I feel so manipulated...

Rating: 10/10 (10 February 2006)

I just don't get it. Here I am, rapidly approaching my late twenties, perpetually a heartless misanthrope, and yet this dang movie gets me every time. It's such a simple movie, with characterisations that are barely more than cookie-cutter ciphers, but it makes me well up every time. What's up with that? I've been fortunate enough, over the years, to see most of the movies in Tim Burton's oeuvre, but I think that it's this one above all that characterise him as one of the most idiosyncratic and imaginative directors around. Everything about this film gets me; the contrasts between light and dark, pastels and charcoal, symmetry and asymmetry... then, on the non-visual level, the mixture of satire, dark fantasy, occasionally moving drama and 50's pastiche... I think this is Burton's masterpiece, I really do.
There's the old accusation that this piece is rather mean spirited and encapsulates a deep antipathy towards suburbia, and that its whole purpose was to exorcise the demons of Burton's 'outsider' adolescence, but if that's what it takes to make something so beautiful, then what the hey. And true, it's not as profound as Kant or as mould-breaking as Kubrick, but neither of those chaps ever did fairy stories.
Anyway, my advice is this: don't watch it if you're drunk and remember that it used to make you cry as a kid. Don't say I din't warn you...
Hayfax_Jo