Angelique Bouchard, witch and  former lover of young Barnabas, had never been told, so Curtis and series writer Sam Hall cobbled together a story of a young couple (David Selby and Kate Jackson) who inherit the Collinwood estate, only for the man to be haunted, then possessed, by the spirit of his Collins ancestor, who had an affair with his brothers' wife, Angelique (Lara Parker), resulting in her being hung as a witch, and him entombed with her. A somewhat similar story had been used in the series involving Selby as Quentin Collins, but the Angelique angle was new. Returning were John Karlen and Nancy Barrett, as well as Grayson Hall (the writer's wife) and Thayer David.

Anyone who sees Night of Dark Shadows will understandably come away from it wondering what they just saw, and if they'd missed something. They had. The film, was originally 2 hours long, but M-G-M thought that was too long for a movie they'd planned to put as the B-movie in double-bills (No, really, they used to do that), and so they insisted that Curtis cut half-an-hour out of the film—and he had 24 hours to do it. With such hack-work, any slow build-up was excised, and so Night comes off as poorly as a U.S. released foreign film that only includes highlights...and a bit of a muddle. 

Oh...and studios still do that.

* This also sets up a series of sight-gags that are somewhat clever, as Barnabas never seems to be able to find appropriate sleeping arrangements at Collinwood.

Stardust (2007)

Written at the time of the film's release...

"Getting killed by pirates...heart eaten by a witch...meet Victoria--I can't seem to decide which is worse!"

Matthew Vaughn's film of Stardust is so far removed from his last film, Layer Cake, that it would take a Babylon Candle to bridge the two (Don't know what a "Babylon Candle" is? Then you'll have to see the film. You should anyway). 

Layer Cake (an updated aside—it's the film where, suddenly, Daniel Craig, managed to emerge from behind the furniture into a eye-catching starring performance) was a whooping, swooping kitchen-sink-and-Porsche's story of drug-dealing in contemporary London. And while some of the stylistic touches are the same for Stardust, the story couldn't be more different. For instead of modern-day Britain, he is spinning his camera through Neil Gaiman's Faerie-Land.

Gaiman's reach is all things mythical, from the twee to the atrocious--across the stars, underground, beyond the pale and underneath your fingernails. He borrows from all sources, and puts them through his own personal salad-shooter and spits them out with his own dressing. In his work you'll find echoes of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton, G.K. Chesterton and Jorge Luis Borges and the Brothers Grimm, Greek mythology and Roman gods, History and Urban Legend, The Arabian Nights and the Book of the Dead, The Bible and the DC/Marvel Multiverses. 

I've been reading Gaiman with delight (no pun intended) for years, starting with his "Sandman" saga, which dragged on for maybe a dozen more issues than necessary because he had so many stories he wanted to get to, but I also love his "Violent Cases," and much of his book-work. It is with some trepidation that one watches his forays into film--Jon Peters owns the film-rights to "Sandman," for instance, and Gaiman wrote the English translation for Princess Mononoke, and worked on "Mirrormask," and there's talk of filming "Good Omens," the book he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett.* That's scary talk. For what it's done to the works of Alan Moore, Hollywood looks like a gold-plated abortion clinic, and one wonders if they could do any justice to Gaiman's work. Even to attempt to film his "Signal to Noise" would be to destroy it.

Stardust makes the transition fairly well, though it eliminates the faeries and sprites that populate Gaiman's world like smoke, dust and flotsam do in Ridley Scott's (they also serve as little "Rosencrantzes" and "Guildensterns"). They throw in a sock-o finale, and the film has none of the delicacy of Charles Vess' illustrations from the graphic novel that Gaiman expanded to book-length. In fact, it has the sensibility several refinements up from Monty Python-design. But it does retain Gaiman's special form of "myth-busting," the wink-and-a-nod to the "real" world that suffused The Princess Bride, but without the Borcht Belt cinched around its waist.

What's interesting is how Paramount is selling it...or not selling it, as the case may be. Looking at the poster, you'd think it was one of the endless string of pre-teen or teen fantasy novels adaptations that are filling the Previews, or as reverent as Chronicles of Narnia, when nothing could be further from the truth, (but there are enough spinning helicopter shots of big landscapes to reassure the Suits that it has a "Lord of the Rings" quality). It's frequently hilarious in surprising and snarky ways, especially in the casting. 

Michelle Pfeiffer may not be the best at holding an accent, but her comic timing, and willingness to play against her looks is delightful. Robert DeNiro makes an entrance and you worry that he's been put in the wrong movie, but then he comes through with flying colors. Peter O'Toole does wonders with his limited screen-time as the Lion-King of a family of blue-bloods, and Rupert Everett shows up long enough to tweak his image hilariously. It's a fun, fine, un-gooey fairy tale that charms and delights. It's not doing well at the theaters, so do yourself a favor and go. Don't wait for Paramount to get their act together to convince you.

* "Good Omens" was made into a TV Mini-series in 2019 on Amazon Prime.

Ant-Man and the Wasp

Just Another Phase
or
"Putting 'Quantum' in Front of Everything"

Ant-Man and the Wasp begins without any sort of preamble or warning. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) recalls the day that his wife and partner Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer, who takes a LOT less CGI trickery to de-age her in the flashback sequence) was lost on a mission to stop a renegade rocket aimed at a large city. In order to gain access to the rocket's interior, Van Dyne, in her guise as The Wasp (original), had to go "sub-atomic" and was lost forever in "The Quantum Realm" never to return. Since that fateful day, Pym and his daughter Hope (Evangeline Lilly) have sought to reach her, and until the time that current Ant-Man Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) entered the Realm (in the last film) and survived, they have been working to try and find a way into the Realm to rescue her, with the help of the information that Scott might have retained that allowed their not-exactly-reliable ally to not only enter the Realm, but to return, as well.  Even if he could remember what it was he did. The odds, like everything else in this movie, are shrinking.

It does not help that Scott, due to his mis-adventures in Germany in Captain America: Civil War, is under two-year house arrest by the FBI, confined to his house with an ankle bracelet for both violating parole and crossing international borders, and getting media-attention-noticing giant-size while doing it. He's getting a little buggy doing it, learning magic with an online course (of COURSE, it's going to become a plot-point later on!) and restricting his Dad-time with daughter Cassie (Abby Ryder Fortson) during his custody-weekends.

Well...ya know...not really. Because, before you know, it Scott has been shrunk too small to keep his ankle-bracelet on, replaced with a large size ant, and kidnapped in a super-tiny car by Hope. Seems that Scott has been having "Quantum Realm dreams" in which it is thought that he might be channeling the small thoughts of Janet and, of course, Hank and Hope believe that Scott just might hold the key to finding her in the vast infinite expanse of what used to be a completely unknowable and scary dimension...when it manages to suit dramatic purposes.

Pym has improved his shrinking technology, so he can do it remotely, with seemingly no range and with no limitations to shrink things to absurd levels—he can take his research anywhere he wants by merely shrinking his office building to a handy portable size and expand it anywhere he can find a city-block size area (I hope the lights and toilets are self-contained). This seemingly limitless tech has caught the attention of arms-trader Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins in a performance that can best be described as "unfocused"), especially as he's been approached by Pym for a super-power-cell needed to juice up his "Quantum Tunnel." But, Burch's ambitions—they are never much explained beyond sheer avarice—are to steal the research lab (I suppose) once he learns its expanded and shrinking capabilities.

Geez, talk about taking your work home...

Also wanting it is "The Ghost" aka Ava Starr (Hannah John-Kamen), who has the rather ubiquitous power of "phasing"—becoming intangible and tangible at will— an unstable (except when dramatically necessary) power developed after her father, a researcher who had a falling out with Pym, attempted to activate his own in-development Quantum Tunnel causing a massive explosion.* Ava became a government orphan—we've all seen how well that works—who was supervised by Prof. Bill Foster (Laurence Fishburne), another in the seemingly endless disgruntled employees of Hank Pym. Foster's determined to cure Ava of her condition, and, somehow, he seems to think it involves finding Janet Van Dyne in the Quantum Realm...

Hey, maybe, these guys should work TOGETHER as they seem to want the same thi...Oh! Oh, yeah,  I forgot, it's a superhero movie. "When Titans Clash" and all that.

So, that (and Scott's issues with a suspicious clutch of FBI-minders) are all dealt with in the first hour and fifteen minutes. The following half an hour is, basically, an extended chase throughout the Chase-Scene Capitol of the U.S., San Francisco, as the various participants play "who's got the lab" keep-away, allowing Pym to travel through the Quantum Tunnel to the Quantum Realm (at one point, Scott says "Do you guys just put the word "quantum" in front of everything?") to try to find some quantum of solace with Janet (in a completely arbitrary time-limit straight out of "Star Trek") before she's trapped there for the next one hundred years...for some reason.

"Ghost" goes through a phase...and a mini-van.

This is one of the side-issues with Ant-Man and the Wasp: the sort of "magical thinking" when it comes to science (if you can call this stuff "science"). It's more like dramatically challenging mumbo-jumbo that offers the most conveniently dramatic challenges at the most appropriate stages of the story—it's the science of Star Wars, in other words. One can imagine Neil deGrasse Tyson holding his head throughout the thing.

It's just plain sloppy.  That goes for the film-making, too, as this one is again directed by Peyton Reed, but without the rigorous planning and plotting that Edgar Wright brought to the first one before he was fired by Marvel Studios over "creative differences." There are points in the movie with rough transitions (this thing had five writers), dicey motivations, unbelievable "saves" (how DOES tiny little Ant-Man TRAVEL so fast?!) and a mandate to "call-back" things that were clever in the first movie, but seem less clever when trotted out to remind you that this one's supposed to be clever, too—Scott ran across a pistol in the first one and the Wasp gets to run across thrown knives here (anybody thought of using "Raid?") or when Scott's business partner Luis (National Treasure Michael Peña is given truth serum—no, actually it IS truth serum and goes off on a rant that is lip-synced by many members of the cast.

Ant-Man and the Wasp, despite not having the "2" digit in it, runs afoul of the same issue most of the Marvel Studio's** "freshman" movies in their series seem to have***—they're eager to please but not eager to innovate, **** that is, until somebody comes in and shakes things up a bit...if it escapes Kevin Feige's attention, that is.

But, what am I griping about? At least the Marvel series manage to actually MAKE it to a no. 2 movie....

The "Quantum Realm" looks like recycled bits from the Fantastic Voyage re-boot.

Entertaining in fits and starts, but you really see the Quantum gears grinding on this one.  Oh...and stay for the mid-credit sequence, it ties in nicely with Avengers: Infinity War. (Somehow, I think they'll find a way out of it.)

* Lesson: don't do your highly unstable experiments around your kids.

** Their logo is starting to threaten becoming its own mini-movie these days.

*** The one exception to the rule being Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which had the dramatic advantage of not being set in the past, like its predecessor...and one can also point to Spider-Man 2 (but that wasn't a Marvel Studios movie).

**** I find that a shame, but if Marvel (and their Disney owners) are listening to all the gnashing of Star Wars fans' fangs, there is no incentive to.