Wood’s low budget films are cherished by cultists for their stilted dialogue, poor production values, and blatant lapses in continuity, but his pictures are also unexpectedly personal in a way that other B-movies of Wood’s era rarely are, particularly in the case of Wood’s first feature, Glen or Glenda, which draws on its writer-director’s own experiences as a transvestite. It of course makes sense that Burton’s best film to date is about Ed Wood, one of the most famed outsider artists of the twentieth century. And while it’s easy to snark about a man who regularly helms mainstream blockbusters claiming any kind of outsider status (“I’ve noticed that after a director makes his first $50 million, he usually makes a movie about how tough it is to be a sensitive soul,” Paul Rudnick cracked in a review of Edward Scissorhands over twenty years ago), Burton’s identification with misfits nevertheless remains a welcome departure from Hollywood’s indefatigable obsession with all that is standardized, predictable, and pretty.
As a director, Tim Burton has always been especially interested in outsiders and outcasts: people who exist in their own little worlds or on the fringes of ours.
0 kommentar(er)
