September 4, 1999

Went on a bit of a movie viewing spree over the past day or two. Last night, I returned home from a Schaumburg Flyers game (minor-minor league baseball, lotsa fun) to find myself restless enough to watch the entirety of Ed Wood starring Johnny Depp and the amazingly talented Martin Landau.

Is there a better Tim Burton film than Ed Wood? All the problems he's had with suffocating his stories beneath his images are gone. Instead, he's filming completely in the service of his main character. Beautiful, intuitive, very sensitive work.

And did I mention already how amazing Landau is as Bela Lugosi? What emotion and empathy. A well-deserved Oscar for that guy.

What I adore most about Ed Wood is the care with which it treats its titular character. It doesn't take him completely seriously at all, of course; how could you? This is the guy who made Plan 9 From Outer Space, fer chrissake! s. You can't treat him seriously, because the central irony of the film (and it's a gentle irony, but it's there) is that he takes his own films more seriously than anyone else ever would. He saw Plan 9 as his life's masterwork; it's now viewed as the worst movie of all time. He toils in the service of what he views as his "art," where the rest of the world views his work as "shit pictures," C-level films that don't deserve even a B-list talent like Lugosi.

But he makes them all happen anyway because that's his dream. And Ed Wood's greatest virtue is that it doesn't spare the man, but it does spare his dream. You can ridicule the movies Ed Wood made, you can mock his writing, you can laugh unabashedly at his motley crew of a cast-Bela, Tor Johnson, Vampira. But you can't mock his dream-to be a great filmmaker. The movies may suck, but the intention is pure. Burton never forgets that; it haunts his movie, and it haunts us viewers, far more effectively than! any flaccid rubber octopus ever could.