Hey folks, Harry here. And man... this Big Brother fella seems to hate this movie. Now I don't know... but everything he seems to be dogging on are the very same aspects that I love in Burton's other work. The 'is it scary, serious or funny' aspect is at the very core of what I think defines Tim Burton. As for the 'storyline change'... well... You do know that SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS is the biggest bastardization of the Snow White tale right? Point is... I DON'T CARE, so long as I like the story. Now... Who knows... maybe it does suck, like this guy says... or... we could go along with what all the others have said and be very very excited. Having read the script and loving the trailers and look of this film... I'm inclined to be quite hopeful. But... if you want to be brought down... here's Big Brother...
hi, i've been a fan of the site for a long time but i never wrote in. But tonight I feel obligated to deter people from seeing one of the most dissapointing moviegoing experiences of the whole year. At a studio screening held in downtown n.y.c. tonight, sleepy hollow was shown. And boy does this movie have problems. Let me just say that when I first saw the trailer for this movie I was in ecstacy. I thought, "this is perfect." everything looked right, the sets, the actors, the story, the mood. But this movie just doesn't know where it wants to go. It starts off with Ichabod Crane, played by Depp. In this version, Ichabod is no longer a schoolteacher, but an investigator who is stoic and determined to make the rest of the community see that using torturous methods to seek out criminals is wrong. Instead he wants to use science and logic to determine this. Christopher Lee, in a cameo which just adds nothing to the film (kind of like Janet Leigh's in Halloween H20) tells Ichy that if he wants to go use science, he better go and help stop this mean old killer who's "lopped off" the heads of three people in this upstate NY town of Sleepy Hollow. So he goes and finds troublesome goings on in the form of seemingly conspiratorial town leaders -- who are very well played. The whole set up of this movie, essentially the first half hour, is excellent. But from there the movie goes sour.
We all know that Ichabod crane is supposed to be this big wuss right? But the movie inserts so many "funny" moments at times when the action should be kept completely serious that all attempts at both real suspense and real believability are spoiled. Ichabod is a wuss but time and time again the gag of having Ichabod faint dead away after something frightening happens ruins the whole mood. It seems like Tim Burton couldn't decide, actually it seems more the writer's fault, whether or not this movie was supposed to be a comedy or a horror - adventure. But this movie fails at its attempt to be all three. At times Burton tends to also camp it up a lot, and this again defeats the effect of the film being frightening.
But what about effects? I'm not a big fx person but the effects in this movie are really phenomenal. The whole mood in terms of photography is wonderful and works perfectly with the story. It's just the dialogue and the writing that fall flat. The movie has these graphic scenes of decapitation that set up the movie as a horrific scary deal, but then go off every which way. There is also a weird sequence where Ichabod visits a "hag" in a mysterious cave, and her eyes bug out like jim carrey in the mask and large marge in pee wee. that was really strange. The casting of christopher walken as the person who later becomes the headless horsemen is sort of out of place in this film. He doesn't do much more than grunt.
The ending of this film was perhaps the worst part of this movie. Besides from the fact that it can be predicted from the start of the film and I never can figure out the bad guy on scooby doo) it just plain sucks. The evil bad guy ends up giving a speech straight out of james bond. There is also way too many campy tacky jokes that just stifle what should be the quick, suspenseful pace of the movie.
See the problem is that it's hard to say who to blame. Clearly Tim Burton had a dynamite vision for this film. So blaming him entirely is wrong. This emerges as one of his strangest films, I felt. Tom Stoppard's uncredited dialogue doctoring could be at fault, but I doubt it. Could be Francis Ford Coppola at the producing helm, but who knows? The actors aren't at fault either, even though most of them overdo it. I tend to think it's the writer, who's name i made a point of forgetting as soon as the movie ended. That's just my opinion, but i urge you to stay away from this movie. It's just a dissapointment for any true burton fan.
thanks
call me Big Brother
