Well, sad to relate that most of the costumes I saw on the weekend were shamefully shabby. I just drove by most of them in my car, as I didn’t have much of a sense of what or where would be best and it seemed by Saturday I’d missed a lot of what I wanted to go to, anyway. I need to get in touch with the Costume Con crowd again. They will blow me out of the water no doubt. Should have done that. And I didn’t get out to the gay hangouts, I bet that would have been glitteriffic. See you guys at the Margaret Cho Booksigning at The Grove Barne’s & Noble’s, eh?. That’s happening on Friday the 4th.
Some insane costumes I have tackled in the past: Marie Antoinette (with paniers and hand-constructed wig), the horse and the mule for Don Quixote and Sancho in Man of La Mancha, (steel welded frames and leather patching), giant frog heads made of foam, a 15-minute rendition of Princess Leia that actually worked very well; a two-person Appalachian horse, and a pair of saguaro cactii, to name some… I want to see more of the marvellous….
Which brings to mind another costume I’d considered, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. However, I found I didn’t really adore this film as I wished I had. It just left me rather unmoved, and I keep trying to place why.
Is it that we’ve seen the Burton/Elfman formula too many times? (And it was that, right down to the skeleton sequence in the middle of the film, the music for which had none of the catchiness of Nightmare Before Christmas’s Oogie Boogie song.) I kept looking for things to like in this film. The few “funny” lines were not that humorous, and I couldn’t help wondering if they just needed some new blood in the script department. The trailer I’ve seen for Chicken Little was far better, which is a sad thing to say.
And if you say, But it wasn’t really meant to be that humourous, it was meant to be romantic, I counter with: So what’s the stupid maggot character need to be in there for? Boring. All in all I felt sad that it seemed Tim is in a confirmed slump and needs to get some fresh time away from work and then come back. The sets were all rendered beautifully and the characters were nicely done, but I just didn’t fall in love with them, because the script was just so thin on their humanity.
I felt Johnny Depp’s voice was only a so-so choice, and it should have been Hugh Grant. Helena Bonham Carter was a good choice for the bride, as was Emily Watson’s delicate Victoria. Albert Finney’s physical character looked strangely like James Earl Jones, and I wondered if he’d pulled out at the last minute and been subbed by Finney…… A happy postscript: I found it charming that they thought the maggot’s voice would have been best represented by Peter Lorre, had he been around to do it. The imitator they picked did a close second.
On the whole, I think I would have liked it if Tim had pushed the macabre aspect of the underworld a little more. I think audiences are ready for that, and if you look at Tim’s early sketches that spawned Nightmare, you’ll see some really pretty edgy grimness. I think he might need to return to that.
Tim also drives me crazy because it’s really difficult to make a great Halloween costume based on his characters’ figures. They are not forgiving to the human form, elongated and skeletal, with golf ball heads. I have seen a few people pull them off as costumes, but truly successfully only once, and that was a fellow who actually went around all night with a huge globe over his head and wore stilts. Hotcha!! That was grand.
Anyway, I am now over my lame and boring Halloween weekend which occurred largely because I don’t know anyone and don’t know where to go yet in this town as well as my boring rest of the weekend (three trick or treaters, count them, one two and three.) and on to being psyched about even lamer things like dressing in my costume for an IMAX Harry Potter showing. Which I WILL do. Yes. Just to make some deluded three year old believe the movie is actually real-er than their parents will admit. Why not?. Santa Claus is pretty commercialized out. Gotta have something to inspire them with. Or maybe it will just make them want to grow up and stand in line to watch fantasy films in costume. Life as art.
The other best thing about my Halloween weekend was watching Monsters, Inc. again. Forgot some wonderful bits. I am getting truly beyond help, can you tell? Come rescue me someone, please. I dare anyone to just show up at Doh Soon Eh restaurant and wait for me (we order out from there every other day it seems) and give me some better ideas. I dare anyone to FIND Doh Soon Eh restaurant anyway, hole in the wall that it is. But: best dueji bulgogi in town.
Oh and the Star 80s station I bumped into in the car, thanks for playing On the Metro. Missed that song a lot. Those were such great times, such happy go luckiness before 9/11 and all…. when “I remember hating you for loving me” made such sense to our smugly chic cocaine-and-Hagen Daaz selves. Now I’d grab that chick and smack her and tell her to get a grip, there are people drowning in hurricanes and stuff, and we can’t waste that kind of affection anymore, there are people with rubble on them trapped in Cashmere, and stuff, and we have a bodybuilder for a Governor that we have to elect out in a week at very least just because he has a wife that looks like a walking skeletal freakazoid, and MAN, I have REALLY had a lame and nonbrightening weekend.
Old Monty Python sketch: I need a new brain.
I’m off to administer some dark chocolate.
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