Tim Burton likes strange stories. From the razor sharp fingers of “Edward Scissorhands” to “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” he has made his trade on stranger-than-life stories.
Now, with “Big Eyes,” starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz as Margaret and Walter Keane, he has found a true-life tale that is stranger than fiction.
There was a time when Walter Keane was the top selling painter in the world. Original paintings of his big-eyed waifs commanded thousands of dollars but if that was too high end for you, a print could be purchased for the price of a breakfast at Dennys. And sell they did, like hotcakes. Keane became rich and famous and even though gallery owners, like the one played by Jason Schwartzman in the movie, thought the “taste police” should be called wherever the paintings were displayed and a critic (Terrence Stamp) called them grotesque and “an infinity of kitsch,” the morose portraits were very popular.
“I think what Keane has done is just terrific,” said Andy Warhol. “It has to be good. If it were bad, so many people wouldn’t like it.”
Trouble was, Walter couldn’t paint. He was an artist wannabe with a talent for promotion of other people’s work. In this case it was the work of his wife Margaret. For her the paintings were a personal expression, for him they were a personal cheque to fame and fortune. From selling the paintings at street fairs to the walls of jazz clubs to their own gallery and finally department stores all over the world, Walter became the public face of the phenomenon while Margaret sat at home, tucked away in a small garret cranking out big eyes and keeping her mouth shut.
Eventually Margaret sought out the credit she and share of the money she had rightly earned in a dramatic courtroom battle that was settled with easels and brushes instead of lawyers and writs.
Like Burton’s look at the life of Hollywood hack Ed Wood, “Big Eyes” once again proves that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. The love and generosity Burton slathered on Woods’ eventful life and subpar work is once again on display.
The big-eyed paintings are an acquired taste, a kitschy look at another time when outsider art took center stage but Burton uses them not just as an artifact form another time but to present a story of an artist’s quest for recognition and recompense. It’s a trip back in time to the early to mid Sixties when women’s art was not taken seriously—“Your husband is quite a talent. Do you paint too?” she’s asked—and while we never really learn why the paintings become so popular, we know that through some savvy promotion they did.
What’s more important is the how and why of Margaret’s story. Why did she let her husband steal the spotlight and the money?
That’s the heart of it all and through Waltz’s flamboyant performance as the charmingly vile Walter and Adams’s soulful take on the shy and pliable Margaret we’re given a glimpse into a one-sided and unhealthy relationship with a very public face.
If the eyes are the window to the soul, “Big Eyes” is a skillful, if a little thin look at an artist’s soul and the soulless shark who tried to steal it from her.
Fury, the new Second World War film starring Brad Pitt and Shia LaBeouf, is being called the most realistic war film of all time. The story of a U.S. 2nd Armored division tank rolling through Germany in the final days of the war is as authentic as director David Ayers could make it.
Actors were put through their paces at a week-long boot camp, living and sleeping inside tanks. Then there were the tanks themselves. Borrowed from collectors all over the world, Fury is the very first time a genuine Tiger 1 tank has been used in a Second World War film.
Onscreen authenticity has been the goal of many directors. As Michael Cimino once said, “If you don’t get it right, what’s the point?”
Cimino, director of Heaven’s Gate and The Deer Hunter, is a stickler for detail. For a scene in a Chinese eatery in Year of the Dragon, the director hired the Shanghai Palace Restaurant to supply the meals that dotted the tables. Cimino not only wanted to create the look but also the vibrant atmosphere (complete with food smells) of a bona fide restaurant. To that end chefs worked round the clock, whipping up 100 plates at a time, using 500 eggs rolls and hundreds of pounds of chicken, beef, shrimp and vegetables. “If the food got cold we had to throw it away,” said chef Charlie Wu. “The food doesn’t look good when it is cold.”
Any other director would have done the Nut Room scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with computer-generated imagery, but Tim Burton decided he wanted a more lifelike approach. To make sure the scene looked as real as possible, animal trainer Steve Vedmore spent 10 months training 40 real squirrels to crack and sort nuts on a conveyor belt.
Eric Schwab, the second unit director on Bonfire of the Vanities, was asked to grab a shot of the Concorde landing in New York against the backdrop of the setting sun. Schwab spent months studying the rotation of the Earth and the flight path of the plane to capture the perfect, pure moment when the sun framed the landing aircraft.
Finally, it’s not just live-action movies that go to extreme lengths for authenticity. The creators of Monsters Inc. individually animated each of giant fuzzball Sully’s 2,320,413 hairs to make them look as lifelike as possible. Every frame featuring the character took 11 hours to render.
“When you lose someone you love they never really leave you.” These are the comforting words parents say to their kids when a beloved pet or grandparent dies. Leave it to the twisted mind of Tim Burton to take it one step further in “Frankenweenie,” his latest stop-motion animated film, about a boy and his dead dog.
The story takes place in the small town of New Holland, the kind of place with nosy neighbors and a line in the official town song about “modest homes at modest prices.” Look just beyond the perfectly manicured lawns, however, and you’ll find goth kids with creepy names like Victor Frankenstein, (voiced by Charlie Tahan), his parents (voiced by Catherine O’Hara & Martin Short) and dog Sparky. When Sparky is unexpectedly killed, Victor takes his mother’s platitude to heart—the “never leave you” part anyway—digs up his pet and brings him back to life using a method he learned in science class. He’s thrilled to have Sparky back, but will his parents and friends be as happy?
Reanimating corpses is not exactly the subject of kid’s films… unless you’re Tim Burton, who takes a horror premise and turns it into a touching and funny family story about a lonely boy and his best friend. The climax may be too intense for small kids, so judge your child’s tolerance for giant Sea Monkeys and some mild action before shelling out for tickets for the whole family.
Using gorgeous black-and-white and 3D Burton has crafted visuals that would make James Whale proud. No detail is too small or too strange for the director’s eye, from the beautiful set design to the homages to “Gamera” and “An American Werewolf in London.”
All the macabre elements of good old fashioned horror movies are represented—mobs with torches, lightening strikes bringing dead things back to life—but underneath it all is a great deal of heart, something that has been missing from Burton’s recent blockbuster work. “Frankenweenie” feels more personal, and because of the stop-motion animation, handmade. Kids may not get the “Bride of Frankenstein” gag, but they’ll love the look of the film.
Good voice work from Burton’s “Beetlejuice” cast members O’Hara and Wynona Ryder with “Ed Wood’s” Martin Landau chiming in and new comers like Short, Tahan and Atticus Shaffer bring the ghoulish puppets to life, animating them with personality.
Tim Burton has been trying to make “Frankenweenie” for a long time. It first saw life as a Disney short way back in 1984, and has definitely been worth the wait.
Imagine if our collective image of Santa Claus had been shaped by Allegory of Gluttony and Lust painter Hieronymus Bosch instead of some nameless commercial artist at Coca Cola and you’ll get an idea of the dark edge of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. The jolly fat man in the red suit is gone, hijacked by a skeleton in a pinstriped suit.
Although Tim Burton’s name appears above the title The Nightmare Before Christmas was actually directed by stop motion animation legend Henry Selick, but make no mistake every frame of the film bears Burton’s twisted imprimatur. Originally conceived while he was working as an animator on much tamer fare for Disney in the early 1980s, the story of the mayor of Halloweentown who kidnaps and impersonates “Sandy Claws” to bring his own brand of good will to the world, percolated in his head until 1993 when he was powerful and famous enough to get the film made the way he envisioned it. The result is a wonderfully twisted holiday story that is plays like an offbeat Rankin / Bass production.
The film is really wonderful, with creepy songs by Danny Elfman, amazing stop motion visuals (more than 120 animators worked on the project) and warped humor that should appeal to most of the members of the family. Note though, that The Nightmare Before Christmas is a tad too dark for smaller children. It’s a Disney release but it is one of the rare ones that isn’t meant for the entire family.
The Nightmare Before Christmas has been released several times on DVD but this package includes some extras that are worth the shelling out a few additional dollars for. This Special Edition contains the usual stuff—a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film and theatrical trailers—but it also offers up two Tim Burton shorts, Vincent and Frankenweenie; Tim Burton’s original poem narrated by Christopher Lee and all new audio commentaries from Burton and Selick. It’s a great package and highly recommended.
A hullabaloo arose in 1924 when sex symbol Rudolph Valentino, nicknamed The Shiek, was seen sporting a Van Dyke beard, cultivated for his upcoming role in The Hooded Falcon. The Barbers of America, fearing a loss of business if the famous actor made beards chic, threatened to boycott his films unless he shaved his beard.
Now comes Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, surely to be a target of another nation-wide barber boycott for it’s depiction of hairstylists as bloodthirsty fiends.
Sweeney Todd, the latest collaboration between director Tim Burton and actor Johnny Depp is the darkest musical you’ll likely ever see, a vivid restaging of the 1979 Stephen Sondheim stage musical that doesn’t spare the gore. Based on the classic penny dreadful story about a barber who slits the throats of his clients and his accomplice who then grinds up the bodies and turns them into meat pies, the tale doesn’t seem to lend itself to a musical treatment. The hills are alive with the sound of… gushing blood?
In fact, the musical has always divided audiences. On the opening night of its original Broadway run half the audience reportedly left in disgust at intermission but the show was a hit nonetheless and ran for a healthy 557 performances. The movie is likely to be as divisive. It’s bloody—geysers of arterial plasma spurt from slashed throats before the sliced bodies are unceremoniously dumped down a chute to land on crushed skulls with a sickening thud—but in the best Grand Guignol tradition it’s bleakly beautiful.
In the lead role is Johnny Depp in his sixth partnering with Burton. The deranged barber is another in a long line of risky roles from the actor who once said he would do anything for Burton, adding “If he wants me to have sex with an aardvark in one of his next movies, then I will do that.”
Luckily there’s no bestiality in Sweeney Todd, but that’s about the only sin left undone. Depp’s Sweeney—nee Benjamin Barker—looks like one of the characters from The Corpse Bride come to life. He’s so pale he makes Nicole Kidman look sun burnt and the stripe of grey in his hair brings to mind a German Expressionist version of Jay Leno. Wrongly imprisoned for fifteen years by a judge who coveted his wife, Todd has come back to London with revenge on his mind. His retribution takes the form of a bloody ballet of throat slashing unparalleled since the days of Freddy and Jason. Depp’s memorable performance heightens the drama, perfectly capturing the pent up rage of a man whose life is being overtaken by obsession.
Balancing out the gore is Sondheim’s intriguing light operetta score and Helena Bonham Carter’s take on Mrs. Lovett, the cannibal baker. Before the movie opened online pundits were commenting that she was only cast because she’s Mrs. Tim Burton. Not only is that dismissive and rude, it’s also far from the truth. Living with the director may have given her better access to the part, but she is the perfect choice from her Victoriana Goth looks to the much needed light touch she brings to the grim proceedings.
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street isn’t your father’s musical, but it is beautifully realized vision from one of the most interesting director / actor teams working today.
Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are back at it, collaborating on their eighth film, resurrecting “Dark Shadows,” the long dead gothic soap opera.
The story of a lovesick vampire who awakens in 1972 to find a much different world than the one he left behind seems like perfect fodder for the duo. With Burton’s kitschy-Halloweeny style and Depp’s expertise at playing troubled outsiders, the question remains, Will this have more of the heart of “Ed Wood” (we’d like that!) and less the forced quirk of “Alice in Wonderland” or the other way around?
Depp is Barnabas Collins, (played on the original show by Canadian actor Jonathan Frid who passed away last month at the age of 87), an eighteenth century man cursed by the succubus Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green) after he broke her heart. Turned into a vampire and buried alive for two centuries, he is exhumed in 1972 and returns to his family home, Collins Manor. Things have changed. His once grand home is in disrepair, the family fishing business is in tatters and he thinks the lava lamp is a “pulsating blood urn.”
His descendants, matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer), her daughter Carolyn (Chloë Moretz), Elizabeth’s brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), and his son David (Gulliver McGrath), make a deal with him. In exchange for business help they’ll make him head of the house once again. Trouble is, the rival fishing company is run by the still jealous Angelique who still has feelings for Barnabas.
“Dark Shadows” unfolds at a funereal pace. A peppy prologue sets up the story, but once the main credits roll and Burton is saddled with the task of introducing the movies many characters and giving them all something to do, the pace crawls to a stop.
The movie has a couple of good ghostly apparitions, is wonderfully designed, the sets are beautiful, the look is muted—the vivid colors of “Edward Scissorhands” and “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure” are gone, replaced by a monochrome palate—and the cast is certainly fetching, but while al that may entertain the eye the general lack of energy does little to entertain the rest of the senses.
Depp does what he can to keep things moving. With a ghostly pallor that recalls Edward Scissorhands’s white complexion he is a vampire-out-of-water living among humans in a time he doesn’t understand. His first tentative steps in “the future” are well played and understated. His culture shock at seeing a car or a MacDonald’s sign is fun, and while Depp is skillful, it’s a one-joke premise that wears out its welcome.
More fun is Eva Green’s turn as Angelique. She’s strange and sexy, which is exactly the right tone for this movie. Her love scene with Barnabas—Burton’s first ever!—has the energy sadly missing from the rest of the film.
“Dark Shadows” could have been a fun companion piece to “True Blood” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Too bad the storytelling is as musty as the dilapidated old Collins Manor.
Tim Burton’s cell phone ring tone is exactly what you would expect from the man who has directed some of the most atmospheric films of the last two decades. In Toronto this week to promote an exhibition of his art and films at the TIFF Bell Lightbox Burton was mid sentence when his cell phone went off. The eerie wail of a Theremin filled the room.
“Sorry,” he says fumbling to mute the phone. “It scares me every time it rings.”
Turns out the visionary director of Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetle Juice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands and most recently, the billion dollar grossing Alice in Wonderland, values his time away from technology, specifically his phone.
“I always try to at least spend time, as much as I can everyday, staring out into space; staring out a window,” he says. “I find that sometimes you get the most ideas and the most feelings when you’re not involved in things you have to do everyday; especially these days when technology is such that you can be reached any time. I try and avoid that.”
He may call spacing out an “important part of the day” but don’t call him a loner. On set he looks forward to working with others.
“Part of the joy of making a movie is working with collaborators,” he says. “When I first started in animation class you’d draw all the characters, you’d cut it, you’d do everything, which is great because it gives you a great background. But as you go on part of the joy is working with collaborators. People who surprise you. People who you try and tell them what you are doing and they get it and they add something to it, whether it’s actors or designers or whomever. I’ve really gotten to enjoy that process. It keeps things fresh. You get surprised by people and that is part of the joy of making a film.”
Right now Burton is working on full-length 3-D stop motion remake of his own 1984 short film Frankenweenie, a well loved cult classic about a young boy who uses electricity to revive his recently deceased dog.
“I love stop motion,” he says, “so it is kind of fun to keep with that. The tactile nature of it is something I always like to experience.”
Ironically he’s making the film in conjunction with Walt Disney, the same company who fired him in the mid-80s after he made the original short film, claiming it was too scary for young audiences. The House of Mouse and Burton have since kissed and made up—he made Alice in Wonderland for them—and he says now he’s appreciative of the two years of experience Disney gave him as a young man.
“If I had been there at any other time I wouldn’t have gotten the opportunity to do what I did,” he says, “because they were so directionless as a company. They were trying to move into the modern world but they weren’t quite ready for it yet so I got to try things that were off the track. It was a strange time but I’m always grateful for it because if it had been any other two years on one side or another [of the time he was there] I wouldn’t have gotten that opportunity.”
Now, courtesy of the Bell TIFF Lightbox working in conjunction with the MOMA, we’re getting the chance to see some of the early Disney work as well as 700 of the director’s paintings, drawings, maquettes, puppets, videos and storyboards.
“This is a strange thing,” he says. “I never really went to museums. A wax museum maybe, so the idea of [seeing my work] here was an out of body experience. It’s kind of like, ‘Look at my dirty socks hanging on the wall. Look at my underwear.’ But reconnecting with yourself is very interesting because I would never have looked at any of this stuff ever again and so they kind of forced the issue. It’s strange, which is fine. I don’t mind a strange feeling.”
The Burton exhibit runs at the Bell TIFF Lightbox from Nov. 26, 2010 to April 21, 2011.
Remember the Fractured Fairy Tales on the old Rocky and Bullwinkle show? They were updated riffs on old fables and following their candy-coated summer hit, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp now present a film in that same spirit. Corpse Bride is a stop-motion animated film that brings life to a century old Russian folk tale.
Far less dark than the name would imply, Corpse Bride is a grim fairy tale about an awkward young man (voiced by Depp) whose nouveau riche family has arranged for him to marry a titled but penniless young girl (voice of Emily Watson). After a disastrous wedding rehearsal the nervous groom is sent away to learn his vows. While rehearsing in the woods, he playfully slips the ring on a tree branch and utters the wedding words. In the film’s scariest sequence the hapless man discovers the branch is actually a bony hand attached to an arm—an arm belonging to The Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter). In life the deceased girl with the Michael Jackson nose was jilted at the alter and now thinks she has a second chance at martial bliss in the Land of the Dead.
The tale of the reluctant groom and his new ghoul-friend is a simple story that really comes to life in the telling. The beautifully hand-rendered animation—each movement of the puppets was done by hand, frame by frame—is a gift for the eyes. The colorful Land of the Dead is a wild underworld that resembles the heyday of the Cotton Club in a parallel universe, complete with a chorus line of skeletons; while the Land of the Living is a gorgeously somber place that reflects the mood of the story.
Far more, however, than simply a triumph of art direction or stop-motion, Corpse Bride is one of the best movies of the year featuring good performances, a story with real emotional depth and fun faux baroque music from Danny Elfman.
As a director Tim Burton works best when he is able to create slightly skewed visions of the real world. From the hyper-real pastel-colored California of Edward Scissorhands and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure to the grimy Gotham of his Batman films to the idyll of Big Fish he shines when he spins reality 90 degrees to the left. He has done it once again in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a faithful adaptation of the Roald Dahl book and not a remake of the 1971 Gene Wilder film. In Charlie and the Chocolate factory he creates two distinct worlds—the “real” world, both very modern, yet somehow timelessly retro and the weird candy world of chocolatier Willie Wonka’s factory where trees are made of spun sugar and a chocolate waterfall dominates the landscape. Of course the movie isn’t about the art direction, and Burton has ensured that the characters are strong enough to compete with the film’s strange backdrop. Johnny Depp seems to be channeling Michael Jackson’s otherworldly mannerisms as Wonka, a slightly creepy, but misunderstood outcast who has built his own fanciful universe to deal with the damage done to him by his overbearing father. His strange rendering of the parent-hating Wonka—complete with perfect fake teeth and a pageboy haircut—is an all or nothing performance that is so out there that it will either enthrall or annoy audiences. Either way it will make an impression. The other standout performance is from Freddie Highmore as the sweet-hearted Charlie. He and Depp worked together in last year’s Finding Neverland, and have real chemistry. Highly recommended.
Tim Burton likes strange stories. From the razor sharp fingers of “Edward Scissorhands” to “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” he has made his trade on stranger-than-life stories.
