Tim Burton was certainly an imaginative director back when he first started working in features. Kicking off his feature career with Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (which also kick-started Paul Reubens’ screen career and helped launch his TV show Pee-Wee’s Playhouse), an odd but entertaining film about a man-child whose…
Director Tim Burton has a filmography that spans nearly 30 years, even more than that when you take his early short films into account, and each of his films however varied their content and subject matter are unarguably his. The end credits for Big Eyes, which chronicles the story of painter Margaret Keane and her husband Walter …
All the highlights of the news from yesterday with stories on Jack O’Connell officially cast in Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote and NBC orders five more episodes of Marry Me.
All the highlights of the news from yesterday with stories on Liam Neeson and John Slattery join the cast of Ted 2 and NBC developing single-camera comedy based on Real Genius.
Batman Returns (1992) Cast: Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer Director: Tim Burton Country: USA | UK Genre: Action | Adventure Official Site: Here…
Almost thirty years ago, Disney famously (or rather infamously) gave a then little known animator, Tim Burton, his walking papers. Disney executives, unhappy with the time, effort, and more importantly, money spent on Burton’s live-action short, Frankenweenie, saw no future in continuing any kind of relationship with a filmmaker executives perceived as non-commercial. They were wrong, of course. Audiences responded to Burton’s brand of Gothic-inspired, horror-inflected, off-kilter filmmaking for the better part of three decades (the occasional misfire notwithstanding). Never to leave an early, not-quite realized project alone, Burton resurrected Frankenweenie as a feature-length, black-and-white, stop-motion animated film, unsurprisingly strong visually, but just as unsurprisingly weak narratively.
Tim Burton’s latest animated oddity heralds a return to form for the director. Although he distracted himself with big-budget remakes over the years — many of which failed to resonate with viewers — Frankenweenie is a welcome return to the Burton of old.
Expanding on a concept conceived back in 1984, Frankenweenie has gone from a 30-minute project to a feature-length film lensed in glorious black and white — an homage to the horror influences of his childhood.
Dark Shadows is a film of dry charms and wet failures, a movie where the quiet tone and sly humor is doused by the writ-large panache of its uncomfortably bawdy humor and misplaced epic canvas. There is a very wry, gothic Burtonesque homage to the ‘60s-era cult classic TV series struggling to break free from the more dominant, equally-Burtonesque, quasi sex comedy-cum-haunted house actioner. To say the film is tonally discordant is being far more polite than the film itself is.
Tim Burton movies have become something of a joke recently, and not without good reason. For the last decade or so, he’s been more hit and miss than ever before, struggling to regain the creative stride he one had. For every great film he knocks out of the park like Big Fish or Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, he churns out a disaster like Alice in Wonderland. I’ve long defended Burton as a director who made a lot of good movies and still does, but only when he really cares. A film like Alice in Wonderland reeks of just taking on a project for a paycheck and to keep busy, whereas a deeply personal film like Big Fish becomes a sort of accidental masterpiece. So when he gets to do something like Dark Shadows, which has him returning to his more grounded period work of his earlier career, and is apparently a passion project for him, where does it land? The unfortunate truth is that it falls into the misfire category.
Tim Burton’s Batman is a dark and more mature depiction of the character than seen in previous incarnations, which has set a standard that still lasts to this day. Forgoing the usual campy nature of the genre, Burton creates an eerie story showing the battle between two deeply disturbed opponents.