Three Films Make A Post: The lucky ones freeze to death.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011): One of the many fascinating aspects of Sean Durkin’s film about a woman, Martha, (Elizabeth Olsen) who has freshly escaped from a cult to the home of her sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and Lucy’s husband Ted (Hugh Dancy) is how it manages to be enigmatic and precise at the same time. But then, it uses its precision exactly to (re)create the imprecision of memory, inducing in its audience the same confusing floating sense of reality, identity and memory its titular character is existing in. There’s great clarity to Durkin’s portrayal of things not being clear at all, so to speak.

Beetlejuice (1988): Ah, remember the time when Tim Burton was young, his aesthetic still fresh to the audience’s eyes, and critics weren’t complaining this auteur was exactly doing what auteur theory asks of him? This is very much prime Burton, in the weirdness of his preoccupations as well as in the sweetness of said preoccupations (Burton always being the nicest weirdo in any given room), as it is in the accomplished and peculiar way the director presents them here. Sometimes, I do believe that his falling out of critical favour has less to do with his films as with their general lack of cynicism. These are films made by a guy who loves the macabre, but who also wants the characters in his movies to end up happy (as a rule).

If we just forget about Ed Wood for a second, Beetlejuice may very well be the director’s best film, with nary a second on screen that isn’t meant to still pop eyes and open minds, or turn the viewer into a child again.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018): Speaking of sweetness, Peyton Reed’s lovely bit of Marvel superhero comedy is a prime example of how far a film can get on a mix of likeableness and technical accomplishment. Very much directly into my heart, that is.


There’s nothing at all world-changing about this entry into the Marvel universe, but the chemistry between the actors, the light touch of the script (and if you’re a comics nerd like me, also the clever way it uses elements from actual comics), and the general joyfulness and imagination of the film’s shrinking and growing business come together into the perfect shape of a popcorn movie that may theoretically only be made to take your money, but is really working very very hard to make you smile.

In short: Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

I’ve never shared the growing annoyance of certain parts of the critical classes with the way Tim Burton’s personal obsessions took over his films, despite some moments in his later films where even I wanted to grab the guy by his shoulders and tell him to just calm the fuck down for scene or two.

But if you’ve suffered from that particular illness worse than I did, it might just be worth it to return to Burton for this one. Turns out replacing Johnny Depp with house favourites Eva Green and/or Samuel L. Jackson has calmed Burton down enough to put a bit more effort into shaping the film into an actual narrative instead of a series of moments of whacky strangeness. The book this is based on and Jane Goldman’s script might have helped there, too.

There are of course still a lot of Burton’s visual trademarks on display, his patented eye for the lightly macabre, and so on and so forth. But even here, the director seems to attempt to get out of his standard approach, using actual locations beside the still excellently artificial sets, and managing to fuse the expected Tim Burton-ness with the demands of the family adventure world he is operating in.

All this adds up to a film I’d have a hard time finding reasons to dislike: the cast – including young (but not as young as their characters) leads Asa Butterfield and Ella Purnell and a horde of well-loved faces – is in fine form, the plot is fun for the whole family (unless one’s family is really boring, obviously), the film’s very nice to look at, and there’s nary a scene that doesn’t contain at least one charming, imaginative detail.

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

The original Alice of Wonderland fame has grown into a pale young woman (Mia Wasikowska) with not much to look forward to in life. Her beloved father is dead and her mother is trying to sell her off into a marriage with the most boring man on the planet. Alice doesn't remember much about her initial adventures in Wonderland anymore, and what she does remember, she takes (rather understandably) to have been a fever dream.

Nonetheless Akuce prefers to run after a white rabbit in a livery on her surprise elopement party (that is, a party where Alice is to be surprised by the fact that she is supposed to say "yes" to a marriage proposal from the least fitting husband for her) instead of falling into the arms of her future would-be husband. It turns out to be a sound decision that leads her back into Wonderland, or Underland, as the place is really called.

Things aren't well in the girl's home away from home. The rather rude Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and the rather dim, but at least not fixated on beheadings White Queen (Anne Hathaway) are at war - more or less. Worse, the Red Queen has won - more or less - and rules the place with, well, a tendency for violence and nonsense, so really, it's not much different from the old state of affairs. Be that as it may, the White Queen and her rebels need a champion to slay the Red Queen's champion, the Jabberwocky with the Vorpal Sword. And wouldn't you know it? Alice is the prophesied champion of all that is good and relatively sane. She only needs to find the sword, flirt with the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), find her inner strength (yes, it's one of those films) and slay the Jabberwocky.

I'm pretty sure that the things the young woman will learn in Wonderland will help her cope with her problems in the real world later on (it really is one of those films).

Ah, it is good to know that Tim Burton is still able to finagle large sums of money out of boring old corporations like Disney to finance an go-round through his usual visual obsessions. Most viewers will certainly know the typical Burton look by now, and will probably have realized that there is not much of that silly old substance stuff under all the gnarly trees and acid-influenced designs.

I can't say I have a problem with that. Fortunately, some of my visual interests are quite compatible with Burton's, and there's something joyful about the man's absolute aesthetic single-mindedness. He knows what he likes to look at (gnarly trees, Helena Bonham Carter, pale young women, weird floaty stuff, crooked things and candy colours), and by god!, he will throw these elements on screen again and again (and really, the reason why his Planet of the Apes is his worst film is that the original film and Burtonland just don't have anything in common), whether people shout "We have seen this all before!" or not. That's perfectly fine by me, although I can understand that it isn't everyone's cup of tea.

Burton's cinema is always one meant for the eyes and not for the intellect, and that is not something bound to make a director everyone's favourite, especially when he is as unapologetic about it as Burton is. Burton never tries to hide behind "social importance" or other stuff that wins one Academy Awards in his films and treats plot as something to ignore.

Alice does have a little message, of course, but, because Burton doesn't put as much importance in it as a different director would do, it doesn't ruin the film's pleasures at all. There's also the fact, that I find it difficult to argue with a moral that goes something like "a young woman should live the life she wants to live and not the one others want her to, even if what she wants is a little strange".

What I can and do argue with is Burton's weird idea to send his heroine to exploit China in the end, as if that's any sort of Happy End. I'm pretty sure though that this is Burton being naive and not Burton being malevolent. Compared to the dreadful morals Disney other films still tend to have, this is still quite a success.

 

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