Is Lincoln Meant to Caution or Console?

by Tony Dayoub

It's a rare occurrence when a preview screening plays to a nearly empty house, but a preview screening of Lincoln that I attended last week did just that. It's not entirely surprising since it played in an Atlanta suburb. The schizoid nature of the metro Atlanta area is such that though the city proper is a stronghold of the African-American Civil Rights Movement (fully reflected in the diversity of its population), pockets of areas outside of the I-285 perimeter still have a lot of catching up to do. It was only 2 years ago that the Daughters of the Confederacy un-ironically set up a booth in my own suburb's annual Main Street parade. Things are changing, but not at the speed one expects. One week post-election and roughly one half of the country still feels steamrolled by the Democrats' top-to-bottom victory. And into this comes Lincoln, a movie centered on the enfranchisement of a subjugated people during the most divisive era of our storied history.

Movie Review: Dark Shadows (2012)

by Tony Dayoub

It's ironic that Tim Burton—whose expressionism-by-way-of-acid-tinged Batman was the forerunner of the modern superhero film—has a new film getting trounced in the box office by The Avengers, the ultimate example of the very kind of genre he helped to usher in at the start of his career. And that this film is Dark Shadows, not only a property with a fervent cult audience but probably the most satisfying effort from Burton in quite a long time. Based on the Gothic soap which ran on ABC from 1966-1971, Dark Shadows is the apotheosis of Burton's artistic concerns, perfectly fusing his love of all things dark and creepy with his off-kilter family dynamics in a way only glimpsed at in previous efforts like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and most precisely (but all too briefly) in his 1984 short, Frankenweenie. In films like Sweeney Todd, Burton gets the sense of dark foreboding right, but misses that infectious feeling of benign wonder which his other movies are bursting with. And most of the rest of his oeuvre, though exuberant in its ability to astonish with imaginative production design and fanciful style, doesn't quite get that Hammer horror feel of movies like Sleepy Hollow. Perhaps Dark Shadows succeeds because, by Burton's own admission, it was a formative influence.

Movie Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) and Three Better Ways to Spend Your Money at the Movies

by Tony Dayoub

No big surprise. A Nightmare on Elm Street, the unnecessary remake of Wes Craven's 1984 hallucinatory slasher film opening tomorrow has nothing new to offer. You know this film is headed in the wrong direction literally from the start, with a misguided opening credit design that looks like it started as near-illegible chalk scrawls on a sidewalk, but ends up visually echoed by redundant white on black credits as a corrective. And the film goes downhill from there. My frequent criticism of remakes is, why revisit a decent film if it won't be improved? In Samuel Bayer's reboot, the overt sexual paranoia of the original's promiscuous kids is neutered into a hollow exploration of pedophilia simply to give the illusion of topicality.