Word: burtons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...budget on a movie whose basic business is consciously to satirize a genre that until recently tended to be low-rent and pretty much self-satirizing. Maybe this is an all too conspicuous waste of precious cinematic resources. But you have to admire everyone's chutzpah: the breadth of Burton's (and writer Jonathan Gems') movie references, which range from Kurosawa to Kubrick; and above all their refusal to offer us a single likable character. Perhaps they don't create quite enough deeply funny earthlings to go around, but a thoroughly meanspirited big-budget movie is always a treasurable rarity...
...White House to the gang in Las Vegas, to the dysfunctional bunch living in a trailer near a small Kansas town, are presented as entirely worthy of zapping; they are all either too dumb or too self-absorbed to warrant salvation. Indeed, the big, slowly dawning joke in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks! is that, unlike Independence Day or any other high-tech disaster movie, most of its vast and starry cast--headed by Jack Nicholson, in dual roles--is not going to be present when the final credits roll...
Keeping his zeal in check would be a big change. Burton, a former insurance salesman who is by turns gregarious and confrontational, has not spared even Socks the cat--"Why are the taxpayers being made to pay for your feline's fan club?"--in raising ethical questions about the Administration. He was one of the first in Congress to suggest that the President might have broken the law and might have lied in his handling of the Whitewater affair. Burton became obsessed with the idea of a cover-up involving Foster, the White House aide and Clinton friend whose death...
Asked about the case today, Burton says it "wouldn't be appropriate" for him to comment while special prosecutor Kenneth Starr is still investigating. Burton's promise to tone down his rhetoric was enough to overcome rumblings among some Republicans, who wanted Speaker Newt Gingrich to disregard Burton's seniority and choose someone else to replace William Clinger, the retiring moderate from Pennsylvania who in the past two years has presided over hearings into Travelgate and Filegate. Burton passed an important test last week. When word got out that his new chief investigator, David Bossie, had procured the Commerce Department...
...President, Burton's role is not all bad news. When a chairman lacks credibility, it's easier for White House spin doctors to dismiss the committee's work as partisan bilge. To prevent that, Burton says, he won't rush to hold hearings on the campaign-finance scandal but will instead spend the next few months investigating. By then he plans to have enough information to make Huang and others squirm at the witness table. If Burton remains true to his new form, the White House could be in for an unpleasant year...