Greil Marcus, famously, lamented that no one had so fully betrayed their innate talent as enthusiastically as Rod Stewart. No doubt Stewart will be raising an eyebrow at this, as his latest paramour wraps her legs around his neck in whichever of his country estates they are currently reclining in. But it’s hard not to view Tim Burton as his cinematic equivalent.
Because for all their material success, they must both know, at some level, that it was never meant to have been about the money.
Burton’s prodigious raw talent was immediately spotted and very quickly he was able to direct his first feature, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, in 1985 at the age of 27. And over the next ten years, he made Beetlejuice (‘88), Batman (’89), Edward Scissorhands (’90), Batman Returns (’92) and Ed Wood (’94).
Which looked like he’d struck that ideal combination of doing one for the studio, followed by one of his more personal projects. The studio pictures managed to make money while still bearing his very particular personal stamp, and allowed the studio to justify funding the more idiosyncratic fare that Burton was clearly more interested in.
But in the 30 years since making Ed Wood, Burton has made around a dozen other films most of which are neither one nor the other. Some of them look like they started out as personal pet projects, but quickly grew to become bloated studio pictures. Others were clearly designed to fund what came in between.
None of them are bad films. Burton’s not capable of making a bad film. They’re just not terribly interesting. And now this, the so say long awaited sequel to Beetlejuice.
If you were trying to be charitable, I suppose you could say, isn’t it great to see all that talent up on screen? Willem Defoe, Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux and Monica Bellucci join Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Catherine O’Hara from the original. But it’s hard not to conclude, what a shame they weren’t given a bit more to get their teeth stuck into.
I hope they all enjoyed the experience of the shoot and were suitably compensated for their time. And the studio put a huge amount of heft into their marketing efforts, so hopefully they’ve recovered their investment and won’t feel the need to blame anyone for the film that resulted.
But it’s hard not to be a little disappointed that Burton’s best film, Batman Returns, turns out to have been one of the studio films that were supposed to have been funding his more personal projects, all those years ago.
You can see the trailer for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice here
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