Hearty, Touching and Hilarious, One of Burton's Most Overlooked Wins

Rating: 9/10 (11 November 2015)

A big hearted, quick-tempo biopic with as many personality quirks and oddly-charming eccentricities as the subject himself. Ed Wood, widely regarded as the king of the pointless, meaningless, hacked-together nonsense picture (aka the worst director who ever lived), is both blessed and cursed to not comprehend the depths of his own awfulness. Forward he endlessly marches, procuring has-been celebrities and clueless investors through sheer force of will and personality, all in the quest to become the next Orson Welles. Which, of course, is like buying a can of bug spray and expecting it to serve as a dessert topping.
Johnny Depp is a great, big, overinflated bag of optimistic energy in the title role, half carnival barker and half renaissance man, but he's overshadowed by a heartbreaking turn from Martin Landau as a struggling, drug-addicted, late-life Bela Lugosi who somehow gets wrapped up in Wood's little world. Landau won a surprising Best Supporting Actor award for this take, well-deserved as he projects all manner of emotion to an unsuspecting audience and towers over every scene in which he appears. Bill Murray is also fabulous in a very small, nearly-pointless role, which surely deserved further exploration. Alas, at just over two hours, there wasn't time to get to everything.
One of Tim Burton's best, most restrained films, bubbling and churning with his own brand of black, twisted humor, but also much more controlled and traditional than his more definitive films (say, Beetlejuice or The Nightmare Before Christmas). Energetic, entertaining, funny and poignant and tolerant, it touches a whole lot of emotions with impressive delicacy, and its deep ruminations on acceptance remain particularly relevant in a modern setting.