Posted by: Bradley Redder
The first minute has to be making fun of Burton and Dark Shadows.
Before I say anything, I will reiterate the last line of your post: Henry Selick directed Nightmare Before Christmas. That always bothers me when Tim Burton gets the credit for that. And the upcoming Frankenweenie is even more annoying, mimicking the stop-motion style of Selick with computer animation while surely destroying his brilliant short film. My brother and I used to rent the original Frankenweenie all the time at the Video Loft, a video store shaped like a barn, for some reason. My dad didn't care because it was only like fifty cents to rent it. When we found out that store was closing, we immediately hopped in the car, in the middle of having dinner, to go buy that VHS tape, and it is still one of my favorites to this day. So sad that Burton feels the need to revisit it in this way. But anyway...
I half agree with just about everything you said. I think we both derive the same conclusions when we look at Burton's steady decline from creative genius to... whatever you call him now; I just think you're more optimistic about him than I am. Since the relatively underrated Sleepy Hollow, up until the egregious eyesore that is Alice in Wonderland (why would you do that to your wife?), I went into his films wanting to like them, love them even. But I've gotten disappointment after disappointment, and I'm pretty sure what I was watching was the well running dry. Each of the films in between those have at least a few moments of grace, even the equally visually antagonistic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had some heart. But with these last two films, I just really haven't cared if I was going to like them. I was open to enjoying them, but expected nothing from them, and ultimately got nothing from them.
The auteur question is relevant... People seem to still love him, though I have to imagine even the die-hardest Burton/Depp fans won't really find anything worth defending in Dark Shadows. I will say that you can still definitely spot a Burton film from outside the theater, with that trademark "Gothic" blue tint to everything, but do I think he is actually expressing anything personal anymore? No. Not at all. And the last ten years of shit make me wonder if he ever really was, or if he just accidentally made a few great films. Nowadays he just feels redundant. I get the impression that when people ask him what he's really like, he not only feels obligated to respond, "I'm pretty weird," but that he also actually believes it. Unfortunately outside of obnoxious, sometimes even intolerable visuals, his work is about as ordinary as it gets. It's all conventional, as you say... There's no creepy subtext, or quirky laughs. Just Johnny Depp and seventeen pounds of make-up hiding the gaping void where a true character should lie.
I also don't know if I was quite as taken by the visuals in Dark Shadows. Sure, it had the Burton look, which I would hope he has perfected by now. It did look good, but it didn't really have the interesting compositions that something like Edward Scissorhands had. It all just seemed to be in service of nothing. I think Burton was at his best when he was doing homemade effects and props, like in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, another vastly underrated treat. Lately he just uses digital backdrops and CGI, which are so completely lifeless... they lack the craftsmanship and care that his earlier films were overflowing with.
Which brings me to the humor. While some of it was clever dialogue, a disturbing amount of it was CGI-based, a real pet-peeve of mine. Actually, pet-peeve makes it sound like it's just a little annoying. Let me rephrase: I hate CGI in comedy. Hate it. It has absolutely no place in comedy. It should be outlawed. I can't believe producers don't automatically pass when they see anything CGI related in a comedy script. Great comedy is based in honesty, whether it's physical comedy or verbal jokes, it has to feel true to be funny. I don't want to laugh at the idea of somebody doing a face-plant, I want to see it happen. CGI-based comedy is like writing an IOU when all I really want is the twenty dollars you owe me in cash. I can't do anything with it. It's boring. And it's depressing that somebody that used to be so in tune with that idea has steered himself so far off course.
As for Frankenweenie, just watch the short film HERE!
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