Frankenweenie (2012)

In this recycled review, I spend a lot of time complaining about Tim Burton recycling material...("...the nerve!")

Speaking of nerves and things, this was written at the time of the film's exhumation....

Recycled Material From the Grave
or
"I Can Fix This..."

Really, it's a little soon for Tim Burton to be re-making one of his own films—albeit his first live-action short for Disney. One worries that maybe he's run out of ideas, or that he's simply doing what he's always done—take a property and combine it with that goofy blend of the kinky and ghoulish that he has made his own...it's just that this time the property is his...and he's already made it his own once. Maybe, he looked at this product of his younger self with limited resources and thought "I can do better. I can do more." Or along the lines of young Victor Frankenstein, he looked at it his earlier creation and vowed "I can fix this."

At the time of the live-action short, Disney looked at the product of their young animator...and promptly dumped it...only acknowledging it when Burton became an A-list director (with some studio hesitancy) with the first "Batman" film.* Now, Disney is crowing about its brand new Burton movie, and one can only imagine the wry smile that must produce for the director. It was natural for Disney to want an expansion—they owned the property—and although this new version of Frankenweenie has a lot of (dare I say) re-animation of material, it did give Burton a chance to give it a little more depth and play around without the inhibitions of live action.

I say inhibitions rather than limitations because the differences are exhibited in a weird and rather contrary way, given that the film is done with puppet figures: emotion. The character of Sparky exhibits a far greater depth of moods than a trained pit-bull terrier could exhibit in live action, not only in its darker moments, but especially in moments of joy—the animation of the dog running elicits fond feelings immediately, as the puppet is rarely touching the ground in motion, not unlike Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" kids who hover over the ground in transit. And although the human figures are Burton cyphers (resembling the human character designs of his first film Vincent) they are still soulful, their eyes expressing more emotions than their faces will betray.

Given that the subject matter is about a mad scientist of a little boy who runs the parallel path of his literary namesake to re-animate his beloved dog, killed in a traffic mishap, there's a lot of room for high emotion there, and far more than in the motivations of the original story.

But, Burton takes it further and makes it more than about young Victor. Taking pages from The Nightmare Before Christmas and Batman Returns, he stages the denouement at a city festival that brings all parties together in one spot, the communal experience gone awry.

Seems that Victor's work has attracted a lot of attention among his classmates, and as there's a science fair going on, all the kid's are doing the same thing—literally, the same thing, bringing to life their dead pets with very mixed results, and providing Burton a chance to explore other species of monster movies (and recreating scenes from them) than just the one, paying tribute to each, just as he does by including a scene from friend Christopher Lee's turn as "Dracula."

Like Victor's experiment, this is a labor of love as Burton—just as with the earlier short—resurrects the movies he loved as a kid, long-buried memories that never really leave, and have influenced Burton throughout his career. It's a fun, resonant electrification of his earlier work, with just enough fresh in it to make it worth the effort and bring it back to new life in leeched black-and-white (which Burton always manages to make look sumptuous). Now, if only we could see something wholly new and original from him, that would be some experiment.

The original Frankenweenie

Brad Bird's "Family Dog" (from Steven Spielberg's "Amazing Stories") based on animation designs by Tim Burton

* It did find it's way to Paul Reubens who'd been trying to find a suitable director to collaborate on his long-in-the planning Pee-Wee Herman movie he'd been dreaming about.  Frankenweenie convinced him to contact Burton.

Meteor (1979)

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash Day"...

Meteor (Ronald Neame, 1979) A co-production between Shaw Bothers Studios, Warner Brothers, Nippon Herald Films and American International Pictures, featuring a script by Edmund H. North (who wrote The Day the Earth Stood Still and co-wrote Patton) and Stanley Mann (who wrote a couple of Sean Connery's early films) and featuring a cast that probably ate up most of the movie-budget—Connery, Natalie Wood, Brian Keith, Karl Malden, Henry Fonda, Martin Landau, and Trevor Howard all under the direction of Ronald Neame, who directed The Poseidon Adventure. The story was the most high-profile of topics—an asteroid (called "Orpheus") is headed for Earth and American and Russian scientists must cooperate and use their own orbiting nuclear defense systems to destroy it before it hits Earth and creates a global catastrophe.

What could possibly go wrong?

 

Budgeting. That's what could go wrong.

 

Although a lot of the writing in Meteor is overwrought, the cast does alright with it, and Neame's direction isn't particularly flashy, but manages to keep things moving briskly.

But, by the time all of that was done, the movie's coffers had little room left for post-production and special effects. It didn't help that by the time attention was being paid to the post-production, the group assigned to do the effects of the large threatening asteroid and the missiles designed to destroy it was summarily fired for the work for being below expectations.*

Now, there's a lot of grousing these days that "special effects don't make good movies." Goodness knows there have been a lot of movies where the special effects were sub-par, even in the 1970's (Logan's Run, for instance), even after the water-shed moment of the Star Wars premiere. And one has merely to look at the output of AIP's post-Star Wars coat-tails films to see that their effects work was "made-in-the-garage" quality.

So, one is left with a Frankenstein-monster of a movie: An able cast with a somewhat shaky script (with some truly cringe-inducing dialogue), spliced with sub-par special effects sequences that—despite the many limitations—seem to go on forever, with no real editing scheme to create tension, but plopped into the film to fill the time with the shakiest of continuities.

There's no finesse to it at all—how could there be when the film was being pieced together so close to the premiere? One can only console oneself with a sequence where the all-star cast gets drenched in mud while trying to escape their command headquarters through the New York City subway system. The images call to mind so many derogatory descriptions for the movie. "Disaster" being the kindest one.

Hollywood wasn't quite done with the concept yet: 1998 saw the release of not one, but two "asteroid-threatening-the-Earth" movies: Armaggedon and Deep Impact. 

Apparently, there's a lot of "rockery" in neighborhood-space. And nothing new under the sun.

* Actually, two groups of special effects studios were let go, sucking up a lot of the "post" budget and pushing the time-line for the eventual team—they had a mere two months to complete the work before the premiere!

There was another major up-ending of expectations in the post-production: John Williams was given the job of writing the score for Meteor, but the production delays and the revolving door of special effects artists prevented any sort of semblance of "picture lock" for him to compose music for it before he had to go off and work on Steven Spielberg's 1941. Laurence Rosenthal was then hired to compose the score, which ended up being rather good—amazing, given his time-constraints.