Dead Man (1995)

1/5

Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man is one of the most uninteresting, meandering, meaningless movies I've seen since Truffaut's The Soft Skin. I sat there for two hours watching scenes transition to different scenes with the barest semblance of plot or purpose. The movie follows William Blake (Depp) as he makes his way from Cleveland to the West in the late 19th century. He gets mixed up in violence and must go on the run to save his life, but I think the title is meant to insinuate that he is already dead. People who like the movie will tell you it's about a man's transformation in the time of our country's transformation, but I think those people are just seeing stuff that isn't there. Or, perhaps, seeing the bits and pieces of stuff beneath all the garbage piled on top of it.

Johnny Depp kind of reminded me of Guy Pearce in this movie, and I mean that in a bad way. He has dead expressions and no depth. He sounds entirely uninterested in just about everything going on, even when he's supposed to be scared or excited. Regardless of whether his affect is intentional or not, it's simply boring and painful to watch. I don't even want to talk about the dialogue, because I'll just get upset. The script tries to be edgy and badass, but instead it's spoken by what sounds like bad student actors trying to be edgy and badass. Mix this bad acting (or bad directing, I'm honestly not sure which it is) with crappy special effects and cheesy old-time film techniques and you have an entirely laughable production. It's times like these I wish I had waited before burning an entire director's oeuvre until I knew I liked them.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112817/

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

3/5

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is as weird and darkly comic as all his other movies. The plot follows the young Alice (Wasikowska) after being proposed to in front of a huge party by a wealthy lord named Hamish. She is a young independent soul who doesn't like corsets or stockings and certainly doesn't want to wed someone just because he is rich and she is getting older. But that is the option she is presented with, and the hundreds of guests in attendance seem to be pushing her towards the safe choice. She asks for some time to think it over. And with that time, she manages to fall down a rabbit hole and into "Underland," which she mistakenly calls Wonderland.

The movie is blandly quirky and innocently morbid, but somehow also reassuring and uplifting by the end. There were some funny moments (almost entirely involving Helena Bonham Carter) and some boring moments (almost entirely involved Johnny Depp). The oddness of the story didn't work for me. I found it neither charming nor endearing; it was just a charade to distract the audience from the simpleness of the story. And the visuals, while Burton-esque to a T, were filmed and/or animated poorly. Quite frankly, nobody understands 3D as well as James Cameron does right now. (That scene where Alice is falling down the rabbit hole made me almost vomit from nausea.) At first I thought Tim Burton just made bizarre movies for the sake of being bizarre, but now I'm starting to think that he doesn't really know how to make a movie that isn't bizarre. That, or he doesn't see the point in it. Still, this is a pretty entertaining movie. Watch it if you're a Burton or Depp fanboy, but don't expect anything grand.

IMDb link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1014759/

Wild at Heart (1990)

4/5

Wild at Heart is so funny. I was laughing the entire time. I would love to see this movie with Sameer; he would laugh with me at literally every single word that is spoken and action that occurs. But there are two different reasons one might laugh. You can laugh because you think it's just a bad movie, but I am fairly certain that it is not. It is in fact cleverly mocking bad movies. It is a satire and a spoof, and a shallow exploitation film set in the late 80's. It is like Rodriguez's Planet Terror except set in a more realistic world (although thinking about it, not that much more realistic) with more sexploitation than horror zombie flick. In the first five minutes of the movie, there is excessive violence, cursing, nudity, and sex. The movie loves its shallowness; Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern speak their lines with the most effective faked fervor I can remember.

All that being said, it is what it is. A stupid, cheesy, exploitation 80's grind house film. Even though it is a satire of that genre as well, it fits the mold perfectly and cannot sit outside of it. It is funny, but not very fulfilling or meaningful. You walk out of the theater and think about something else.

Note: I saw this movie as part of the Cannes retrospective series on the beach, so there were many distractions (although I think I tuned them out pretty well).

IMDb link: http://imdb.com/title/tt0100935/