Burton and Depp keep on Burtoning and Depping in...Dark Shadows!

http://rjbuffalo.com/images/apertures/shining_3_185.jpg

It's overly concerned with the undead, ie early '70s pop culture.

HBC is most valuable player.

What I can't figure out is why Burton, undoubtedly a man of vision, hasn't made a movie that wasn't an adaptation or remake since "Ed Wood" (which, coincidentally or not remains the general consensus for his "best" movie)? Is it all about the bucks?

One of those adaps is among his best films, Sweeney Todd. Doing a 30-year-old Broadway musical classic is not "for the bucks" even if you make it explicitly gory.

(All of Stanley Kubricks's films (aside from the first two I think?) were adaptations.)

also Sleepy Hollow had pretty much nothing to do with Washington Irving aside from the basic Headless Horseman image.

really an aptly named movie

What I can't figure out is why Burton, undoubtedly a man of vision, hasn't made a movie that wasn't an adaptation or remake since "Ed Wood" (which, coincidentally or not remains the general consensus for his "best" movie)? Is it all about the bucks?

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, May 9, 2012 10:09 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

isn't it clear that he's just more of a visual stylist than an ideas guy? the only full-length films he has a writing credit on are Scissorhands and Nightmare Before X-Mas and in both cases he came up with the basic story and then gave it to a screenwriter to flesh out (his next project is a full-length adaptation of the early short he wrote, Frankenweenie, but again he had someone else do the screenplay). the real shame, i guess, is that he never found a writer or writers that could serve as a longterm creative partner the way he did with Depp as a star, so remakes and adaptations kind of became a logical direction to take (although obv i agree that he has lost his touch in other ways and could've done better even with the projects he has done).

maybe there's just a pile of terrible spec scripts sitting in a pile in his office from kids who think they've written 'the perfect Tim Burton movie,' though. supposedly Jonathan Gems, who wrote Mars Attacks, has written a bunch of unproduced screenplays for Burton, maybe they're great, maybe they suck.

the real shame, i guess, is that he never found a writer or writers that could serve as a longterm creative partner

john august

As with many auteurs, Burton may do plenty of uncredited rewriting (have TB or any disgruntled writers weighed in on this?).

John August, the writer whose breakthrough was Go, has had a hand in four of TB's recent films (incl story credit on this) and is listed for the upcoming feature version of Frankenweenie.

xp

well i meant specifically someone who was coming up with ideas for original films, not someone to help him adapt Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, etc. (xpost)

really i think Depp's embrace of CGI is far more tragic than his turn to remakes. he had such a gift for in-camera effects and then he just tosses them aside to make digital puke like Alice In Wonderland.

to my mind he's always been in favor of gimcrackery; it's just that his means of achieving it are less charming today than they were during - say - beetlejuice's claymation scenes.

on the commentary track to Ed Wood, Burton says it's the only script he's never changed/rewritten prior to production

Wasn't a fan of Sweeney Todd, so that sort of makes this one Burton's best in the last decade or so by default.

Not meant as a rave at all; just saying.

I'd call this movie somewhat original despite the tepid results, because my impression of the Dark Shadows series as a child was that it was monstrously boring, like every soap opera ever.

perfect match for tim burton, then

(i liked big fish)

I really like "Sweeney Todd." But really, that aside, Burton has show himself truly adept when it comes to original properties. "Pee Wee," "Beetlejuice," "Edward Scissorhands," "Nightmare Before Christmas," "Ed Wood" - these were all original scripts, and really are the guy's best, most iconic movies. SInce then it's been these garish remakes and recreations, perhaps good places to hang his visual sensibility but imo, aside from Todd, all pretty much duds (giddy dud though Mars Attacks! may be).

Big Fish is soooooo mawkish and sentimental, though.

Also, thematically creepy, I seem to recall.

I think the phrase "Big Fish" pops up a couple times in Shadows, incidentally.

it is mawkish, and probably not very good. It's like everything else TB has done; emotionally simplistic – schematic – kind of Aspie, sort of TB taking on Spielberg.

monstrously boring

perfect match for tim burton, then

nope, but should've done DS as a pure burlesque, and preferably with more kink and violence.

Never loved him before the 1-2 of Ed Wood/Mars Attacks!, haven't since. (and here we are recapitulating the goddamn career again)

btw how the hell did the French chick from The Dreamers and Casino Royale turn into an Anne Hathaway clone?

Big Fish was lame. Every so often something would happen and there'd be a real cool image on the screen and why can't i watch THAT movie?

Alice was cool. The retro-fitted 3D gave it a nice paper doll look in the pre-CGI scenes. I can forgive the post-Matrix plot autopilot because the design of the castle and especially HBC's queen was so much fun to look at.

As an aside, when did they confirm Beetlejuice 2? I keep seeing things here and there on it. Johnny Depp will be in it, of course, but not at Beetlejuice. Hopefully Beetlejuice won't be a Shrek/Aladdin's Genie-like pop-culture whore.

Oops, said it three times.

As an aside, when did they confirm Beetlejuice 2? I keep seeing things here and there on it. Johnny Depp will be in it, of course, but not at Beetlejuice. Hopefully Beetlejuice won't be a Shrek/Aladdin's Genie-like pop-culture whore.

I really hope this does not happen, it would be so bad.

really i think Depp's embrace of CGI is far more tragic than his turn to remakes. he had such a gift for in-camera effects and then he just tosses them aside to make digital puke like Alice In Wonderland.

― some dude, Wednesday, May 9, 2012 10:37 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah AiW was so incredibly ugly

I am sorry to have paid money to see this thing.

I guess $28 M gross is bad, given $150 M cost.

this movie looks good, maybe? i should get my hopes up though, right? cahiers du cinema (or jean-michel frodon in particular) liked it a lot.

it's easy to forget that burton is/was an accomplished director, one of the best directors that american cinema of the 1980s produced. his last few films (with big fish a partial exception) have been so dire that he could be zack snyder for all anyone cares.

shouldN'T get my hopes up

I am sorry to have paid money to see this thing.

otm. worst movie i've paid to see in the theater in a long time. hugely disappointing, even relative to other recent burton flicks.

I'm seeing it tomorrow night, I am unenthused/ambivalent

probably the right way to go in

Masochists!

I'm going with a group, they picked the movie I'm just tagging along to get out of the house/eat dinner

That's understandable. Unfortunate movies have been a component of many otherwise lovely evenings I've experienced.

I've seen plenty with this group, I'm used to it :)

So I saw Dark Shadows tonight and it-zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

so
fucking
boring

otm. worst movie i've paid to see in the theater in a long time. hugely disappointing, even relative to other recent burton flicks.

It's totally understandable to think this movie boring or just plain bad, but how anyone could fail to see this is nowhere within earshot of the megaton disaster that was Alice in Wonderland is beyond me.

oh it's miles better than Alice

Dark Shadows has Alice Cooper doing 70's Alice; Alice in Wonderland only has junkie Alice which = massive fail on all levels

burton's filmmaking, while perfectly competent or more, feels completely anonymous and uninspired. all the CGI landscapes are so predictable and dispiriting. they could have hired any competent director, added some goth trappings, and it would probably be about the same.

it's kind of sad that the best parts of this film were all the cheap-but-funny fish-out-of-water gags.

it's also kind of sad that we're measuring this film's artistic success against alice in wonderland. i will probably never see a movie directed by this shell of a filmmaker again.

This just didn't have a reason for existing. Sweeney Todd did.

Dark Shadows just seemed to miss the point: the fish out of water gag should be like 5 minutes of the movie, at best. You can't make a whole movie out of that.

but how anyone could fail to see this is nowhere within earshot of the megaton disaster that was Alice in Wonderland is beyond me.

i know i'm in the minority on this, but i think alice in wonderland has a kind of casual pride in complete junkiness that makes its many sins seem sort of irrelevant. i took it as a cheap, dumb children's cartoon and was happy just to see distorted versions of crispin glover and HBC camping it up at the margins. it's a failure, of course, but it at least moves quickly from one colorful bit of nonsense to the next - never lets things drag the way dark shadows does.

Alice makes me so IA I can't even begin to say how much I hated it

the nihilism in it was just, ugh...maybe I'm too sensitive but it was just downright offensive

I look forward to watching Lucy once again pull the football away upon the arrival of Frankenweenie.