Word: craned
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...years the tale has kept children awake and atremble--or lulled them to sleep with Washington Irving's drolly orotund style. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is still a bedtime staple in tonier households, and with its Headless Horseman hurling a grimacing pumpkin at the head of Ichabod Crane, the story helped create the American giddying-up of Halloween as a funny fright night. But like so many old fables, Sleepy Hollow is chiefly remembered in its Disney version. That 1958 cartoon short, a genial mix of comedy and anxiety, took its tone from the voice of its narrator: Bing...
...just makes you hope that someday, you'll be close to director like that. When Burton first cast Michael Keaton as Batman, people were like, Mr. Mom as Batman, Come on! But I think Keaton is now regarded as the best Batman ever... and when you think about Ichabod Crane, in the novel, he's this gangly, thin, gawky, awkward-looking man with a big nose and big ears. In the novel, Christina Ricci (Katrina Van Tassel) flirts with him to make me jealous and to get my character to marry her, and it works; Brom ends up marrying...
...cartoon, the traditional tale is set in Sleepy Hollow, a small New York suburb, in 1799. A headless horseman haunts the outskirts of the town and chops off people's heads in revenge for having lost his own --or so goes the rumor in town. When lanky, schoolteaching Ichabod Crane comes to town, alienating the locals with his intellectual pretentiousness, he scoffs at the legend and further ruffles burly townsman Brom Bones' feathers by flirting with his girlfriend, Katrina Van Tassel. Riding home after being rebuffed by Katrina at a quilting party one night, Ichabod begins to take the town...
...plot diverges markedly from the original, but one of the most notable differences from Irving's tale, and one that seems to yield further plot divergence, comes with Burton's casting of Johnny Depp as Ichabod Crane. The gawky schoolteaching Ichabod of the novel and cartoon becomes an incredibly attractive, law-practicing heartthrob. This Ichabod, as opposed to the weird-looking schlepp in the book, is squeamish but admirable, cowardly but endearing. And while he tries his hardest to temper his hunkiness by acting nevous and jumpy (which definitely elicits some giggles), Johnny can't help but be adorable. Depp...
...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...