Ed Wood (1994)

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette

Have I Seen it Before: Big time.

Did I Like It: If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’ve probably heard about my affinity for Tim Burton’s likely most famous film, Batman (1989). I’ve owned it in five different formats, and have probably watched it more than any other film in history…

But it isn’t my favorite Tim Burton film. Not by a long shot.

The story of Edward D. Wood, Jr. isn’t a very nice story. A man with not a lot of talent doesn’t let that stop him, he proceeds to make movies despite that lack of talent, and the pursuit of those dreams did not bring him fortune, or glory, or even some mild sense of fulfillment. They only exacerbated his alcoholism and left him to die in squalor.

But the film stops before any of the truly tragic realities of Wood’s life can creep into the frame (indeed, they are mentioned only in codas before the end credits). It is a story about hope springing eternal against all odds (and even reality). It’s uplifting, and it’s about friendship at its core. Johnny Depp is never more reserved (or, for that matter, better) than he is in the title role, and Landau’s well-deserved Oscar for his turn as an at-the-end-of-his-rope Bela Lugosi makes this Burton’s strangest and most personal film, when it really should lay claim to neither.

I’m not even all that weirded out that for one of the few times (the others being, naturally Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and oddly, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)) when Danny Elfman is not orchestrating the score for a Burton film. I mean, I’m a little weirded out, just not a lot.

Also, with the one two punch of Vincent D’Onofrio’s face and Maurice LaMarche’s voice, this film contains the most believable, fictional portrayal of Orson Welles on film.

That doesn’t just count for something; it counts for a great deal.

Hocus Pocus (1993)

Director: Kenny Ortega

Cast: Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy, Thora Birch

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. But I may be one of those people who didn’t come to the film on numerous airings on cable. It had an odd effect on me back then, but it’s possible a film which is unassailably played for laughs somehow unsettles a child under the age of ten. One might say there is something I saw it in the theater. Which, blah, blah, blah, I miss going to. I’d go to see almost anything, if it wasn’t a wildly irresponsible thing to do.

Cut to this very film being run at the local drive in currently, and me not wanting to go anyway. We’re all a big puddle of contradictions, no?

Did I Like It: It is, easily, the second-best Halloween-themed, non-cell-animated, Disney film of 1993.

That reads as a dig, I’m sure, but I’m pretty sure I intended it as a pledge of allegiance to The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). The film is amiable enough, and objectively has the same kind of broad comedic mugging one might have experienced in a bygone era from either the Marx Brothers, Abbott, or Costello. It also has an early Amblin-esque energy about it that, while it never reaches for the pathos Spielberg could so easily achieve, even in his worst movies, it is as winning a framework to deliver entertainment as any.

Ultimately, I can’t fault a film entirely when both a) it clearly isn’t/wasn’t made for me and b) the three leads appear to be having a great deal of fun in their shenanigans. It’s little touches that capture my imagination after all these years, though. Primarily the delight in seeing Doug Jones do anything, but the idea that Garry and Penny Marshall are playing a married couple when they were, in fact, siblings, is definitely one of those strange quirks of cinema that one can’t help but dwell upon.