Tim Burton -- classic or dud?

He peaked at Peewee's Big Adventure.

It really is hilarious that after a string of so many adaptations and remakes, he finally got around to remaking his own film. Be even funnier if someone had independently rewritten the script, got it to Burton, and he was all "that's it! this idea is genius! finally, an original property to remind people why they liked me to begin with!"

Rewriting "Beetlejuice" right now, btw. Hoping to land Burton as director.

Took kids to Frankenweenie at the dollar theater yesterday (which is actually a $2.50 theater now, but anyway) -- it was fun, well made. Not a patch on, say, Coraline, but we all enjoyed it. My older kid (8) was actually sort of freaked out by some parts, but the younger one (4) happily munched popcorn straight through and was talking about it for hours afterward.

man i caught 30 minutes of edward scissorhands on tv last night while cooking/waiting for dinner for the first time in probably 20 years and jesus it was interminable.

more than any other director i can't square how this guy could make a couple of my favorite movies of all time and then a whole shit ton of pure skin-crawling dreck using the same basic aesthetic.

I caught Scissorhands for the first time in 20 years recently too and it was overwhelmingly slight, I thought. Burton is one of those directors whose aesthetic -- the idea of a Tim Burton film -- is better than any of his actual films that I recall.

In the early 90s/late 80s, Robert Smith-style gothiness + John Waters + Disney hit all the right buttons culturally.

I haven't seen Ed Wood since it came out, but based on what I remember of it I'd still defend it as Burton's best (w/possible exception of Pee-Wee, but I give Paul Reubens more credit for that).

I've seen Ed Wood a number of times and I agree that it's his best.

"Alice In Wonderland" is on TV later on. I'm kinda interested in seeing it tbh.

ymmv, but it felt like a true artistic nadir for Burton the one time I saw it. Worse, even, than his take on Charlie&tCC. I occasionally watch the clip of Depp doing the "Futterwacken" dance on YT if I'm in a bleak mood, just to remind myself that things could always be worse.

pee-wee > ed wood > beetlejuice > mars attacks > everything else

Looking back it's just so odd that this is who DC handed the first Batman film since the 60s - the allegedly first "serious" one - to. And that they gave him another! Not that I'm complaining about either.

I think he's had mistakes before and since, but Big Fish was the one that I remember watching and thinking "Wow, there's nothing in this".

tbf i haven't seen anything he's done in full since charlie and the chocolate factory, but then do i really need to?

Big Fish was pretty bad

Burton's reputation would be preposterous and invincible if he had stopped making films in the 90s and was only now making a comeback. A friend put it another way: "tim burton could have won best picture for big fish if he had taken about ten years off before making it"

I stopped seeing his movies about 10 years ago but he's still useful to me as a commissioner of new Danny Elfman scores (for some reason Elfman still brings his A game for Burton's films even though the films themselves do nothing of the sort.) I never plan on going near the Alice film but Elfman's music for it was maybe the best film score of that year.

(There's a similar dynamic with M Night Shyamalan and James Newton Howard-- JNH invariably writes his most inspired music for these misbegotten films)

I think he's had mistakes before and since, but Big Fish was the one that I remember watching and thinking "Wow, there's nothing in this".

― Andrew Farrell, Wednesday, December 26, 2012 9:38 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

planet of the apes was the beginning of the end for me. what a big nothing. what gets to me is how ugly his films are now. its all digital chintziness with no character

The best thing for him at this point would be some of jobwork. Like, having to direct someone else's baby. But he has too much clout to be constrained in that way.

weird thing to say right after someone brings up planet of the apes

ha. point taken.

h4a otm - Alice, Dark Shadows, all this new stuff has a very plastic deadness about it. all gloss, no depth

TB would be fine if he stuck to animated stuff -- like, a stop-motion burton 'alice' would probably have been awesome. it's amazing that a guy who did something as good as 'ed wood' churns out as much soulless dreck as he does now.

the single worst thing about 'alice in wonderland' was its not being alice in wonderland, rather a silly sort of lotr-lite fanfic

yeah how the hell do you manage to make Alice in Wonderland boring ffs

exactly. I do not know what grade of numpty picks up one of the english language's best regarded works and goes 'hey I can do a better one'.

hee hee numpty, i love that word

'the picture of dorian gray: lost in new york'

yknow I really love little women but let's lose all the women and the whole family thing, it's pretty on the nose

'the wind in the willows', in which toad wears a black suit with spiralled coat tails and battles an undead womble army

would probably see that

yknow I really love little women but let's lose all the women and the whole family thing, it's pretty on the nose

can't wait to see helena bonham-carter as a goth meg

'the wind in the willows', in which toad wears a black suit with spiralled coat tails and battles an undead womble army

i can see him doing this for real

beetlejuice 2: beetlejuice goes hawaiian

would probably watch that too

dug up this quote from an old alice thread:

"Every other version I've ever seen, I've never really connected to because it's always just a series of weird events," Burton said. "She's passively wandering through, meeting this weird character, that weird character. It's fine in the books, but the movies always felt like there wasn't anything underneath them. That's what we tried to do. Instead of the Hatter just being weird, [we wanted to] get some kind of character underneath him. That's the goal, is to give the 'Alice' material a little more weight to it."

wow thank god you were there to 'give a little more weight' to one of the greatest books ever, you doofus.

that TB quote right there is pretty much why I hate screenwriters in a nutshell.

weirdy mcweirdson of weirdsville decided his source material was too weird xp

giving the Hatter character = dancing like a nit

"yes but who ARE the flying monkeys"

can you imagine if he made 'pee wee' now? it'd start out with a flashback to 10-year-old pee wee getting hit by a bike.

I liked the back story he gave Willy Wonka in that Charlie Chocolate Factory movie but at the same time, in typical Burton fashion is underlined the motivations of the original story way too much (ie original was a sad treatise on spoiled children and horrible parents masquerading as a fun adventure)

he just can't help to make everything bummertown USA

in typical burton fashion *he, not is

I really really liked his version of charlie, especially the whole michaely-jacksony parallel xp

i liked a lot of it, but there was something about the disco-y ness of it that really annoyed the shit out of me at the same time

depp did a nice carol channing, I thought :)

oh yeah, the pop culture oompah-loompah sons were shithouse

*songs

bahahaha carol channing

i got really really tired of deep roy after a while

making wonka into a sad victimized dude just messes too much with the whole dynamic of the story. the original film's take, where wonka remains mysterious, genuinely unpredictable, and even vaguely malevolent throughout the whole story, seems much more in line with dahl's intentions. plus wilder's thinly veiled delight in the kids' fates is way 'darker' than anything in burton's film.