Word: burtonizing
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...Brian Burton's life was turned upside down by a joke. As a composer-producer-DJ working under the name Danger Mouse (often in a mouse costume to ease his stage fright), Burton had a solid career on music's experimental fringe when it hit him: mix the Beatles' White Album with Jay-Z's Black Album, and you get a gray album. "I was cleaning my house at the time," says Burton. "It wasn't my deepest thought ever." Still, he spent three cloistered weeks in his bedroom translating snippets of Beatles music into hip-hop rhythm and synchronizing...
...Suddenly Burton was famous, and not entirely happy about it. The Grey Album didn't just use unlicensed samples from two of the world's most famous artists-it was only unlicensed samples, and the Beatles' label, EMI, is vigilant about enforcing its copyrights. "You couldn't make a more illegal album," says Burton. "When it spread beyond being a little art project, of course EMI came after me." It wasn't just the cease-and-desist business that bothered him. He was also a little put out by the acclaim heaped on his Frankenstein's monster (ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY named...
...Luckily, Burton got a second chance to make an impression on the world's ears. Damon Albarn, the singer-songwriter behind the acclaimed British band Blur and the multiplatinum rap-rock concoction Gorillaz, heard The Grey Album and liked it. "But I loved the metaphor," says Albarn, "the mixing of genres and the idea that you can take past and present and make something futuristic." Albarn summoned Burton to London and quickly hired him to produce Gorillaz's second album, Demon Days, out this week. Albarn says he and Burton had "loads of music" in common. They are also both...
Front runner in the summer sweepstakes is War of the Worlds, for which Steven Spielberg has added his patented parent-and-imperiled-child theme to H.G. Wells' alien-invasion novel, memorably filmed in 1953. Tim Burton has imposed his lovable eccentricity on the Roald Dahl children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with Johnny Depp replacing Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. In 1974, Burt Reynolds starred as the football-playing con in The Longest Yard; now he supports Adam Sandler and Chris Rock in their replay. And if your memory of Herbie, the Disney Love Bug, is as rusty...
...Sometimes a remake can be as fresh as any "original" film. Burton's two Batman films had a dark, loopy grandeur, and David Cronenberg's The Fly turned a routine science-fiction film into a parable of a man facing disintegration (into cancer, AIDS, madness) and fighting for his humanity. Some of Hollywood's all-time terrific films--His Girl Friday, Some Like It Hot, the Bogart Maltese Falcon--were remakes of earlier films. So, let's all go to the movies this summer. We may pay to see the familiar and--guess what?--be astonished. --Reported by Desa Philadelphia...