Meryl Says "Hi"

Burtonjuice: The Disney Misfit Years

BURTONJUICE. Our Tim Burton retrospective begins now...
Every Thursday night until we can't take it  no more! 

Last week I rented the Disney documentary "Waking Sleeping Beauty" which I was curious to see again after it's strangely quiet public reception. I really enjoyed the documentary and though it ended like one big long self-aggrandizing commercial for the Magic Kingdom and all they bring to the movies, it's first hour is surprisingly frank about the downward slide of Disney animation in the 70s and 80s and the political tug of wars among the big money executives.

But let's get to the subject. Don't you always forget that Tim Burton started at Disney? I know I do. He never gets a line in this documentary but we do see him briefly twice in the behind the scenes footage while the narrator talks about the generational divide at Disney during the animation studio's near-demise in the 1980s.

Ron Miller knew that Walt's guys were retiring fast. He had to raise a new crop of animators but he was cautious about it. It was this interesting cross generational thing where you still had a few of these legendary artists who were in their 60s and approaching retirement and then a bunch of young people in their 20s who were really really exited and sort of passionate about this medium.

It was thrilling to learn from the masters but there was a feeling that somehow we could be making better films."

Burton doesn't look too happy sitting slack jawed in that tiny cubicle, but that's just his face. Surely the budding filmmaker was excited to be chasing his dreams. Even if his now ultra familiar dreams are far more Gorey lite Gothic than Disney cheerful.

Before his star ascended in the early 80s when two shorts Vincent (1982) and Frankenweenie (1984) gained him a reputation within the industry as a truly distinctive and entertaining filmmaker, he made a handful of very rarely screened shorts. I wish I'd attended the Burton exhibit recently which featured them. Have any of you seen these five?

 

The Island of Doctor Agor (1971) was his first effort at the age of 13. He played Dr Agor. Stalk of the Celery (1979) is a one punchline animated short but you can see Burtonisms especially his love for the mad scientist... though it should be said that Burton's ouevre also includes subversions of this trope, the benevolent (if still mad) scientist. Doctor of Doom (1979) has Burton crashing a party and creating a monster that he sends out to "destroy all beauty." Luau (1982) is a lengthy short that is unfortunately kind of unwatchable on YouTube but it telegraphs a bit about Burton's oddball sense of humor though it also seems a little hornier than his subsequent work. He plays a disembodied head that's the "most powerful force in the universe" and though he tries to turn people into zombies, he doesn't have much luck. At least at first... I gave up 12 minutes in but not before I understood his affinity for Ed Wood. Burton also made a version of the oft- filmed fairy tale Hansel & Gretel (1982) -- which is hard to find -- with the great production designer Rick Heinrichs as his producer. They met at Disney and kept working together.

 

Oscar winner Rick Heinrichs and Tim Burton at work on Vincent (1982)

It only took their collaboration 17 years later to win an Oscar (Heinrichs for Sleepy Hollow) though Tim Burton has famously never been nominated as Best Director. His sole personal nomination was for the animated feature Corpse Bride.

Where were we? Oscar trivia is so distracting. Oh yes, Vincent (1982). We love it. Disney, rather famously, did not. Too dark!

My favorite favorite favorite part...

He likes to experiment on his dog Abercrombie
in the hopes of creating a terrible zombie.

Vincent is just wonderful isn't it? A.

Vincent's Tim Burton's perfect woman?
Before we move on to Frankenweenie (The Original) next Thursday tell me if I'm crazy but little Vincent's hallucinated dead wife...

He knew he'd been banished to the tower of doom
where he was sentenced to spend the rest of his life.
alone with the portrait of his beautiful wife."

She looks SO familiar. A pinch of Lisa Marie? Two cups of Corpse Bride... a scoop of Helena Bonham-Carter in Alice in Wonderland? What Burton woman does this most remind you of?

What's your favorite part of Vincent? And do you think it's too easy to retroactively project meaning on to the early work of famous filmmakers?

 

Girl Gone Wild

Madonna's "Girl Gone Wild"... I can't stop watching it! 

But why do I think all male models are Colin Firth's rejected hustler from A Single Man? I swear I see him everywhere. Or is that actually Jon Katajarena? Madonna and Tom Ford do like to share collaborators.

It's great when stars can play on past triumphs without exactly repeating them. This song/video has flashes of previous Madonna classics like "Bad Girl" (the smoking, the hair) and "Express Yourself" (Madonna in silhouette and chains) a verbal reference to "Like a Prayer", but it also recalls the Sex book / "Justify My Love" era as well which I was not at all expecting given the complicated fall out from that particular Madonna era.  

Best of all is the confident but not lazy sparseness that suggests "Human Nature" and yet it's all still very "Girl Gone Wild". Wouldn't it be crazy if movies were as sexual as music videos? The MPAA would die.  A-

Distant Relatives: The Bicycle Thief and The Road

Robert here w/ Distant Relatives, exploring the connections between one classic and one contemporary film. This week the last in a three part series on how one classic film can have many children.

Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road will most likely always be remembered as a great novel first and a somewhat well received film second. But whatever your opinion ofthe film, and the consensus seems to be that it could have benefited from a little more Bicycle Thief-esque neo-realisism (indeed it's the only of the three "children" of The Bicycle Thief that we've looked at, that isn't heavily influenced by that style), it's hard to ignore the relationship between the two films as two tales of a father and a son wandering through the remnants of humanity.

 

But before we get into the father/son dynamic, it's worth noting that the heightened reality of post-apocalyptic cinema and the unavoidable realism of wartime pictures (and by that I mean films shot in a country during wartime or immediate post-wartime, not romantically shot prestige pictures) are fascinatingly similar. More after the jump...

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Hit Me With Your Best Shot: "Ladyhawke"

Time for Season 3 of Hit Me With Your Best Shot. Wednesday evenings.

from left to right: Goliath, Navarre (Rutger Hauer) and Isabeau (Michelle Pfeiffer's stunt double)

I thought we'd kick off this season with a personal favorite from the 80s. I use the word favorite emphatically because in many ways, Ladyhawke (1985) is a movie with a confusing relationship to objective quality. It's both great and bad, the score arguing that it's a feature that absolutely should not exist outside of 1985 while the mythic story fights for timelessness. The sound (Oscar-nominated) has wonderful details, maximizing the earthly details of fluttering wings, wolf howls and horse hooves while also embracing the transcendently romantic voices (Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer) but it's marred by jarring score cues that take you out of the action and weird post-production "comedy" vocal work from extras. It feels, at least for its first half, like it's a movie with several authors and endless studio interference from people who didn't believe in a romantic fantasy epic in a time long before fairy tales were hot commodities and sword and sorcery epics were the furthest thing from bankable. So, would you laugh at me if I claimed I thought it was thisclose to being a classic? People are always reediting the Star Wars prequels to try to make them into the movies they should have been but the fantasy with the easiest fix to nudge it from punchline to greatness is Ladyhawke.

The one area where Ladyhawke can lay legitimate claim to greatness without lengthy conditional explanations is in the cinematography of three-time Oscar winner Vittorio Storaro (most famous for Apocalypse Now and various Warren Beatty epics). Many films throughout history have used sunsets and sunrises for their sheer beauty but Ladyhawke's reliance on light is more than vanity; it's storytelling.

Pfeiffer's beauty and Hauer's pain after the jump

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