The Best of Depp + Burton

With eight collaborations under their collective belt, Johnny Depp & Tim Burton are one of cinema's most lucrative & stylistically successful actor-director pairings. Depp is an actor who so easily understands & communicates Burton's particular creative sensibilities & Burton is a director who always provides Depp with both opportunity & creative freedom to create a wide array of left-field characters. In honour of their upcoming Dark Shadows, let's look back at their best work together:

1. Edward Scissorhands

An artistic breakthrough for both star & director & the start a beautiful pairing. Burton's distinct visuals tell an effective modern fantasy. Disbelief is gladly suspended in order to share the quiet emotions of Edward's world. Depp makes a leap from bit parts & 21 Jump Street & introduces the eccentric sensibility that would ultimately bring him fame. Underappreciated at the time (nearly everyone but Depp got nominated by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror), Depp's performance is a master class in silent film acting & iconic in & beyond the goth community. With Bo Welch's incredible sets, Colleen Atwood's iconic costumes & Danny Elfman's soaring, magical score on display, it's amazing that Stan Winston's (admittedly stand out) make-up was the only thing recognised by the Oscars.  

2. Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street 

 Seventeen years after Scissorhands, another blade wielding, pale faced outcast yielded the first & - to date - only Oscar nominated performance for a Depp / Burton collaboration. Far darker than any of their previous collaborations, Sweeny Todd is a very tricky proposition: a musical horror, with lines blurred between cringing, laughing & sing-along. It is to Depp's credit that he gets inside Todd's skin & maintains the emotion behind the singing & killing, but it is to Burton's considerable credit that he holds it all together. This time, the exceptional technical team was recognised alongside Depp, but Burton regrettably not.

3. Ed Wood

Another Ed is at the center of the pair's second collaboration, a strange & heartfelt biopic of the infamous & probably unfairly maligned "worst director of all time". Filled with eccentricities & style that celebrate its subject, Ed Wood is one of Burton's more serious (yet also sublimely silly) films. Depp's performance keeps things broad & light & unpredictable - never trying to explain or make fun of the man, but simply enjoying inhabiting his strange skin & world.

4. Charlie & the Chocolate Factory

To reinvent a character already successfully brought to life by Gene Wilder, Depp takes a number of deliberate left turns (in his own words) & churns out a true oddball - an un-apologetically antisocial, creepy perfectionist with daddy issues & a bit of a vindictive streak. His Willy Wonka bears an eery resemblance to the ultimate eternal man-child himself: Michael Jackson & makes up in enticing unpredictability what he lacks in warm charisma. From Burton's side, the Chocolate Factory is hardly a stretch, but it is joyous eye candy of the highest order & still a film with Burton's distinctive fingerprint all over it.

5. Sleepy Hollow

It has a good story, but Burton's Sleepy Hollow is all about the evocative style & rich atmosphere. A gloomy retelling of the tale of headless horseman, with incredible sets & gorgeous cinematography doubling for Washington Irving's prose. Depp's Ichabod Crane is a predictably offbeat take on the classic literary investigator. Never one to take his character too seriously, his Ichabod is a decidedly reluctant hero; an often terrified & cowardly academic more interested in science than people. A stern, serious character played for well judged comic effect in a merrily gothic tale.

6. Corpse Bride

Who better than Depp to voice the shy, sensitive hero of Burton's first animation outing as Director (after producing the hugely influential & extremely Burton-esque The Nightmare Before Christmas for Henry Selick)? The story is slight but sweet, the animation is legendary & the voice actors do uniformly excellent work.   

7. Alice in Wonderland

With Depp beneath the cap, Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter was understandably promoted to lead character, but while Depp & Burton promised a truly mentally damaged Hatter, they delivered a brightly coloured, giddy cartoon. Depp's hatter is larger than life, entertaining & sweetly damaged, but ultimately more of an idea than an actual creation and, personally, the weakest of the pair's collaborations. Burton's film, meanwhile, is a technical & visual wonder, but quickly digested popcorn fare, story-wise. 

Dark Shadows - Trailer

The trailer for Tim Burton's Dark Shadows has dropped. It seems like quite a loose take on the source material, but apparently there's more horror melodrama than the trailer lets on.

Vampire vs witch in campy 70s, old world meets new(er) world, fish-out-of water finds new family... Dark Shadows may be Burton's first out & out comedy since Mars Attacks (or, arguably, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory). Kind of like War of the Roses meets Back to the Future meets The Witches of Eastwick. 

Burton's always impressive style sometimes overshadows his storytelling, but the good news here is that he seems more interested in his characters than their setting, so we should be in for a good ride. It's also great to see Eva Green in what seems to be a more central, and funny, role. The comic vixen part fits her like a glove.

Depp, Bruckheimer & Verbinski let The Lone Ranger ride again

Continuing his infatuation with Vintage American TV, Johnny Depp is also reviving 40s / 50s / 60s TV serial The Lone Ranger with his Pirates of the Caribbean collaborators, Jerry Bruckheimer & recent Oscar winner Gore Verbinski. In true Depp fashion, he insisted on playing Tonto, rather than the titular Ranger, to ensure the classic "sidekick" is not sidelined & stereotyped , & to explore his own part-American Indian heritage.

Depp's elaborate take on the classically single-feathered Tonto has been met with mixed reception, but his detailed make up & get up may be closer to reality, if you consider the reference pic below. And why have one feather when you could have a whole bird?

Ryan Gosling was briefly attached to fill the big shoes of the Lone Ranger, but that mantle has ultimately be-crested the shoulders of Armie Winkelvii Hammer. May the force be with him. There is no doubt that Depp's Tonto will take a more central role (he is, after all, the humble mastermind, while the Lone Ranger is the posturing jock...), but whether Bruckheimer & Verbinski will be able to create a blockbuster while staying true to the simple spirit of the TV show will be the real test.

Tonto & the Ranger - alone, together:

The Lone Ranger opening credits: 

After the cut - this chick is awesome & super excitable & tells the story far better than I can:

Depp & Burton resurrect Dark Shadows (again)

For Tim Burton's 2012 live action outing, he is reviving 60s Horror Soap Opera, Dark Shadows. Vampires, werewolves and witches cross paths with the upper class Collins family in their Maine mansion.. The show ran from 1966 - 1971, with Jonathan Frid as head vampire, Barnabas Collins.

The show was briefly revived in 1991 with Ben Cross as Barnabas Collins & Joseph Gordon-Levitt as David Collins.

Burton's take seems a touch cartoonish (Depp looks like he stepped out of the Dick Tracy movie, as a vampire), but Depp claims it is a return to "vampires who look like vampires", in the Nosferatu / Dracula vein. Depp & Burton have more brilliant collaborations than bland ones, and Dark Shadows combines juicy source material with a killer cast: Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer (returning to the Burtonverse for the first time since Batman Returns), Chloe Grace Moretz, Eva Green, Johnny Lee Miller, Helena Bonham Carter & Jackie Earle Haley.

And just because the internet can be a strange, strange place - a musical montage tribute to the loves of Barnabas Collins (one of several) after the cut:

Johnny Depp in The Rum Diary - Trailer

Johnny Depp returns to the worlds of Hunter S Thompson (he played Raoul Duke aka Hunter S Thompson in Terry Gilliam's fairly bonkers adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and rum (Pirates of the Caribbean ad infinitum). 

The trailer doesn't let on whether Depp & director Bruce Robinson nail the tone but, done right, it should be a meaty part of Depp.

Johnny Depp is back in the new Pirates & the new Hunter S Thompson adaptation

Johnny Depp sure has been quite prolific the last few years. Last year his performances in Alice in Wonderland and The Tourist were decent but disappointing, and started feeling like perhaps he should be a bit more picky.

This year, he sinks his teeth into another Hunter S Thompson adaptation (last time was Terry Gilliam's take on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, this time it's Bruce Robinson's The Rum Diary). The plot (according to rum-diary-movie-trailer.blogspot.com) hints at quite a role for Depp:

"The Rum Diary follows Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp), a divorced alcoholic and struggling novelist who decides to kick around in San Juan until his ship comes in, working as a journalist for a newspaper that’s on its last legs, drinking gallons of rum and experimenting with LSD. With his new friend Bob Sala by his side, Kemp becomes entangled in a corrupt hotel development scheme with a slick PR consultant named Sanderson."

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides - more after the cut: