Why do I have to pretend like he’s anything better than that?ĬinemaBlend’s Sean O’Sullivan and Kristy Puchko, both self-proclaimed admirers of Burton’s earlier work, debated about where it all went wrong: Burton’s been handed a rare opportunity to tell stories to a global audience, and all he does is make toy commercials. “Directing” a film comes with a lot of storytelling responsibilities that go beyond making everything look cool. That’s an impressive skill set, but it doesn’t make him a good director. He’s great at coming up with visual graphics that translate to impressive costumes, makeup, scenery and special effects. So let’s stop pretending and call it like it is: Tim Burton is a really good art designer. Looking at the last decade of his work, it’s clear that if he’s this one-note, then all the past glory he’s received needs to be given to other people. He’s so ensconced in his little bubble that he’ll never hear “that’s a bad idea” or be pushed to find new ways to entertain. He’s surrounded by producers who sign blank checks for him to do his “Tim Burton” thing, then he casts his best friend and his girlfriend in his movie. Similarly, MovieFone openly wondered if Burton has ever actually been a good director: He doesn’t have a sense of clarity and flow in his camera movements. He is not a director who has grown over the years. From then on, he has merely retread the same ground. However, there has been nothing original about Burton’s visuals since Beetlejuice. His visuals are solely affectation, a strange stamp added onto a film to give it the semblance of originality. A hack makes movies only for money.īurton isn’t interested in expanding his visual palette or exploring any meaning in the grotesquery of everything. A hack may have some filmmaking talent, and may make the occasional good movie, but overall a hack has no strong artistic vision or talent for storytelling. Somehow, Burton, the visionary animator who brought his signature aesthetics to live-action 80s classics like Beetlejuice and Batman, had become an undeniable hack, a complete sell-out who ran out of original ideas ages ago, if, indeed, he ever had any in the first place, or so the internet argued.įor example, 3BrothersFilm made the case that Burton doesn’t know how to tell a story and has coasted by on his fetishistic devotion to ugly and unoriginal visuals which see little use for any colors outside of white-black spectrum:īurton doesn’t produce truly weird, interesting works of art, but commercial products targeted at the mainstream, intending to make them feel unique and interesting while actually giving them derivative stories and tired visuals. However, while pondering how little I care about Burton’s new film, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, I stumbled upon a mountain of essays from 2012 when the internet collectively decided Dark Shadows was finally a Burton/Depp collaboration too far. No one really says that, or at least I don’t think they do. They say you can’t truly consider yourself a film blogger until you’ve written the obligatory obituary for Tim Burton’s career, usually timed to the release of his latest film for which you feel little to no enthusiasm.
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