Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - Movie Review

Starring Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Ella Purnell, Samuel L. Jackson, Chris O'Dowd, Judi Dench, Allison Janney, Terence Stamp, Rupert Everett, Kim Dickens, Lauren McCrostie and Finlay MacMillan.
Written by Jane Goldman.
Directed by Tim Burton.

★★★

Some actors should just not be forced to try an American accent, and Chris O'Dowd is one such actor. The Irish actor best known for the BBC comedy The IT Crowd makes Ewan McGregor sound like Robert Redford. But that aside he plays Franklin, father of Jake (Asa Butterfield, a Londoner who's slightly more successful at sounding like a native Yank.)

Jake is on a quest. After his grandfather dies, Jake follows a set of clues to find Miss Peregrine. Miss Peregrine is the subject of bedtime stories his grandfather would tell him, but he confides that the stories are true. Jake convinces his father to take him to a small island off of Wales, where Miss Peregrine's house is supposedly hidden.

He finds it, and it's a house in the middle of a magic cave. The house is stuck in a time loop from 1943, and in this house live all sorts of peculiar children. One boy is invisible. One girl has a mouth on the back of her neck. And so on.

But there are another set of mutant peculiars who are hunting them. These are a menacing breed led by Barron (Samuel L. Jackson). The design of the mutants is where you can really tell this is a Tim Burton film.

The movie is breezy and enjoyable. Eva Green tends to be great in everything, and she's darkly bewitching here as Miss Peregrine. Like many Burton films, the ending isn't great. In fact, it gets quite convoluted with jumping from time loop to time loop. I lost track trying to make sense of it.

300: Rise of an Empire - Movie Review

Starring Sullivan Stapleton, Eva Green, Lena Headey, Rodrigo Santoro, Hans Matheson, David Wenham and Callan Mulvey.
Directed by Noam Murro.

★★

This is a prequel and sequel all in one. In fact the majority of the action takes place during the same time as the events in the first 300 movie. We get a couple shots of Gerard Butler's face but otherwise the movie dances around not having their main star from Part 1.

Part 2 revolves around Themistocles, an Athenian who wants to unite Greece against the Persian invasion. He's played by Sullivan Stapleton, an Australian actor best known (if he's known at all) as one of the leads on Cinemax's series Strike Back. He doesn't have the same wattage as Butler.

Rodrigo Santoro is back as the 8-foot-tall god-king Xerxes, but since he has to be gone most of this movie dealing with the events of the other one, his army is led by Artemisia, played with unbridled gusto by Eva Green (Dark Shadows). Indeed, this movie would have been much harder to sit through if it wasn't for her.

The "story" is slimmer this time around, the gore just as splashy and cartoonish, the substance is at zero. There are a couple points where Themistocles gives a troops-rousing speech and I felt a little embarrassed. How many troops-rousing speeches have been committed to film over the years? Hundreds, and most of them were better than these.

I hope the eventual 300: Fall of an Empire is a musical.

Dark Shadows - Movie Review

Starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Eva Green, Helena Bonham Carter, Chloe Moretz, Bella Heathcoate, Jackie Earle Haley, Jonny Lee Miller, Gully McGrath, Alice Cooper and Christopher Lee. Directed by Tim Burton.

★★½

What is it with Tim Burton and a twisted tree on a cliff? All of his movies have that image in there somewhere. A tree, with gnarled branches, near a cliff. Even Big Fish had it.

Anyway, this eighth collaboration between Burton and Johnny Depp is a decent entertainment, even if it's more about visuals and dialogue than story. Depp plays Barnabas Collins, a 200-year-old vampire who's awakened in 1972 and must recalibrate accordingly. He finds his descendants hanging on their vast manor of a house, but barely. Their fishing business is on the skids. Ah, but Barnabas knows where the money's buried and he's determined to turn this family around.

There to throw a wrench in his plans is Angelique (Eva Green), the witch who cursed him and locked him away and has spent the past couple centuries making his family fail.

This is one of Depp's better characters under Burton's watch. Barnabas is an 18th-century aristocrat with some adjusting to do, and Depp's umpteenth variant on the Eurotrash accent still entertains. Most of the supporting cast is good in their less-flashy roles. (I just like seeing Michelle Pfeiffer get work).

The main problem for me was the ending, by which I mean the last twenty minutes or so. Tis a giant mess. Each thread is tied up, but the pacing and general clumsy execution is as though pages 80-95 of the script just said "Hijinks ensue."

I loved the early 1970's soundtrack. It's worth a rental, but you can wait until then.