David R. Walker

Posts Tagged ‘Arthur Conti’

Ebenezer

Director: Ti West

Cast: Johnny Depp, Ian McKellan, Rupert Grint, Andrea Riseborough, Sam Claflin, Tramell Tillman, Daisy Ridley, Arthur Conti, Ellie Bamber, Henry Lloyd-Hughes.

Running Time: 1 hour and 56 minutes

Film Rating: 6 out of 10

When the opening credits of Ebenezer blaze in flaming red across the screen and the screenwriters’ names are mentioned while omitting all mention of the fact that Ebenezer is based on a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, I suspected that this wasn’t going to be a faithful reinterpretation of a classic Victorian tale.

40 minutes into the film Ebenezer starts declining although there are some beautiful moments crowded out by a storyline that is emphasizing more a horror story than a morality tale. Who knew there were Zombie Ghosts in a Charles Dickens’ novel?

While three time Oscar nominee Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Finding Neverland) is good as Ebenezer, he is not brilliant, which says more about the director Ti West than Depp himself.

Johnny Depp is a superb actor but he needs a brilliant director to match his talent. Think Tiim Burton or Marc Foster.

Inexperienced director Ti West recreates Ebenezer more as a horror story and fails to take full advantage of one of Charles Dicken’s most memorably mean characters.

Ebenezer Scrooge is mean, rich and nasty and unfortunately in Johnny Depp’s version, this character is still too sweet and bewildering. This 21^st century scrooge is too mild.

In his novella, Dickens created a horrific penny pinching master that hates Christmas who was meant to echoes the horrors of early Victorian England at the start of the industrial revolution filled with debtors’ prisons, bitter poverty and rampant child labour. Think 1840’s and 1850’s.

While the production design by Eve Stewart is sufficient, Ebenezer as a film starts lagging in the middle section and comes across as a dark and dreary narrative made only lighter by one extraordinary performance. That actress is Ellie Bamber who plays the beautiful Belle, Ebenezer’s first love which we see in the first sequence in the ghost of Christmas past.

Young Ebenezer is played by Arthur Conti and Ellie Bamber (Nocturnal Animals) is radiant as Belle, the young lady that could have decisively soften Ebenezer’s hard nature before full manhood and responsibility set in.

The supporting cast is perfectly British with Sam Claflin and Daisy Ridley as Ebenezer’s exasperated nephew Fred and his charming wife.

Depp does his best with a bad director but he should have known that this version of Ebenezer was full of ignorance and want much like the two changelings found inside the Ghost of Christmas Present.

Ebenezer is unfortunately not very authentic and at times the film comes across as a B-grade horror movie with zombies thrown in. Not as inspiring as one should expect. Thankfully Charles Dickens is not alive to see this classic novella butchered on the big screen.

Ebenezer gets a film rating of 6 out of 10 and is not memorable but more disturbing. Eventually the Christmas message comes through but not in a Disney sort of way.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: 2024

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Arthur Conti, Santiago Cabrera, Danny deVito, Willem Dafoe

Running Time: 1 hour 44 minutes

Film Rating: 6.5 out of 10

To make a sequel 36 years after the original film is always a risk. Tom Cruise pulled it off but Michael Keaton doesn’t.  

In this case, director Tim Burton returns to direct Beetlejuice: 2024 with Michael Keaton returning as the pesky phantom Beetlejuice along with Oscar nominee Winona Ryder (The Age of Innocence) as Lydia Deetz and Catherine O’Hara as the hilarious Delia.

Beetlejuice 2024 is a simulacrum of all previous Gothic fantasy films laced with dark humour and serves as a fitting tribute to the highly successful Addams Family films.

When Lydia’s teenage daughter Astrid, superbly played by rising star Jenny Ortega gets taken to the underworld by a mysteriously creepy young man, Lydia has to summon up the crazy Beetlejuice to enlist his help in tracking her down before she boards the soul train, with the last stop being the Pearly Gates.

Meanwhile down in the underworld, Beetlejuice’s crazy ex-wife Delores wildly played by Italian actress Monica Bellucci (Spectre) in a role which pays tribute to Anjelica Huston, is a member of a soul sucking death cult and is out to exact revenge and plans to kill Beetlejuice.

Oscar nominee Michael Keaton (Birdman) must have been offered a substantial sum to return as Beetlejuice yet one thinks it was more a cinematic opportunity to reunite with Tim Burton who directed Keaton in the original Batman film way back when Jack Nicholson played the Joker in 1989. To put that in perspective it was when I was a teenager.

Filled with lots of 1980’s nuances and some fantastic scenes including the Soul Train dance number, Beetlejuice 2024 starts off really promising with some great supporting actors including Justin Theroux (The Girl on the Train) as Lydia’s slimy producer fiancée Rory and Catherine O’Hara making the most of her recent fame as Moira Rose in Schitt’s Creek as she reprises the role of the eccentric Delia. Soon Beetlejuice turns literally into a nightmare trip of pastiche and unoriginality as Tim Burton rips off recent films like Dune while paying homage to older more memorable films like Psycho and Rosemary’s Baby.

Unfortunately, the story of Beetlejuice 2024 is chaotic nonsense and despite the odd laugh and garish ghoul, the film comes off as a desperate attempt to reclaim the original success of the 1988 version.

While the makeup is brilliant, the storyline gets derailed by some truly bizarre dream sequences which feature a mash up of A Nightmare Before Christmas and Addams Family Values.

The idea was there, but the execution failed in every sense, except for Monica Bellucci and Jenna Ortega the rest of the cast did not look happy to reprise their roles which should have stayed buried at the end of the 1980’s.

Sometimes the original film is enough without having to make a sequel so long afterwards. For all its craziness, Beetlejuice 2024 failed to impress and gets a film rating of 6.5 out of 10. Infantile and slightly inane.