Hey, all. "Moriarty" here. Harry's a busy, busy man right now, and even though he and I have been working on things here in Los Angeles -- cool things that we are hurrying to share with you -- he's a little busier than I am. So, yes, sleep has finally caught Head Geek and dragged him down. Earlier tonight, some of the AICN LA office made our way to The Paramount, one of my favorite theaters in Los Angeles. I get to go to the Alfred Hitchcock tomorrow, another of my favorites, so I'm a pretty happy Evil Genius this week. One of the people in attendance was John Robie, master thief and dashing millionaire. Besides which side of the law we live on, turns out Robie and I have our newfound love of SLEEPY HOLLOW in common.
Between all the anger and darkness at the movies nowadays, the shouting tirades about life and how to live it, you sometimes get to hear or see something that is so pure in its effort to entertain that it knocks you on your ass. Cynicism, even if it’s hidden, has come to be expected. Sly lines dropped, a character who winks across the screen every so often, something that tells you that the people who made the movie are in on some kind of joke. That attitude has come to be expected, and it sucks.
You don’t have a skeleton, in the midst of fighting Jason, smile to the camera. The world comes crashing down. How can a fantasy work when the people behind it have come up with the action figures and marketing strategy before they even have a script? It doesn’t have to be that way. The films can still be pure. They just need the people making them to understand how to do it. Tim Burton knows how to do it. God he knows how to do it. “Sleepy Hollow,” in all its scary, funny, gorgeous glory, is nothing short of a masterpiece.
If you look at “Sleepy Hollow” with the right kind of eyes it’ll hit you at the part of yourself that’s most electric. The white-hot visceral rush that comes from seeing or doing something great for the first time. The first time you read a book that spoke to you, the first time you won a fight, the first time someone you cared about told you that they loved you. It’s that kind of feeling, that kind of hit, and it’s why this goes far beyond a great couple of hours of thrills. “Sleepy Hollow” is a piece of art, and it is beautiful. It’s the kind of thing that you yearn to share with your friends, the kind of thing that you know you’ll show to your kid someday, the kind of thing where you get tired from smiling for so long because it just gets it all so right.
There are moments here that will go down in the Burton canon, stuff that’s going to be shown when he receives all the lifetime achievement awards in about thirty years. Nothing that can or should be given away, and words would be at a loss to describe just how amazingly cool the images that grace the screen are. Everyone knows the basic story. Plenty has been added here. Ichabod Crane is no longer the scared, cowering man. Even if he were written that way, Johnny Depp is way too smart an actor to play him like that. The confidence that sounds from the soft, angelic Christina Ricci makes her mesmerizing. The Horseman is the only monster in recent cinema who can stand with Universal’s classics of the thirties. In action he’s lightning. His body hunched over, sword at his side, the thump, thump, thump as he rides his horse through the misty, gnarled, brilliantly creepy forest. As the centerpiece he’s a force of nature, the type of dynamo that hardly ever gets realized on the screen anymore.
Yet there’ll be a large camp who just doesn’t get “Sleepy Hollow.” The blood doesn’t look real, they’ll say. Why is so much of this absurd, and why does Christopher Walken growl so much? In Walken lies distinction between people who will dig “Sleepy Hollow” and people who won’t. If you can buy into the great white Walken when you see him slaughtering soldiers during the Revolutionary War, if you can understand by the portrayal of the Horseman where Burton and Co. are coming from, then you’ll have more fun than you can believe with the movie.
If you can see that this isn’t the pop scares of “Scream,” that it’s not the genuine terror of “Halloween,” that it’s not the gothic horror of “Nosferatu,” that it’s something original, singularly Burton, then the movie will work for you. Burton said that he wanted this to look like a Hammer film. If that means anything to you, know that he’s done that and a lot more. The people who started Hammer Films should look at “Sleepy Hollow” like proud parents. It’s a movie far more pure and far more fantastical than you can believe. Don’t get mad that the film doesn’t turn out to be what you expect. Revel in the fact that it is something different, something better. This will go down as a classic. It might not do it right away. It probably won’t. A lot of critics aren’t going to get the movie. They’ll complain about Walken being over the top and the film being too gruesome, they’ll ravage it because the story doesn’t pan out like they think it should, they’ll be put off that the film doesn’t blaze across the screen with a post-modern edge. They’ll all be wrong. They’ve lost their sense of wonder.
We haven’t. “Sleepy Hollow” is brilliant.
|
