In Which Tim Burton Never Gave Us A Chance

I Know Why The Caged Bird

by ETHAN PETERSON

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children
dir. Tim Burton
127 minutes

When asked why all of the children in his new film Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children were white, Tim Burton answered that he finds it more insulting when diversity is needlessly shoehorned in. After all, the main villain here is Mr. Barron (Samuel L. Jackson), although he is a shapeshifter. Given that time travel is possible here through "loops" which are locations that enable passage to a specific time in the 20th century, it is likely Mr. Barron just found out about Samuel L. Jackson and wanted to look like him. So no worries – no actual individuals of color had to be inserted into this pale ménage.

Joseph Epstein had a essay earlier this year about the lunatic of one idea – how some people see the world through one lense which distinguishes everything they do. These simple-minded folk are led by Tim Burton, who is the lunatic of one aesthetic. Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children builds to a climactic battle at a carnival, where monsters called Hollows attack the white children. To defend themselves, a boy named Enoch (Finley MacMillan), animates a group of skeletons to battle them. It looked almost exactly like a scene from The Nightmare Before Christmas, which Burton did not even direct. Everything else in the production design of this movie seems remarkably familiar.

Earlier, Jacob Portman (Asa Butterfield), or as he is referred to about 700 times in the movie by the gentile children, "Jake", finds his grandfather (Terence Stamp) dead, his eyes torn out. Instead of being horrified or even mildly disturbed by what he has found, Jake decides to solve the murder. About twenty minutes of flashbacks follows with young Jake learning about his grandfather's adventures during World War II. When he presents this information to his class at school, everyone laughs in his face and his parents tell him that his grandfather is a liar. He feels very alone.

Jake and his father Franklin (Chris O'Dowd) journey to Wales so that the boy can prove to himself that his grandfather's stories were hot bullshit. Despite the fact that this movie cost $110 million, none of it was actually shot in Wales. You can tell, because this part of the movie looks far from glorious; more like a depressing beach town in the Tampa area.

When Jake meets all of these children, they each demonstrate their powers for him. Leading this white menagerie is Miss Peregrine herself (Eva Green). Disappointingly, Miss Peregrine declines the opportunity to become a romantic option for Jake, and turns into a falcon at times. Despite being a magnificent bird of prey, she only uses this form to hide.

Jake seems vaguely upset about the rejection, and sets his sights on a woman more his own age. Emma Bloom (Ella Purnell) most recently dated Jake's grandfather which is pretty screwed up if you ask me. Perhaps understandably, she is very reluctant to kiss him.

Emma's powers are massive: not only is her lithe body lighter than air, but she can also swim for hours just by manipulating air bubbles. The rest of the group feature powers of differing utility. One is strong, another likes bees, another is invisible. Another girl can start fires (hint: anyone can), while two of the children are Gorgons who wear masks to prevent turning everyone to stone. The moment when they take them off still makes me want to cry.

Burton is great at this kind of casual horror. Thank God for that, since he seems terribly bored with every other aspect of this script by Jane Goldman (Kick-Ass). All of the children are kept pre-adolescent with no more agency than five year-olds. Miss Peregrine has had no adults in the vicinity for the half-century she has been reliving the same day, waiting for Jake to arrive. I suppose she is asexual, but maybe in her bird form she meets other falcons. I chose not to input the words "how do falcons have sex?" into google, but it is good to know it is there.

In many ways, Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children feels woefully dated. Its character development is sub-Avatar level, and boy does it take its sweet time. Ultimately, in a film that should contain a lot of mystery and wonder for its magical world, everything about the fantasy aspects of the film seems woefully normal.

The most wild elements are actually the moments when the narrative interacts with historical truth. Burton specifically doesn't want to go there — the Nazis bomb the home into oblivion, which is why Miss Peregrine keeps reliving that one day before the violence. But unlike in Pan's Labyrinth, for example, no one talks about the war, or the world around them in the movie. It is all just background noise for magic tricks.

Ethan Peterson is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

In Which Johnny Depp And Amber Heard Look Through The Glass

Wonderland Diary

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Alice Through the Looking Glass
dir. James Bobin
113 minutes

Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska) is a ship's captain for an international conglomerate. It is unclear what exactly she has done to earn such a title, but she is clearly good at what she does. She returns to the firm's partners with pressing news about possible new trade routes. They tell her actually this is her last voyage and women should stay at home where they belong.

Dispirited, Alice strolls into a mirror and reverts to her childhood self, as some of us are wont to do. She finds Johnny Depp wearing some appalling makeup. Depp is in the midst of a psychiatric episode, but he thinks everyone else is the crazy one. Director James Bobin and producer Tim Burton probably should have seen this coming from their friend. Dressing an abuser up in disturbed facepaint and making him appear like a lonely old crank fits basically with what we know of Depp's recent behavior.

When Depp left his partner of fourteen years, Vanessa Paradis, and later asked her to explain that he did not actually strike a woman she knows nothing about, Amber Heard, he did not lock himself up in a house like the Mad Hatter. He probably did wear makeup to look younger, for although Depp made an incredible amount of money from Walt Disney Pictures, he no longer possesses the youthful vibrancy which propelled his understated acting style in the early days.

At least with the Mad Hatter in 2010's Alice in Wonderland, there was a joie de vivre that obscured whatever disturbed sadness was at the heart of this father of two. In Alice Through the Looking Glass it could not be more clear we are viewing a deeply unhappy person in the guise of a children's comedian. It is not unlike watching the last days of Pee-Wee Herman's Playhouse or the time Mr. Rogers made that little girl cry.

The theme of Alice Through the Looking Glass is the oldest sexism imaginable: it is that women have no particular goals or person without men to serve in some fashion. In order to make the Mad Hatter happy again, Alice plans to journey into the past to prevent the events that led him to become sad. To accomplish that, she contacts Time (Sacha Baron Cohen), in a career move even more perplexing than The Brothers Grimsby.

At one point or another Amber Heard posted these really sad videos of her in bed. She is nude and in bed, but there is nothing really close to sexy about them. The viewer quickly realizes they are the desperate work of a profoundly lonely and unhappy person. Why she married such an older man in the first place would be unclear if Depp's personality were not just as manic as her own. Such individuals can never find a concord within each other, and are all extremes.

The couple took their Yorkshire terriers Pistol and Boo to Australia. It never seemed like such a big deal at the time, although they might easily have afforded a dogsitter. What was most reprehensible was the tongue-in-cheek apology video they were forced to record by the Australian government, where they both revealed themselves as half-chastened, half-impudent children. "If everybody minded their own business,' the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, "the world would go round a deal faster than it does."

Alice Through the Looking Glass posits that there is some utility in returning to what we were as children. This operates in a few ways: Alice is able to surmount any fear, apprehension or anxiety in decision-making. Alice has many friends who refuse to judge her and she doesn't judge them, either. Finally, the vocabulary the now-adult Alice uses in Underland is completely altered; by not having to use adult words she defuses the basic power of rhetoric. In Underland a regressive emotionality always triumphs.

After Alice Through the Looking Glass dispenses with its timely version of pretend feminism, it becomes essentially a time-travel film. In this confused movie's best scene, the Mad Hatter meets Alice for the first time when she might be meeting him for the last time. Sadly, neither has much to say to each other, since their relationship is more about the anxious enjoyment we exchange with people who we admire rather than a genuine connection.

Was this what brought Heard and Depp together in the first place? After the judge's preliminary hearing on the divorce proceedings, some awful photographer took a picture of Amber weeping in her car. Whatever form it took, Depp's abuse of her is an terrible, disgusting thing, and he seems to know it because he immediately made all his friends vouch for what a kind, gentle soul could throw a phone at another human being's head.

I was actually surprised to see Amber so affected by the proceedings. I have witnessed that when people are angry at each other in relationships it can turn to hate, disgust and disrespect almost instantly, but I find it so difficult to forget or abandon feelings of love, or even respect. Depp's decision to drag his children into the process — kids who naturally loathed their mother's replacement and heard Depp's now-deceased mother denigrate her on many occasions — was an interesting choice. Depp's only concern now is the impact this publicity will have on his career of marketing literature from disturbed old men not entirely dissimilar to himself as entertainment for young girls.

It makes sense that the infantile people who produced Alice Through the Looking Glass would see no real difference between childhood and adulthood. For that reason Alice's journey comes across as incredibly cynical, and her deliberate abandonment of the real world and real struggles for an alternate, fantasy universe quite cowardly. The children who wandered into Narnia did so by accident, and they stayed there out of love and necessity. Alice escapes to Underland when she doesn't get her way, and she stays there because it feels good.

This essential hedonism was possibly all that Johnny Depp and Amber Heard shared. In pictures the two genuinely look alike despite the difference in their age. Even the tone and structure of their bodies, from facial features to bone structure mirrors each other. Could that have been their biggest difficulty? We do not want exactly what we already have – or maybe we do, but not for so long.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"Faint of Heart" - Tegan & Sara (mp3)

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.