The Dictator

I was of the opinion that Sasha Baron Cohen’s glory days were over and that he was going to settle into a long, happy career doing eccentric bit-parts like those in Sweeney Todd and Hugo. But no, he still has the oomph to carry a film on his own, and it’s considerably better than Ali G in da House. He may have got progressively less original since the days of The Eleven O’Clock Show, but he’s still a very funny man. I had my doubts when I saw the posters of this film and read the plot summary, but the trailers made me think it would actually be worth seeing.

And it was. It was very, very funny. It may not have been very fresh, and the whiff of South Park and Team America was all over it – from the throwaway gags pushing the boundaries of taste to the moment where the whole film is glibly made to look like a sweeping political statement on America – but I still watch South Park and huge originality isn’t exactly necessary for something to be incredibly funny.

Baron-Cohen skewers everyone here, not just absurd dictatorships. Much of the comedy is fish-out-of-water humour about the dictator going unrecognised in New York, which allows not only extremist states to be a target of comedy, but silly idealist lefties. There are some brilliant comedy moments, not all of which were given away by the trailers, and the script sensibly allows for a human element, pathos and love – even if only to subvert it.

The bottom line is that Baron-Cohen remains funny. He may become less so soon – but for now he remains well worth the price of admission. 

Dark Shadows

I was not particularly looking forward to seeing this film. The concept seemed trite and the humour in the trailer was painfully unfunny. I have never seen the cult soap opera, which apparently didn’t introduce any supernatural elements for the first six months of its run, so came without any nostalgic feelings there, and had even forgotten about its existence until friends suggested we went to see it.

So I had low expectations – and it’s likely for that reason I didn’t find the film too abhorrent. I would not say it was good, but it was nowhere near as terrible as many have made out – it was mediocre to adequate, worth a single watch, but never made it to the territory of ‘good’. It was very much like late-80s Burton, but without the idiosyncratic spark. In short, it felt like an inadequate attempt to emulate rather than what it could have been – quintessential Burton.

The basic plot is that a rich young man named Barnabus Collins is cursed by a jealous witch to be a vampire. When she still cannot win his love after murdering his lover (funny that), she locks him in a coffin for almost 200 years, until he is finally dug up in the 70s. Emerging as the classic blood-sucking, pale, undying, burning-in-sunlight, pointy-toothed vampire, he joins his descendants without fitting in. He doesn’t have the winsome, awkward charm of an Edward Scissorhands, though, rather taking charge of the family business and trying to improve the lives of the children. Of course, the rival company who has forced the Collins into near-ruin is run by the witch, and things soon come to a head. Throw in every woman in the piece falling for Barnabus, additional complications from vampires and ghosts and a gig by Alice Cooper and you have a very, very campy vampire story. If the set-up of a very strange supernatural personality forcing his way in amongst a family sounds very Beetlejuice, though, it’s unfortunately never as crazy nor as funny – though the humour is certainly a lot better than it looked to be in the trailer: with context, the jokes are much more amusing and less obvious.

The two main strengths of the film are its aesthetic – genuinely beautiful most of the time, and hilariously schlocky most of the rest – and its cast. Of course Depp and Bonham-Carter are present and correct, doing their usual job of overacting in the right place, but there are more interesting choices: Michelle Pfeiffer’s transition from beauty to matriarch is to be taken more seriously after this, and Eva Green from The Golden Compass was compelling in the over-the-top role. Misfires, though, were Christopher Lee in a vampire film cameo that felt very lazy indeed (especially as he didn’t even use an American accent) and the girl from Kick-Ass and Hugo as a two-dimensional grumpy teen. That said, her presence led to some of the film’s bigger laughs. Her final reveal would have been better left out of the script, though, especially as it was part of a particularly soulless CG-fest that made me long for the more inventive effects of Beetlejuice.

The humour can only go so far, though, and the end all gets wrapped up a bit too glibly – so after admitting to his numerous murders, what can Barnubus do now with his new partner for all time? But this film is a superficial and silly one, and works best considered that way. The trouble is that a Tim Burton film used to mean campy, silly, supernatural – but also fantastic. Sadly, that hasn’t quite been the case for a long while. I haven’t wholeheartedly enjoyed a Tim Burton film since Big Fish, and even that was no critical darling. I think it’s time for him to do another Ed Wood. Another clever and intimate film to make him respected again. That or get Neil Gaiman to write him a script.

The Avengers / Marvel’s Avengers Assemble

Happily, this is the only thing Joss Whedon has done that I've really enjoyed. Well, except for that one episode of Firefly where Jayne is seen as done sort of God. Despite an unnecessarily slow first two acts, the payoff was well with it, and though it was really the bare minimum I'd expect from an Avengers feature,

The key is probably that Whedon only directed rather than writing the full script – he tweaked, but he didn’t come up with the concept or the larger part of the dialogue. So we don’t have to put up with his trademark smugness, largely consisting of him using genre tropes and then sneering at them or nudge-nudge-wink-wink laughing at them as if beneath him – and calling it irony. Instead we get his genuinely funny glib one-liners deflating action scenes in just the right way, and a respectful treatment of a property he clearly loves. 

The story is basic, which is necessary for the complex task of bringing so many characters who already have full-movie backstories together. The Avengers featured in the film are showcased – Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Hawkeye and Black Widow. We also see the antagonist, and his simplistic comic book plan – Thor’s brother Loki means to use the Tesseract to bring a huge army of aliens to Earth and conquer all, the idea being that they will then crown him. So Nick Fury has to get all the prickly superheroes together in one place – gathering them and having them all learn to cooperate forms the bulk of the fairly dull first two thirds of the film. Then Loki fools the lot of them, puts them in disarray and takes the tesseract. From then on, things get fun – the Avengers work together to stop a full-blown alien invasion, including fun flying dragon-eel-turtle things on a massive scale. Iron Man has a moment to prove his mettle – do ho ho! – and then we get a typical teaser for the next film.

Much to my surprise, given that he’s my least favourite member of the team most of the time, and despite the fact it’s inadequately explained why he decides the rest are his allies, the real star emerges as The Hulk. I had never seen the guy they cast as Banner before but he was perfect, much more so than I imagine Ed Norton would have been, and ultimately, having him onscreen with Thor allows for Whedon’s humour to shine through, as an Asgardian god is one of the few characters you can believably have engaged in slapstick scenes with The Hulk without being reduced to a red smear on the ground. And his scene very close to the end was one of the best in cinema history, no doubt about it.

Thin on plot and slow to start with, it was nonetheless what an Avengers film should have been. The personalities were well-balanced, with straight-laced Cap and swaggering Stark sparking off one another brilliantly without getting to dominate, the Black Widow far from a peripheral extra, each character being admirably human – and SHIELD giving the kiddies the lesson that they ought to question authority figures at all times, it may not have blown away my expectations, but it certain exceeded them.