films & fashion
Just Looking
into It...
Lucy.
For decades Tim Burton has had a unique vision of the world that he’s been trying to communicate in his movies. I knew 20 minutes into this one that I was watching his masterpiece; it’s the culmination of everything he’s been trying to say. He finally got everything right. This movie is flawless, delicate, and a perfect communion of his world view or so says
Lucy.
I
knew halfway through the movie that it was the best I’ve seen in a decade, and by the end I knew it to be among the best cinematic experiences I’ve had.
Watching the movie also gave me a twinge of sadness, because the more I loved the movie, the more I understood -- from experience, mind you -- that it was going to leave a lot of viewers bewildered and unhappy. Tim Burton is generations ahead of his time, and the closer he comes to showing us his true vision, the more people he alienates, leaving an ever-smaller core of aficionados who can be moved and astonished by the brilliance of that vision.
Johnny Depp obviously gets the vision. People who work time and again with Burton do so because they get *him*. And Depp gives bravura, astonishingly subtle performance of an incredibly difficult character. It may have been his finest work to date. But the difficulty of the character will also confuse many people, and you’re going to hear about it in the reviews.
these people are caricatured in
The movie, like many of Burton’s movies, pokes fun at
precisely the kind of person who doesn’t get this movie.
People who’ve lost touch with the wonderment of their childhoods, people who are mostly concerned with what is fashionable and proper, dull people with little imagination and even less tolerance for it in others --
Alice, both in the “real world” at the party and again in the Red Queen’s court.
Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a wonderful metaphor
for the relationship between Burton and his audience. The theme of the movie is that a few people in the world -- “only the best people” -- still have boundless imagination and delight for the truly novel, while the rest of polite society thinks of them as being quirky, off- kilter, or simply embarrassing. It will take years for this mess to get sorted out, of course. People will whine and moan and complain about it. In time they’ll accept it. A generation from now this movie will be viewed as one of the best fantasies of our times: a 21st-
century Wizard of Oz (to which Alice pays a brief homage at the end of the film.)
A word of advice: go re-read Lewis Carroll’s two Alice stories before watching this movie. No Alice has ever been truer to the spirit of Carroll’s strange, haunting and timeless vision.
in Owensboro, Kentucky, on June 9, 1963, Johnny Depp was raised in Florida. He dropped out of school at age 15 in the hopes of becoming a rock musician. He fronted a series of garage bands including The Kids, which once opened for Iggy Pop. Depp got into acting after a visit to Los Angeles, California, with his former wife, Lori Anne Allison (Lori A. Depp), who introduced him to actor Nicolas Cage. He made his film debut in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). In 1987 he shot to stardom when he replaced Jeff Yagher in the role of undercover cop Tommy Hanson in the popular TV series “21 Jump Street” (1987).
In 1990, after numerous
roles in teen-oriented films, his first of a handful of great collaborations with director Tim Burton came about when Depp played the title role in Edward Scissorhands (1990). Following the film’s success, Depp carved a niche for himself as a serious, somewhat dark, idiosyncratic performer, consistently selecting roles that surprised critics and audiences alike. He continued to gain critical acclaim and increasing
I
popularity by appearing in many features before re-joining with Burton in the lead role of Ed Wood (1994). In 1997 he played an undercover FBI agent in the fact-based film Donnie Brasco (1997), opposite Al Pacino; in 1998 he appeared in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), directed by Terry Gilliam; and then, in 1999, he appeared in the sci-fi/horror film The Astronaut’s Wife (1999). The same year he teamed up again with Burton in Sleepy Hollow (1999), brilliantly portraying Ichabod Crane.
Depp has played many characters in his career, including another fact-based one, Insp. Fred Abberline in From Hell (2001). He stole the show from screen greats such as Antonio Banderas in the finale to Robert Rodriguez’s “mariachi” trilogy, Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003). In that same year he starred in the marvelous family blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), playing a character that only the likes of Depp could pull off: the charming, conniving and roguish Capt. Jack Sparrow. Now Depp is collaborating again with Burton in a screen adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005).
Off-screen, Depp has dated several female celebrities, and has been engaged to Sherilyn Fenn, Jennifer Grey, Winona Ryder and Kate Moss. He was married to Lori Anne Allison in 1983 but they divorced her in 1985. Depp is living with French singer-actress Vanessa Paradis, with whom he has two children: Lily-Rose Melody, born in 1999 and Jack, born in 2002.
With our Orbit Icon Jonny Depp.
Born John Christopher Depp
10
The Orbit
APRIL 2010
100% ENTERTAINMENT MONTHLY
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