REVIEW: Frankenweenie

Frankenweenie (2012): Dir. Tim Burton. Written by: John August. Featuring the voices of: Charlie Tahan, Martin Short, Catherine O'Hara and Martin Landau. Rated PG (Spooky and cuddly in that order). Running time: 87 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

Frankenweenie, a new black-and-white claymation movie from Tim Burton, opens with its young protagonist, a boy named Victor Frankenstein (voiced by Charlie Tahan), screening a homemade movie for his parents. A plastic bat terrorizes a town made of cardboard boxes while horribly outmatched toy army men battle it. Suddenly, the family dog, Sparky, makes a cameo and saves the town, happily chewing up the monster.

There are moments in Frankenweenie that have the endearing feel of a boy playing with his toys, as though Mr. Burton had stumbled across the clay figurines used in the film and started imagining a story with them. (All of the character designs, particularly a morose science teacher with quite the long face and the voice of Martin Landau, are delightful.)

But just as often the film’s low-key vibe feels scattershot. As the movie jumps from one half-formed idea to the next, it feels less like the off-the-cuff imaginings of a child than a lack of inspiration from a director who has a good idea but doesn’t know what to do with it.

After a patient set-up introducing us to Victor and his parents (dryly voiced by Martin Short and Catherine O’Hara), the story begins in earnest when Sparky gets run over by a car. Victor, ever the inventor and amateur scientist, decides to harness the power of lightning to resurrect the poor pooch for a science fair project.

The problem with Frankenweenie is that I’ve already described all the essential plot points. Everything that follows is fluff. There are occasional sprinklings of inspired slapstick but no jolt of energy on the order of that which brings the titular canine back to life. This is not the tragic story of Mary Shelley’s original tale but rather an intermittently playful (if ultimately tepid) tribute to the shadowy gothic imagery of classic horror films and to the campy pleasures of old monster movies.

Frankenweenie is based on an early Tim Burton short and this feature-length version bears the stretch marks of a script padded in order to meet a minimum running time. Screenwriter John August adds a few middling subplots and tangents but all he really does is slow down the fun. The movie comes alive when Sparky slip-slides down a roof in pursuit of a bug-eyed neighborhood cat but is as stiff as a corpse when Victor’s father, in an attempt to bond with his son and add some human interest to the movie, encourages the boy to play sports.

Tim Burton’s movies rarely look bad and Frankenweenie’s crisp animation indulges in long shadows and dark suburban streets lit up by bolts of lightning. But though Tim Burton may be a lively visual artist, his storytelling is far too often as anemic as the pallid faces of his characters. As a result, this monster mash ends up being rather lifeless.

- Steve Avigliano, 10/16/12

REVIEW: Dark Shadows

Dark Shadows (2012): Dir. Tim Burton. Written by: Seth Grahame-Smith. Story by John August and Seth Grahame-Smith, based on the TV show Dark Shadows by Dan Curtis. Starring: Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green, Jackie Earle Haley, Jonny Lee Miller, Chloë Grace Moretz and Bella Heathcote. Rated PG-13 (Plenty of blood-sucking and some suggestive but non-graphic sex). Running time: 113 minutes.

2 stars (out of four)

At this point, one may safely assume a new Tim Burton movie will not break new ground. He has found he can work comfortably in his pop-goth niche producing mixed results and he rarely has much interest in expanding his aesthetic or exploring outside the box. What he does instead is find new ways to play inside that box, or coffin, as the case almost always is.

This time he revives the late-1960s vampire soap opera Dark Shadows (unseen by me) for a tongue-in-cheek broad comedy. Mr. Burton’s pal Johnny Depp plays Barnabas Collins, the heir to a wealthy fish-packaging family who is cursed by the family’s young maid, Angelique (Eva Green), when he does not reciprocate her love. She is a witch, apparently, and transforms Barnabas into a vampire. She then turns the townspeople against him (torches, pitchforks and all) and they bury him alive.

There he rests until 1972 when construction on a new McDonalds unearths his coffin. To the old Collins manor he goes, to see what living relatives he may have who are willing to help him exact revenge on Angelique. The current residents of the Collins manor include Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer), her daughter Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz), her brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller) and his son David (Gulliver McGrath). David claims to be able to communicate with ghosts (in particular his deceased mother), an oddity the family treats by hiring a boozing, live-in doctor (Helena Bonham Carter) to hang around the house and watch him.

Also employed at the manor are a drunken groundskeeper (Jackie Earle Haley) and Victoria (Bella Heathcote), a young woman who has just arrived from New York and bears a striking (perhaps even mystical) resemblance to Barnabas’s dead lover. (Did I forget to mention Barnabas’s lover was killed by Angelique back in the day?)

Not that any of this matters much. The lengthy introduction turns out to just be a set-up for gags involving Barnabas wandering around and marveling at modern innovations such as automobiles and ice cream. The jokes in these scenes are tired and predictable but, thanks to Mr. Depp’s unflagging enthusiasm, made me chuckle about half the time.

At any rate, the comedy is more interesting than the undead love triangle that is supposedly at the center of this dramatically limp script by Seth Grahame-Smith and John August. The movie fails to convince us its characters are worth even paying attention to, much less emotionally investing in their fates. A number of scenes drift past without leaving any impression.

Playing eighteenth-century vampire-types must be a walk in the park for Johnny Depp by now but he finds ways to have fun with the part. Bella Heathcote’s gaunt, bug-eyed face makes her a classic Burton babe and she plays the character dull and submissive, which is how Mr. Burton typically portrays innocent and virginal young women. Michelle Pfeiffer and Helena Bonham Carter are amusing in underdeveloped bit parts and Jackie Earle Haley, in a rare comedic turn, seems to be enjoying himself. The weak link here is Chloë Grace Moretz, usually a firecracker, who here stomps around in one-note teen angst.

In one of the movie’s last scenes, a character reveals a major secret about herself but kindly asks everyone in the room to not make too big a deal out of it. Fair enough. Dark Shadows is not a movie that warrants a big response. It disappears from the mind as quickly as an apparition.

- Steve Avigliano, 5/13/12