Word: headedly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...from the handlebars; in Edward Scissorhands, it was a creatively stifled suburban neighborhood; and, in Batman Returns, reality was bounded by Gotham Citys perpetually moonlit skyline. Burton's films become dark, contained fantasylands that lure you in as much as they make you wonder what goes on inside his head. From Beetlejuice to Mars Attacks, this director has honed his signature style, a style that, in the words of one actor who worked with him, can best be defined as Burton genre...
...jumping off point for Burtons dark imaginings. For those who have not read the book or watched the Disney 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...
...Speaking of the ordinarily recognizable becoming barely that: the headless horseman--when he has a head in a flashback and in the resolution--is played by Christopher Walken. Walken's silent performance is sure to make you start out of your seat at least the first time you see him. His gnarly-teeth, wild hair and demonic eyes make you regard his subsequent headlessness as less of a fright and more of a relief...
...choose to see it, in all its blood-spattered craftiness and enveloping spookiness, just remember -- it's only a movie; you can rest assured your head isn't going to get chopped off. Although exposure to the shadowy twists and turns of Burton's imagination, inside-John-Malkovich-style, might make it spin...
Take his music. That Monty Norman's classic tune can be straightforward enough to instantly stick in one's head yet sophisticated enough to instantly trigger one's imagination is a minor miracle, not to be overlooked. It calls for a precise interplay of uncomplicated but carefully wrought elements: the tensely chromatic rise and fall of the bass, the edgy twang of crafty appoggiaturas, wailing brass punctuation in all the right places. It's just so. What the music doesn't need is a techno beat underneath...