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Rest in Peace, Jonathan Frid
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Jennifer, that's sad news for me, too; he was a big part of my teenage years, so a very real piece of my personal past dies with him. R.I.P., indeed! Thanks for letting us know.
I imagine he timed this on purpose, so he can spin in his grave when the new Dark Shadows movie comes out. ;)http://www.ValourDesigns.com
Erik wrote: "I imagine he timed this on purpose, so he can spin in his grave when the new Dark Shadows movie comes out. ;)http://www.ValourDesigns.com"
Erik, that is exactly what I thought! He can't live on a planet where that piece of junk exists.
Erik and Jennifer, you do know he has a cameo in the new movie, right? In a party scene? Along with David Selby (Quesntion Collins), Kathryn Leigh Scott (Maggie Evans), and Lara arker (Angelique) are also in it. To me he was my one and only vampire crush.
Pamela wrote: "Erik and Jennifer, you do know he has a cameo in the new movie, right? In a party scene? Along with David Selby (Quesntion Collins), Kathryn Leigh Scott (Maggie Evans), and Lara arker (Angelique) a..."Yeah, I heard they were in it for cameos. I'm not sure that can save it, though. I'm trying to keep an open mind until I actually see the film but... it's difficult. :P
Whenever I'm a little leary of a movie, and expect it to suck, I just go in with the assumption its the worst movie ever. Then I can't be disappointed, but I could be pleasantly surprised.
Very nice write up by Tim Lucas:DARK SHADOWS' Jonathan Frid (1924-2012)
I love this photo from the article (as big as the Beatles!):
Thanks for sharing that link, Shawn! Lucas' write-up is genuinely moving. Jonathan Frid will be missed; but it's nice to at least see him receive some of the credit he deserves.
Becca wrote: "Whenever I'm a little leary of a movie, and expect it to suck, I just go in with the assumption its the worst movie ever. Then I can't be disappointed, but I could be pleasantly surprised."LOL! Very nice.
Also, Shawn, thanks for sharing; that's a tremendous photo!
DARK SHADOWS (2012)
How to put it? Not as terrible as I feared, but (expectedly?) uneven. Not a comedy as advertised (those parents bringing kids may blanch at the acrobatic vampire/witch sex, panties gags and implied oral sex - Dr. Hoffman, how could you!?! - not to mention the expected weed jokes - Barnabas does not partake) but a really uneven mix of goofy comedy, cutesy references, subtle character comedy, full bore melodramatic soap operatics and special-effects laden big Hollywood movie.
Some of it works well, a little bit works VERY well. The movie itself never pays off on the check it writes with the wonderfully moody, autumnal title sequence set to "Nights In White Satin". For a couple of minutes, this hit a previously invisible - to me - resonant nerve that suddenly seemed to "explain" the 60's-70's Gothic Romance revival not only as escapism from troubling times - that part was always obvious - but also as a conscious, slightly embarrassed turning away from the failure of 60's idealism - and all this by putting a pretty girl in a dowdy, older style outfit and playing The Moody Blues as she rides a train through New England autumn and hitchhikes with some hippies.
Oddly - and again unexpectedly for fans of the show, I think - the movie generally does a good job at both respecting and tweaking the original characters, finding new, subtle dimension to Elizabeth Collins, for example, and making Dr. Hoffman - always a favorite of mine - both funny (the little gag with the pill in the cup is absolutely hilarious), kind of sad/pathetic and true to her original (although no gasping!). Roger Collins finally gets to be the scoundrel and cowardly cad it always seemed like he was *going* to be but never really was in the original. Eva Green does a good job as Angelique - she captures the character's obsession and sheer craziness most of the time (I laughed out loud as she turned to address the mob - displaying her absolutely insane smile and eyes - before entering Collinwood for the big showdown). In the neutral - sorry to say that not much is done either way with my other favorite character - Willie Loomis (Barnabas' Renfield, enjoyably played by John Karlen in the original) - he doesn't get to grovel or fail Barnabas but, on the other hand, I laughed when, even under hypnosis, he was unsure what the actual year was (typical pathetic Willie) and at his later line when loading the boat (typical nasty Willie). David Collins remains about the same. On the negative side - Carolyn Collins is promisingly played as a petulant, (assumedly) stoned teenager, until a very stupid decision about her is made late in the game. Victoria Winters (conflated here with Maggie Evans) needed a bit more character ummph considering her pivotal role in the soap operatics, but she's just given a gloss of a tragic past.
Nice momentary cameo by Christopher Lee. I was looking for, but completely missed, the original cast cameos (they were the guests at the party, greeted at the entrance). Some aspects seem like cute ideas (Alice Cooper as special musical guest) but then are tweaked in such a way that they actually kind of transcend that glib cuteness (underscoring the character's emotional arcs with the performance/lyrics of Alice Cooper songs!) and work. The special effects may be overdone in the final battle, but the visual of Angelique starting to flake and crack like a hollow porcelain doll is surprisingly effective. Nicely, the movie never tries to skirt around the fact that Barnabas kills innocent people to survive (in one sequence, which I will only mention in passing, the announcement of this intention plays out as a joke but also feels oddly poignant while being funny - given the preceding discussion. Or maybe that was just me).
A lot of it... not fails, really, but just doesn't all click together - while the film does a good job some of the time at actually recreating an overheated, melodramatic soap opera tone through character and mood (instead of purely plot contrivance), it also wants to do too much and so seems too busy and cluttered by the climax (really, that last minute character reveal was absurd - you couldn't take 2 minutes earlier to set it up in some smart way?) and in the end you know it's a big budget Hollywood movie and so, tone be damned, it's all heading towards a big special effects throwdown (why is proper tone management so *hard* for modern directors? Is it the kid in the candy store effect of being able to do literally anything you can imagine now - and so never considering whether that jars against what you've done earlier in the film?)
I almost forgot to mention the absolutely wonderful homage to Robert Cobert's score for the original show - it only occurs during a long stretch of Barnabas' first return to Collinwood, but it does a great job sketching a nice undertone version of Cobert's trademarked "light-dimming-into- shadow" lone vibraphone tones and cobwebby flutes.
Not a particularly good movie, but more entertaining than I was expecting. You can see in it the shape of a really good, modern DARK SHADOWS movie - even one that retained some of the Gothic cartoon aspects and didn't necessarily play everything totally straight - but it never comes fully into focus. Some of the humor is just poorly judged in placement (the best thing about the "Top Of The World" montage is hearing Karen Carpenter's beautiful voice over a cinema sound system) or deployment (really, a big balls joke? really?). Probably won't re-watch it anytime soon, but didn't feel like I'd wasted money on the ticket.
Great review, Shawn. I think we're going to see this next week.
Shawn, I'll echo Jim's praise for your review. As always, it's really detailed and informative; kudos!From my perspective, I'd say this movie doesn't sound like an improvement on the original series. The attempts to inject campy humor wouldn't work well for me, and neither would the infusion of sex and drug references. I don't ever expect to bother watching it; but I'd love to have the DVD version of the original!
It's kind of strange - I'd put it this way - if you're a die-hard fan of the original, you probably won't like it. If you're a fan of the original who still can concede that it was basically a soap opera and thus formulaic redundancy half the time (like most soap operas, you could watch DS only on Monday, Wednesday & Friday and have no problems following the story) - this is me - you can probably enjoy it for what it's worth. I'm not really sure how anyone who had never seen the original might take it. I will say this - they do stay true to the idea that the show was all about the Collins' as a powerful yet cursed family...And thank you both for your kind words!
I never got to see the original very often & thought it was definitely a soap opera, albeit cooler than any of the others out there. I love the team of Burton & Depp, too. Their twisted humor works well for me. Marg likes them, but she was a die hard fan of the original, so we'll see. Since this will be the first time I've taken her to a movie in 15 or 20 years, I have a feeling she'll like it.;-)
I was a pretty hardcore fan of the original (although I still had to miss a lot of it because of circumstances) and enough of a purist not to like this kind of tampering. (At least I'm consistent; I also didn't care much for either House of Dark Shadows or Night of Dark Shadows, because I didn't think either one was faithful to the basic idea of the original.) But I also have to be honest and admit that Shawn's point is valid, too. The show WAS a soap opera in its original conception; that was more noticeable in the first season, before the writers introduced actual supernatural elements into the mix, but it was always a limiting factor in the way the plotting and storylines could develop. And I also have to say (and said at the time, too!) that the quality of the series deteriorated in the later seasons; I had the feeling that the writers were out of long-range inspiration, just writing the scripts from day to day, and scouring the barrel for any kind of supernatural trope they hadn't already used. But I still watched it when I could --hey, at the time, there wasn't much supernatural TV out there!From the reference above to Angelique "starting to flake and crack like a hollow porcelain doll" in the final battle, I infer that she's portrayed as the Big Bad here, and that she gets a typical Hollywood villain's spectacular demise, to rousing cheers from the audience. :-) Interestingly, in the original series, while Angelique definitely wasn't a likely candidate for canonization (and was the poster girl for the quote "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned"!), she wasn't ALL bad at her core. As the writers brought out near the series' end, and rarely but occasionally in the earlier seasons too, she did have her good side mixed in with her faults; she could be a loyal, and even likeable, friend, and her love for Barnabas (underneath her anger) was real. That way of portraying her gave the character a bit more complexity and appeal than the stereotypical cardboard evil villainess, so that you could feel (or at least I did) some honest compassion and sense of loss for her when she died at the end of the series. That's to the credit of the series writers, to give it where it's due --and, I suspect, not a credit they'll have to share with the movie writers.
Well, like I said - yeah, they do make her the big bad, but they do seem to want to stress that she really does love, or thinks she loves, Barnabas. She just has a funny way of showing it.I actually like both of the earlier DARK SHADOWS films - although NIGHT is severely compromised by last minute cuts that eliminated huge chunks of the plot (an ongoing effort to find the original excised material is having little luck). HOUSE is interesting (great real world mansion setting!) because it just hyper-concentrates so much of the show into a 90 minute form - I've always loved the fan theory I once read: during the initial run of the TV series, as all fans know, they did quite a bit of time traveling and parallel worlds and all that, and in one unfortunate story thread Barnabas ends up finding himself, while mentally possessing the body of himself in the past, *re-locked* in the coffin for a hundred odd years all over again, because he was unable to effect a change on that event. There's a fan theory that HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS is the dream world Barnabas envisioned while living through the most awful period of his (un)life for a second time, a dream world where he takes out all the pain and suffering and insanity of his predicament on the entire cast of characters.
Shawn, that's an interesting theory, and actually would make a lot of sense as an explanation for House of Dark Shadows! Of course, I suspect that the true explanation was just that some Hollywood moguls figured a lot of people would pay to see a movie with "Dark Shadows" in the title and the series' cast and characters onscreen, whatever kind of script they wrote to justify it. :-( (I know, one of my college classmates told me that I'm a born cynic.... :-) )
Jonathan Frid was great, and he had a great life. I want to cry each time I see the trailer for Dark Shadows, Tim Burton should be ashamed of himself for treating the movie as a dark comedy. Thank goodness I have the original series on DVD, I only need about 4 more to complete the original collection. They've since reissued the series on DVD, before Barnabas joined the cast.
Werner wrote: "Shawn, that's an interesting theory, and actually would make a lot of sense as an explanation for House of Dark Shadows! Of course, I suspect that the true explanation was just that some Hollywood..."Hi Werner I think you're right. I logged in using gmail btw, so now my profile does not show up, so I have to redo it with a new pix.
Shawn wrote: "It's kind of strange - I'd put it this way - if you're a die-hard fan of the original, you probably won't like it. If you're a fan of the original who still can concede that it was basically a soa..."Shawn, I'm sure I would not like it.
"Dark Shadows" was pretty good. Not as funny as I thought it would be, but there was a fair amount of subtle humor with a quite serious streak running throughout. Depp delivered his lines with his typical precision. The way he made long, archaic phrases trip off his tongue was just incredible.
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