Last night the Princess and I went to see Alice, Through the Looking Glass, the latest Tim Burton movie. Of course we loved it. Burton is one of the most interesting story-tellers of our time. Did you know he is two years younger than me? And also, like me, he began as a cartoonist and is totally dedicated to the idea that every artist is a surrealist and must exaggerate, elucidate, equivocate, and numerous other things that start with the letter “e” and end with the suffix “ate” simply because that’s how surrealism starts. You notice a little bit of weirdness in real life and blow it all out of proportion with lies and coloring of meaning and relentless “what-iffing?” If you don’t see surrealism in those last two sentences of purple paisley prose… then maybe you can see it visually in Burton’s many masterpieces.
Tim Burton began his legacy as an apprentice Disney animator specializing in stop-motion animation. But he was just another creative nobody like me until the launch of his small-budget monster hit, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.
Of course, any time you can pull in huge profits for little investments, you will have Hollywood executives ramming the heads of their unpaid interns like battering rams against your door so they can get in and throw money at you.
Hence, Batman.
Batman was the first time I actually took notice of Tim. And not just as a director of a film… eventually two films. He was gifted at assembling a cast. And this would work to his advantage as several singular talents attached themselves to him and worked in his movie projects repeatedly.
And his repeated collaboration with Danny Elfman and his music was easily as great a master-stroke of genius as John Williams with Spielberg and Lucas.
He has repeatedly used his movies to describe and rewrite his own life story as a misunderstood genius flubbing horribly in the quest to fit in with a world full of “regular people”.
Poster for the film ‘Edward Scissorhands’ (directed by Tim Burton), 1990. (Photo by Buyenlarge/Getty Images)
His sense of humor, of course, is distinctly and colorfully bizarre.
DSTF-0046r JOHNNY DEPP as Barnabas Collins in Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures DARK SHADOWS, a Warner Bros. Pictures release.
Burton is, just like me, a child of the 70’s. He references things like the old gothic soap opera, Dark Shadows, that were a part of his impressionable youth just as they were mine. He picks stories about things he truly cares about, and that is also just like me.
So, in a rather bizarre coincidence that is entirely appropriate to surrealists, I love any Tim Burton movie simply because it is a Tim Burton movie. He is probably me in an alternate dimension. And as such, I already know I will love his next movie, whatever the heck it is.
The first big surprise came from Muck Lad. Muck Man chose the Friday showing at Valley View Mall because Muck Lad had to work both Saturday and Sunday and couldn’t attend otherwise. His job at the Asian Market making and serving boba tea is the most important factor in his life right now. He needs the money to buy a gaming computer. You know how important that is to a teenager in this day and age. But when the time came to go to the movie, as much as he really wanted to see it, his headache was too much to allow him to go. He needed to stay in the Muck Cave with Muck Dog and play RPG computer games instead.
Yesterday, before the big game, I watched the DVD I bought of Tim Burton’s Golden Globe Award movie, Big Eyes. It is the true-story bio-pic of an artist I loved as a kid, Margaret Keane… though I knew her as Walter Keane.
Catch a Falling Star 