If I touch a burning candle, I can feel no pain. If you cut me with a knife, it’s still the same. And I know her heart is beating, and I know that I am dead; yet the pain here that I feel, try and tell me it’s not real, and it seems that I still have a tear to shed.
Any picture associated with directorial visionary Terry Gilliam is always going to rouse the public’s attention, yet the tragic death of Heath Ledger midway through filming has ensured that the name “Doctor Parnassus” has been on everyone’s radar for more than 18 months. Much has been made of Gilliam’s fervent determination to finish the film and particularly the ingenious casting of Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell to fill Ledger’s void. Gilliam executes it with gusto, and — as should be expected from such an auteur — transports the audience into a visually fantastical world tinged with a didactic message about the importance and power of the imagination.
Retreating into dark shadows and having a private but very audible sob was my reaction to watching the trailer for Tim Burton’s latest catastrophe. Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter have shown Burton unrivalled loyalty in recent years (one senses they’re in on some sort of terribly unfunny joke) as he slowly undoes any of the good will that his early work may have garnered with clangers following swiftly on from stinkers. The fact that Dark Shadows shows little sign of breaking that run means that save for Corpse Bride, Burton hasn’t made a good film since Mars Attacks in 1996 and even that was iffy at times.
Arriving hot on the heels of the critically maligned Project X comes writer Michael Bacall’s interpretation of the ’80s teen-cop caper, “21 Jump Street” — the show that thrust Johnny Depp into the limelight. One might be forgiven for letting out an audible groan in the expectation of more equally crass fare. But this is a completely different beast; and it’s a bloody funny one at that.
crash/burn 