PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN - Day 9 - BFI London Film Festival 2017

PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN is a really fascinating and subversive story about the real-life creator of Wonder Woman, told in a disappointingly conventional and banal manner by director Angela Robinson (HERBIE FULLY LOADED, says it all).

The story begins in 1920s Harvard-Radcliffe, where Professor Marston (Luke Evans) is a psychology professor with a theory of dominance and submission and proto-feminist views on how women should rule the world. This is frankly unsurprising as he's married to the fantastically smart, sexy, unconventional Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall - dazzling) - who is intellectually everything a Wonder Woman should be.  They both fall in love with Marston's teaching assistants - a student called Olive (Bella Heathcote), a woman who knows what she wants, but is far more submissive than Elizabeth.  The three form a menage a trois that is truly based on love as well as sex, but are kicked out of Harvard.  Forced to earn a more conventional living, Elizabeth becomes a secretary, both women have kids, and Marston invents Wonder Woman after a trip to a S&M costume shop that blows his mind. He combines the dominance and submission of both the women in his life - their fierceness and softness - to create a modern comic that will very deliberately radicalise children with ideas of feminism and, er, bondage. 

I recently got a trade hardback of the early Wonder Woman comics and it was shocking to see how overtly sexual they were - some of the frames are like something out a Bettie Page film. But also how radically feminist they were, despite Wonder Woman's ludicrous outfit.  And I love how this film shows how subversive the character was, but also questions the more dubious aspects of the supposed feminism through the framing device of an interrogation by Connie Britton's moral authority.  The story - and Rebecca Hall's character - are enough to make this film worth watching.

The problem is that everything about the direction is utterly conventional to the point of banality. Every set choice, the way the scenes are constructed, the utterly forgettable score - it's all so dull. And it's particularly sloppy not to have the characters age over the 25 odd years of the film. It was incredible - and drew me out of the film. It's not the origins story that Wonder Woman deserves and I won't be rushing out to see another Angela Robinson film any time soon.

PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN has a running time of 107 minutes and is rated R. The film played Toronto and London 2017. It opens in the USA on October 13th, in Germany on November 2nd, and in the UK on November 10th.

DARK SHADOWS - Enough already.

When was the last time Tim Burton made a half-decent movie? 2005's CORPSE BRIDE? Well that was animation.  1994's ED WOOD?  And yet I think of myself as a massive Tim Burton fan.  Maybe it's just because I like the idea that in the botoxed, day-glo Wood that is Holly, there is still room for a camp-goth weirdo.  But I guess, like an abused wife, it's time to realise that he may tell you he loves you, and that he's sorry, and that it won't happen again, but that you have too much self-respect to go back yet again to hurt and disappointment.

Am I over-reacting? Maybe. But the mind-boggling stupidity of DARK SHADOWS - the two hours of grating boredom -  have unleashed two decades of pent-up anger, sorrow and regret.  Tim Burton used to be radical. He used to be subversive.  Now he's just predictable, banal and worst of all, aimless. Where once there was auteur vision, now there's just a shapeless, nonsensical mess.

DARK SHADOWS may well be worse than JOHN CARTER.

Ok, so let's take a moment, calm down, and start this review again.  Once upon a time a long time ago, there was a camp-horror TV series called "Dark Shadows".  Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Michelle Pfeiffer fell in love with it. It centred on a 17th century guy called Barnabas Collins, living in then-contemporary 1970s Maine with his formerly rich, impoverished, odd-ball family.  Clue lots of fish-out-of-water comedy, and some good old hammy romance-vengeance as the witch who originally cursed Barnabas continues to purse him.

In this remake, which was can only presume is loving and a fan-fic, Depp takes on the role of Barnabas, Pfeiffer the current matriarch and Eva Green the witch, Angelique.  The film is, as one would expect, beautifully designed, with the exception of Green's shockingly bad blonde wigs. (Second only to Cersei's bad wigs in HBO's Game of Thrones, season one.)

The problem is that the story zigs and zags with no apparent logic.  The movie is tonally all over the place. Is it a spoof? A straight comedy? Is it even trying to be spooky at all? Some characters are under-used and under-developed (poor Jonny Lee Miller as Pfeiffer's brother is a case in point).  Other characters have major plot reveals that are dictionary definitions of non sequitors (Chloe Moretz as Pfeiffer's daughter).  And the key romance between Barnabus and a contemporary nanny just has no emotional purchase on us whatsoever.  This movie is a mess. And not a mess in the manner of a quirky indie movie, whose rough edges are part of its charm.  A mess that is frustrating and boring to endure.

Avoid.

DARK SHADOWS is on global release everywhere bar Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, where it is released on June 22nd.