In the continuation of our rating, we will determine the best stories of the sad storyteller: from puppet animation to superheroics, from biography to the acclaimed series.
From the imagination of Tim Burton... Let's get started!
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The acclaimed sequel divided the audience at the time, and it seems that the debate about it has not died down to this day. Some consider it too much even by today's standards, others admire the courage, gloomy tone and new characters. I used to consider the movie one of my favorites ever, now I'm somewhere in the middle.
The second "Batman" is like a series about an ill—mannered clone from Smeshariki. Yes, we've seen things much darker, yes, it's still cool and adult, but it's like you don't expect such a cryptic thing from an almost children's film. Behind the shadow of the sequel, few people will remember how dark the original "Batman" was, and how much it turned the idea of what a comic book movie could be. Now Burton just raised the degree, and it worked... heterogeneous. To say the least.
On the one hand, we have a Catwoman with a BDSM whip and in a latex suit who will sexually lick Batman's face. On the other hand, the Penguin, who, although famous for his bloodlust and simply vile habits, eats raw fish in front of the public, but looks like a comical villain from Scooby—Doo with this villainous laugh riding a giant rubber duck. Let's put it this way: either your noses are bitten off with fountains of blood, or an army of kamikaze penguins is trying to blow up the city - these are slightly different formats.
But... Isn't that the beauty of it? The history of the franchise has shown that no safe approach can replace the pure imagination of the author, even if he is sick. The film is full of stubborn humor on the verge of a foul. This is a concentrated Burton madness, which we all love, and at the end — a drop of sad New Year's mood. I will single out the role of Christopher Walken, who is ready to compete with Danny DeVito for the title of the main monster in this film.
Score: 7 bitten noses out of 10 lashes by Michelle Pfeiffer. Humanity is not ready for this acid yet.
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Have you seen a lot of black-and-white cartoons that are not a century old or festival-level? Popular, relevant, and still bold. The beauty of Burton is that even in the delicate children's segment, he allows himself not only to avoid adult topics, but also the gloomy, or even frightening form of their presentation.
I know what I'm talking about because I watched Frankenweenie the year it was released, when I was a 12-year-old kid. He scared the hell out of me with his mutant rats, but at the same time he established a deep emotional connection with me. Now there are not enough Gothic films in the children's segment, such as "Coraline", "Nine" or "Monster House".
I am surprised by the laconism in the elaboration of characters, which is especially evident in Burton's animation. I haven't reviewed Frankenweenie for five years, but I remember perfectly well the sinister Professor Rzykryuzski (just listen), and the nauseating Edgar, and sportik Toshiaki, the pretentious Nassor, the physical therapist, the mayor's daughter... They may not have a deep character and story arc, but the detail of their appearance and manner of speech firmly imprints these characters in your soul. The form determines the content itself.
Frankenweenie reminds me of R.L. Stein's Horror Films, those same books in the spirit of urban legends, about how children overcome the monster from the closet with the power of friendship. This is the best of everything that Burton shot in the tenth, and I would like him to return more often now to these creepy-touching stories about boys who raise their beloved dog from the dead.
Personal recommendation: do not be lazy to check the name posters for each character in the film, including all monsters, on the Kinopoisk. All posters are stylized as thrash horrors of the 30-50's — wild vibe.
Rating: 7 screamer cats (seriously, I almost died) out of 10 creaking mills.
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I've been thinking for a long time how to start a block about this movie. Yes, this is the base, it is necessary to know this, but I will not call Beetlejuice an outstanding pearl or an incorruptible for all time. The film declared Burton as a bright, independent author, whose visual style gave rise to a queue of imitators already in the year of release. This film is a phenomenon, a monument film, worthy, as it turned out, even of a Zoomer sequel. To a much lesser extent, this is a sit-down-and-look film, being surpassed by the next two works of the author.
Nevertheless, "Beetlejuice" is a wild style. Considering that Burton does not write scripts and is only engaged in production, all the recognizable features of the director have already appeared in this project. Firstly, he always allows his actors to fool around, which resulted in the image of a demonic trickster. Today it feels like an outlet against the backdrop of all Michael Keaton's moody roles.
Secondly, a bright crowd. Seriously, I want a separate film about each inhabitant of the afterlife. Here Burton flexes as a former artist, which we will admire in "The Nightmare before Christmas" and in "The Corpse of the Bride", equally rich in colorful characters.
Thirdly, amazing practical effects. The giant worm on Saturn's moon looks amazing and, it seems, will never grow old, because it was originally conceived to be vibe-outdated with these jerky stop-motion transitions between frames. This is a wonderful concept where the deceased family, being ghosts, tries to expel obnoxious new tenants from the house. "Others," hold our bug juice. This is a creep buffoonery with toothy humor, and definitely one of the best children's horror films in history.
Rating: 7 shrimp fingers out of 10 altushki Rider (where to order one ...)
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I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be an adaptation of a lost short story by Poe or a novel by Emily Bronte, so the film is made in the canon of Victorian Gothic literature. And this is definitely a compliment. For many years, The Corpse of the Bride has been gathering dust in the shadow of The Nightmare Before Christmas, and I am pleased that in recent years the film has grown an independent fan base.
The story of a marriage by calculation is as old as the world, the plot for 75 minutes is simple and concise, but it is in the details that the hand is felt. Burton standardly criticizes materialistic philistinism and pompous aristocracy. But, as an example of the same "Alice", no one talks about their emotions here.
Take a look at these characters! You will learn their whole character from the design and plastic of the doll figures alone. The otherworld looks amazing, the songs are pleasant and do not slow down the narrative, as it happens in musicals. On the contrary, each number is unique in its mood, and often in its genre component. Some compositions are unobtrusively sewn into the narrative itself, for example, Victor and Emily playing the piano in four hands. Please note that Victor plays in a major, warm way, which reflects belonging to the world of the living, and Emily plays in a minor and cold, but after a few bars she joins Victor's tonality, as if entering his "living" space.
I note that this is simply a great genre comedy. Not many romantic feature films are able to evoke emotions such as the chemistry of these characters. What is worth one scene of Victor and Victoria meeting after his piano playing. Almost nothing is said, the characters stutter and drive equivocations — but how much is said, and Emily's tragic love and her final rejection of Victor are forever etched into the soul. This is a deeply sensual, literary film, definitely a classic of world puppet animation.
Score: 7 cranial caterpillars out of 10 muskets.
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The position of the series in this list ranged from 9th place to 4th, as a result, I settled on a compromise. This is a strong, verified series that does not offer the viewer anything new and works as a talented attraction. Without negativity, the entertainment value of "Wednesday" is exceptional, and I appreciate it when you can have a good time watching it.
I explain the phenomenon of popularity for myself simply: zoomers need their own "Harry Potter", and millennials are hungry for the atmosphere of a mysterious school of magic. I will not dissemble, Nevermore does not have anywhere near that mythology and fabulousness, from the category of "we have Hogwarts at home." But the series diligently takes care to captivate you with a lot of mysteries and local folklore. It even has its own kind of faculty competition, the same dark academy raid with secret societies, nods to Edgar Poe and William Faulkner.
It may seem as if the series is trying to be smarter than it is, saying that we are not only admiring Ortega here, but also learning something new. And... you are not exactly wrong. These mentions are no more significant than "we found out, we agree." But I suddenly want to stand up for the series. I'm not a fan of the metamodern in the spirit of "American Horror Story", when not the most outstanding form tries to define the content through references, but I like how in "Wednesday" every stylistic decision is beautifully woven into the narrative.
Yes, it still looks like a cut for TikTok, but if you look at what the motive behind it is, you will find a good idea. Simply put, Ortega can make an important face for another cynical punch a hundred times in a series, but the plot will definitely lead us to the idea that denying our emotions, unsociability and blinkering is not an excuse even for a very great talent. The authors understand why we are gathered here, and just let us enjoy Ortega's next trick, as if conducting a dialogue with the viewer directly, bypassing the conventions of the film language.
This still doesn't add much depth to the series, but it doesn't make it a dummy for preschoolers at all. I also like Burton's involvement. Starting with the fifth episode, you, like me, will probably notice a change of director. Each episode stands out: the boat race, the school ball, the fair, the arrival of parents or Uncle Fester.
Some scenes are almost masterpiece out of context. Personal recommendation: try to watch the ending of the third episode in isolation from the rest. A monologue, cutting interesting, and most importantly emotional hooks, and all to the beautiful orchestral version of "Nothing Else Matters" with soulful medieval notes. This is a real Renaissance of Burton's career, and I'm glad that after this series they started talking about him again. Although two years ago, he himself did not know where to go from it.
Rating: 7 dramatic views of Ortega out of 10 jokes about dismemberment.
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Let's skip the part with the enumeration of merits and influence on the genre — this is just an amazing film. Until dushny Nolan ruined the whole fan with his social network, he was also considered the best about the character, and before the release of Reeves' masterpiece, he was also my favorite.
Everything is fine here. Gotham is gothic, Batman is erotic, even the Joker does not look like a left-wing schoolboy avatar. The film envelops the entourage. Starting as a genre neo-noir, he dosed reveals the mythology of Batman, but (!) does not stretch it into an hour-long story of formation. Instead, we taste the mysterious nature of the hero through the perspective of criminals, police, journalists, ordinary residents of the city. Hot take: the movie looks like an adaptation of the mafia game, if such a thing could take place.
The image of Bruce Wayne is concise and pleasant, I shake the strong hand of Michael Keaton for a great job. Unlike Bale or Affleck, this Bruce has character, human emotions, and a slight irony. His duet with the best screen Alfred is incomparable, the butler turned out to be perfectly prim, strict, but most paternally sincere. I can believe that this Alfred is capable of replacing Bruce's father.
Joker-Nicholson is a real gangster, a crank and a heartthrob, not loaded with a hackneyed actualochka. His performance in the gallery to Prince's soundtrack is art itself. However, Burton does not change himself and kneads a pinch of wild game, like the Joker's fake cosmetics, after which the girls die with a numb smile on their face... and then he shoots a commercial featuring corpses. Is it weird? Yes, it's awesome. It's also 1989 in the yard, think for yourself.
But it is here that Burton perfectly balances grotesque sincerity and noir seriousness, creating a unique mix in the atmosphere and design of the film. Separately, I will note the memorable minor characters and the death scene of the Joker. That toy laugh from the corpse still haunts me, as does the scene of the underground operation with rusty tools, which is why he got such a smile.
Score: 8 comically long pistols out of 10 amazing Kitons (seriously, let him adopt me...)
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I could name a hundred shortcomings of this film, from the protracted musical numbers to the sloppy staging of individual scenes, but I strongly do not want to stifle this unique work. As one well-known cook says, when it's delicious, then it's delicious.
The emotional palette of Sweeney Todd is so intense, she revels in her own naked nerve so much that it is almost impossible not to get infected with it. If we could be condescending to Burton's other attempts at gloom, this film leaves no room for criticism. This is not only the director's most creep film, but also a very good horror out of context.
Todd's righteous hatred of his wife's killer is intertwined with a tender feeling for his daughter, and they are together with Mrs. Lovett's painful, perverted infatuation with the killer hairdresser. That's a family, they sheltered a boy, saving him from the sadistic Pirelli, but they fed the named son with their pies with human flesh. However, as well as half of London... To hell with your Jokers and Harley Quinn. These two are my favorite Bonnie and Clyde of modern times!
There are scarier, sharper, deeper, bloodier and more thoughtful horrors. The terrible charm of this film is in the seething tragedy of a little man, which Dostoevsky himself could have written. Doomed love in the midst of urban sewage, touching madness, like an abscess on the body of Puritanical values. With such material, it was easy to fall into vulgarity, instead Burton created a musical that was beautiful in its ugliness.
A shot in striped tights on the beach > everything else. The final scene with the stove >>> everything else. Please note that almost the entire cast, including supporting roles, participated in the Harry Potter films — a plus sign for the British vibe. If you love Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes, be sure to enjoy this work as well.
Score: 8 silver razors from 10 fingers inside cupcakes.
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When I was about 10 years old, I saw a picture crossword puzzle in my grandmother's magazine — several Johnny Depp characters whose names were suggested to guess. Jack Sparrow was there, and Sweeney Todd, and, of course, Edward. Even then, without even knowing about Burton, I felt through one expression of the actor's face in a tiny photo all the barely expressive sadness of his character. I think I bought out the contents of the entire movie long before I saw it for the first time.
You may have heard the take more than once that Burton approaches the movie as if it were an animation. This is the peculiar genius of the director: he looks at the actors as if they were drawings. It's enough for him to imagine just one character, a lonely cyborg with blades instead of hands, and the world builds itself around him — just have time to saturate it with new details.
You usually won't find Burton's deep psychology and nuances of human relationships, which is why even his best films seem caricatured. That's the beauty of it. He takes several expressive images and saturates them with a purely expressionistic mechanism of emotions, a subtle transfer of state by external tools — effective and very effective. This method may seem rude to souls like me, but let's remember the "show don't tell" rule and the European expressionism of the 20s, which gave rise to the first masterpieces of cinema in history and developed the possibilities of cinema as a language.
All this expressive, sensual splendor found its best embodiment in "Edward Scissorhands", in its touching charm. Let's pay tribute to Johnny Depp — true talent is revealed in such laconic roles, where one eternally puzzled look is instead of a thousand words. I can't help but cry from the scene of dancing under snowflakes, Elfman does not make music, but real magic.
Rating: 9 iconic Vincent Prices out of 10 shorn poodles.
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How many times have you met a narrative in family films, saying that a fairy tale exists, it is real, you just need to open your heart and believe? So I'm sick of this cloying, manipulative and out of touch idea. The child grows up, and it turns out that there is no tooth fairy, neither is the Queen of England, and the movie deceived him for momentary effect.
After the "Big Fish", the entire run with real fairy tales could be closed once and for all. This is Burton's least Gothic film, apart from "Big Eyes" and the episode with the witch's eye, in which the main character allegedly saw his death. And, like all good works by a director, this one is dedicated to one particular dreamer. Edward Bloom is an incorrigible optimist and a jerk, comparable in luck only to Forrest Gump. Their principle is the same — "the road will be mastered by the walking one," but if Gump was motivated by the inability to assess the risks due to dementia, then for Bloom to be an idiot is a conscious choice. And that's fine.
In form, it is still an adventurous tale about how the hero became friends with a giant, worked in a circus for food and rescued Siamese twin singers from captivity by Japanese troops. In fact, the giant is not quite a giant, and the Siamese twins are not quite Siamese, and this brings us to another simple and good idea: not so much about the road under the feet of the walking, but about the beauty in the eyes of the beholder.
Bloom literally draws augmented reality in his head and shares his tall tales with others, which is why he deserves the glory of having gone. This is a sunny semi-biography with an encouraging morality, where the freak turns out not to be a rejected klutz, but a strong-willed hero, such a Don Quixote of the 20th century. There is both an adventure and a beautiful romance with a love triangle, and a long time interval makes you start to feel nostalgic for the film before you even watched it.
The hero, played by the radiant Ewan McGregor, is an underrated literally me character. I was lucky enough to know such a person in my life, and once this film was one of my top ten favorites of all time. It's still Burton's best work of the century.
Rating: 9 McGregor smiles out of 10 of my tears.
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Before the first place, I will speak about the films left out of the list.
Firstly, since Burton reshot "Frankenweenie" in the form of a more perfect cartoon, I did not include his game short version in the top. She's good. The same black and white and atmospheric, it will be a good aperitif for a Halloween party. Secondly, I haven't watched Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. An uninteresting debut for me with the most repulsive feature of Burton — the infantile antics of simply stupid characters.
Of course, it is impossible not to mention "The Nightmare before Christmas" — literally the most Burton film, which became the quintessence of his visual style... but he was not even assigned by himself due to his employment in another project. I insist that there is more Burton in the film than Selik, including the signature musical arrangement and character design, which performs 70% of the entire task.
The most canonical characters, the best compositions of Elfman, the most grotesque horror and the blackest humor are the main Halloween film of all time and some peoples, which I would put on 9 and put in second place if I counted within the main top.
And we are moving on to the top of the master's entire creative career. Oscar goes to...
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I admit, I'm biased. Cinema about cinema is one of my favorite genres. Edward Wood Jr. is a director recognized by film critics as the worst director of all time. I must say, not without reason, but it also made him famous and the status of the main legend of thrash films. And I wouldn't underestimate the size of their audience. "The Sinister Dead", "Rocky Horror Horror Show", "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" are classics of world cinema aesthetics, which would be much poorer without Wood's creative legacy. We all love Tommy Wiseau, Rob Zombie and Alexander Nevsky, to be honest — the spiritual followers of Ed Wood.
What is Burton doing? Burton elevates Wood's already outstanding story into an insanely stylish, black-and-white Gothic myth. This is a very free retelling of events: the hero even meets Orson Welles here (which never happened), at that time the drunken author of "Citizen Kane" — one of the greatest films in the world. Burton equates talent and mediocrity as two adjacent facets of the same phenomenon. Wood himself considered Wells a colleague, agreeing with the master's grumbling at greedy producers. He considered himself a great creator, and his films were masterpieces, sincerely not understanding the criticism against him.
He is a classic Burton weirdo, like Bloom from Big Fish, a desperate adventurer, inspired and inspiring. Depp shines, especially in the image of Wood, a transvestite. But the diamond of the film is the legendary Bela Lugosi, performed by the no less legendary Martin Landau. Lugosi is widely known for his role as Count Dracula in the 1931 film and several other roles in horror films of varying degrees of lousy. The actor remained in demand for a long time, but by the middle of the century he had lost his former greatness.
Wood tried to resurrect his career in his awkward film work, but Burton... he resurrected Lugosi for real, even after his death. The director often turned to film veterans, be it Vincent Price or Christopher Lee, and here he also honored the memory of his teacher. Wood and Lugosi had a very touching friendly tandem that broke my heart in the second half of the film. In addition to the old vampire, Wood helped many people in need, albeit in a peculiar way, but to be realized, whether it was a circus strongman or a pack of respectable movie stars.
The film is imbued with a sense of light sadness, even the boring morality of "being yourself" reveals itself expressively and does not amuse you with false hopes. Wood is a legend, he influenced a whole stratum of the industry through his own mediocrity and prejudice, and also ... died in debt without the slightest hint of recognition.
Burton gives Wood this glory in absentia in the scene of the triumphant premiere of Plan 9 from Outer Space. The premiere that never happened. Undoubtedly, Burton will remain in the centuries, as well as Wood himself, because despite everything, both masters did their job to the end. Fan fact: In Burton's three best films, the main character is named Edward.
Rating: 10 Vampire busts out of 10 TV horror stylizations.
Thanks for reading. Which director's rating would you like to see in the following parts of the column?1
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GoldenPriest
I was happy to see that some of the films I watch made it to the top 10. I really liked The Corpse’s Bride when I was a kid, it was amazing how well animated everything was and how they nailed the atmosphere of beauty in a character that was dead. Despite being fantasy, Tim Burton always seem to have this ironic view on reality, instead of catering entirely to fiction or either seriousness. I highly appreciate it, because it’s a sarcastic take on childhood fantasies. It’s funny, too…how everything has this aura of somberness with a hint of happiness. I haven’t watched some of these films, but after this text, I am curious about some of them. Thank you for your reviews Rating: 10 eyeworms out of 10 friendly widows