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October 04, 2005
Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride (2005) *** 1/2
The mood is grue: With Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, co-directors Tim Burton and Mike Johnson cook up a confection of the kind of good-humored, childish morbidity that should call up the inner Wednesday in any audience already attracted to Burton’s straggly muse. Stop-motion enhanced with digital refinements, the look is wispier than Henry Selick’s work in James and the Hungry Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas, but is fetchingly original, with a silvery-shivery-ash palette in the doings above ground and a dusty absinthe-meets-marzipan look in the necrophile city of the dead to which our shy, unlucky groom finds himself haplessly propelled. Like flesh, of course, Burton’s command of plot tends to disintegrate, and by the movie’s end, there’s little consistent logic yet a sweetly twerpy sense of movement in all the elongated figures, as they step, skip, shuffle or pirouette through the story’s turns. The musical numbers are as vivacious as you could imagine chorus lines of the dead being, a syncopated Day of the Dead celebration. The four songs, by Danny Elfman, whether pastiching Kurt Weill or Gilbert & Sullivan, all sound the same, just more of the never-ending afterlife of Oingo Boingo. Voices by Johnny Depp, Emily Watson, Helena Bonham-Carter, Albert Finney, Richard E. Grant, Christopher Lee and Deep Roy. There’s also a couple of the most fannish and boyish of fanboy nods to the king of stop-motion, Ray Harryhausen. I like the skeletal dead dog an awful lot. 75m.
Posted by pride at October 4, 2005 06:47 PM
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