I didn’t create this image – it’s a promo for the epic 1977 Japanese horror film, House, but you get the idea. I’m sorry I don’t have better attribution for it, I found it on my desktop and all I remember is that it was sent to me by Janus Films when they re-released the movie on DVD.
The Tim Burton exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art was lots of fun, although it was clausterphobically crowded. It took a fair amount of determination and patience to see every piece in the show, but it was worth it. It’s 5 or 6 rooms crammed with sketches, storyboards, notes, character studies, maquettes, props and other goodies.
At one point I got hemmed into a corner, although to be fair it was a good corner – filled with storyboards from Nightmare Before Christmas. I’m quite intimately familiar with those sketches now.
After I escaped that corner, I almost immediately found myself wedged in next to one of the fantastic scarecrows from Sleepy Hollow. It’s probably my favorite Tim Buron movie so I was okay with that. It was also an excellent vantage point to watch the reactions of the Tim-Wannabee Boys as they randomly encountered one another.
The carefully coiffed and dyed guys in their Tim Circa-1993 uniforms looked like they’d escaped from a casting call. They’d be bouncing around, clutching their sketchbooks tightly and trying to look cool even though this was the moment they’d been waiting their whole 25 or 30 years for. Then, something awful would happen. The crowd would surge hither or yon and they’d suddenly find themselves nose to nose with another Tim-Wannabee Art Skool Boy.
You know how Siamese Fighting Fish placed next to one another in their little bowls get all puffed up and agitated? The same thing happens when you place Tim-Wannabee Art Skool Boys together. I tried not to laugh at them. I probably looked like I was intentionally rocking the Helena Bonham Carter in Sweeney Todd look, they don’t know I always look like that in the morning.
Here’s the website for the exhibit. This sketch made me laugh the most. (I’d swear it was labelled as a collaboration but the website doesn’t give any indication of that).
Tim Burton, Blind Man with Permanent Seeing Eye Dogs
[Because most of the sites I wanted to link to use flash and iphones and flash are mortal enemies, this post got scrambled on Monday so I’ve edited it to add links and images and reposted it.]
So, Halloween is right around the corner and I need to get to work deciding what, if any, the theme of this year’s Halloween movie marathon will be. Last year it was Frankenstein’s Monster (mostly). Of course other movies worked their way into the mix, thanks to our Tivo, Overlord.
I’m leaning towards werewolves. Or possibly haunted houses. No zombie or vampires – been there, done that.
Maybe I’ll do a movie-a-day for the entire month of October and allow for multiple themes. I’ll be at a conference for a few days, but it’s about the state of the music industry, radio, and telecom & internet policy so it will be rather like watching horror movies every day. Also have a daytrip to DisneyWorld for mom’s birthday. Some would argue that in itself is pretty horrific, but I’m looking forward to it. Plus, I do so love the Haunted Mansion. We went to Disney a lot when I was growing up (got to do something with the parade of visiting relatives) so I pretty much have a photographic mental map of the ride, and yet I still love it. I suppose this would be a good occasion to finally watch The Haunted Mansion, I’ve never gotten around to it.
Well, what do you think? Werewolves? Ghosts? I was going to post an actual poll but everyone one I installed had a glitch of one kind or another and time was slipping away. You can vote in the comments.
Husband had to work obscenely early this morning so I decided we might as well catch the early matinee of Coraline when he got home. We’d heard that the local theater was fairly dead on weekend mornings, so we decided to test the story out. I suspected choosing a so-called kids movie to see at 10:45 a.m. was probably going to push the boundaries of the experiment, but we did it anyway.
We got there around 10:30 and there were two other people in the theater with us. At 10:40 there were still only about a dozen adults and three or four kids. Just as the last previews ended, the place suddenly became infested with parents and their tiny spawn. Tiny, tiny spawn. Tiny, wiggly spawn.
If you plotted the ages of the people in that auditorium this morning I think there’d only be two spikes on the graph: one around 3 years and the other around 35.
yet it was the quietest audience we’ve ever been in, I think. Go figure.
Maybe they’d all taken narcotics right before the movie. I know I had.
Close to the end one little boy got scared and pleaded with his dad to take him home. Dad scooped him up and left without a fuss.
I liked the movie a lot – it looked stunning and sounded great. I thought the story was a little bit flat and the end seemed rushed. I can’t remember the book all that well, it’s been years since I read it so I can’t say if it’s the same way. Doesn’t matter, because you can forgive a lot when a movie has bat dogs.
There’s a fascinating and lengthy post at W+K’s website detailing the publicity and marketing campaign they created and managed for the film.
They’ve posted trailers, pictures of the boxes and keys they sent to bloggers, images of those creepy interactive billboards that made you look like you had button eyes, and lots more information you probably don’t want or need but will read anyway because it’s really clever and cool.
The Pennsylvania Tourism Office has been busy. Having watching the Shining recently, I found this particularly funny. Linking directly to the film trailer by-passes the cute introduction, so you’ll just have to click another link once you get to the site. I think you can handle it.