Word: hollower
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Kennedy, a documentary filmmaker, paints a picture of grinding rural poverty in her latest film, "American Hollow," which she presented last night at the ARCO Forum...
...hues of the Disney version, Burton gives his film a swankly, dankly desaturated color scheme. And just to make sure he doesn't go soft, he hires Andrew Kevin Walker, author of the sleazorific Se7en and 8mm, to write the screenplay. No one will fall asleep in this Sleepy Hollow. It revs up the gore...
...there a Headless Horseman? Then he'd better cut off some heads--heads that, when detached by the whoosh of the Horseman's blade, go spinning, rolling, bobbing as if each were a top, a bowling ball, a Halloween apple on its way from Hollow to hell. (The terminally cool Tussaud effects are by Kevin Yagher, who also worked on the script.) Irving's Horseman, a long-dead Hessian mercenary, was most likely a story to scare away intruders and, when Ichabod sees him, a human prankster toying with the gullible schoolteacher. Here, though, the creature must be realer than...
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...
Funny thing is, those movies weren't very good. This one is: Burton's richest, prettiest, weirdest since Batman Returns. The simple story bends to his twists, freeing him for an exercise in high style. Sleepy Hollow may be late for Halloween, but this trick is a real treat...