Word: burtons
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...Burton will not let you go so easy into that dark night. The director wants to turn this fairy tale into a full-blooded ghost story--and a total Tim Burton experience. So for this end-of-the-century parable (it's set in 1799), he imports the bats from Batman, the jack-o'-lantern from Nightmare Before Christmas and, as Ichabod Crane, Johnny Depp from Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood. Instead of the bright Halloween hues of the Disney version, Burton gives his film a swankly, dankly desaturated color scheme. And just to make sure he doesn...
Crane's name was his frame: a gangly galoot and, when he fell for buxom Katrina Van Tassel, an easy prey for the burly lads of Sleepy Hollow. In Burton's revision and Depp's incarnation, Crane is a Manhattan constable sent upriver to solve a murder; predating Poe's Auguste Dupin by several decades, he is America's first detective. He is also a troubled soul, carrying literal scars from childhood and memories that roil his sleep. So handsome, so haunted, he proves irresistible to this Katrina (Christina Ricci). Yet Depp bumbles and stumbles, just like the old Ichabod...
...filmed in a studio near London and cast mostly with British actors. At first the accents are jarring; viewers will stop to wonder just when Americans finally learned to speak American. But the presence of Michael Gambon, Miranda Richardson and especially Christopher Lee will tip you to Burton's intent. He is making not an American folktale but a British horror movie--a tribute to the Hammer studio of the late '50s and later, to its Dracula and Frankenstein remakes, to the decorum punctuated by gore, the stake driven into the capacious bosom...
...release of Burton's next film, and his return to directing. Ed Wood told the story of Hollywood's most famous bad director (played by Johnny Depp), who, in the '50s, made a number of awful films, the epitome being the infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space. The film handles Wood's story delicately, never mocking the character but rather focusing on the earnestness that is at the heart of Wood's "best" work...
...Burton returns to more twisted territories with Sleepy Hollow. Working once again with Depp, who this time steps into the role of the idiosyncratic Ichabod Crane (now a detective and not, as readers of the original tale may recall, a schoolteacher), Burton's film looks like yet another plunge into unique style, his personal fantasies that are always so entertaining to the rest of the world. One of the few directors who can be said to have a "stable" of actors (including Depp, Jeffrey Jones and Lisa Marie, among others), Burton has made a name for himself through blockbusters that...