Best of 2024

Best I Can Come Up With For The Year List

Too much life going on, had an extremely limited viewing selection this year, a more mainstream list than I’d like. In ascending order, the best of what I saw:

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice (Tim Burton, 2024)

And I'll never have that recipe again

How to do a proper sequel? Used to be a silly question but in this age of endless remakes, reboots, recycling in one form or another it's almost become a major artistic question, if art can or has ever been considered major (was there a time in the '60s and '70s, or were we just fooling ourselves?).

Superhero movies

Ubermensch

You could start a discussion on superhero movies at any point-- from the first Zorro movie in the '20s to Marvel Studios' 2011 Captain America-- but in my book the genre properly began in 1933, with a superpowered vegetarian.

The Flash (Andy Muschietti, 2023)

Flashback

Warning: plot discussed in explicit detail

Was The Flash a waste of time? I don't know

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, Snowden

Out of joint 

Call Tim Burton's latest his idea of an X-Men movie--a group of super-powered mutants aliens whatever, this time children hiding from a hostile world.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder)

Bruce and Clark's excellent adventure 

Let's get a minor issue out of the way first: Zack Snyder's latest atrocity is, well, atrocious--basically an adaptation (the fourth if you include Christopher Nolan's trilogy) of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, to the point of quoting images (pearl necklace pulling apart*), lines of dialogue ("I believe you"), entire sequences (the famed faceoff between our eponymous crimefighter and the Big Blue Schoolboy).

Big Eyes (Tim Burton, 2014)

Small wonder

I can't see Burton doing this for big bucks. Unlike say Dark Shadows (which I did like, more for the visual texture than script or storytelling (the actors seemed to be having fun)) or the even less defensible Alice in Wonderland (which I also liked, if only because it's not as solemn as its apparent role model, Peter Jackson's endless Lord of the Rings movies (low bar I know)), but with Big Eyes Burton returns to his longtime fascination with marginal Americana, and chooses for his subject a once-notorious, now largely forgotten chapter in the country's pop (I hesitate to say 'art') history.  

Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton, 2001)

In response to the latest installment of an ape-old franchise, an old post from 2001:  

Monkey pee, monkey do

I regret to report that despite my better judgement and capacity (admittedly limited) for logical thinking, I enjoyed Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes. It's a true guilty pleasure--I experienced pleasure and felt extremely guilty about it. It's a piece of ordure, by most standards; there's no reasonable way to explain my liking it--the screenplay doesn't make sense; the dialogue, when it isn't trying for lame one-liners, is leaden; characters are introduced and dropped, new ones inserted with nary a care for coherence; the ending cries out for a reshoot, maybe even an entire sequel that improves on this misshapen mess.

And yet I like this film. I feel affection for the 1968 original with its shock moments (the manhunt in the fields, the first spoken words of defiance, the 'surprise' ending) and Charlton Heston's inimitable straight-man performance, but I've always thought the premise silly (you land in a planet where they speak English and don't think it's Earth?) and the attempts at social commentary equally silly (Rod Serling, God help us, was the kind of earnestly profound scriptwriter the Manunuri would have approved of, except he wrote science fiction).

I consider Burton a more gifted fantabulist than the original's director, Franklin J. Schaffner (though Schaffner is admittedly the better storyteller); this Planet has the kind of perverse heedlessness only possible in an intensely personal filmmaker. Burton quickly takes on racism, sexism, fanaticism--the usual targets of social satire (and of Pierre Boulle's original novel), and as quickly drops them--possibly because the filmmaker has the attention span of a six-year-old, and focuses only on matters that interest him.

In this case, the apes. Complaining about Mark Wahlberg, Estelle Warren and Kris Kristofferson's almost uniformly leaden performances is beside the point, I think; Burton lavishes all his attention and love on the simians, not the humans. The makeup is a definite improvement over the original's--you see the actors' features more, see them as distorted versions of themselves, as if through a funhouse mirror. Their movements are surprisingly eloquent--Lisa Marie as Nova sways and sashays like a vamp, only one with prehensile toes; Michael Clark Duncan as Colonel Attar stands tall and impassive, a pillar of military discipline (decked out in the softest glossy fur); and David Warner as Senator Sandar is reassuringly statesmanlike. Even Charlton Heston, playing General Thade's father on his deathbed, is instantly, startlingly recognizable--you feel muleheaded conservatism and paranoia rising from him like a fever heat.

Of this vivid, varied menagerie, three stand out: Paul Giamatti as Limbo, a craven slave trader, has the most ghoulish, skull-like face (he's Burton's designated Beetlejuice figure, only without the magic powers), and all the best lines; Tim Roth as General Thade is all flaring nostrils and psychopathic glare (Roth seems liberated by heavy makeup--the way Olivier was in Richard III, or Welles in Touch of Evil--to create a villain more outrageously evil than would be possible using their own faces).

Then there's Helena Bonham-Carter as Ari, a liberal ape intellectual--daughter of Senator Sandar, she's a spoiled and pompous and faintly silly dilettante who makes all kinds of noises about ape-human equality. Yet through the course of the story she grows (the only character in the entire film to actually do so) into her convictions and, in the end, wears said convictions with genuine dignity.
 
And--Burton's best joke in the film--she's totally, helplessly, hopelessly in love with Mark Whalberg as Leo (the picture's alpha male). Bonham Carter is a beauty and has a vibrant glow in costume dramas like A Room With a View or Wings of the Dove, but I've never really warmed up to her as an actress--maybe because I never felt she was particularly passionate about anything or anyone. Decked out in ape makeup, with mouth distended and hair extended over  cheekbones, we're forced to stare at her huge brown eyes and they're stunning. Bonham-Carter easily outshines Estella Warren, a reputed model, who does have undeniable appeal--both on prominent display--but is otherwise as disposable as soiled toilet paper. When Ari looks with those melting, Spaniel eyes at Leo you want to slap the idiot upside of the head for not noticing. Their "affair," more suggestion than anything concrete--a series of smoky stares and uncomfortable silences--is perversely all the more exciting for being so understated. And (skip to the next paragraph if you haven't seen the movie) the quick buss Leo finally grants Ari crackles with more electricity (is, I'm willing to bet everything plus a truckload of bananas, possibly the reason why Burton agreed to do the film) than all the clashing armor that precedes it.

  
I admit it--I fell for Ari as hard as she fell for Leo, and think Leo's too stupid to realize how unworthy he is of her love (or of how richly he deserves the bleak 'surprise' ending Burton tacks on--the third after the 1968 version and Pierre Boulle's and easily the silliest of the three). I still can't take either the original or this version’s take on racism, sexism, fanaticism and all that jazz seriously, but on the subject of sexual tolerance and possibility of interspecies sex? I'm sold; I'm sold all the way.

First published in Businessworld 8.10.01

Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992)

"Life's a bitch; now so am I."

Those immortal words were first spoken on the big screen for the first time on 16 June 1992, and while they haven't exactly set the world on fire, they have scattered sparks over the many years since. They've certainly stayed with me.

(WARNING: plot points of Tim Burton's Batman Returns (1992) discussed in close detail)

Seven Psychopaths, The Master, Frankenweenie

A Few Good Men

Martin McDonagh's Seven Psychopaths is cinematic Cherry Coke--sweet and tasty, but basically lacking emotional nourishment. It's not just as previous critics have noted that this is recycled Tarantino, it's Tarantino recycled at his least expressive, early enough in his career that Roger Avary still shared writing credit, and the pose Tarantino struck (itself secondhand) was so cool it started a fashion trend in filmmaking, hence the hideous term "Tarantinoesque." 

Well, this film is "Tarantinoesque," and that's a good and bad thing. Good in that on several counts McDonagh writes sharper, funnier dialogue, or at least sharper, funnier punchlines, and serves up twists every bit as witty and entertaining as said punchlines, not to mention the original source. Plus, unlike Tarantino, and as evidenced by the oft-promised shootout that ends the picture, McDonagh seems to know a thing or two about staging, shooting, and cutting action. 

Otherwise, it's largely disposable (there's a subplot about a Vietnam psychopath that's so transparently a bid to transcend the label 'disposable')--except for Christopher Walken. Walken's psychopath seems to linger in memory because he seems to be the only character in the movie to actually care about something or someone, and we can't help but respond to that in this otherwise emotionally arid wasteland. What makes his performance even better is that he owns a pair of eyes more frightening than even Lucifer's. In Rosemary's Baby the Devil glared through several pounds of prosthetic fur and a satanic pair of contacts; Walken without wearing even an ounce of makeup much less contacts can gaze effortlessly back and you know who's gonna blink first. A pair of tired, loving, psychopathic eyes pouched in a cadaverously pale face--what's not to like?

The Matter

I came away from Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master thinking it's a collection of superb film moments--sequences, even--that don't really come together much. Anderson proudly and famously never attended a class for scriptwriting and I suspect this creates the tense energy in his films--he's basically a high-wire act, trying his best not to break his fool neck. But it also means a lot of floundering about, and sometimes you suspect it's the floundering audiences come to watch in an Anderson (Paul Thomas, not W.S.) and not the actual film--that, and the chance to maybe see him break his fool neck. 

Oh, but what an act! Overhead shots of the ocean swirling behind a ship; a group of Filipino workers chasing a man across a vast dusty field; Joaquin Phoenix draped lazily past the boundary of a ship's railing, threatening to fall over and not caring; Phoenix later in the film, pressing his lips longingly to the windowpane (he appears to be trying to break through--to what? And why?). Anderson knows how to whip up a striking image, knows how present it--big, baleful, portentous--on the big screen (and I mean big--65 mm on traditional film stock, instead of the standard 35 mm digital video), knows to the microsecond how long to hold an image: long enough that you begin to wonder if you aren't perhaps missing some extra layer of meaning in what you're seeing, but not so long that you start to suspect maybe he's faking it with all the pregnant pauses.

It's not about Scientology--well, not directly about Scientology, which takes a few glancing blows to the rib; it's more about the dynamics that exist within a group not unlike the Scientologists, complete with fanaticists, doubters, and those that vacillate back and forth between the two extremes. And it's about the uneasy friendship that develops between Phoenix's Freddie Quell and the cult's founder Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in a low-key yet authoritative performance). Most of all it's about what two men--one a wandering alcoholic, the other the multi-million dollar founder of a cult religion--have in common, and the answer is unsettlingly simple: both arrive at their respective positions in life (near ruin, great success) through hard struggle, and they will respond with rejection, anger, even violence, to anyone who threatens to topple that position. They recognize the same angry, fearful man inside each other, and they can't help but acknowledge that man, even lend him a kind of uneasy support. 

Is it a great film? Hell no; least I don't think so. Anderson could go so much further if he actually knew what he was doing; then again, if he knew what he was doing, he wouldn't be the special flavor that is Anderson--Paul Thomas, not W.S.

A Boy and His

Talk about yet another unconscious, instinctive artist, Tim Burton's Frankenweenie is an expansion of the live-action short of the same name. Presumably Burton had his reasons for turning to stop-motion for the remake: more control over the overall look and the characters' gestures, a stylization that helps sell the sweet-natured premise (which is arguably too sweet, though Disney deemed the original short too frightening for kids) and, well, stop-motion don't need no reason--it's just awesome all its own. 

The film starts with a short film that somehow manages not just to suggest its handmade nature (this in a $40 million Hollywood feature), but one with crude yet innovative special effects--pterodactyl swinging on a string, menacing cardboard buildings; toy artillery firing styrofoam muzzle flash; infantrymen made of cheap green plastic (what boy growing up back then didn't have an odd platoon or two forgotten in his toy chest somewhere?).

The story isn't much more than that: boy loves dog, boy loses dog, boy resurrects dog using recycled household appliances (our protagonist Victor improvises with a ironing board as operating table, an aquarium as battery, and a kite as lightning rod). It's Frankenstein recast as a iconic suburban creation myth, and it's arguably the film's money sequence, its reason for being--all throughout Burton's career there's been an uneasy tension between idyllic suburban home and doomed Gothic melancholy, and as shown in his short Vincent he's not averse to spoofing either sensibilities. With this film's first half, he's finally stitched both into a perfectly monstrous creation that lurches about the attic with gleeful abandon. 

And then there's the rest of the film. After Victor creates the dog, Burton doesn't seem to know what to do next--he fills the picture with busy plotting and made-up conflicts that don't really threaten the status quo (a Gothic child growing up in an essentially benign suburban community), or at the last minute tosses in sketchy characters that shake things up without really clarifying why they do so, though even this has its moments--love the shout-out to Godzilla, and better yet, the classic animated short Bambi vs. Godzilla. The narrative really regains its footing only after the windmill sequence, after which all is right with the world. 


Which doesn't really mean the ruination of the film. Burton was never a consistent or especially skillful storyteller; I suspect that he spent years and millions of dollars to do Planet of the Apes, for example, as an excuse to shoot the moment when man and ape kiss, sending a sexual charge straight up your spine. I suspect he did Frankenweenie to pour all of Disney's considerable resources into producing that creation myth--expressing his love for his long-ago animated short, for the James Whale original, for the neverending tension between Goth and suburb in his life. Everything else was pretty much an afterthought. 

10.29.12
 

Michael Jackson, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton, 2005), A.I. (Steven Spielberg, 2001)

Talk about strange developments--saw a broadcast of Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) recently and two things struck me stronger than ever before: that the dramatic center of the film belonged to Charlie (Freddie Highmore), from whom this version of Roald Dahl's book rightly takes its name, and that Johnny Depp is basically channeling Michael Jackson:

You think?
 
I know I'm hardly the first one to notice the similarities, but in my own blinkered way I've started to realize just how deliberate and, well, inspired the choice may be. Burton and Depp tap into Jackson's lurid reputation to give their protagonist the kind of subtext Gene Wilder's Wonka was never able to exploit. Of course the earlier version had Wilder, no mean asset, who could play an infinite variety of lunatics to perfection better than Depp ever can--but beyond the actor's considerable abilities no, no tabloid unwholesomeness in that earlier effort.

This film's funnier this way, considering recent events; one thinks more and more about parallels to events in Jackson's life, and how they add resonance to Wonka's own story--Wonka's factory standing in for Jackson's Neverland; Wonka and Jackson's desire for secrecy competing against a pathological need for attention; the five Golden Ticket winners enjoying their tour, at any moment in danger of being invited to a sleepover at Wonka's private quarters...

And, finally, a comic justification for Burton's addition of Wonka's father, always to my mind the film's weakest element. Of course a man will suffer severe trauma, will develop into an eccentric (to put it kindly) introvert when the biggest single adult influence in his childhood is Dracula, or Joe Jackson; I for one am not surprised.

And it's not as if Burton's caricature were totally unkind. He grants Jack--sorry, Wonka--a certain amount of closure, plus the possibility of a surrogate family. It's the kind of benign ending one might have wished for Jackson, too.

Also saw again after many years (and much urging from fans whose opinions I respect) Steven Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). I'd dismissed it as a Spielbergian botch of Kubrick's (Philip K. Dick's?) ideas. This time around the film seems much more poignant (if still far from perfect), easily Spielberg's most ambitious and troubling work.

The film's first third (funny how Kubrick's projects--2001, A Clockwork Orange, and Full Metal Jacket come most readily to mind--tend to break down into sections of threes) is the most emotionally wrenching: a dark, domestic comedy about the sibling rivalry between boy and robot for mom's affections (come to think of it, aside from Lolita and The Shining Kubrick has done precious little drama or comedy, domesticwise--it's almost always genre fare). Here Spielberg to my mind most closely hews to the look and tone of Kubrick's films, at least in coldly recording the various emotional dislocations being inflicted on the hapless Swintons. The abandonment in the forest that climaxes this first third makes one think of the tale of Hansel and Gretel--a parent's mixed feelings of love and repulsion resulting in a scene as traumatic as anything Spielberg (or Kubrick for that matter) has ever done.

The middle third is said to be Spielberg's take on A Clockwork Orange. I don't quite see the similarity--despite the striking production designs, Kubrick's vision of future England displayed a sterility and desolation the other can't quite match. Spielberg may be aiming for a dystopia, at least where robots are concerned, but what I see here is a vibrant, colorful tomorrow, filled with technological marvels. The man can't help being what he is, I suppose; even in Minority Report (2002), where he relies heavily on Janusz Kaminski's gray color palette to make the future look unappealing, there are 3-D ads that call you by name, a marvel of an electric car that assembles all around you, and (lovely touch) creepy carnivorous flowers that nip at your fingertips. Spielberg, unlike Kubrick, has a difficult time evoking despair; there's just too much restless energy flowing out of his filmmaking, where Kubrick can sap the juice out of one's optimism through the sheer architectonic power of his images.

I questioned the high level of intelligence of the existing mechas in my article on the film. Actually, I may have missed the more complex view Spielberg and Kubrick had in mind--these robots are smart, very smart, capable of a high level of logical reasoning; what the film's diminutive hero David (Haley Joel Osment) possibly represents is a robot able to jump tracks, use imagination, connect seemingly disparate elements to form a cohesive whole. The heart of this segment--of the film's debate on what constitutes genuine intelligence, I think--is the "Dr. Know" sequence where in the space of seven questions (three of which are wasted) David manages not just to track down his Blue Fairy, but also point up the qualitative difference between his mind and other robots'. David's companion Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) may provide crucial information (where Dr. Know can be found, how much each question costs), but it's clearly David who drives the interrogation--bringing up the subject of "fairy tales," suggesting it's possible that what they're looking for is both "fact" and "fairy tale," formulating the final, crucial question that gives them their first real clue.

Later Gigolo Joe brings up a disturbing possibility--what if what David's looking for isn't real? In the face of doubt, David professes faith ("My mommy doesn't hate me! Because I'm special! And unique! Because there's never been anyone like me before, ever!")--something robots are supposedly incapable of doing. Joe replies to David: "She loves what you do for her, as my customers love what it is I do for them." Sharp observation, but that's all it is: an observation, a distillation of what he's seen and known.

Joe does conclude with these words: "We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us. That's why they hate us, and that is why you must stay here, with me." Joe turns out to be prophetic, and seems to display some evidence of affection, or need for David's companionship (true Joe is programmed to show affection--he's a love 'bot, after all--but David is presumably not in the category of clients he's supposed to show affection to). Which brings us back to my original objection, or question, or whatever: just how special is David, and why does he represent an advance in artificial intelligence?

The middle third climaxes with the presentation of the story's ostensible final solution--a solution David ultimately rejects. The last third begins with yet another of Kubrick's 'magical journeys' (think 2001), here through time, not space. On my first viewing I was unhappy with the possibility that David will hibernate through his tedious trip on low batteries; this time I managed to ascertain that David is conscious, and will be for for a possibly very long time before he runs out of batteries (But what happened to his DAS, or Damage Avoidance System, and his ability to find creative solutions? Do they just run out, like the batteries?).

As for the ending (please skip this paragraph if you haven't seen the film)--yes it's sad, tragic even, but I'd love to have seen Kubrick's take. According to Spielberg, Kubrick wanted to produce the film with him to direct, and I'd love to have seen more of Kubrick's influence (of this scene, at least). I know Kubrick intended for Strauss to play in the background (did he intend the ending to mimic so closely the final scene of 2001?), but knowing Kubrick and his handling of drama and accompanying music (see, oh, the finale of Paths of Glory, the farewell scene between Humbert and his beloved in Lolita, the climactic duel in Barry Lyndon) he would most likely have handled it in a different manner--the emotions of the scene as merely an element (a disciplined element) of a precisely composed whole, and not threatening to overwhelm everything as it does here. As mentioned before, I suspect Spielberg despairs of ever doing despair properly.

Sweeney Todd (Tim Burton, 2007)

Attend the tale

The old joke about opera is that if you cut a soprano open song and not blood would issue forth; the joke in Burton's latest is that here it's the other way around, though for a moment or two there's doubt. Stephen Sondheim, arguably the best lyricist and composer in modern musical theater--my favorite anyway, within the limited range of my knowledge on the subject (never mind that atrocious British creator of large-scale McMusicals about cats, phantoms, Vietnamese prostitutes, and whatnot)--has been treated what may be his finest big-screen adaptation yet, by a fellow pop iconoclast working on what may be the artist's best-known work: Sweeney Todd, his 1979 musical about a psychotic barber (Len Cariou in the original Broadway production, Johnny Depp on film) who cuts clients' throats and with the help of the neighborly Mrs. Lovett (Angela Lansbury on Broadway, Helena Bonham-Carter on film) turns them into meat pies. Sondheim, Burton, Burton Sondheim; may the slashing begin.

Burton's film begins with a series of swooping shots of Victorian London; one might be forgiven for thinking he's simply zooming in on a series of drawings, but they shift with every change of perspective in the camera's movement, they look more like diorama cut-outs than mere flat sketches. I couldn't help but compare the art to Eddie Campbell's work in From Hell, his and Alan Moore's fictional take on Jack the Ripper--ironic, because Campbell's drawings aren't exactly like the usual notions of Victorian art; they're black-and-white, they're rough, they don't glance at London with modestly averted eyes but stare hard at its horrors like a documentary filmmaker. Burton's camera levels a similarly unflinching gaze at images considerably more stylized, if no less horrific. This is the way to use CGI, not as some means of showing the impossible in a flashy manner (in effect, turning the impossible into the boringly digital), but as a way of realizing specific visual goals--in this case bringing two-dimensional illustrations to spatially profound life.

If this is a mock opera about a butcher, it's I suppose only fitting that Burton (reputedly with Sondheim's approval) performed minor surgery, cutting out entirely the one song I remember best ("The Ballad of Sweeney Todd"), reducing considerably one of its funniest numbers ("A Little Priest"), and removing parts of one song that lifts an already dark musical to the level of Swiftian savagery ("God, That's Good!"). This is perhaps a diminished Todd, a simplified Todd (I confess I've never seen an actual production), the offspring of a lesser Todd; I submit that it's as much Burton's Todd now as it is Sondheim's, and that the cuts and changes only serve to allow the cadaver--sorry, creation--to more easily slip into the mantle of Burton's peculiar sensibility.

Hence, instead of a beefy Cariou or George Hearn as Todd, a fragile Depp in Bride of Frankenstein makeup and 'do; instead of a dotty Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett, a doll-like Bonham-Carter, singing in a bright warble. Depp and Bonham-Carter are not Broadway belters with mighty voices, able to send melody tumbling to the rafters; instead they're introverted mannequins, meant to respond in giant close-up to every twitch of Burton's myriad strings. Depp in particular doesn't seem to be singing the songs so much as he's performing them, using them as his only means of cracking open Todd's glowering demeanor, to peer into the massive depression festering inside (you can see the cracks in his pale piecrust of a brow from the strain of holding it all together). Burton plunks this Todd firmly on his trophy shelf of brooding visionaries: he's an Ed Wood with a homicidal streak; an Edward Scissorhands with considerably less impulse control; a Batman with a worrisome taste for straight razors.

It's fascinating how Burton revels in visual textures. From the cardboard-and-modeling-clay set of the miniature town in Beetlejuice (1988) to the frozen zoo statues in Batman Returns (1992) to the gelatinous bottled brains of the invading aliens in Mars Attacks! (1996); each and every Burton film offers a moment--maybe more--where one can marvel at the shape and surface of sometimes vast, sometimes toylike, sometimes vast and toylike objects.

More and more, though, Burton's been exploring how textural details can suggest emotional states--thus, Todd's furrowed brow indicate forces barely kept in check; thus, the gleaming pavement he kneels on (the camera suddenly craning upwards to turn cobbled street into stony wall, the despairing Todd hanging from said wall) implies the unyielding nature of his circumstances. There's the endlessly varied behavior of blood echoing the endlessly varied behavior of dying men, the crimson juice spurting, spitting, fountaining out of vein or artery depending on the victim's temperament--how it drops from a slashed neck in a rich red curtain, or gurgles out a puncture wound like thick stew. And then there's Todd, looking again and again into a cracked mirror, the fractured glass reflecting the fractures of his own psyche.

Beyond inserting mere details Burton devotes entire sequences into making his point. In "A Little Priest" Lovett leads Todd (in a scene Burton may have borrowed from Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961)) from window to window to window to peer at people, soothe him, persuading him to her point of view. We're implicated as well; the camera assumes Todd's vantage, gazing through flawed panes at the distorted, two-legged creatures outside while he talks of them as if they were--well, meat.

In a later scene Todd ponders his barber's chair, tinkers with it, starts adding gears and cogs and clockwork to its underside with an accelerating sense of purpose. It's the standard-issue hero-at-work sequence; like Batman with his Batmobile or Ichabod Crane with his portable forensic analysis kit (Sleepy Hollow, 1999), or Edward with his snipping blades, Todd uses intellect or intuition or talent to work the problem--here the problem of building a device that will quickly and efficiently send a dead body into the basement below.

(The bodies dropping from the second floor are in the play, of course, but people who've seen both onstage productions and this film claim that Burton has added the extra aural detail of the corpse's head thudding into the basement below. Burton, ever-enamored of mannequin figures and toylike objects in most if not all his films, points out the ultimate obscenity: that our bodies, bereft of life and soul, are little more than sacks of meat--mannequins just as capable as their wooden counterparts of making a firm crunch! when landing on a stone floor.)

Putting all in context, Burton's Todd is yet another one of his misunderstood artists, this time a practitioner of the art of homicide, and the film is yet another of Burton's meditations on what it means to be such an artist, to attempt to create art in the face of a vulgar, uncaring world. His Todd creates scarlet-soaked masterpieces no one is meant to see save us (we are witnesses thanks entirely to the privileged lenses of Burton's camera). His Todd is a sensibility in development: born out of trauma, grown big and strong in exile, razor sharp in intensity and intent, able to improvise as necessary. When Todd finally realizes the full demands of his field of endeavor, when he finally becomes aware of the extent and consequence of his thirst of vengeance, when he--in effect--learns all there is to learn about the nature of his art, we are with him as he sits brokenly, like a marionette with cut strings, awaiting final judgment.

(First published in Businessworld,1/18/08)