Tag: Tim Burton

With “Dark Shadows,” the tandem of director Tim Burton and producer Richard D. Zanuck has delivered its sixth movie, this one starring Johnny Depp as a confused and heartsick vampire who spends two centuries trapped underground before emerging with two urgent instincts: Drink blood. Find family. Both those impulses stay with the fanged Barnabas Collins for the remainder of the Warner Bros. film, which arrives in theaters Friday, as he dedicates himself to restoring the fortunes of his cursed bloodline. It’s not the first time that the legacies of fractured families and a yearning for reconnection pulsed at the heart of a Burton-Zanuck film. In “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” for instance, the film’s emotional payoff arrives with the doorstep reunion of candy-maker Willy Wonka (again, Depp, deep in the pale) and his estranged father (Christopher Lee). It’s a scene ...

Johnny Depp makes transformations for a living — he’s played a poet, pirate, cop, crook, lizard, killer, candymaker, astronaut and even (shudder) an accountant — but, surprisingly, he had never portrayed a vampire until ”Dark Shadows,” opening May 11, in which he stars as the aristocratic Barnabas Collins. The movie  actually adds a second unprecedented role to Depp’s career list: Now he can say he’s been the producer of a Tim Burton film. Depp had produced just two previous films, “Hugo” and “The Rum Diary,” both released last year, but expect to see more; in 2010 his production company, Infinitum Nihil, solidified and extended its existing deal with Oscar-winning producer Graham King (“The Departed,” “The Aviator”) and an adaptation of Image Comics’ “The Vault” is among the projects in the pipeline. Years ago, Depp snapped up the rights to the old television show “Dark Shadows” and that led to Depp and King ...

Johnny Depp said the world has lost “a true original” with the passing of Jonathan Frid, the darkly debonair Canadian actor who played vampire Barnabas Collins in the melodramatic and macabre soap opera “Dark Shadows.” Depp grew up as an ardent fan of “Dark Shadows” and that passion led to the film version remake, which reaches theaters May 11 with Depp as a key producer and also starring in the role made famous by Frid. Director Tim Burton also brought Frid and other original series cast members in for cameos in the movie, giving Depp a chance to share the screen with an idol of his youth. So as news spread Thursday that Frid had died late last week — on Friday the 13th, no less  –  Depp was balancing the bittersweet subplots of a life that could last 87 long years but ...

The sun was just about to set over Lake Pontchartrain on a humid Louisiana day last May when Abraham Lincoln was summoned into action in a grassy field to wrestle to the hard, unforgiving ground the murderous nemesis who took the life of his mother years earlier. Lincoln bellowed with sorrow and rage, pinning an enemy beneath his considerable weight. This was not the weathered president struggling to bear up under the agonizing grief of a bloody and brutal Civil War. This was a young man primed for a fight to the death. Funny thing, though — no one in the assembled crowd of onlookers seemed to bat an eye that Honest Abe was facing off against a vampire. Such is the straight-faced approach to the somewhat ridiculous-sounding “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” Fox’s 3-D adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel due ...

Reporting from London — There’s a night and day difference between the soundstages of Tim Burton’s “Dark Shadows” and his previous movie, “Alice in Wonderland,” and, no surprise, this is a filmmaker far more comfortable in the darkness. The digital ambitions of “Wonderland” required numbing weeks of work in a green-screen chamber, and by the end of it Burton was desperate to get back to his roots — building a cinematic house and then haunting it with his unique brand of cemetery cabaret. For “Dark Shadows,” an eccentric vampire romance starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer and Eva Green, he’s staged a minor one-man rebellion against CG imagery; the story has some digital effects, but where the script called for a Maine fishing town’s waterfront, circa 1972, Burton persuaded Warner Bros. and the film’s producers to build it on the back ...

BAT FILMS OF THE FUTURE? The end is near — when the credits roll on “The Dark Knight Rises” this July, it will mark the close of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy and the final adventure for Christian Bale as the caped crusader of Gotham City. Warner Bros. executives have made it clear they won’t leave the iconic property sitting on a shelf, however, and a new director and star tandem could be inhabiting Wayne Manor by 2014. But how on Earth will any filmmaker follow the work of Nolan and company? Working together, Hero Complex lead writer Geoff Boucher and graphic artist Sean Hartter came up with 15 imaginary Batman reboots — and, yes, they did it with tongue in cheek. Tim Burton’s “The Dark Knight Returns” Long before Christopher Nolan set foot in the Batcave, iconic director Tim Burton made Hollywood ...

Sitting in the dark with “A Clockwork Orange” is a rite of passage for many moviegoers and young Tim Burton was no different. “It looms quite large,” Burton said of Stanley Kubrick’s dark 1971 classic. “I remember I saw that movie at a drive-in on one of the first dates I ever had. It was a double bill of ‘Clockwork Orange’ and ‘Deliverance.’ My girlfriend got drunk, and I remember watching ‘Clockwork Orange’ and her throwing up the backseat while I just sat there and watched the movie.” This year marks the 40th anniversary of the transgressive film that starred Malcolm McDowell. Friday night, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will screen “A Clockwork Orange” at a sold-out tribute to McDowell. (Hero Complex’s own Geoff Boucher will be interviewing the actor on stage before the screening.) The film was ...

Tim Burton turns 53 today and this year also marks the 40th anniversary of his creepy film “The Island of Doctor Agor” — yes, Burton made the H.G. Wells-inspired short at the tender age of 13. The past is moving front and center for Burton these days. A few weeks before Halloween 2012 he’ll be in theaters with “Frankenweenie,” a stop-motion, black-and-white, feature-length movie based on his breakthrough 1984 short film of the same title. The story is about a boy and his dog — the boy has considerable mad-science savvy and the dog happens to be dead, at least until his grieving owner hatches a plan to revive his beloved pet. Footage from the film, aired at Disney’s D23 Expo this month, showed Burton’s trademark blend of the whimsical and grotesque. Right now Burton is at Pinewood Studios outside London ...

In 1989, “Batman”  ushered in a new era of superhero cinema and one of the key behind-the-camera figures was Michael E. Uslan, a producer whose name has appeared in the credits of every Gotham City film released since that first landmark Tim Burton adventure. Uslan is the author of a new book,  “The Boy Who Loved Batman: A Memoir,” and it’s packed with telling recollections and surprising revelations about the history of comics and masked-man films. Uslan will be in Santa Monica on Sept. 23 for a 6:30 p.m. signing at the Every Picture Tells a Story shop and gallery and that will be followed, right across the street, with the American Cinematheque screening of “Batman” and the underrated 1992 sequel ”Batman Returns.” I’ll be interviewing Uslan on stage before the first films and plan to talk about his memoir and his long odyssey in ...

The Disney D23 Expo 2011 kicks off today at the Anaheim Convention Center with a weekend of all things Disney (as well as Pixar and Marvel),  and our Geoff Boucher caught up with Steven Clark, the head of D23, to get some insight into the three-day event. GB: This is the second D23 Expo. What are you hoping for this time around? SC: In the first year we didn’t necessarily know exactly what to expect from our fans or just in general what the response would be. We knew we had a good show and knew that we were giving people the insider look at across the company. The one thing we’re trying to do even more of this time is to provide the fans with that touch-point with the creative executives or the talent or the archivists — those people within the Disney organization who never get ...