Post to Blu-ray.com Forum section with irreverent take on Tim Burton.

Although I'm never inclined to entirely trust reviews of films I haven't seen myself, that review honestly doesn't surprise me. I've been seeing trailers for this in front of movies at the theatre for a heck of a long time now, but for whatever reason I haven't been able to get excited about it. Until recently, when a few additional (and mostly frenetic) scenes were added in, the trailer seemed to be geared to entice the audience mostly via amusement with the Frankenstein (or Bride of Frankenstein) references, rather than anything very unique. The "old" Tim Burton--the one who directed "Vincent"--was all about ripping off Edward Gorey, and paying tribute to the twisted and ghastly. Edward Scissorhands seemed to be the transitional film, where he first started turning into the "new" Tim Burton, who was all about pointing out how mean perfect people pick on poor misunderstood souls with pale complexions--And then he even pushed THAT aside to direct everything his fanboys and nostalgically clueless studios thought he "should" direct, which usually means campy, snickering love letters to easy pop-culture references everyone thinks they're clever for throwing about. He hasn't done one of his "own" movies since Mars Attacks, and that was fiffteen years ago. By getting the chance to look back at his roots, now that post-Alice Disney throws money at him for belching, think he wanted to see whether he could still direct Beetlejuice, and from the reviews, think the answer we get is......."No." You can't go home again after Dark Shadows and Corpse Bride.  (If I want late-80's/early-90's Tim, I'll just have to content myself with the "Aladdin" episode of Shelley Duvall's Fairytales.)

The burden of being Tim Burton.

Remembering an interview Daryl Hall once gave where the subject of music superstars who wanted to hire Hall and Oates to produce their records came up. Hall referred to these unnamed singers as "....vampires who want to vampirize your sound.". And there's Tim Burton, enough of a brand name to be hired to Burtonize projects such as the 2001 PLANET OF THE APES, SWEENEY TODD (which was genuinely good, along with the under regarded CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY)) and ALICE IN WONDERLAND. During the past decade, there was also BIG FISH, which I'd like to think of as producer Richard Zanuck encouraging Burton to make an uplifting, non macabre, Oscar-friendly project. And there's the unevenness of DARK SHADOWS, where Burton was apparently expected to treat Dan Curtis' gothic TV/film franchise as THE ADDAMS FAMILY--given Burtonesque treatment by Barry Sonnenfeld two decades ago. What now exists in my short-term memory: Johnny Depp's heroic gravitas, the waste of Helena Bonham Carter (in a role changed from strong female on the TV series to comic lustful drunk) Chloe Grace Moretz and Michelle Pfeiffer, Bella Heathcote looking like a character from Burton's stop-motion and CGI-animated films come to life and Eva Green gamely maneuvering all the film's shifts in tone. Somewhere, the ghost of Dan Curtis weeps as Tim Burton continues a two-film artistic slide which will hopefully end (UPDATE 10/18/12: The slide did end, with FRANKENWEENIE turning out as Burton's best post-SWEENEY TODD film, but suffering at the box office due to being the last in a threesome of animated horror comedies out this summer and fall--and perhaps paying for the sins of DARK SHADOWS too.) with this fall's animated remake of a short film called FRANKENWEENIE (the original was made when Tim Burton was considered subversive and relatively avant-garde by the standards of 1980s Hollywood).