Okay, okay, okay, everybody take a Time Out here. It's official, there are too many white kids running around with expensive video cameras and too much time (money) on their hands.

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Depp’s aging face is the most interesting part of Dark Shadows. In fact, it’s one of only two interesting things about Dark Shadows: The other is Depp’s performance as a 200-year-old vampire named Barnabas Collins. As Collins frees himself from the tomb where he’s been trapped for the last two centuries and makes his way back to his ancestral mansion, he bumps against the hippies and swingers of 1972 in amusing ways. Depp is acting like a classic overacting movie vampire, with an ancient vocabulary (“Fear me not, drunkard!”) and a comical sense of self-importance. He’s a crappy photocopy of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula performance in almost every way, and so those few scenes where he feasts on innocent victims—not with a genteel sip at the neck as you expect, but with a screaming, leaping, all-you-can-eat massacre—are wrought with a special kind of comedic terror.

But the rest of Dark Shadows is shit, and it’s all Tim Burton’s fault. Because the movie is based on a campy gothic horror soap opera with more than 1,200 episodes of material, the script is all over the map. Collins returns to find his name on the wane. His ancestors are losing the family fortune, the fishing industry his father left to him is in danger of going under, and the witch who imprisoned him in the first place is dismantling Collins’s legacy, brick by brick. There’s schlocky comedy, attempts at pathos, and flailings at romance. Family secrets—most of which make no sense—are unveiled in the last 30 minutes of the film in a clear attempt to seed sequels and build a franchise...

(Keep reading.)

This week's shot is "Number 3 Acheron," a short by a director, Dalyce Lazaris, whose work and history is completely unknown to me. But the short speaks directly to my love for the highest form of transportation, public transportation.

Thanks to the U.S. Government, DVDs and Blu-Ray discs will soon display two warnings intended to educate viewers about movie piracy. Ars Technica writes:

Will the two screens be shown back to back? Will each screen last for 10 seconds each? Will each screen be unskippable? Yes, yes, and yes.

An ICE spokesman tells me that the two screens will "come up after the previews, once you hit the main movie/play button on the DVD. At which point the movie rating comes up, followed by the IPR Center screen shot for 10 secs and then the FBI/HSI anti-piracy warning for 10 secs as well. Neither can be skipped/fast forwarded through."

"Thanks for legally purchasing and not pirating this movie! Now please sit there while we tell you about how bad pirating movies is. Yes, you have to watch our warning every time you watch this movie that you legally purchased. How else will you know not to pirate movies?" Idiots.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

The Atlas Shrugged movie is trading a non-speaking extra role for social media cachet. If you want the ultimate bar story, you should follow these directions:

So, what do you need to do to get on set? You need to get busy...

1. Follow us on Twitter and retweet any of our tweets.
2. Like us on facebook and share any of our posts.

The more you tweet and share, the more chance you have to be cast so, tweet and share early and often.

We’ll be selecting an extra this Friday afternoon and flying the selectee and a guest to LA this coming Monday, May 14th - all expenses paid. Or, most expenses anyway - flight and hotel for two nights.

By the way, while you’ll definitely be an “extra” on set, we can’t really guarantee you screen time. But... we can certainly guarantee you a good time. We’ll make sure you get some cool swag too.

If you win, let me know and I'll give you some Stranger paraphernalia to try to sneak onscreen. Based on how poorly the last Atlas Shrugged film was produced, I'd bet it'll slip right past their crack production team.

The News Tribune:

Well, lookee who braved the dark woods and made his way to Tacoma this week.

Screenwriter Charles Mudede, aka the columnist for Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger, was part of a movie crew hunkered down near Old City Hall to shoot a true story about a turn-of-the-century hobo outlaw.

Mudede claims the crew came here for the architecture. We think he came expecting a ready supply of hobo outlaws to cast as extras.

“Thank you, Tacoma!” he gushed in a blog post Wednesday, like we’re suddenly sweethearts and his past is forgiven and forgotten.

Not so fast, Mr. Hollywood bigshot.

Recognize the name? “Mudede” was once spoken around these parts with irritation – a one-word oath, like when Jerry hisses, “NEW-man!!” in “Seinfeld” reruns.

Mudede’s film, “You Can’t Win,” sounds like the title he’d choose if he made a movie about Tacoma.

It was August 2000 when he wrote: “By all accounts, Tacoma is a failure. Every day it lives failure, sleeps failure, eats failure; this is part of its charm.” He also called Lakewood a “working-class neighborhood in South Tacoma.”

Mu-DE-de!!

• Michael Pitt is Jack Black