An elephant flies but 'Dumbo' doesn't soar

Director Tim Burton takes a crack at a classic Disney story.

I first saw Dumbo as a child in one of its re-releases, but haven’t seen it since, although I did watch selected clips on YouTube as I readied myself for director Tim Burton's new live-action remake.

Even with only a brief refresher, it’s clear that the Burton-directed Dumbo doesn’t match the great set pieces of the 1941 original, falling short in such crucial areas as humor, charm, and enchantment.

In telling the story, Burton has taken what Disney accomplished in 64 minutes and turned it into a 112-minute live-action feature with a CGI Dumbo. To expand on the original, the movie’s screenplay makes a deeper foray into the human world that the animated version wisely minimized.

The story begins when a World War I veteran (Colin Farrell) returns home. Newly widowed, Farrell’s Holt Farrier joins his two children (Nico Parker's Milly and Finley Hobbins' Joe) as he tries to resume his career as the star of a horse act in the Medici Circus, a rundown show that travels the US offering typical circus fare and what its mildly sleazy ringmaster (Danny DeVito) calls a "fake freak show."

Absent some of the musical numbers that enlivened the 1941 movie and including a less-than-impressive bow to the original’s famous Pink Elephant fantasy sequence, Dumbo occasionally yields to Burton’s darker instincts, though not entirely.

Dumbo also uses its story to illustrate what it seems to regard as the exploitative rise of the theme-park era, an interesting twist considering that Disney isn't exactly unfamiliar with theme parks.

Michael Keaton, who worked with Burton on Beetlejuice and a couple of Batman movies, plays a con man who wants the flying baby elephant to become the centerpiece of his new theme park, Dreamland. Keaton’s character doesn’t amount to much more than a weird hair cut and a faux accent. I wasn't sure what he was trying to do in giving the movie its hiss-boo villain.

As a veteran who lost an arm in the war, Farrell seems a bit lost. The kids are ... well ... Disney-style kids. They replace Timothy, the mouse of the original who encouraged Dumbo to fly on his own, putting aside the feather that the elephant believes enables him to flap his big ears and take flight. The feather helps explain how Dumbo discovers he can fly in the first place.

If you’ve forgotten, Dumbo's over-sized ears initially cause him to be scorned but eventually solidify his special place in the world.

Burton finds flashes of emotion in the story of a baby elephant separated from his mother -- Mrs. Jumbo -- tugging on the same heart-strings as the first movie, although I doubt whether you'll need to bring a full box of tissues to the new addition.

The CGI Dumbo isn’t as endearing as his predecessor, but Burton’s movie isn't particularly sweet nor does it allow the director fully to give himself over to his weirder impulses. An awful lot of energy seems to have gone into the film’s retro production design, and Danny Elfman's score strains to achieve a level of enchantment that the story doesn't always deliver.

Dumbo winds up taking us on a journey without the kind of surprises or stirring uplift that mark Disney at its best. I wouldn't say live-action versions of animated classics shouldn't be made, but this could be one case in which Disney might have done well to pass.

The original includes some dated material -- crows portrayed in racially stereotypical ways, for example -- but the bold creativity of Disney's animators still impresses. That makes the original feel fresher than much of what Burton and his team have created some 77 years later.

'Miss Peregrine' runs a cluttered home

Tim Burton tries his hand a weird YA novel.

The YA novel, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, seems a perfect vehicle for director Tim Burton, whose ability to blend effects, story and mood tilts toward the dark and perverse without sacrificing something we might call general appeal.

With movies such as Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow and Corpse Bride, Burton has developed a following based on his distinctive style and a willingness to dip into the dark side of his palette.

Considering all that, Miss Peregrine should have been a slam-dunk.

But for reasons having to do with a glut of plot and the somewhat confusing creation of an alternate reality, Burton's adaptation of Ransom Riggs' 2013 novel proves only fitfully engaging.

Burton mounts a variety of captivating images -- from scary monsters to moments frozen in time to a floating girl who wears weighted shoes to keep herself earthbound.

At times, Burton seems to have been inspired by the Quay brothers, whose work with stop-motion animation surpasses almost all other cinematic peculiarities.

The story finds young Jake (Asa Butterfield) mourning his grandfather (Terrence Stamp). Just before his death, Grandpa instructed his grandson to travel to Wales to locate Miss Pergerine's School for Peculiar Children: Put anther way, Grandpa sends Jake on a destiny-defining journey.

After consultation with a child psychologist (Allison Janey), Jake's parents (Kim Dickens and Chris O'Dowd) decide that Dad should take the boy to Wales.

Once in Wales, Jake finds Miss Peregrine's school in ruins, destroyed by a direct hit from a German bomb during World War II.

But as he rummages through the bombed-out rubble, Jake begins to see the peculiar children of the movie's title. Eventually, he time travels back to the day the school was bombed.

He soon learns that Miss Peregrine (Eva Green), the school's head mistress, has the ability to stop time by creating time loops. Moments prior to the German bombing, Miss Peregrine stops the clock, and the day again repeats. Her charges are saved, although they're suspended in time. They never age another day.

For emotional heft, the movie focuses on the developing relationship between Jake and Emma (Ella Purnell), the girl who floats. He also meets Enoch (Finlay MacMillan), a kid who knows how to give life to expired creatures.

There's also an invisible kid and a girl who has a mouth with sharp predatory teeth on the back of her head; at times, the movie feels like an off-kilter take on X-Men, a story about young people who are heroic precisely because they don't fit into any mold.

Burton embeds all of this in a jargon-heavy screenplay that requires those unfamiliar with the novel to master a new vocabulary. An example: Ymbrynes, of which Miss Peregrine is one, can create time loops. You'll also find monsters called Hollowgasts -- or some such.

By the end, a new villain surfaces, Samuel L. Jackson's Barron, a creature known as a wight; i.e., a Hollowgast that can assume human form after devouring lots of eyeballs plucked from peculiar children.

And, yes, I gave Google a workout to catch up.

No stranger to over-the-top menacing, Jackson does what's expected of him. Butterfield doesn't bring much by way of expression to his role; and it falls to Purnell's Emma to make the biggest impression.

Not surprisingly, all of the actors are a bit outdone by the movie's copious effects.

Finding the story less than compelling, I drifted from scene-to-scene, wondering how Burton achieved some of the movie's more impressive images and trying to decipher the screenplay's murky references to the Holocaust.

What I didn't do was emerge with a coherent feeling about a movie that doesn't seem to have an entirely coherent feeling about itself. Miss Peregrine felt like movie I'd just as soon thumb-through as watch.

A Danish director makes a Western

The Salvation, a Western made by a Danish director who shot his film in South Africa, offers more proof that national lines are being shredded by globalism.

Perhaps inspired by director Sergio Leone's top-drawer spaghetti westerns, director Kristian Levring serves up a revenge saga in which forlorn western landscapes provide a backdrop for the savage brutality that's brought to bear on a town full of innocent homesteaders.

Mads Mikkelsen plays Jon, a Danish immigrant whose newly arrived wife and young son are viciously murdered in what amounts to the film's prologue. Jon's wife, of course, is also raped, sexual violation being an indispensable element in any vigorous big-screen revenge saga.

Instead of pursuing the agrarian life he sought in the New World, Jon finds himself engaged in a very American activity -- at least as far as movies are concerned: He must pursue personal justice in the face of rampant lawlessness.

This battle puts him at odds with the town's merciless enforcer, a man named Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Delaure has his own revenge agenda: Early on, Jon kills Delarue's brother, one of the outlaws who destroyed Jon's family.

Not surprisingly, the thoroughly cowed townsfolk refuse to stand up against Delarue.

The local undertaker (Jonathan Pryce) is also the mayor, a self-interested man who's willing to sacrifice his neighbors for what he deems the greater good.

The local pastor (Douglas Henshall) doubles as the town's sheriff. Like Pryce's Keane, he's a man of dubious morality.

Eva Green portrays a woman whose face has been scarred when she was captured by Indians, who also ripped out her tongue. She was married to Delarue's brother, but that doesn't stop Delarue from pushing her into his bed.

With a major assist from his grizzled-looking cast -- particularly the stony faced Mikkelsen -- Levring creates a Western in which the frontier exemplifies lawlessness and exploitation, subject only to the raw justice of the gun.

Perhaps to add a bit of additional spin, oil becomes the demon substance behind much of the movie's violence. Capitalist greed adds a bit of spice to the movie's violent stew.

The Salvation stirs up primal lusts, dishes out brute behavior and tries to be as stoic as possible while doing it. Levring seems too devoted to genre tropes to transcend them, but he knows his way around a drama that -- at root -- is all about vengeance through bloodshed. Be prepared to get splashed.

Mom's gone. Does anyone care?

The best thing about White Bird in a Blizzard: Its title. Very poetic. Otherwise, this arty, semi-sensationalistic effort from director Greg Araki doesn't have much to recommend it -- unless you're intent on seeing every performance given by the talented Shailene Woodley (The Fault in Our Stars, Divergent, The Spectacular Now and The Descendants). In White Bird, Woodley plays Kat, a teen-ager living with her dad (Christopher Meloni). The event that ignites the rest of the story: Kat's bitchy, dissatisfied and often crazed mother (Eva Green) vanishes. Mom's disappearance is normalized over a couple of years while Kat continues with her life. She also has sexual experiences with a neighbor boy (Shiloh Fernandez) and with the detective (Thomas Jane) who's investigating her mother's disappearance. Araki, who's adapting a novel by Laura Kasischke, embellishes the story with arty touches such as dream sequences, but the movie's ending feels as if it has been contrived more to surprise than elucidate.

A return trip to 'Sin City'

It's lurid and creative, but what's the point?

It's rare that one's expectations are entirely met by a movie -- and it's not always a good thing when it happens.

Case in point: Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Prior to the movie's preview screening, I imagined that this follow-up to Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's 2005 Sin City would be another stylish immersion in a fantasy world composed of pulp impulses, noir gestures, brutal violence and fan-boy prurience.

Miller is a graphic novelist and sometime moviemaker. Rodriguez is a director of variable achievement. Together, they again serve up a movie that feels as if one is leafing through the pages of a graphic novel, entering a purportedly forbidden world where politicians are murderous, women are dressed for sex and half the male characters look as if they're mutants from an another planet.

And, yes, the movie is precisely what you expect.

Rodriguez and Miller create a world of uber-shlock that seems to derive from an exaggerated reading of noir ingredients and second-rate pulp fiction.

Noir, of course, had a socially critical dimension that completely eludes this second helping of Sin City. Besides, in combining several of Miller's stories, the movie challenges one's ability to sustain interest.

This helping of Sin City -- in which occasional splashes of color intrude on the heightened black-and-white imagery -- features a scorecard cast of names, some recognizable on screen, some not.

Among those who stand out are Josh Brolin, who takes over the role that Clive Owen played in the original; Eva Green, who plays the movie's sexy, deadly femme fatale; and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who stars in what ultimately feels like a satellite story about a young man who's lucky in cards and not so lucky at everything else.

Powers Boothe portrays the brutally smooth Senator Roark, a politician for whom the word "corrupt" would be a euphemism. Mickey Rourke returns as Marv, the freakish looking, motor-cycle riding avenger.

Some of the actors have extended roles, some (Ray Liotta as a lecherous businessman who's caught with his pants down) have cameos.

In the movie's best story, Brolin's character is irresistibly drawn to the duplicitous Ava. No matter what his brain tells him, he can't resist her siren call.

Miller and Rodriguez can't seamlessly blend the movie's several stories, and when the primary tale -- the one involving Green's Ava ends -- the movie essentially is over.

The rest feels like a death rattle, an obligatory advancement of loose ends that march zombie-like through what remains of the movie's 102-minute running time.

Devotees of Miller's work probably will be won over by the snide humor and outre violence. At one point, one of the character's eyes is plucked out.

But Sin City: A Dame to Kill For seems like a lot of work devoted to building a fantasy edifice that may tell us more about the sensibilities of those who dreamed up the fantasy than about the world it purports to describe.

To get back to where I started: Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is exactly what I thought it would be: creative, lurid, immature, and, perhaps, a bit pointless.