Cheese Man ,'Chosen'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Pretty much anything from Anthony Trollope would be right out.
Generally true, but it would be interesting to see him tackle the Ferdinand Lopez/Emily Wharton plot line in The Prime Minister. (On the other hand, if Burton decides to tackle a Victorian novel, he'd be more comfortable with Charles Dickens. Or at least Willkie Collins.)
What.
I refuse to link that for you.
I refuse to link that for you.
BECAUSE IT NEVER HAPPENED.
BECAUSE IT NEVER HAPPENED
I saw. And I can never, ever unsee ...
I refuse to link that for you.
I thank you for not even giving me the temptation to click.
The thing is, in the movie it's presented as a positive. Like, if only the Mad Hatter would get his dance on again then we would know that Underland (Wonderland) is free and glorious again. Whereas, it is just the opposite and makes you suspect the Red Queen knew what she was doing repressing all their free expression. If freedom leads to Mad Hatters' breakdancing then freedom must be quashed.
Ouch, Scott Tobias speaks the painful truth:
Somewhere in the sloping arc of Tim Burton’s career, what was once a sensibility slowly morphed into a brand. That distinctive gothic flair, freed from horror and animated by comedy in great films like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, has not gone away, nor has his attraction to stories about imaginative outcasts misunderstood by the squares around them. But what’s gone missing in recent years—Sweeney Todd excepted, though Stephen Sondheim had a hand in that—is the spiky wit and purposefulness that used to accompany that unmistakable visual style. There’s no doubt that viewers still know that they’re watching a Tim Burton movie. The question now is why.
Well, the animated Frankenweenie should be arriving soon.
True story: we had a trailer for Frankenweenie before The Avengers. Unfortunately, the friends who went to the movie with us had had to put their dog to sleep that morning. I am not even kidding. Worst. Timing. EVER.
There’s no doubt that viewers still know that they’re watching a Tim Burton movie. The question now is why.
Because we're desperate fans who are hoping that the spark and wit will come back. It's a dysfunctional relationship.
But saying that Tim Burton has become a brand is spot-on. And I feel like I, personally, shouldn't bitch about it too much, because a lot of MY "personal brand" owes a debt to the Tim Burton brand. But it still hurts to think that the man who made Beetlejuice or Big Fish isn't really around anymore.
From Slate, a good review of Dark Shadows:
Dark Shadows (Warner Bros.) was probably a beneficiary of the low expectations I brought into it. Tim Burton adapts a late-'60s/early '70s TV soap about a melancholy vampire, with Johnny Depp in the lead: All the elements of that sound so drearily familiar, from vampires to TV-shows-turned-movies to Burton/Depp collaborations in camp-Gothic mode. And stretches of this movie do feel dreary: like Burton’s recent Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows puts too much faith in the power of lavish costumes and eye-popping set décor and Danny Elfman’s music, and too little in constructing a well-paced story. But there’s something there that elevates Burton’s Dark Shadows above the strained, plodding whimsy of his Alice: At least he and Depp, both avowed childhood fans of the original series, seem to be in their element and having a grand old time.
Yeah, I think the reviewer's low expectations helped....