GBU: "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel", "Wanderlust", "Total Recall" and "Dark Shadows".

Since writing full reviews - and even Short Takes - has become almost impossible (until someone pays me maybe...hehe) we'll give GBU a try and rank the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of recent films I've seen. Let me know what you think of this new experiment and as always thanks for reading!

Total Recall (dir. Len Wiseman) *½

The good: It's always nice to see Colin Farrell onscreen, although he's made it clear that he now fares much better in smaller works (see Ondine and In Bruges). Also that body, wow!

Also, give Kate Beckinsale more villainous roles, she was delicious in this!

The bad: why bother remaking a movie when you'll just remind audiences of why the first one isn't even much of a classic to begin with? 

The ugly: the whole Asian-meets-futuristic aesthetic felt old in The Matrix and that came out almost 15 years ago, in this movie it just was awful to watch.

Wanderlust (dir. David Wain, 2012) ***

The good: this Aniston/Rudd reunion reminded us what made them so great to watch in The Object of My Affection back in 1998. Their chemistry is spot on! Wain's screenplay (co-written with Ken Marino) is a treasure chest of one liners and manages to be funny without being too crass and insensitive.

The bad: just nitpicking here but the ending was slightly facile.

The ugly: N/A

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (dir. John Madden) ***

The good: Judi Dench. Maggie Smith. Tom Wilkinson. Bill Nighy. Celia Imrie. Penelope Wilton. Ronald Pickup. Enough said. This cast is to die for and it's great to see real grown up movies are still being made. Dench's soulful performance was worth the admission ticket. How can an actress do so much with so little?

The bad: too many plots means we always end up craving more from the best, like Wilkinson's character.

The ugly: why does Dev Patel keep playing Indian stereotypes?

Dark Shadows (dir. Tim Burton) *

The good: Michelle Pfeiffer needs to be in more movies! It was also nice to see Helena Bonham Carter pushing her shtick to new places and Eva Green was simply to die for! (No pun intended)

The bad: the Burton-Depp thing has been old for almost a decade now, it's time to stop them!

The ugly: Burton's aesthetics seem to be getting more self indulgent with each passing film, in Dark Shadows the settings were so contrived that we couldn't allow ourselves for a moment to see the fantastical in all of this, everything felt just so stale.

Sheet-y Saturday.

Where we take a look at posters for upcoming features.

May Tim Burton redeem the last decade or so with Frankenweenie...this lovely one sheet holds the promise of some of his most iconic work and the fact that a non-cadaverous Johnny Depp is featured anywhere should be a good sign. Gotta love the folds and scratches that make it seem as if they just ran into a B sci-fi movie and are releasing it for the first time.

Magic Mike still has the best poster campaign of any movie this year. This 4th of July offering is truly delicious and not just for the obvious reasons. Just look how they completely avoided the peen to remind us that independence is all about freedom of expression.

When i first saw this poster for the last (bless you Lord) Twilight movie, I honestly thought it was a teaser for the next season of America's Next Top Model. Whoever this actress is, she's surely channeling Tyra's fierce "you go bitch" look.

Right?

Sheet-y Saturday.

Where we take a look at posters for upcoming features.

Every body and their mothers seem to have a soft spot for Tim Burton. I have never found myself seduced by his tiresome odes to the macabre, especially those in which he teams up with the oh-so-dull Johnny Depp. However the trailer for Dark Shadows hit this week and it seems everyone wants to see it, so who am I to deny audiences the pleasure of doing what they want?

The poster does nothing new to the kind of advertising Burton often goes for, notice how HBC looks like his version of Willy Wonka? I am only curious to see what Michelle Pfeiffer and Eva Green bring to the table...

Another movie about fighters that goes for yellowish meets shadowy art. Groundbreaking...

What's your take on these two one sheets? Am I especially bitter this time around or are these are dull as I think?

Alice in Wonderland ***

Director: Tim Burton
Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter,
Anne Hathaway, Crispin Glover, Matt Lucas, Stephen Fry
Michael Sheen, Alan Rickman, Marton Csokas, Timothy Spall

Lewis Carroll's books of Alice in Wonderland have been adapted into movie form since the medium began. From silent versions to the subversive animation of 1950's Disney to Jan Svankmajer; Alice's story has always fascinated artists who tend to explore the horror that lies in the innocent.
It makes sense that Tim Burton would want to do his own version, and even if it's not the definitive take fans of the filmmaker were expecting it to be, it's a lovely ride and one of Burton's most mature films to date.
Taking Carroll's text for a spin, he makes Alice (Wasikowska) a nineteen year old girl about to be married to a man she barely knows.
Encouraged by her deceased father (Csokas) to use her imagination and spoiled by the dreams she's had all her life about strange characters and a mysterious land, she follows a white rabbit (voiced by Sheen) on the day of her engagement.
She falls inside an all too familiar hole in the ground where she finds the door to Underland, a place populated by weird characters who insist she's come to fulfill a prophecy.
Soon she learns that not only she has been there before (creating an interest dilemma between what reality is in dreams while giving Disney the opportunity to make endless sequels relying on this concept) but this time in particular she's set to end the reign of the evil Red Queen (Carter) and hand the crown to her sister the benevolent White Queen (Hathaway).
Alice teams up with Tweedledee and Tweedledum (Lucas), the Cheshire cat (Fry), the blue caterpillar Ebsolem (Rickman) and the Mad Hatter (Depp), among more famous characters, as she explores this wonderland and learns lessons for her own life.
Obviously stuck somewhere between the director's vision and the studio's demands Alice in Wonderland is uneven in narrative terms as it struggles between the edge of Burton and Carroll, with the status quo preserving by way of forced naivete Disney specializes in (it's surprising but the animated version is much darker than this).
Therefore we see how Burton inserts his dark humor and macabre nature by way of the art direction, concealed symbols and unexpected character quirks.
In this way Hathaway's, Nigela Lawson-inspired, White Queen takes an aim at social terms of perfection with a lunatic side (watch as the actress deliciously travels from Barbie to Chucky in seconds), Carter indulges in the oddity of her character's construction (her giant head and blood red lips are almost iconic), while Depp surprisingly underacts his way out of the Hatter's madness, creating a character that moves more than it disturbs (his character's post traumatic stress disorder might be a bit too facile but also allows Burton to take a subtle aim at the effects of war).
Perhaps it served Burton to tone down his darkness because the film achieves a calm and sense of equilibrium that allows both opposing visions to co-exist and deliver entertainment that's clever and simple.
In many ways the film is more shaped after The Wizard of Oz than any previous incarnation of the Alice story and in the same way frames the protagonist's adventure against unconscious manifestations.
At first Burton stresses too much what "real life" character will inspire each Wonderland inhabitant but soon this becomes an opportunity to decipher if Burton finally found a way to comment on the power of dreams.
The fact that this Alice often wonders out loud if she's inside a dream doesn't make her smarter than Oz's Dorothy, but serves as a well meant, if underwritten, attempt to encompass female liberation and the Industrial Revolution overthrowing Victorianism.
For all the flaws in Alice in Wonderland we are rewarded with lush scenery, extremely thought out character design and a filmmaker surprisingly finding marvels under restraint.
Like his heroine, Burton enters a land that thrives with the promise of unknown terror but his ability to refresh his aesthetics despite compromise is the real wonder.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street **

Director: Tim Burton
Cast: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter
Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen
Jamie Campbell Bower, Jayne Wisener, Ed Sanders

Based on Stephen Sondheim's beloved musical, Tim Burton does a great job adapting it into cinematic form, but in the process has lost some of the urgency and majesty of the source material.
Johnny Depp plays Benjamin Barker, a barber who is sent to prison by Judge Turpin (Rickman) so he can keep his wife and daughter.
Fifteen years later, Barker, who has now taken the name of Sweeney Todd, returns to London and sets shop above Mrs. Lovett's (Bonham Carter) pie store, where he begins to device his revenge.
But as Mrs. Lovett reminds him the best part about this would be to "plan the plan" and while Sweeney sharpens his knives (who he calls his friends), Mrs. Lovett finds herself content with the company of this man who she loves.
On the other side of town, a young sailor (Campbell Bower) has become infatuated with Johanna (Wisener), Sweeney's daughter who is being held captive by Judge Turpin. Luckily for Sweeney, he becomes involved in a plan to rescue her, but more than having his daughter back his mind is set in revenge and after a failed attempt to murder Judge Turpin, he decides that now he will take revenge on everyone.
Just like that and the film's flaws begin with this rushed decision; if it wasn't for the fact that the music becomes louder, Burton sets the visuals and Depp raises his voice we wouldn't know that a big twist has occurred.
More than character development, this event just pushes the plot forward, because soon Sweeney is slashing people's throats so that Mrs. Lovett can make pies out of the deceased.
Depp does fine work as Sweeney, but whoever thinks he is proving his versatility is blinded by the fact that now he sings. Someone should give the man a role that doesn't require for him to be covered in makeup and act weird.
His lackluster performance is the film's biggest detractor. Perhaps he shouldn't have been loud and morbid, but he is nothing. You can not detect a single emotion in Depp's Todd. And it wouldn't be fair to say that to be soul-less was the intention, because you should at least feel the rage that inspires his revenge and turns him mad.
The best thing in the film, along with the gothic visuals, might be Bonham Carter's performance.
You never know what on Earth this woman sees in Sweeney, but the actress, whose singing voice is a whispery tease, brings the only life the film has.
While she might seem like "The Corpse Bride" come to life, you miss her when she's not onscreen. Her scenes with little Toby (Sanders), who develops a protective crush on her, are the only times when the film achieves any evidence of real emotion.
As grotesque and morbid as it all may sound, the monochromatic color scheme, the dreariness of the settings and the overtly Tim Burton-ness of the film can't cover the dark satire contained in Sondheim's work.
When the film reaches its complex final twist, where there should be tears and gasps, you feel a void which is covered by buckets of fake blood that fill the spaces where emotions should've been.
It should feel appropriate that a film so filled with death had been extracted of all its life.
Somehow it just doesn't.