This is how I imagine it happened.

Tim Burton’s phone rings. It is Richard Zanuck and he is agitated. “You’ve got to start shooting Dark Shadows. The people at Warner are concerned about a new Twilight picture. They’re ready to pull the plug.”

“I don’t care!” Zanuck says. “Whatever you have: it’ll play, it’ll play!”

At least I hope that’s how it went, because otherwise I can’t explain the mess of Tim Burton’s newest film. I should note that I don’t know anything about the original series Dark Shadows, except that it was my brother’s favorite show and it terrified me when I was five. But I figured that the film Dark Shadows would be something else completely and I entered the theater with high expectations.

The film started off bad, because I immediately sided with the antagonist, Angelique Bouchard, played with much gusto and perverse sexuality by Eva Green. I guess I’m kind of an outcast, but can’t a spurned lover kill a guy’s parents and turn him into a vampire without everyone saying she’s somehow bad? Johnny Depp plays Barnabas Collins, one of these Capitalist Barons who inexplicably exist in our “free market” economy. With all due respect to one of my favorite authors, I have come to despise characters like Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley who have the luxury of being noble given that nothing else is required of them.

And so it is with Barnabas. Angelique is in love with him. Barnabas is not so noble that he won’t have sex with her, but he is much too noble to lie to her and tell her he loves her. Instead, he is in love with Josette du Pres, played as the insipid character of male fantasy by Bella Heathcote. Fortunately, she gets killed right at the start of the film. Unfortunately, she floats around as a ghost for the rest of the film.

Angelique locks Barnabas in a coffin where he is trapped for 197 (?) years when some workers dig him up and release him. It is now 1972 and much hippy hilarity ensues. It would probably take me a couple thousand words to describe what next happens because the film bounces around more or less randomly. Let me provide just a few of the plot elements:

1. The Collins family is down and out and Barnabas saves it.
2. The matriarch tries to keep the family from knowing Barnabas’ secret.
3. Barnabas learns about love.
4. The scoundrel father of the little boy is banished.
5. Barnabas falls for another insipid character of male fantasy played by same actor.
6. Insipid character is given an unnecessary back story.
7. Semi-obligatory music video of home renovation.
8. Fish wars!
9. The live-in doctor tries to become a vampire.
10. Did I mention the daughter is a werewolf?

This is all over the place, hung on the spine of the main story, itself completely disappearing from the film for ten minutes at a time. That story: the fight between Barnabas and Angelique. And this too is very poorly constructed. However, and this is important: Depp and Green light up the screen when they are together. It is just a shame that they have so little to do.

Having said all of this, I’d like to see it again some time. The film is a mess. It could so easily have been good. But even still, it is playful. Johnny Depp is always fun to watch. The film is good looking. The special effects on Angelique were quite impressive. And there are isolated scenes that really work.

But The Raven was ten times as good with one-sixth the budget.

Update (Less Than an Hour Later)

Despite myself, I seem to be writing what are more or less film reviews recently. I am sorry about this. What’s more, I seem to have really missed the mark on this film, because I agree with most of the people who “reviewed” the film. There is one thing that I talked about—and was the thing I thought most about while viewing—that no one touched upon: its repugnant treatment of class.

When Barnabas is first released, he kills all of the workers for the favor they did him. Later, after learning about love from a group of hippies, he kills all of them for the favor they did him. He also kills the doctor for the sin of trying to become a vampire. The only one who notes the hypocrisy of this is the evil Angelique. There is a kind of droit du seigneur element to all this: Barnabas is above the law because of his position (as Lord rather than Vampire, but it hardly matters).

What’s more, Angelique’s story is entirely about class. She is a servant and I gather that this more than anything is why Barnabas cannot love her. After she buries Barnabas, she goes on to be successful in business, almost completely taking over the industry that the Collins family once controlled. The set up here is classically British: the vulgar peasant getting above her station and eventually getting her comeuppance. (See, for example, one of my very favorite films: Gosford Park.)

Am I over thinking this? I tend to think not. Humans are storytellers. And one of the most profound uses of storytelling is social control. Just look at the Bible! I don’t think that Burton was setting out to make a film that told working people to know their place. But it is certainly the case that neither Burton nor Seth Grahame-Smith[1] are great thinkers. They soak up the intellectual environment in which they live. If they thought about it, they might see the repugnant ideas they push. But they never do think about it.

[1] It should come as no surprise that Grahame-Smith is best know for the “novel” Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Lots of politics today. Matthew Yglesias asks a very smart question, “If the unemployment and inflation rates were reversed, would the Fed do something about it?” You see, the Federal Reserve has a double mandate: minimize inflation and maximize employment. Right now, the inflation rate is less than 2%—far less than its historical level. The unemployment rate is over 8%—far more than its historical level. And yet the fed does… Nothing!

Yglesias asks if the Fed would do something if unemployment were less than 2% and inflation were over 8%. And the answer is, “You bet your second house in Nantucket!” However, Yglesias doesn’t explain why this is, probably because he doesn’t want to soil his reputation as a thoughtful political observer. I have no such reputation to soil, so I will tell you.

Bennie and the Feds aren’t doing anything because the current situation is great for them and all of their friends. You see, if you are wealthy and have lots of cash, inflation is terrible. You money loses value. If you are poor and in debt, inflation is great. Your debt gets reduced without even paying it down.

Similarly, if you are rich and own a company, high unemployment is great because you can get the best workers for the lowest prices. But if you are poor and unemployed, high unemployment is terrible for obvious reasons.

Bennie and the Feds are not doing the job they are paid to do. They are supposed to maximize employment and minimize inflation. Yet all they do is minimize inflation. They should be fired.

Melissa Harris-Perry—who is Beautiful, Intelligent, Learned—had a nice segment on her show last weekend. She discusses this idea that a business career is a great (or even) good background for someone becoming the POTUS. It is a good discussion:

One thing that isn’t discussed is an idea that Paul Krugman has been hammering on for years: running the country is totally different from running a business:

The fact is that I understood that when I was child. We Americans are so vested in the romantic hero archetype that we just can’t see the world as it is. And we are paying a very high price for this.

This amazing graph is taken from The Rachel Maddow Show. It is based upon work from the two academics listed on the graph. The bottom chart is the distribution of income that Americans think would be right. The yellow line is the top 20% of earners, the orange line is the next 20%, and so on. The middle chart is the distribution of income that Americans think is what we have. And the top chart is the actual distribution of income. So Americans think income inequality is far better than it really is, but even with that distorted view, they would like the economy to be even more equitable.

When I was a kid, I loved John D. Fitzgerald’s The Great Brain series. So I thought I would revisit it to see if I had any taste whatsoever when I was a youngster. I couldn’t find the original The Great Brain nor my favorite, The Great Brain at the Academy. But I did find More Adventures of the Great Brain.

For those of you who do not know these books, they tell the story of the Fitzgeralds, a Catholic family living in Utah around the turn of the 19th century. The star is Tom (TD), the middle child, who is a very smart con artist. Most of the books are told in the first person by the youngest, John (JD). The books are highly episodic with a vague story arc. Think Cannery Row.

I am pleased to report that at least this book is very good. I suspect that when I was younger I found them a good deal more clever than I do now. But they strike me now as far more charming that I thought they were. I’m surprised they aren’t more popular today. They will certainly appeal to smart kids—or at least kids who think they’re smart.

Update (23 June 2012)

I was wrong, all of the Great Brain books are written from little John’s perspective. I just got The Great Brain at the Academy and it is told as though J.D. is learning all about what happened from Tom’s letters and then telling the reader.

You may remember that for Mother’s Day, I posted this really great video Thank You Mom. So I went looking for something similar for Father’s Day. The results were poor. All of the videos celebrating Father’s Day were not only explicitly Christian, they had a very traditional view of fathers.

Even when I was growing up in the middle ages of the 20th century, I could see that the standard line on “dads” was wrong. Fathers were much more involved in the lives of their children than commonly accepted. They were a hell of a lot more involved than the standard line that says that fathers lead by example. This is the “we aren’t reptiles” theory of fatherhood: we don’t eat our young!

The great diversity and fierce attachment of modern fathers shows that men always wanted to be intimately involved in the rearing of their children. The moment that social mores allowed this, men jumped at it. This is one of the best and most enduring results of the feminist revolution.

And this is the text from the supremely silly card I got my father:

To which I added even more silliness. But that’s private.

Happy Father’s Day!

My father seemed to be impressed with Nik Wallenda’s upcoming high wire walk over Niagara Falls. It seems really boring to me. I just can’t see it as much of anything after seeing Man on a Wire a couple of years ago. So I forced my father to watch it. He was very impressed, but still looked forward to Wallenda’s walk.

The main thing I remembered about the film was that while Philippe Petit had all charges dropped against him after his walk between the Twin Towers. His co-conspirators, on the other hand, were thrown out of the country. In fact, there is a remarkable moment late in the movie where a police officer comments on the wire the group had put up, “The rigging outfit itself, it’s magnificent the way he did it.” The way he did it. Well, he didn’t do it. If he had been alone, he could not have done it. The walk required a group of committed people. But in America, all that matters is the guy in front of the camera. No one else matters.

What I most noticed this time is what an asshole Petit is. He treats his friends very badly. And I feel that to all of the people involved there was a feeling that Petit was never really much of a friend. He was a fun and interesting guy to be around. He is a symbol of a great thing they were involved in. But they can’t miss the personal relationship they had with him, because they never had a personal relationship with him in the first place.

I’m glad that people like Petit are around. He makes life interesting. But he doesn’t make it true or deep—even for those who are physically close to him. He is the personification of the lonely man on a wire pretending that he willed the wire from his mind.

Woody Allen has impressed me with his use of narration. I think it goes back to his fundamental orientation as a short story writer. In particular, Broadway Danny Rose is probably the best use of narration in a film ever. And I think everyone remembers the Greek chorus in Mighty Aphrodite.

I’ve gotten out of touch with Woody Allen. I haven’t seen any of his films in the theater since Alice and the last of his films I’ve even seen is The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, which is not even that recent. So I’ve been taking steps to get up to date.

My first effort was to watch his 2008 film, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. It is a pleasant enough film with many things we have come to expect from Woody Allen: clever dialog, truly surprising plot twists, and a vague ending. But that’s not what I noticed. I noticed the narration that blanketed the film.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is narrated by a man who I guess is supposed to be the author of what Allen sees as the novel the film is based upon. It is clearly an omniscient narrator, because he knows everything that is going on in the minds of all the characters. Just the same, he is not any of the characters in the film. And he sticks out in the film, never really melding with the film.

I would have really liked this film if it hadn’t been for the narration. What’s more, it isn’t necessary. Nothing narrated wasn’t clear from the many excellent performances in the film. My question is why: “Why did Allen add this narration?” Was he assuming that his audience was too stupid or distracted to figure out the film without being told?

Also, like I implied, the ending was weak.