In Which We Are The Only Shadow You Need Concern Yourself With

Tim Burton Was Dead Already

by DICK CHENEY

Dark Shadows
dir. Tim Burton
113 minutes

Dark Shadows cost $150 million dollars, which is about as hard to itemize and account for as the budget of the Pentagon. If that really is how much a film set basically in one, dark decrepit mansion cost to make, then Michelle Pfeiffer potentially received a career encompassing honorarium totalling $69 million, since there is nothing in this movie that suggests that even an ounce of care went into it.

Tim Burton obviously never got his hands on a Hollywood memo that originated in the late 1980s from the office of Robert Towne, Syd Field or Robert McKee. I can reconstruct it almost from memory.

Dear Everyone,

Guys. Writing to let you know that one level of irony is no longer enough.

For example: a baseball player is afflicted with a life-threatening disease, but each time he hits a home run he feels a little better. One level of irony.

Same situation, but the baseball player is a woman. $$$$$$

An alien wants to return to his ancestral home planet and enlists the help of children (small adults) to get there. One level of irony.

Same situation, but the alien resembles a Jewish grandmother. $$$$$$

Two levels of irony, guys. (Or three if it's a remake of an old Ronald Reagan movie.)

Carry on.

I'm not even sure the concept of a vampire out of place contains any irony at all by now, although the concept of Michelle Pfeiffer looking like this at the age of 72 is certainly akin to rain on your wedding day, or a free ride when you've already paid.

you know what you have to do

Dark Shadows concerns Barnabas Collins, a lovesick eighteenth century gentleman who employs a witch (Eva Green) as a maid. Envious of the love he offers to another white girl, she enchants the woman to throw herself off a cliff. Barnabas follows in short order, but instead of dying, he just rolls around next to the corpse of the woman he loves. He's immortal, and upset about it for some reason.

Barnabas returns to the seventies and is extremely surprised by modern inventions like the television. Actually, this is the only new development he is alarmed by at all. In fact, it's almost more astonishing how little has changed since 1792. This itself might have been that elusive second level of irony, but this is Tim Burton we're talking about here. The only new thought he's had since Beetlejuice is, we should add the color purple to that.

But no, you say. Surely Johnny Depp couldn't be doing the exact same voice he used for all eleven Pirates of the Carribbean movies and The Tourist? He must have really thrown himself into the role offered by his close friend and goatee groomer! What wouldn't one dark lion do for another, unless the other dark lion was Grover Norquist?

Depp looks to be half asleep for most of Dark Shadows. It's clear he's only really trying when he's involved in a scene with Helena Bonham Carter, who is so much more beautiful than the other women in the cast that it makes absolutely no sense she's treated like an old woman who wants to replenish her body's vitality with undead platelets.

act bad everyone, act bad!

This is Burton's inner sexist at work — he gives people what he thinks they either want or don't want to see it here, because he lacks the human concept of empathy and he's colorblind as fuck. The fact that he would do this to someone he cares about in real life makes the betrayal even more disturbing.

Try to watch the original Dark Shadows on YouTube. It's hard to decide which of the two is worse, although at least the original was at the time presenting a somewhat novel concept. Dark Shadows appeared during the day like any other soap, although by virtue of the fact it was breaking the conventions of the genre, it managed to stand out and garner an audience. Today the concept itself is utterly normal; what would be genre-defying would be to have a movie not about a vampire living in modernity.

Sometimes you have to zig when others zag. Tim Burton left his first wife for Lisa Marie, and then later when he ditched Lisa Marie she auctioned off all his stuff. This was the only time he zigged, and I guess it didn't turn out too well, so he started to take the gothic thing to the extreme and acted like he made it up.

People would be like, "Tim, you know you didn't invent the whole gothic aesthetic, right?" and he would just sob and prepare a maudlin adaptation of The Bob Newhart Show before leaving it during preproduction. Have you ever seen Tim Burton's visual art? Just squint your eyes at a VHS copy of Edward Scissorhands, twist your penis slightly to the right and you'll get the fucking picture.

designing this room alone cost $40 million dollars

Perhaps the most predictable scene in Dark Shadows occurs when Barnabas manufactures some reason to get high with a bunch of young people. A scene where the main character gets high and the camera pans around the circle as in That 70s Show is now a familiar staple of every picture, I think this even happened in the Margaret Thatcher movie I refused to see because Meryl Streep makes me sad about my life. After he exchanges various insights with stoners on a beach, he murders them and drains their bodies of blood. In the theater, this "idea" did not even get a single laugh or chuckle from the audience. You can't murder someone if they're already dead.

OK see you guys later. And don't watch Veep. It's totally unrealistic.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is the former vice president of the United States and a writer living in an undisclosed location. He last wrote in these pages about Game of Thrones. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Home by the Sea" - Genesis (mp3)

"That's All" - Genesis (mp3)

The new album from Genesis was tremendous.

In Which We Can't Avenge Them If We're Dead

Bannermen

by DICK CHENEY

The time between when you make your wish and when it is granted comprises everything. As a mere hooligan who only cared about the marginal income tax rate, I did not understand this, so I would keep on wanting the thing. To stop needing to do whatever it is — sleep, eat, summon a dark spirit — is incredibly difficult, but if you do not stop, then afterwards you end up discarding your heart's desire. If you really wish something, you must have it then and now or not at all.

My wish was for Westeros to become alive. Sadly, I wished this in 2007.

What do you do with a show after you kill off its best characters? Without the considerable presence of myself and the last president in the public discourse, The Nation has resorted to slandering black people and mocking Mormons. ("Why Can't We Make Fun Of Mormons?" If you have to ask, you're probably not a liberal magazine.) Sure, my jabs about Katrina vanden Heuvel having two silver spoons embedded in her sizable cheeks are all in good fun, but when you look to who benefits, you can see that Victor Navasky's secret plan is for Romney to be elected. It means his entire bottom line.

The deaths of Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon were also bad business. Not quite Scarlett Johanssen when she's Lorraine Bracco-ing a Norse God bad, but horrible nonetheless. Unlike in The Avengers, where they kill off even incidental characters with gaudy, funereal music, the HBO series felt the need to stay faithful to the novels on which they were based. And everyone dies. Hopefully they haven't read A Dance of Dragons, because there is still a chance to get this right.

She's going through a thing right now

Try watching Game of Thrones with someone who isn't emotionally invested in whether Arya Stark lives or dies on her journey up the King's Road. It's just a series of increasingly disturbing scenes; actually the show is a deep departure from the novels where a twenty page chapter was spent leading up to said scene. Here we just get: rats crawling into men's bodies, the theft of teenage dragons in onesies, the slaughter of babies, the rape of Khaleesis, the austere birth of a shadow. Everyone in the Seven Kingdoms possesses a mid-sized or larger tongue.

The real problem is the focus on the two most boring families of the Seven Kingdoms, the Baratheons and the Greyjoys. The Baratheon's squabble/Clash concerns two feuding brothers, one gay and one impotent, who seek to inherit their oldest brother's birthrights. The words of House Baratheon are "Ned Stark died for this?"

tyrion is peeking during at lease 18 percent of all his screentime

The Greyjoys are somehow worse, if this is even possible. I hate you Theon Grejoy. You look like a jack-in-the-box, you can't act worth a shit, and you didn't even say goodbye to Robb Stark.

The words of the Greyjoys are "incest boating." The ancestral home bases of the Greyjoys are the Iron Islands, and if it did not look so glorious, the scenes set in these environs would be even more execrable than they already are. The set design in Game of Thrones borders on magnificent. The show must cost twelve fortunes. You can easily watch the show without the volume on and get the basic point.

"I came from nothing." "That's the sixth time you've said that."

Game of Thrones uses the word 'only' a lot. At some point, you begin to doubt the singularity of the subject. The dialogue mostly concerns the following:

"Remember our words."

"It was only a dream."

"I am only a maid."

"It is my duty."

Ser Loras, I'm coming!!!

"I cannot, my lord!" (He can.)

"He has to pay the iron price."

"It is only my duty."

"I am your king!"

During a recent episode the takeaway point from seven straight scenes was, "You can't avenge him from the grave." Because most of Game of Thrones' compelling characters have already died off or are about to, much time has been dedicated to establishing new villains. The process is long, and there are a lot of them. Littlefinger actually seems like a super guy compared to most, and young creature playing Sir Loras is a star in the making.

But that's the only thing marking time between when a twee Tyrion is twinkling like Santa's elf about some decision he's going to make that will turn the tide of war. How lovely to imagine how many bannerman will be consumed by the wildfire. In the North, Jon Snow is contemplating throwing a bone to one of the maids from Downton Abbey. It's hard to know who exactly to get behind.

My disgust for the Onion Knight knows no bounds. He can't even read. It's laughable.

you kowtowing little maggot

Someone needs to do a theatrical release of all the Arya scenes. See you later.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to this Recording. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about Magic City.

jon snow is the only one permitted a pet for some reason

"The Lost Buoys" - Clock Opera (mp3)

"Move to the Mountains" - Clock Opera (mp3)

Ways to Forget was released on April 23rd.

inside The Nation's editorial offices

In Which The Past Is Dead To Us

Wishcasting

by DICK CHENEY

Magic City
Starz
creator Mitch Glazer

The pilot of Magic City ends with a corpse floating through the ocean, perhaps the dumbest cliché in crime fiction. That the offending dead body is the head of a powerful labor union is no panacea on this insult to my intelligence. I lived through the sixties twice, well, three times if you count the four hour brunch I had with George Lucas where he said "In those days" over 450 times.

Nostalgia for the past permeates almost every aspect of society. It is the defining characteristic of a declining civilization, and it is all the more pervasive in the midst of technological or industrial revolution. I hate this attitude, that things were better before x, unless the x you're referring to is the HBO adaptation of Game of Thrones. Thankfully, Starz's new series Magic City is so completely overwhelmed with ridiculous cliches that it's difficult to imagine anyone wishing to return to the Miami of 1959.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan's ever-expanding neck (on loan from Tom Hanks, who presumably no longer requires the device) portrays Isaac Evans, the manager of Miami's Miramar Hotel. His backer Ben Diamond (Danny Huston) is a member of organized crime, and the remaining details are copied verbatim from Martin Scorses Casino.

Isaac has two sons and a daughter by his first wife Molly, and he remarried a Gentile woman his daughter disapproves of and his son creepily observes sunbathing in the nude. Since there is no XBox, his eldest son spends the vast majority of his time having unprotected sex, In the pilot alone there are three blowjobs received, all by men. Actually, it is grammatically correct to refer to a blowjob as a "bowjob" if the sexual act in question has occurred thirty years or more in the past. Once in Magic City a woman tries to give another woman a bowjob, but it all goes so predictably wrong.

the ice queen

It gets to the point where you're actively praying for a powerful female character to enter the mix, with the brains and bravado of my wife Lynne and the prominent forehead of an Angelina Jolie. It happens near the end of the second episode, and when you find out she's a tall, icy blonde you just sigh. After striking union members toss Isaac's wife's poodle off a hotel balcony, he doesn't even even respect her enough to tell her the dog died. He just replaces it with a new snarling poodle. This is what amounts to comedy in Magic City.

the abused mob wife

I made a list of the show's clichés so they can fix them:

- Cranky old man with a secret heart of gold

- Bowjob while driving a convertible and the car crashes

- Purportedly religious politician is actually a corrupt buffoon

- Witness has to be intimidated but ends up killing himself anyway

- Young girl has a bat mitzvah and chooses a Judy Garland theme

- Insensitive rich woman can't hold onto a man to save her life, they don't "deserve her"

- Vicious and heartless mob boss uses elaborate metaphors copied from episodes of Bones to suggest depth of field (watching him relate the story of the Frog and the Scorpion with a straight face was more painful than getting a new heart)

- Peggy comes up with a campaign and Don takes credit for it

- Girl tells boy not to call her by pet name, later reveals she prefers the nickname

- LeBron James is afraid of commitment

Don Draper was able to ever so briefly be interesting because of how ridiculous every single word out of his mouth and woman he slept with was. The writers of Magic City have tragically misunderstood the fact that he is meant to be ironic. The officious Isaac is never funny, he does not joke, he simply ribs, like the backup quarterback on a football team. He has no friends, not even his boss or his wife. He gets along with his father, but only because he needs help disappointing the labor unions of the world.

Don's shame at his mysterious origins was obviously a light parable of the Jewish self-hatred of Matthew Weiner, and of course Don really had nothing to fear. Isaac, who is an agnostic Jew, endures slurs and various difficulties related to his ethnicity, but he himself and his family make Ace Rothstein look like David Ben-Gurion. There should an inset displayed during the show of Jeffrey Dean Morgan's circumcised penis as verifiable proof he is what it seems he isn't.

the maid

Isaac's younger son, law student Danny, is infatuated with one of the hotel's maids. As Frank Sinatra prepares for his New Year's Eve concert, Danny sends his intended the gift of a lavish red dress. (Her massive eyebrows are nicely set off by the gown's elaborate fringe.) Women are either servants or whores, and there are about 20-25 prostitutes in the pilot alone. It's a woman in 1959, what else could she be?

Isaac's eldest son Stevie Evans starts an illicit affair with Ben Diamond's tragically abused wife Lily Diamond. At first the sex is completely unprotected and fun, but after the fifth time, she says, "Can you please just hold me Stevie?" To kill time takes a bunch of indecent photos of them having sex. Over seven times she asks, "Did you burn the photos?" If I have to tell you the answer, you don't yet understand the familiar appeal of Magic City. It's like slipping into the second asshole where David Chase forced Terence Winter to put all his bad ideas.

Alex asked me to review the second season of Game of Thrones ("You won't believe what happens to Tyrion!" Fuck you.) I said no. He asked me to review The Hunger Games. I said no. He asked me to review Magic City, and I said, "Only if I can use the word shiksa over twelve times." I must simply be getting old. The past and the future both seem equally boring. All around me in the real world I see things that have never existed before, that are never described in our art or media. I turned this disaffected feeling into a screenplay titled Vaginal Space Program. It has a huge part for Holly Hunter and it was purchased by a savvy executive at Paramount. Look forward to that. What else is there to look forward to?

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording and the former vice president of the United States. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

a prostitute

"Four Hours Away" - Young Prisms (mp3)

"Runner" - Young Prisms (mp3)

"Outside" - Young Prisms (mp3)