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Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Posted on May 14, 2017October 20, 2020 by Village Vidiot

  “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” (2016), May 14, 2017, DVD, home.    Tim Burton’s interpretive transformation of Ransom Riggs’s wildly popular novel of the same name. I’d never read it before I saw this version, which includes many of Burton’s signature uses of skeletal monsters The movement between CGI and stop-action Claymation didn’t always work for me I enjoyed aspects of the film quite a bit, but it was also a bit clumsy plot- and script-wise. It felt rather cluttered, and not in an interesting Gothic or Edwardian sense. Jake is a ‘boring,’ adolescent Floridan who doesn’t know how peculiar he and his grandfather (Terrance Stamp) are. They’re being hunted by rogue ‘peculiars” led by a miscast and poorly-scripted Samuel L Jackson baddie, who travel along with their monster skeletal mutants as they search to destroy the child peculiars (each with their own off-base ‘power’) This group of children is cared for by Ms Perrigren, a pipe-smoking Eva Green, in a way-cool Welsh (actually Belgian) manse. It’s always nice to have a character named Bronwen. They escape by looping through the same day every day. It’s sort of a mess, but is fun in its own way until it goes over the top. The ending, added by Burton (as he describes in the associated feature on the making of the film) brings closure without real satisfaction. It’s not that I didn’t like the film but it was less than I’d hoped. I do so long for the Burton of Edward Scissorhands. Still, watching both the film and the feature you do get a great sense of why artists of all sorts love to work with him.

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