Dark Shadows and Final Moving Preparation

Today, Dad took me to see Dark Shadows, which I was hoping would be quirky, a little dark, and richly entertaining, after seeing many of the previous Tim Burton and Johnny Depp in Pale Makeup movies.*

Sadly, while the visuals were riveting, the story and mood seemed to be all over the place. The movie seemed to go from quirky and fun to horribly depressing way too quickly at many points. I am not averse to movies having a balance of funny, scary, joyful, and sad, especially darker movies like Tim Burton's works. But it is annoying for the mood to switch from scene to scene, without any sense or rhythm. The lack of a cohesive storyline made this feel worse.

At times, the plot seemed to serve visual show-offs (explosions! blood flowing from paintings!), rather than the visuals serving the plot. This was also an issue in Repo! The Genetic Opera, which uses a lot of unnecessary blood and gore, but in Repo the strawberry red blood, even in excess, still serves some purpose. The organ repossession scenes in Repo highlight the brutality of GeneCo, the company which orders them. But the visual effects in the Collins mansion in the final scenes just seemed over the top for the sake of being over the top. I was hoping for a neater resolution towards the end of the film, and instead got bleeding paintings and later splashing waves, without little more tying it back to the introduction than Depp's moody narration. Oh well. There were some good lines, most of which were in the theatrical trailers, and Depp does look surprisingly good in the Moody and Pale look.

The other main highlight of the day was finishing my packing. Dad managed to fit all of my boxes into the back of the new family car (it's a hatchback; the previous car was a very petite sedan). This means we don't have to rent a monster car or van, which is wonderful because now my parents can entertain themselves by playing around with the new car's audio features (including connecting to Dad's iPhone's music library). And I can listen to them go on about how they should probably read the manual for the audio features, but let's try this button and see what happens.

It will be a fun trip to Philadelphia.

* Edward Scissorhands, Sweeney Todd, Corpse Bride (even if it was technically a clay representation of Depp). If you haven't watched them, the basic look was a powder white face with dark eye circles (done with dark brown and black eyeshadow), sometimes accented with blood or scars, and dark clothes.