There are enough terrific, elegant old-style Tim Burton touches in Dark Shadows that, now and then, you might be fooled into thinking the once-mad genius had finally come back to his senses: A young girl gazes dreamily through the window of a train slipping through the New England countryside, the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” serving as an aural curtain for her reverie; a wispy ghost woman floats toward the waiting arms of a giant chandelier, her hair and tattered skirt winding around its crystals like jellyfish tendrils; a secret button reveals a passageway whose opening is framed by mechanical ocean waves and a cadre of cast-iron wolves raising their snouts to the moon in a hearty salute. Parts of Dark Shadows look lovely. So what happened to the story?
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She can put “Bond girl extraordinaire” on her resume and describes her character in the forthcoming Dark Shadows as a “bawdy Barbie,” but between those two roles Eva Green is a woman holding on for dear life during a global pandemic in Perfect Sense. In David Mackenzie’s romantic drama, Green plays an epidemiologist struggling to track and contain a series of mass-scale maladies. Acute emotional states like unexplained sadness cause the human race to gradually lose the ability to taste, smell, hear and see, leading to more than a few mood swings.
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Don't let singer-songwriter Johnny Nash anywhere near the new trailer for the Ewan McGregor movie The Perfect Sense, because it's a Contagion-style disaster film where everyone loses their senses one by one until they can't see, hear, smell, taste or -- I guess -- touch anything. It's a little hokey and a little hilarious, but with Eva Green (the best Bond girl of all time, period) in tow, there may be some genuine hope for this one. If only I could see or hear it!
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