Tim Burton may now be considered a filmmaking visionary, and one of a fairly small number of directors working inside the Hollywood studio system to still legitimately be called an auteur, but his unique genius wasn’t always embraced and celebrated. When Burton first conceived of the idea for Frankenweenie, based on a dog he loved during his childhood, he envisioned it as a full-length stop motion-animated movie. Owing to budget constraints and a lack of enthusiasm for that form on the part of his employer Disney, however, Burton instead made drawings of how he imagined the characters and directed it as a live-action short in 1984, starring Shelley Duvall and Daniel Stern. The plan was for the film to debut theatrically pegged to a re-release of Pinocchio, but Disney fired Burton before the movie was completed — feeling the project was too scary and weird — and for years it was shelved. Flash forward almost three decades later, and Burton is now set to debut the full realization of one of his first and most personal filmmaking visions — and to do so for Disney. For the full feature piece, over at ShockYa, click here.
Daily Archives: October 6, 2012
Decoding Deepak
A best-selling author, lifestyle coach and proponent of Eastern medicinal practices, Deepak Chopra is known to and beloved by millions. Of course, he’s also just a man — and a sometimes distant and curious one to his son, Gotham Chopra. Decoding Deepak, then, is a documentary devoted to unraveling a bit of the myth surrounding the public figure, as the younger Chopra follows his father for a year, chronicling his brokered ordainment as a Buddhist monk in Thailand and subsequent book tour for a fictionalized autobiography of Muslim prophet Muhammad. Smart, warm-hearted and inquisitive, it digs into one of the under-examined (and ongoing) difficulties we all face — recognizing and understanding our parents as actual people, and not just a mom or dad.
Chopra recognizes and respects his father’s intelligence and drive, but his relationship with him is also leavened by skepticism, and a certain disconnection from what he eventually characterizes as Deepak’s insatiable hunger to be relevant on a grand scale. Like any son or daughter, he’s frustrated when his father thinks he has nothing left to learn, and he sketches out the contours of their relationship thusly: for engagement, follow him into his work, and listen to him talk about… whatever.
A lack of something to say is certainly not a condition normal to Deepak, who is adept at elegantly phrased, bite-size morsels of wisdom, and a master of wrapping philosophical poetry around terrible moments of human despair or depravity. In Gotham’s view, his father can turn “any mundane question into a talking point for a book,” so ripples of an understated adolescent longing for more personal connection come bubbling to the surface by way of his innocent needling of his dad over the lack of his books at a train station kiosk (“You’re not as popular as The Secret“) during a trip to India.
The film doesn’t quite crack the ineffable remoteness of its subject, but it is humanizing. The portrait that emerges is an interesting and engaging one — of Deepak as a perhaps deep but also innately restless thinker, not a phony, really, but a spiritually-minded guru who also enjoys many of the material pleasures of life. He’s a man of contradictions, like us all. This is always why he can be seen as pondering the big questions of life, while still obsessed with both his Blackberry and a contentious Nightline debate with professional skeptic Michael Shermer from months earlier.
As a kind of well-captured travelogue, Decoding Deepak is of course quite specifically about its namesake subject, but it also has a much wider reach and sense of reflection and purpose than that. The film actually shares a good deal in common with Doug Block’s superb, little seen 2009 documentary The Kids Grow Up, and Agnès Varda’s slightly better known The Beaches of Agnès, both of which were highly reflective nonfiction self-portraits refracted through the lens of modern parenting, and by degrees about the difficult but necessary notion of evolving familial relationships. If life is about answering but a few questions and the process of discovering more and more with which to grapple, Decoding Deepak suitably captures that. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. For more information on the movie, and to view its trailer and information about its availability on VOD platforms, visit its website by clicking here
Catherine O’Hara on Beetlejuice, Frankenweenie… Health Care?
Befitting a comedienne of her talents, Catherine O’Hara is many different things to fans of different generations. To most in her peer set and perhaps six or seven years in either direction, she’s best known as an award-winning writer and performer on SCTV, the influential sketch comedy show which started north of the border and eventually migrated to NBC. To plenty of younger fans, she’s Kate McCallister, the beleaguered matriarch of the Home Alone films. Urban cineastes and others probably know her best, meanwhile, from her four ensemble collaborations with multi-hyphenate Christopher Guest. And then, of course, family film fans will recognize her distinctive voice, from animated movies like Chicken Little, Over the Hedge, Monster House and The Nightmare Before Christmas.
That last title is also related to another thread or ribbon running through O’Hara’s filmography — her relationship with Tim Burton. She first worked with him on 1988’s groundbreaking Beetlejuice (and also met her husband, production designer Bo Welch, on the project), and then Nightmare, which was produced by Burton. Now, in Burton’s new stop motion-animated Frankenweenie, about a misunderstood boy who uses his love of science to re-animate his beloved, recently deceased dog, O’Hara voices three different characters. I recently had the chance to speak to the Canadian-born actress one-on-one, about Burton, Beetlejuice, Frankenweenie, how she muffed an audition to play Robert De Niro’s wife and, yes, even her thoughts on health care. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.