POST 8: TIM BURTON: A biography

                                          Tim Burton

Fill in the gaps in this biography of Tim Burton

Tim Burton was born in 1958, in the city of Burbank, California.

He remains without question one of the most original film maker working in cinema today.

 Indeed, his talent and originality have kept him at the top of the profession where he occupies a very special place, somewhere between the mainstream and the avant-garde, in that region of cinema occupied by artists which worldview is not unconventional that it attains popular appeal.

In 1989, Tim Burton directed the hugely known Batman which, although his least personal film, was one of the most popular movies of all time and gave him unprecedented success in Hollywood, considering the originality and adventurousness of his previous films (for example Beetlejuice in 1988).

Edward Scissorhands (1990), another hit, saw him at the peak of his directing powers and established a fruitful working collaboration/partnership with actor Johnny Depp who played in his 2005 film version of Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and who became one of his most esteemed partner since their first film together.

In 1992, Batman Returns was a way darker film than the original, a reflection of how much cinematographic freedom Tim Burton had won (producers Warner Bros were reputedly unhappy with the final result).

And even if Ed Wood (1994), his loving tribute to the life and work of the legendary ‘Worst Director of All Time’ Edward D. Wood, Jr., was a box-office disaster, it got some of the best critics of Burton’s career.

In fact, Tim Burton is known/famous both for his dark, quirky-themed movies like Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, or Dark Shadows (2012) and for blockbusters such as Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, Batman, Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland (2010), one of his most successful films, which became the fifth highest grossing films of all times.

Burton has produced 18 feature films as of 2014, and has released 12 as of 2012  (among which the very nice Christmas tale called The  Nightmare Before Christmas in 1993).

All in all, Tim Burton’s films consistently challenge the spectator’s expectations, push forward the principles of filmmaking and bring to life previously unthinkable characters (like Edward Scissorhands).

Taken as a whole, his work is based on the confrontation between the fantastic and the horror, and the consequences of these two worlds intermingling.

Big Fish, Burton’s 2003 effort, is no different. And ___, somehow, it is not really the

_________.

On the surface, it would appear to have all the aspects of a classic Burton film: a magic screenplay, fairy-tale characters, flights of imagination, forces of nature (as well as the supernatural), far-fetched situations and vastly imaginative visual style and imagery. The movie is, in fact, fully packed with fanciful episodes that it begins to feel like a loose adaptation of The Odyssey, told from the mouth of an aging character named Ed Bloom, a story-teller and dreamer who sees the world with beautiful eyes.

                                                                        

 

                                                                  

POST #1: A CARTOON

The Fanatic Geek



The document we have here is a cartoon called The Fanatic Geek by Patrick Chapatte in 2008. It tackles the issue of technological progress slowing down the movie business.

What catches the eye at first sight is the Cannes logo we can see in the top left hand corner. The cartoon is made up of a drawing and a balloon. We can see a man, obviously a film director, who maybe looks a bit like Sean Penn with cow-boy boots and sunglasses, on the red carpet with a blond woman in a very fancy dress, signing an autograph to a fan of his. The fan is telling the director that he loves his movies and that he's pirated them all, meaning he didn't pay to watch them, doing illegal downloading by using the internet.

By drawing this cartoon, the author wants to show the world one of the downsides of the internet and technological progress.
He aims to criticize the "génération Y" as we call it in French, the generation of people born in the 90's who not only have easy access to all the new technology but grew up with them so can use them very easily. This generation doesn't go into stores to buy a CD or a movie on DVD to watch it at home on their TV. They just pirate them, which means download them for free and watch their movie on their computer. I think what the author is trying to say here is that this generation not only disrespects the art industry in general and slows it down by not buying anything, but it also cannot appreciate a good movie on a big screen with friends or family. The author is describing in only one cartoon a whole generation of loners who do not open themselves enough to the world.

I personally think it is very well thought and that the author found a good way to caricature this generation or the downsides of technological progress if you prefer because nowadays the internet and all this technological progress is seen like a blessing to our society while some sides of it are actually bad for it.

We can relate this document to the notion of progress because piracy is something we can do nowadays in the 21st century now that we have technological progress, which we didn't have in the 20th century. It shows how the progress of the movie industry for example is held down by technological progress, so this cartoon, in a way, represents 2 types of progress.