Personally, I hate 'originality'. I hate the idea of someone having 'their own sense of style'. If it's not like everything else, then that must be because it's wrong. If I haven't seen a film just like the one I'm about to watch, then the chances are that I won't like it. In all honesty, I'm the kind of brain-fucked, lazy ball-bag who single-handedly defines everything that is wrong with today's cinematic audience. I therefore belong to a Facebook group entitled "Tim Burton is worthless".Check it out... http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tim-Burton-is-worthless/325595793448
I genuinely don't understand how people can believe things like that. Since the late eighties, Tim Burton has consistently released classic film after classic film. Without Burton we wouldn't have Edward Scissorhands, we wouldn't have Ed Wood, we wouldn't have Sweeney Todd and we certainly wouldn't have Johnny Depp.
Before Burton and Depp started their bromance, Depp was nothing. He was some disillusioned pretty-boy who had found unwanted fame on a cheesy T.V. show. Up until then, the highlight of his film career was being eaten by a bed in the Nightmare on Elm Street and being one of the unnoticed slices of American cannon fodder in Platoon.
When Depp finally met the scarily haired, ex-Disney animator, it was like a marriage made in a nuthouse. Both are shy, eccentric, and obsessed with the odder side of human nature, and both have a dark and twisted sense of humor. Over the last twenty years they have become two of the greatest cinematic collaborators up there with the Gods that are De Niro and Scorsese.
Since Edward Scissorhands, Depp has gone on to turn playing oddballs into an art form. Oh, yeah, and he's now like the most popular actor on the planet. Burton too has gone on to become one of the biggest box office draws, with undeniably the most identifiable visual style being committed to film at the minute. Annoyingly though, it is this style that seems to be the feature of his work that is slagged off the most by those fucktards who hate him.
Yes his films are gothic, but so what? That's just what he does. It's not like he made Twilight or any other mopey teen shit, full of angst and whose fans have a trademark scar across their skinny white wrists. Burton's films are simply the works of a man who watched too much horror as a child. Hammer horror and the expressionist films of the thirties flow through his creations like blood out of one of Sweeney Todd's delicious victims. It is not in any way his intention that his target audience should consist of miserable, scrawny teenagers who have panda eyes and a sore wrist due to excessively masturbating to the cure, whilst mourning the loss of Edgar Allan Poe.
If the goths like his films then great, but he didn't make movies specifically for them. If he had tried to target them, then why the fuck would he make Big Fish? A colorful but melancholic tale that tells the story of a dying bullshitter. Or even Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? A film in which an eccentric factory owner breaks slave labor laws in order to exploit and profit from the young, greedy, fat little shits that we call children. With their fairytale qualities, these two films are just great. They're upbeat, charming, quirky and largely, just plain fun. I dare anyone to watch Big Fish and not laugh at that bit where Ewen Mcgregor accidentally involves himself in a bank robbery with Steve Buscemi.
Okay, some of Burton's films have slightly missed the mark. Mars Attacks! was a bit like watching a crap 60's cartoon and Alice in Wonderland was a kind of shit version of Narnia, but so what? For every bad film he's done, there's about four classics to replace them. And even those not-so-good films have good points, such as Helena Bonham Carter's massive head, and seeing what I can only assume was some sort of mongoloid dog have its eye poked out with a stick. As someone who hates kids, it's nice to watch a film with them in the cinema and think that at least one of them will be traumatized by seeing this.
Maybe he's not to every-bodies tastes; I accept that we are all different and have different likes and dislikes. However, to say Burton is shit is just plain wrong. There is no doubting that what he does is 'art' and that he himself will go down as one of cinemas greatest auteurs. Meanwhile, the creators of this facebook group will probably eventually die and just be forgotten. I do hope they have happy lives but I'm pretty positive that I will never learn their names and that they will never do anything as iconically artistic as the things they slag off. Having looked at their wall posts, they seem more concerned with how many people are in their group than having an actual justified, fully supported opinion. If it's attention they want, perhaps it would be more admirable to seek it through more creative means, rather than bitching on Facebook. Or maybe they could just go out into the street and start wanking. It would certainly get people looking at them which is ultimately all they seem to want...
Follow this blog or I'll fucking cut you.
