Hey folks, Harry here. And man... this Big Brother fella seems to hate this movie. Now I don't know... but everything he seems to be dogging on are the very same aspects that I love in Burton's other work. The 'is it scary, serious or funny' aspect is at the very core of what I think defines Tim Burton. As for the 'storyline change'... well... You do know that SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS is the biggest bastardization of the Snow White tale right? Point is... I DON'T CARE, so long as I like the story. Now... Who knows... maybe it does suck, like this guy says... or... we could go along with what all the others have said and be very very excited. Having read the script and loving the trailers and look of this film... I'm inclined to be quite hopeful. But... if you want to be brought down... here's Big Brother...

hi, i've been a fan of the site for a long time but i never wrote in. But
tonight I feel obligated to deter people from seeing one of the most
dissapointing moviegoing experiences of the whole year. At a studio
screening held in downtown n.y.c. tonight, sleepy hollow was shown. And boy
does this movie have problems. Let me just say that when I first saw the
trailer for this movie I was in ecstacy. I thought, "this is perfect."
everything looked right, the sets, the actors, the story, the mood. But
this movie just doesn't know where it wants to go. It starts off with
Ichabod Crane, played by Depp. In this version, Ichabod is no longer a
schoolteacher, but an investigator who is stoic and determined to make the
rest of the community see that using torturous methods to seek out criminals
is wrong. Instead he wants to use science and logic to determine this.
Christopher Lee, in a cameo which just adds nothing to the film (kind of
like Janet Leigh's in Halloween H20) tells Ichy that if he wants to go use
science, he better go and help stop this mean old killer who's "lopped off"
the heads of three people in this upstate NY town of Sleepy Hollow. So he
goes and finds troublesome goings on in the form of seemingly conspiratorial
town leaders -- who are very well played. The whole set up of this movie,
essentially the first half hour, is excellent. But from there the movie
goes sour.

We all know that Ichabod crane is supposed to be this big wuss
right? But the movie inserts so many "funny" moments at times when the
action should be kept completely serious that all attempts at both real
suspense and real believability are spoiled. Ichabod is a wuss but time and
time again the gag of having Ichabod faint dead away after something
frightening happens ruins the whole mood. It seems like Tim Burton couldn't
decide, actually it seems more the writer's fault, whether or not this movie
was supposed to be a comedy or a horror - adventure. But this movie fails
at its attempt to be all three. At times Burton tends to also camp it up a
lot, and this again defeats the effect of the film being frightening.

But what about effects? I'm not a big fx person but the effects in this
movie are really phenomenal. The whole mood in terms of photography is
wonderful and works perfectly with the story. It's just the dialogue and
the writing that fall flat. The movie has these graphic scenes of
decapitation that set up the movie as a horrific scary deal, but then go off
every which way. There is also a weird sequence where Ichabod visits a
"hag" in a mysterious cave, and her eyes bug out like jim carrey in the mask
and large marge in pee wee. that was really strange. The casting of
christopher walken as the person who later becomes the headless horsemen is
sort of out of place in this film. He doesn't do much more than grunt.

The ending of this film was perhaps the worst part of this movie.
Besides from the fact that it can be predicted from the start of the film
and I never can figure out the bad guy on scooby doo) it just plain sucks.
The evil bad guy ends up giving a speech straight out of james bond. There
is also way too many campy tacky jokes that just stifle what should be the
quick, suspenseful pace of the movie.

See the problem is that it's hard to say who to blame. Clearly Tim
Burton had a dynamite vision for this film. So blaming him entirely is
wrong. This emerges as one of his strangest films, I felt. Tom Stoppard's
uncredited dialogue doctoring could be at fault, but I doubt it. Could be
Francis Ford Coppola at the producing helm, but who knows? The actors
aren't at fault either, even though most of them overdo it. I tend to think
it's the writer, who's name i made a point of forgetting as soon as the
movie ended. That's just my opinion, but i urge you to stay away from this
movie. It's just a dissapointment for any true burton fan.

thanks

call me Big Brother