Word: ichabod
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...nearly 200 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...
...primary characters in the book, becomes just one of the horseman's many victims in the film. Played by Casper Van Dien, who starred in Starship Troopers, Burton's Brom fades into the background of the other townspeople except in a great fight sequence where he and Ichabod team up against the horseman...
...fact, all of the women of Sleepy Hollow are outfitted in bosom-popping dresses--perhaps a nod to Irving's description of Katrina as "buxom." Ichabod's mother, played by Lisa Marie (Tim Burton's wife), breastily swirls in flowery dream sequences that contrast with the bleak scenes of reality. And then of course we have Christina Ricci as Katrina, short, blond and busty...
...more freely (even in one gratuitous scene, from the implied decapitation of a little boy), this version of Sleepy Hollow expands significantly and more disturbingly on the original. Irving's tale becomes entwined in a complicated plot of greed and corruption, a horrifying subplot explaining the psychological warping of Ichabod, and several impressive fight scenes in which the decapitations have an especially martial flare. (Star Wars fans may notice similarities between the headless sword-wielding skills and the light saber moves of Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace. They're played by the same actor, Ray Park...
...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...