Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

September 2005 activity

Total Log Entries: 21

Total Comments: 9

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Corpse Bride / USA / 2005

I hold two of Tim Burton’s films with great admiration, and although Corpse Bride is an emulation of both, it succeeds neither. It is directly evocative of The Nightmare Before Christmas, but excises that film’s sense of wonder and discovery to encapsulate only the romance between two macabre lovers (it is this element that is Nightmare’s weak leg). (Suddenly, I realize how Nightmare’s most artful concept is the same one that propels The Matrix.) And this romance evokes Edward Scissorhands: a boy and girl who fall in love, despite some formidable prohibitions.

The animation is – I say with little hesitation – the most robust stop-motion photography heretofore in film; the characters feel restrained by gravity, and their flesh is buoyant. The dead are the more rigidly articulated (even those that retain some rotten flesh are stiff) and the more interesting, forgiving lot. This is to be expected in a Tim Burton film, and this statement demonstrates Corpse Bride’s excused flaw: the film looks wonderful, but it’s nothing you haven’t already seen.

by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Warner Bros. 35mm print
15 Sep 2005 11:43 AM | Submit Comment

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