Pretty Little Liars: The Case For Mona
Over the course of almost 50 episodes, the mysterious A has wreaked a serious amount of havoc (blackmailing therapists, faking suicide notes, attempted vehicular manslaughter, etc.) and the Liars have burned through just as many potential culprits. Except, that is, the one person who probably should be at the top of the suspect list: queen bee Mona Vanderwaal. (via Huffington Post)
The first good Tim Burton film in 18 years?
It’s almost hard to remember that Tim Burton used to be a really great director. In the first run of his career he made a half-dozen films about freakish misfits that had genuine pathos, emotion and a brilliant gift for comedy. Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Nightmare Before Christmas were films most of all about real characters in genuine extremis. Batman Returns is the best film, perhaps the only good film, of the Post-Adam West/Pre-Nolan Batman sequence. You can not watch that film without your heart going out to Danny Devito’s Penguin. Ed Wood is a genuine masterpiece.
All these films had the unmistakable look and feel of the Burton universe, but they were first and foremost about characters and never lost sight of that beating heart beneath the art direction.But then precisely at the moment of Sleepy Hollow, it was like the genie came out of the bottle and refused to go back in again. Burton fell so in love with his art department toys that every film just became this gigantic wind-up doll Edward Gorey confection which left you feeling like you were going into diabetic shock fifteen minutes in. I can’t recall a director following such a great run so immediately with such a gruesome run - Mars Attacks, Planet of The Apes, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland - you’d be hard pressed to find a memorable, living character in any of these. Johnny Depp’s mugging and simpering gave some of them a quivering simulacrum of lifelike pinache, but in the end were just another effect on a big nauseating fun house ride. Only Sweeney Todd came close to breaking free of the jewel box, but in the end the design swallowed even Sondheim’s powerful story.
I pitched a script once to a producer who at the end of my pitch explained that I was telling a story of normal characters in a weird world, while his company made films about weird characters in normal worlds. It seemed a ridiculous point at the time but in retrospect, that is a choice one makes in style and voice. Burton’s early films were about fundamentally off-characters in world’s that may have been stylized wacky but essentially played by earth-bound rules, be it Gotham City or Ed Wood’s Hollywood. The pain of those films was the characters desperation to fit and prosper in those traditional structures - for Pee Wee to just find his bike, or for the ghosts in Beetlejuice to keep their house - while some enormous issue (having scissors for hands, being 6 year old children in grown men’s bodies, being ghosts, having no talent…) made them fundamentally unsuited for that world.
What happened post-Sleepy Hollow was he flipped to weird characters in weird worlds, giving the audience no-respite from the wackiness, no non-wacky safe harbor anywhere.When I heard he was making Dark Shadows, I assumed it would be much more of the same. The TV show after all is one of the wackiest creations in entertainment history. I considered putting the movie on my least anticipated films of the year list, so thoroughly have I given up on Burton after 18 years since his last triumph. But behold, while you can’t really judge anything by a trailer, it looks like it has the energy, the beating heart and the comic wit of Burton at his best. While there’s a fair amount of 50’s kitsch afoot, the natural Burton order of weird character/normal world seems basically restored. It looks funny! Go figure, I’m actually looking forward to a Tim Burton film.
But if he screws me this time, this truly will be the end.Important to note by the way: his first period of genuine great film making brought him only middling box office success at best, often much worse. The second Burton era of stylized schlock has been enormously successful financially. Which is a sad tragic fact about where film audiences are today.
They think he’s a righteous dude.
Season 1, Episodes 3 and 7
Season 2, Episodes 2, 4, 7, and 9 (requested by Anonymous)There’s also this video on youtube! :)
-bonus!
Page 1 of 31
