Frankenweenie (2012)

November 12, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Frankenweenie (2012) movie poster

director Tim Burton
viewed: 11/03/2012 at AMC Metreon 16, SF, CA

Frankenweenie (2012) is Tim Burton’s black-and-white stop-motion animation re-make of his own live-action short film, Frankenweenie (1984).  It’s the first animated feature that Burton has directed since Corpse Bride (2005).

This Frankenweenie takes place in a town of New Holland, a quintessential Tim Burton world, a suburbia right out of Edward Scissorshands (1990) (albeit in black-and-white), a version of a 1950′s Southern California as Anytown, USA.  But this town is populated with oddballs galore, kids all odder and creepier than our hero, Victor Frankenstein, a boy excited by science who resurrects his pet pooch when it gets hit by a car.

The characters are classic Burton, with their wide eyes, ghostly pallor, skinny legs and arch quirkiness.   I’ve liked Burton’s aesthetics since I first knew who he was after seeing Beetlejuice (1988).  I remember seeing his illustration designs for that film and thinking how cool it all was.

But in 2012, Burton has become less and less interesting and the world only more and more proliferated with quirky Goth cartoon imagery.  Frankenweenie opened a week after ParaNorman (2012) from Laika Studios in Portland, OR.  They were also the creative team behind Henry Selick’s wonderful Coraline (2009).  The world of ParaNorman, also obsessed with zombies, B-movie horror, and oddball protagonists isn’t all that different in many ways to the stop-motion character designs of Burton’s.  And while neither film was great, ParaNorman is superior to Frankenweenie.

It’s caused me much pause to think what motivates Burton these days.  His original ideas have been few and far between and his re-boot philosophy of moviemaking has come to not just reanimate any number of “classic” film, television, or other concepts, but now to even cannibalize his own original creation.

None of that would matter if the films were good.  Frankenweenie is cute, certainly has some lovely animation, designs, some funny moments.  But it’s also just oddly a bit more inanimate and uninspired.  And Felix and Clara felt similarly, preferring ParaNorman and Wreck-It Ralph (2012) of our more recent outings to the cinema.

Filed under Animation, Theatrical, Tim Burton, Winona Ryder, With the kids

Mars Attacks!

September 3, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Mars Attacks! (1996) movie poster

(1996) director Tim Burton

viewed: 08/27/2011

When Tim Burton released Mars Attacks! back in 1996, he still showed a great deal of promise as one of the most interesting directors in mainstream Hollywood.  Coming off his second Batman film, Batman Returns (1995), still visually inventive, his previous film had been Ed Wood (1994), arguably his best work.

And when I saw it in the theaters during its initial run, I considered myself a Tim Burton fan. And I liked it at the time.  It wasn’t brilliant.  It wasn’t classic.  It had some great gags, some great art design, lots of celebrity cameos, a ton of retro ironic humor/homage, but at best, it was good.  Not great.  It seemed to feed upon some of his prior films, notably Beetlejuice (1988), re-purposing not only characters and gags, but many actors as well.

Looking back now, it seems that his slide into perpetually derivative content blossomed after this film.  While he’d “re-booted” Batman and adapted an obscure collection of bubblegum cards into an alien invasion film, he would go on to re-invent Washington Irving (Sleepy Hollow (1999)), unsuccessfully re-boot a retro-1970′s franchise (Planet of the Apes (2001), redo Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and adapt stage-musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007).  His affinity for re-inventing pre-existing narratives, characters, and franchises is only second to his affinity for using Johnny Depp.

But while I’ve soured on Tim Burton, I still see most of his films.  And when the kids and I ended up watching Beetlejuice, I started considering his other films that they might enjoy.  We saw Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), which they liked, though not as well.  I thought since it reminded me in several ways of Beetlejuice, Mars Attacks! might be fun.

It was.

It’s a confection of humor, but it has some pretty awesome gags.  The Martians, who speak in voices that sound like “Aack Aack, Ack Ack Ack Aaack!”, then chasing humans down with ray guns using a translator to say “Stop! We come in peace!  We are your friends!”, having such contempt for human life that they kill indiscriminately and sew heads onto dogs and a dog’s head onto a human body.

Really, it’s a lampoon take on H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.  With a tip of the homage/ironic hat to the George Pal-produced version of that film from 1952 as well as Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and much more.  I’ve read that originally Burton wanted to use stop-motion animation for the aliens as a further acknowledgement of Ray Harryhausen, whose flying saucers from the 1956 film are specifically recognized.  Budget drove them to computer animation, and it’s still a great style.

The aliens, with their green skin, bulbously brained crania, bulging eyes, and skull-like jaws, are a perfect cartoon of old-fashioned extra-terrestrial life.  They are both comic and creepy.

The finale, in which the aliens are defeated by the yodeling voice of Slim Whitman (instead of common microorganisms as in The War of the Worlds), is some great sublime joke, as sublime as the simplistic solution that Wells had dreamed up, but sort of a classic end-gag.  With the parallel music of Tom Jones’ ”It’s Not Unusual”,  to which the planet is rescued and the forest animals all convene, it’s really has some funny stuff in it, limited as it is.

The film actually depicts perhaps Burton’s most fervent misanthropy of any of his films.  Champion of the outsider, the dopey doughnut shop employee (Lukas Haas), the dark solitude of the president’s daughter (Natalie Portman), or occasional others, the film is gleeful in its punishment of the greedy, rich, selfish, self-absorbed, and “small-minded”.  Really of all of his films, this one might be the most far-reaching in its critique of the elements of culture and society that perturb Burton, rather than his consistent appreciation of the people who are cool but out of step with the rest of the world.

The kids quite enjoyed it.  Clara actually wanted to watch it again, liked it enough to watch it again.  It opened for me a further interest in the “alien invasion” film, something percolating within me for a short while of late.  It also made me think that I would like the kids to see some of the films that inspired or influenced this parody/satire/salute.

Burton is an enigma of sorts, but more than anything a bit of a disappointment.   Not long after Mars Attacks! I had written him off of ever making a truly great film.  Still, his work can be fun, is often beautifully designed, occasionally can be quite funny and piquant.  But more often than not, not as good as it could/should be.

Filed under Alien Invasion, Aliens, DVD, Tim Burton, With the kids

Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure

May 4, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985) movie poster

(1985) director Tim Burton
viewed: 04/29/11

I had watched Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985) with Felix some years ago.  On re-examination, it was five years ago, which would have made him four or five and my daughter about two, so it’s little wonder they don’t recall it.  But after watching Tim Burton’s 1988 film Beetlejuice, the idea came to me that Pee-wee’s Big Adventure might be worth another go.  And as circumstances had it, we had a couple other friends in tow for it as well.

For me, my reactions to the film were remarkably similar to what they were five years ago.  I still think parts of it are quite funny, a couple of gags funnier still than others, though it’s a fairly thin film.  The movie does play extensively with genre, being a road movie of sorts and winding up on the movie lot, bursting through a variety of films in production, and playfully tweaking the whole notion of film-making in the Drive-In movie exhibition of the “Hollywood” version of Pee-Wee’s story.

What was most funny about watching it with these four kids, ages 7, 8, 9, and 10 was how weirded-out they were by Pee-Wee’s persona.  Clara summed up that he is “a grown-up who acts like a baby”, referring to his cadre of toys and his penchant for play.  We’ve watched any number of old films together: Buster Keaton, Ray Harryhausen, Godzilla movies, and so on.  Victoria noted that this was an old film (Fair enough.  It is 26 years old), but it wasn’t as old as some.  They had very perplexed and concerned looks on their faces through much of the film and there weren’t nearly as many laughs out of them as I’d anticipated.

I do think that Felix and Clara liked it a bit more than their friends.  Felix liked the part where Pee-Wee rides his bike into the Godzilla movie being filmed and the long chase scene drops Godzilla with Santa Claus, among the cops and chaos that pays homage to the slap-stick comedy genre.

I still say that the dance scene is the best.

Filed under DVD, Tim Burton, With the kids

Beetlejuice

February 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Beetlejuice (1988) movie poster

(1988) director Tim Burton
viewed: 02/18/11

Going back to the late 1980′s, Beetlejuice was a favorite film of mine.  It turned me on to both Tim Burton and Winona Ryder.  I watched it numerous times back then, reveling in the lively comedy, cool designs, and the lovely pale-skinned, dark-eyed teen beauty.  Its mixture of black comedy and strange fantasy was revelatory and I really enjoyed Burton’s designs and cartoons from which the characters, the dead ones, evolved.

In my varying range of films to watch with the kids, I was looking for a change-up, and like a flash, it struck me that this film might be quite good for them.  And besides, it had been years since I had last seen it.

Coming on the heels of Burton’s first feature film, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Beetlejuice was an original story concept, with some very inventive characters (Beetlejuice, Michael Keaton, the liveliest of all), it showed a kind of promise that belied the direction of Burton’s career.

The characters are terrific, deftly sketched, quite often pitch perfect, beyond Keaton and Ryder, Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara are hysterical as Lydia’s (Ryder) parents, the nebbish and high-strung dad and the delusional, shallow step-mother and great.  O’Hara may never have been better.  Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin are very charming as the small-town couple whose happy home is invaded by the tactless, tasteless Deetzes.  And Glenn Shadix as Otho, Silvia Sidney as their caseworker Juno, and Dick Cavett and Robert Goulet as pompous New York snobs, the whole group is pretty terrific.  It was one of Ryder’s most effective roles; she was in her element as a teenager.

The story of how Baldwin and Davis wind up dead, returned as ghosts to their small town home, which is invaded by the Deetzes and their dealings with the afterlife is all strange, tweaky funny stuff.   Apparently, the film started as something much darker and creepier, but it plays well as a family-friendly romp.  When Baldwin and Davis discover the “bio-exorcist” Beetlejuice, the most crass, offensive, madcap “ghost with the most”, all heck breaks loose.

This time around, I found much of the dialog to be surprisingly snappy, sharp and very funny, tuning in to the characters and performances with far more panache that Burton is known for usually.  The kids really enjoyed it.  Clara said she wanted to watch it again, right after it was over.

Burton has been an interesting yet frustrating director for me, perhaps because of his early promise and his failure to grow and blossom.  He’s still a big name in Hollywood, bigger perhaps than he would have imagined back in 1988.  But really, outside of Ed Wood (1994), Beetlejuice may be his best film.  That said, the kids have virtually no memory of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and when considering re-queueing it, thoughts of Mars Attacks! (1996) or either of his Batman films has suddenly seemed like another trope that the kids might enjoy.

Keaton’s performance is so manic, so bizarre and hilarious, I find myself still humming his Beetlejuice jingle:

“I’ll eat anything you want me to eat,
I’ll swaller anything you want me to swaller,
Give me a call,
I’ll chew on a dog!”

Pretty damn good.

Filed under DVD, Fantasy, Tim Burton, Winona Ryder, With the kids

The Nightmare Before Christmas

December 15, 2010 by Leave a Comment

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) movie poster

(1993) director Henry Selick
viewed: 12/12/10 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

You know what’s scary about The Nightmare Before Christmas?  That it’s 17 years old.  That’s what.  I went to see it in the theater when it came out in 1993.  And though that was a long time ago, the fact that it was 17 years ago is just plain scary.

I took the kids to see the film at the Castro Theatre where it was playing for the Christmas holiday.  I’ll take most opportunities to take the kids to the Castro Theatre.  And The Nightmare Before Christmas seemed like as good a reason as any.

I can’t recall the last time that I watched it.  But it had been some time.

When it first came out, I was a big fan of the film’s design, the extra-odd Halloween-inspired figures of Jack, the pumpkin king, Sally, the rag-doll girl, the vampires, werewolves, mummies, ghouls, demons.   And really, when it comes down to it, that is what the film has going for it.  The design is brilliant.  The film is just okay.

Director Henry Selick has gone on to greater things.  His film of Coraline (2009) has become a personal favorite of mine.   But in The Nightmare Before Christmas, while the animation and character designs are great, the characters themselves don’t have a lot of personality.  The story, about Jack taking Christmas hostage in a misguided attempt to expand his horizons beyond Halloween, is decent at the concept level, but Danny Elfman’s musical score for the film, which includes a number of explanatory songs that elucidate the narrative, is lively but flat.

In fact, the score is perhaps the film’s true weakness.  The music seems to have the right vibe at first, but then the numbers are monotonous in and of themselves and then more monotonous when piled one on top of the other.  In some ways they all sound like the same song, without a real catchy chorus, nor very witty lyrics.  It’s sort of like all the swirling fun is just a swirl.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh, but embedding so much of the story and drama in the musical numbers, it sort of keeps the film from having character beyond its design.  And, though I enjoy it visually, I find it a bit disappointing too.  The design is so cool, but the film just isn’t all that great.

Which was definitely the criticism of Tim Burton at the time.  This film was adapted from his concept and he produced it as well.  Burton would go on to co-direct another stop-motion animated film, Corpse Bride (2005), but his directorial efforts have fluctuated between mediocre good and mediocre bad.  Style over substance.

So, you’re probably saying, if I didn’t think that the movie was all that great, why take the kids to see it in the theater?  Well, I always did like the way it looked.  And like I said, I’ll take any good excuse to take the kids to the Castro Theatre.  They enjoyed it.  And who am I to be an utter Scrooge?

Filed under Animation, Fantasy, Theatrical, Tim Burton, With the kids

Alice in Wonderland

March 9, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Alice in Wonderland (2010) movie poster

(2010) dir. Tim Burton
viewed: 03/07/10 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

There are a lot of “Alices” out there and a lot of “Wonderlands” too.  My personal favorite has tended to be Jan Svankmejer’s 1988 Alice, which is largely stop-motion animated and not exactly true to the source material, so I’m not a purist when it comes to adaptations.  But it should be noted that this is not your classic Alice in Wonderland.  Far from it.  Alice winds up in a suit of armor slaying a dragon.

You know, if you take the story and go off the road with it, that’s one thing, but when you take a story that is off the roadway to begin with and pick it up and put it onto a much more commonly trodden path, you end up with a real irony.  It’s ironic that a work that appeals to Surrealist sensibilities, fantasy, and subversion is adapted by a director known for visual style and a gleamingly dark eye and it ends up being far more conventional in the end.

I mean, it looks fantastic.  But the story is a weakness, unimaginative, derivative, and not really too clever.

Tim Burton is a director that I’ve long had a like/dislike relationship with (not strong enough for love/hate).  He’s got a fantastic eye for design, whether it’s his own or it’s the other collaborators with whom he works.  He’s attracted, largely, to pretty interesting material, but really most frequently comes across as a great visual stylist, with occasional flairs for highly appealing stuff, but one whose weakness is in the level of story and ultimately originality, as he is also most often “re-booting” old ideas or adapting pre-existing popular stories or characters.

That said, I had quite enjoyed his last two films more than I had anticipated, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), so I’d had a growing hope that this film might wind up on the more positive side of the fence, too.  I’d been quite attracted by the trailers and the designs and aesthetics of the world of Wonderland.

Did I mention that it’s also in Disney Digital 3-D?

In the opening and closing parts of the story, which place Alice in her Victorian world, initially the child of the classic version, but now a 20 year old, an independent girl, who doesn’t want to wear a corset or marry a dullard Lord.  She’s a proto-feminist, you see.   The film doesn’t really matter a whole lot in those segments.  It’s really tiresome.

It only gets fun the moment she falls down the rabbit hole and the vision becomes that of a hyper-hallucination, depicted through the latest in digital animation/effects.  And it’s something.  The talking flowers, the Cheshire cat, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, the queen of hearts (Helena Bonham Carter with an enlarged cranium), each figure as it emerges is highly pleasurable and vivid.  There is a point as this segment begins, that you almost think to yourself, “Wow, this could be awesome!”  And that feeling carries on for a while.

Up through her meeting with the Mad Hatter, Johnny Depp in a bright red wig, whitened face, and glowing googly eyes, varying between yellow and green, depending on his mood.  His face alone is almost worth the price of admission.  But his performance is not.  Depp may well be one the most appealing leading men in Hollywood, with a litany of entertaining if not very entertaining films to his name, but how many “characters” can you come up with that are just “so unusual”.  And beyond that, his character, the Mad Hatter, is not as mad as he could be.  He’s quite likeable, fun while he’s there, but like the rest of the film, largely a visual pleasure.

Ultimately there is this, well, feminist would be too strong of a word, but this aim at female empowerment.  Give Alice the sword, the role so often handed to the young boy who needs to become a man.  Clad her in shining armor and have her slice the dragon’s head off.  It’s not hard to get the point, nor is the point deep enough to really cut.  The whole film is just a beautifully rendered, visually enthralling, yet flaccid effort, not unworthy of seeing, but a squandered opportunity at least.

There are a lot of Alice’s out there, and doubtlessly, this will not the the end of the list.  I loved the character designs.  But give me the far more bizarre and creepy Svankmejer Alice.  Maybe it’s not half so colorful, but it’s a lot more complex.

Filed under Fantasy, Theatrical, Tim Burton

Edward Scissorhands

February 9, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Edward Scissorhands (1990) movie poster

(1990) dir. Tim Burton
viewed: 02/07/08

I’d long had Edward Scissorhands queued to re-watch.  It was one of those films that I saw at the time it had come out and never again, despite having liked it fairly well.  And whether or not I think positively of Tim Burton or not, I tend to still be drawn to his movies and in some ways have been hoping to find the little tidbits of potential that he seems to squander even in his best works.

A consumate fantasy, told in flash-back by a prosthetically aged Winona Ryder, the film is in many ways a critique of society, and if you look into it, it’s a pretty harsh critique.  Edward, a man-made man (made by Vincent Price in his final screen role), is a child in the body of a Goth-fantasy.  He’s Robert Smith’s head on the bondage body of the “Pinhead” of the Hellraiser (1987) movies, with giant, Freddy-Kreuger-like scissor-hands.  And he enters a world where everything is pastel as hell, people drive the same cars, and have perspectives as limited as their front yards.

At first, he is a novelty.  An artist with his scissors on topiary, pet grooming, or hair-styling, he is adored.  But when a couple of characters turn against him out of jealousy and rejection, he becomes a literal Frankenstein’s monster, chased by an angry mob to his old home on the hill.  The set design would be purely absurd if it wasn’t so clearly some form of allegory.  Edward’s home is on a lone black hill, in a secluded castle that overlooks suburbia.

His hands, incomplete from his build-out due to the death of his creator, leaves him unable to “touch” and his isolation has made him shy.  But his goodness is quickly seen by the Avon visitor who brings him home and tries to teach him well.  The only family on the block with a sense of conscience and goodness.  Johnny Depp, in his first role for Tim Burton, is the death-rock fantasy of internalized shyness and artistic, romantic soul who is an utter outcast in the world.

He falls immediately for Winona Ryder, who is disappointingly blond in this film, playing the cheerleader/homecoming queen to her boyfriend, the pumped up and evil Anthony Michael Hall (no longer a skinny dweeb as he’s been in his John Hughes films).  He’s actually so evil as to be uninteresting.  And the high drama of the ending seems a bit unnecessarily over-the-top.

But Burton is shooting for movie magic here, fantasy, romaticism.  And the scene that drives the romantic story, of why it snows on this little burg, is because Depp is still up on that mountain making magical ice sculptures and sending down the downy shavings of ice like big flakes of snow for her to bask in.  Awwww.

The film is likable.  Not as funny or enchanting as it could be.  The best moment is when Edward kindly snips the bangs for a dog that comes to comfort him in his dour time.  The dog licks him to say thanks.

Burton hit his tops with Ed Wood (1994), his second pairing with Depp, with whom he has now made a number of films.  I had hopes early on that Burton would become great.  His designs are wonderful and occasionally his ideas sparkle.  But he’s lazy in the material he chooses, maybe because Edward Scissorshands, his most personal work, inspired by a story that he co-authored, didn’t achieve the commerical success of his Batman (1989) movies, and so he’s stuck with re-inventing or re-making things, rather than trying to do something genuinely unique.  This was perhaps his closest shot at it, and it almost works.  It has charm, and I am sure that there are many who swoon with it still for its sweet heart.

Filed under DVD, Fantasy, Tim Burton, Vincent Price, Winona Ryder

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

December 29, 2007 by Leave a Comment

Sweeney Todd (2007) movie poster

(2007) dir. Tim Burton
viewed: 12/28/07 at AMC Loews Metreon 16 with IMAX, SF, CA

Sweeney Todd, the latest collaboration between Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, and heck let’s throw Helena Bonham Carter in there too, is some pretty serious Goth and gloom, Victorian era, black-sooted London, and rivers upon rivulets of blood.  Oh yeah, and singing!  I think a lot of people have commented on the oddity of the marketing of this film, which has singing and music throughout at least 95% of its running time, in which the promos show noone’s mouth open in tune.

I’ve become increasingly critical of Burton.  He seems to really recoil from working with originary material, drawn especially toward “re-invention” or “re-imagining” or simply “re-making” movies from all kinds of cultural effluvia.  And his basic lack of depth in the areas of emotion.  Surface is everything.  And it’s beautifully designed.  And then there’s Danny Elfman….

All of these criticisms I had in my head going into this film, which I’d read an interesting short critique of in The New Yorker, which seemed to sum up my expectations.  But then, I still wanted to see it.

In the taking of Stephen Sondheim’s musical to the big screen, I had little to say.  I’m not familiar with the musical, and I only had vague knowledge of the origin of the narrative.  Sweeney Todd was a character that arose in Victorian pulp fiction, the penny dreadful, as people like to refer to them.  After taking a class in 19th Century crime fiction, I have been developing quite an appreciation for the genre and the stories of the genre.

It’s high camp in any era.  A barber who slits his clients throats, whisking them headfirst into the basement, where his collaborator grinds their flesh for meat pies to be sold to an unwitting London public.  And singing!

And revenge on the judge who had him shipped off to Australia on false charges, who drove Todd’s wife toward suicide and abducted and raised Todd’s daughter to eventually be his wife.

And singing!

You know, Depp isn’t given much room to act in this film.  His constant scowl is his unchanged heart and his singular emotion throughout.  Bonham Carter gets the larger emotional scape with her doomed love for Todd, her nonplussed villainy, her dreams of love and family, and her genuine duplicity.  And blood.  There’s a lot of blood.  And singing!

The singing isn’t bad, but it’s also not all that good.  I kept wondering what the songs would sound like sung by people who sang more professionally, who knew the material and might bring out of it what was there.  I think that musically, it’s not meant to give you a lot of ringing choruses that are meant to stay in your head, but strange play and counterpoints that work with the ever clever and interesting lyrics.

It’s a musical after all.  Burton-ized.  Dark.  Lurid.  Heaving Victorian bodices.  Big hair.  Bonham Carter and Depp are virtual male/female twins of one another with their giant mops of dark curls.  And Sasha Baron Cohen shows up, a flash of color, in the dark of London.

But you know, I did kind of enjoy it.  Certainly more than I was anticipating.  I’m still trying to figure out why and what and all, but it was not bad, certainly not all bad.  Maybe even good.

Filed under Musicals, Theatrical, Tim Burton

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure

March 4, 2006 by Leave a Comment

Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) movie poster

(1985) dir. Tim Burton
viewed: 03/04/06 Found with some looking in an old box of videos was a copy of Pee-wee’s Big Adventure that I had found many years ago for $5 or something — an old video store copy sent for the glue factory. I have had a fondness for the film, as well as other Tim Burton works (mostly his earlier stuff). These were back in the days when I actually bought videos. I don’t do that anymore really. Very rarely, anyways. But I had been teasing my son that he danced like Pee-Wee Herman and I felt maybe it was about time to show him what that jibe meant.

The film still holds up for what it is. There is an incredibly low-budget quality to it that sort of redeems its “plot”. I mean, there is the plot that Pee-Wee’s bicycle is stolen and he has to find bike. This, of course, takes him on a road trip to the Alamo. I think it’s probably most fun to work with this film in genre, like that of the road movie.

This time, many years since I had last seen it, I was really struck by the sexual identity of Pee-Wee. I mean, I am assuming that most readers are familiar with the sexual indiscretions of Paul Ruebens, the real-life counterpart and his ultimate fall from fame to infamy that he took. Maybe that adds a layer of sexualization or intensifies that mode of viewing in this film, at least nowadays.

Pee-Wee reads as largely asexual. Dottie, his bike store friend, a cute young girl played by Elizabeth Daily (who I have always had a fond spot for), actively seeks a date with Pee-Wee. On more than one occasion he tells her that he is a “rebel” and a “loner” in a mock-serious way that ultimately gets him out of the situation. Another time, he fakes phone-static to pretend he can’t hear her asking him out. In the end, when he acquiesces to a date with her, they are both on their own bicycles, in a very platonic pose.

His appearance, as the classic 98 lbs. weakling is also heavily patted with make-up, both foundation and lipstick. While not feminized, per se, there is an effeminate quality to him.

In one scene, he disguises himself as a woman, with the escaped convict posing as his husband. Pulled over by a police officer, Pee-Wee is ogled and admired as a female. Upon returning to the car, Pee-Wee leans in flirtatiously with the convict, gleefully playing in his “role”.

I don’t know enough about the character or the man to posit exactly what is being intended, though I reckon it’s more playfully ambiguous that clearly codified.

As a film, I still enjoy it, though it’s in many ways a series of gags strung together over a thin plot. Lots of the gags are still funny. The dance sequence is pretty classic. I found myself recalling and waiting for certain moments to unfold as I remembered them and enjoying the punchlines when they came. It’s still pretty fun.

“Tequila!”

Filed under Tim Burton, Video, With the kids

Corpse Bride

February 13, 2006 by Leave a Comment

Corpse Bride (2005) movie poster

(2005) dir. Tim Burton, Mike Johnson
viewed: 02/10/06

I’ve been a fan of Tim Burton’s design style since I first became aware of him from his 1988 film Beetle Juice. I recall seeing some of his design illustrations for that film in a magazine and really liking his whole aesthetic. When The Nightmare Before Christmas came out in 1993, featuring his first foray into feature animation, I was surprised that he didn’t get involved in directing the film. But here, in Corpse Bride he returns, in part I suppose, directorially behind an animated film.

Burton’s visual aesthetic has always been his strongest point. As well, I think that his sense of humor has kept him largely enjoyable through his likable but flawed filmography.

But here, this film feels, to me, like all aesthetic and the rest of it is really almost a paint-by-numbers effort. The film’s greatest charm arises when the scenery moves to the land of the dead. It’s not an incredible step away from Halloweentown from Nightmare, really. And as much verve as composer Danny Elfman can bring can hardly mask how undistinguished his scores and songs are from one another. There is a veneer of design and visual pleasure here, but that doesn’t sustain itself for long.

Ultimately, this is a highly mediocre work, which is a shame, because it looks neat.

Filed under Animation, DVD, Fantasy, Tim Burton, With the kids

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