A Shiny Coffin Filled with Farts

In Dark Shadows, Tim Burton boldly challenges the notion that movies are a medium for telling stories. He flips the entire paradigm on its head! F*ck you, story! Thing happens! Reaction shot! That’s all you need! The whole thing is basically Tim Burton screaming gibberish at Johnny Depp to make him confused, because it’s cute when Johnny Deppp cocks his head to the side like a puppy.

"Chevy?"

Well, it is.

Good B-movies and schlock (and the kind of fancy Disney-goth Tim Burton used to be a master of) almost always hook you with an over-the-top premise, then, once you’re in the tent, reveal nuance, and engage you in such way that the characters start to feel real. You start to actually care about them – this wolfman, does he have nards? Dark Shadows does nearly the opposite, where a compelling-ish premise leads to a series of increasingly baffling situations happening to people who might as well be random passersby. By the end, I felt like Royal Tenenbaum, shouting “Characters? What characters? All I saw was a bunch of actors wearing costumes!”

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Whether he’s playing a Comanche medicine man or a 200-year-old aristocratic vampire, one thing is for certain, Johnny Depp will be wearing fewer accessories than on an average day. Recently, he spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the origins of his bird-hat costume from Jerry Bruckheimer’s upcoming Lone Ranger movie:

“I’d actually seen a painting by an artist named Kirby Sattler, and looked at the face of this warrior and thought: That’s it,” Depp said in a recent interview. “The stripes down the face and across the eyes … it seemed to me like you could almost see the separate sections of the individual, if you know what I mean.”

I think I do know what you mean. I translated it as “I’m so handsome and famous I can say things like this without being laughed out of the room.”

Depp explained that the lines of paint on the Native American’s face looked to him like a cross-section of the man’s emotional life. “There’s this very wise quarter, a very tortured and hurt section, an angry and rageful section, and a very understanding and unique side. I saw these parts, almost like dissecting a brain, these slivers of the individual,” he said.”That makeup inspired me.”

Oh sure, I often point to the two-inch sliver of skin to the left of my cheek and say “this is my rageful section.” My mailbox seemed nonplussed about it, but he’s been spreading secrets about me.

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Late yesterday afternoon Warner Bros released the trailer for Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, which stars Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Eva Green, and Chloe Moretz (think unsexy thoughts, think unsexy thoughts…). Depp plays Barnabas Collins, an 18th Century playboy who, after breaking the heart of a witch, is turned into a vampire and buried alive, only to be accidentally awoken in 1972 by Jackie Earle Haley, who was in the midst of searching for the Collins family jewels in order to-zzzzzzzzzzzz. Whoa, I lost consciousness there for a second. Anyway, follow me after the jump for a trailer that sucks harder than a disco-era vampire. You guys, I’m kidding!

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If you’re a child of the late 80s/early 90s like me, then you’re fortunate enough to remember 1987, or as I like to call it – the year that changed TV forever. Until ’87, TV consisted of the big 3 networks – NBC, ABC and CBS. It was simple and effective, because that’s the way that billionaires liked things back then. But then Rupert Murdoch said, “F*ck a bunch of that nonsense” and he announced the fourth network – Fox. As we all know all too well, it was all downhill from there.

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Disney just released the first promo image for its upcoming version of The Lone Ranger (directed by Gore Verbinski, and starring Johnny Depp as Tonto and Armie Hammer as the masked lawman), and after looking at the picture for the past ten minutes, I feel confident in making the following assumptions about the plot of the film:

One of the Winklevoss twins got super pissed after the whole Facebook thing went down in The Social Network and left Harvard for the Wild Wild West. But once he got there, everyone kept recognizing him and saying stuff like “Hey, aren’t you one of those guys who sued Zuckerberg?” and “Hey, did you and your twin brother ever, you know … [makes circle with index finger and thumb, furiously jams other index finger in and out of it] … with the same girl? You did. Shut up. You did,” so he decided to start wearing a mask and a cowboy hat so people wouldn’t recognize him. Then everybody looked at him and was like, “Welp, good enough for me,” and they made him sheriff. Two weeks later, Jack Sparrow showed up with a bird on his head and said “I’m in. P.S. I’m an Indian now,” and they started a partnership that resulted in raucous laughter and mass casualties. Then everyone died of SARS. The end.

Spoiler alert.

Relevant picture after the jump.

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