Addams Family (2019)

Most of our memory of Adams Family consists of wonderful performances by Raul Julia, Anjelica Houston, and of course, the unforgettable Christina Ricci. I have watched the first feature film aeons ago and I don’t quite appreciate it back then when I was discovering the likes of Scorcese and Coppola in the 90s. I avoided them like a plague.

Not that I am a snob..come one, I relished Austin Powers and both sequels, I have taste like a hobo and am proud of it. It’s just that a comedy about a ghoulish family just didn’t appeal to me.

What drew me to this film? Well, there are not much high profile flicks playing now bar the ones I have seen and wrote about previously in this blog. Plus, I was curious…how are they going to pull it off in animation.

Well, for one, the animation worked beautifully. Giving the character the abovementioned “ghoul”ish look but with more crowd-friendly demeanour worked. The characters are all a delight to watch on big screen.

As to the overall production quality…let’s just say that Hollywood will always keep outdoing themselves each time when the budget permits…they must have learned from the Christopher Reever Superman films, which, by the fourth film was shot with the producer’s kids piggy bank.

Anyway, coming back to this flick…all I can say is, it is a delight to watch. There’s something (Tim) Burton-esque about these films, aided by his composing partner Danny Elfman (Elfmanesque?... sounds like an Elk puking, no?) giving that delightful gothic sound in almost all their collaboration no matter how far away the films are removed from darkness.

Here, everything is in place. The characters look how they should, the scenes plays out as how we would expect them to play out. Yes, there seemed to be some sort of emptiness in the canvas.

The story is nothing new: the odd family moves into a neighbourhood of “normal” folks and they are not happy about it, led by a Internal Design TV star. There are brushes, skirmishes, and lesson learned: normal or not, why can’t we just get along.

I liked the journey…but when I look back, I felt there could have been more. One thing I found amusing though, that is the use of social media. Here’s online critic James Berardinelli explaining it: “When (the interior designer celebrity ) efforts fail to convince the Addams’ to brighten things up, she opts for another approach – one that uses social media to smear the family and raise the spectre of the modern equivalent of pitchforks

.”

That statement woke me up. Scenes are plenty where mobs do the mobbing carrying hordes of mobile phones, taking pictures and texting. This is the future of media, folks, and it is here to stay. And that is the most “horrific” element in this otherwise quiet, comedic animation.

There will definitely be a sequel, and I might like it then…and so by then, I am going to bury this in my memory bank. Though I might add that the best performance in the film was given by a severe hand. Now, that might be something after all…