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Edward Scissorhands
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Fishing, Eggs, Steak, Lots of Barbeque, Lots of Dogs, Lots of Stupid.
Ahh... Tim Burton... back when 'directed by Tim Burton' meant, "Hell yeah, Tim Burton!" and not "Dark Shadows? With Johnney Depp? Ehhh... I'll pass..."
This is also back when teenage girl romance movies weren't [insert mildly popular Young Adult Novel Adaptation here].
This movie really harkens back to also-Winona-Ryder-vehicle Beetlejuice in it's thematic clash of aesthetics. Here we get Johnney Depp (for the first time with Tim Burton) as Edward, the socially awkward robot with scissors for hands living up in the evil castle up on the cul-de-sac when door-to-door cosmetic saleswoman takes pity on him and demonstrates a fish-out-of-water story by dropping him into a painfully caricatured suburbia.
We also get Vincent Price in what I think is his very last big screen appearance. This is a pretty historic movie.
This movie obviously demands an uncommon degree of belief suspension to work and if you can get past that, it's a pretty enjoyable flick. There's an obvious charm to it's aesthetic, it's caricatures, and it's sincere effort to make a modern fable out of social ostracism.
Many of the effects are obvious, from the Freddy Krueger gloves to the hidden debris fans to the wait-a-minute-that's-a-totally-different-dog, but for the most part I find it pleasantly engaging (save when I'm distracted by the fact that they punished several dogs with this movie because they are different in favor of producing a movie about not punishing others because they are different).
Finally, before the credits roll, it's revealed that Winona Ryder is the narrator in really good makeup doing a really ****** granny voice as she tells us that following Edward's trip to suburbia, it snowed regularly. Snow that, in that special fairy tale kinda way, comes from Edward, carving obvious plastic sculptures out of giant blocks of ice-WHERE DOES HE GET THOSE!?
Final Verdict: [Pretty Good]
REWATCH UPDATE 8/11/22:I couldn't get this marked as a review before so now that I've seen it again, let's try to add a bit more substance to it.
Edward Scissorhands is a cult classic nowadays, and ostensibly Tim Burton's most "personal" project, which I can believe. This definitely seems to be the sort of story born out of the imagination of an outcast growing up in suburbia, and that's pretty much what we get here, albeit slightly abstracted out to a nearly Dr. Seussian degree.
I made the mistake of merely referring to Peggy as a "cosmetic saleswoman". Making her an Avon saleswoman is so much more thematic and actually makes her a bit more endearing as a character because she's effectively a naive and struggling victim of a multi-level marketing company from the word go. I honestly can't think of ANY movie in which "the protagonist" is unironically an MLM hun, and they not only do it here, but they still make her likable. That's pretty refreshing.
And to add to the refreshments, she along with her whole family (and most of the neighborhood at first) is extremely welcoming of Edward when we moves in. There's the obvious jokes about The Cougar and The Hyper-Religious Bitch, but for a movie that so readily sets us up for your typical story about fear-of-the-unknown, it's nice to see people just like Edward for Edward, and not even just like Edward, but have no strong opinion towards him.
There's so much bullshit these days about openness and inclusivity, and just bending over backwards to accommodate anyone even remotely disadvantaged... but one of the most pleasant characters in this whole movie is just Dad. Dad doesn't give a ****. Dad just sits in his lawnchair and offers Edward life and financial advice as he would anyone else.
He doesn't treat Edward differently, and if Edward's comments on TV about knowingly wanting to become "more normal" are any indication, than Dad is just the ultimate embodiment of what anyone can ideally be for him. Just treating him like a regular guy. Not "the guy with the scissors".
THAT IS THE DIFFERENCE between "being inclusive" and being impartial.
It would be so easy to expect this movie to introduce the conflict as soon as Peggy brings Edward home. The conflict is foreshadowed with the all the stereotypical housewife gossip, but the trouble doesn't begin there.
It would also be easy for the conflict to begin as soon as all the husbands arrived home in the evenings (at exactly the same time every day), but as demonstrated that doesn't happen either.
No, at the end of the day, it takes an entitled thuggish douchebag teenager to ruin everything by getting Edward to commit a crime and driving him up a pole until he scares the neighbors by lashing out with petty vandalism.
He's just a genuinely evil character and it stretches belief (on top of everything else, including the Overnight Romance which stretches belief) that Ryder's character would fall for him despite these glaring character flaws. Not that those sorts of relationships don't happen, but so little is communicated about their relationship to begin with and seemingly less is communicated about his motivations to antagonize Edward. We could INFER that maybe he's jealous, because Edward apparently likes her and she pities him back, but that's never made explicit or even implicit by any of the dialog or acting.
It's just suddenly "WHAT UP FREAK!? YOUR KIND DON'T BELONG HERE!"
I guess you could wax philosophical about things like "the court of public opinion" and all that, but the way in which this movie is presented, from it's music, to it's aesthetic, to it's story, and it's characters, this really does seem like it's intended to be, dare I say, a young adult fable.
It seems like an innocent modern fairy tale at first, but it really does juggle some heavy concepts behind the back and it's appreciable in both capacities.
I also just appreciate that Depp wasn't doing puppy-dog eyes the whole movie and actually has a character arc. He manages to be adorable and funny and there's a fair amount of subtle body language in his performance to help communicate what Edward is thinking or feeling even though he's largely a silent character.
I still really like this movie. Only takes 15 minutes to get started, which is a pretty strong pace all things considered. I do wish the ending wasn't such a downer, but it was meant to be a bittersweet story, and there's still some value in that.
A modern classic.
Final Verdict: [Pretty Good]
Edward Scissorhands
Romantic Comedy Fantasy(?) / English / 1990
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
REREREREREassessment time.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*Fishing, Eggs, Steak, Lots of Barbeque, Lots of Dogs, Lots of Stupid.
Ahh... Tim Burton... back when 'directed by Tim Burton' meant, "Hell yeah, Tim Burton!" and not "Dark Shadows? With Johnney Depp? Ehhh... I'll pass..."
This is also back when teenage girl romance movies weren't [insert mildly popular Young Adult Novel Adaptation here].
This movie really harkens back to also-Winona-Ryder-vehicle Beetlejuice in it's thematic clash of aesthetics. Here we get Johnney Depp (for the first time with Tim Burton) as Edward, the socially awkward robot with scissors for hands living up in the evil castle up on the cul-de-sac when door-to-door cosmetic saleswoman takes pity on him and demonstrates a fish-out-of-water story by dropping him into a painfully caricatured suburbia.
We also get Vincent Price in what I think is his very last big screen appearance. This is a pretty historic movie.
This movie obviously demands an uncommon degree of belief suspension to work and if you can get past that, it's a pretty enjoyable flick. There's an obvious charm to it's aesthetic, it's caricatures, and it's sincere effort to make a modern fable out of social ostracism.
Many of the effects are obvious, from the Freddy Krueger gloves to the hidden debris fans to the wait-a-minute-that's-a-totally-different-dog, but for the most part I find it pleasantly engaging (save when I'm distracted by the fact that they punished several dogs with this movie because they are different in favor of producing a movie about not punishing others because they are different).
ANYWAY... other than the us' (how do I spell that?), my biggest issues are simply a couple specific plotbeats.
Edward's love interest (*cough*KISSING*cough*), Kim, could not be shoved in our face any ****ing harder with going into full-on shoujo framing with roses, bubbles, glitter, and fog superimposed into the shot. We dwell on the imagery, we SLOOOWLY zoom in, and that Danny Elfman score cranks up the whimsy to teeth-rotting levels.
It's very forced. What does Edward see in her anyway, if he sees anything at all? He demonstrates a very creepily telegraphed attraction to her which has got to be only skin-deep knowing how little the two interact throughout the movie before finally manifesting in early onset Crippling Monogamy Syndrome. Why is this a romance? Really, why did this need to be anything more than an unexpected friendship born out of pity and admiration?
Another issue I have is the scene in which Edward first accidentally cuts someone. Jim cuts in to shout and point "Hey!" right before he actually cuts her. What the **** was he taking issue with? Edward standing up on a ladder with his back turned away from her? Winona Ryder's whimsical dancing? Actually, yeah, I like that.
Edward's love interest (*cough*KISSING*cough*), Kim, could not be shoved in our face any ****ing harder with going into full-on shoujo framing with roses, bubbles, glitter, and fog superimposed into the shot. We dwell on the imagery, we SLOOOWLY zoom in, and that Danny Elfman score cranks up the whimsy to teeth-rotting levels.
It's very forced. What does Edward see in her anyway, if he sees anything at all? He demonstrates a very creepily telegraphed attraction to her which has got to be only skin-deep knowing how little the two interact throughout the movie before finally manifesting in early onset Crippling Monogamy Syndrome. Why is this a romance? Really, why did this need to be anything more than an unexpected friendship born out of pity and admiration?
Another issue I have is the scene in which Edward first accidentally cuts someone. Jim cuts in to shout and point "Hey!" right before he actually cuts her. What the **** was he taking issue with? Edward standing up on a ladder with his back turned away from her? Winona Ryder's whimsical dancing? Actually, yeah, I like that.
Finally, before the credits roll, it's revealed that Winona Ryder is the narrator in really good makeup doing a really ****** granny voice as she tells us that following Edward's trip to suburbia, it snowed regularly. Snow that, in that special fairy tale kinda way, comes from Edward, carving obvious plastic sculptures out of giant blocks of ice-WHERE DOES HE GET THOSE!?
Final Verdict: [Pretty Good]
REWATCH UPDATE 8/11/22:
Edward Scissorhands is a cult classic nowadays, and ostensibly Tim Burton's most "personal" project, which I can believe. This definitely seems to be the sort of story born out of the imagination of an outcast growing up in suburbia, and that's pretty much what we get here, albeit slightly abstracted out to a nearly Dr. Seussian degree.
I made the mistake of merely referring to Peggy as a "cosmetic saleswoman". Making her an Avon saleswoman is so much more thematic and actually makes her a bit more endearing as a character because she's effectively a naive and struggling victim of a multi-level marketing company from the word go. I honestly can't think of ANY movie in which "the protagonist" is unironically an MLM hun, and they not only do it here, but they still make her likable. That's pretty refreshing.
And to add to the refreshments, she along with her whole family (and most of the neighborhood at first) is extremely welcoming of Edward when we moves in. There's the obvious jokes about The Cougar and The Hyper-Religious Bitch, but for a movie that so readily sets us up for your typical story about fear-of-the-unknown, it's nice to see people just like Edward for Edward, and not even just like Edward, but have no strong opinion towards him.
There's so much bullshit these days about openness and inclusivity, and just bending over backwards to accommodate anyone even remotely disadvantaged... but one of the most pleasant characters in this whole movie is just Dad. Dad doesn't give a ****. Dad just sits in his lawnchair and offers Edward life and financial advice as he would anyone else.
He doesn't treat Edward differently, and if Edward's comments on TV about knowingly wanting to become "more normal" are any indication, than Dad is just the ultimate embodiment of what anyone can ideally be for him. Just treating him like a regular guy. Not "the guy with the scissors".
THAT IS THE DIFFERENCE between "being inclusive" and being impartial.
It would be so easy to expect this movie to introduce the conflict as soon as Peggy brings Edward home. The conflict is foreshadowed with the all the stereotypical housewife gossip, but the trouble doesn't begin there.
It would also be easy for the conflict to begin as soon as all the husbands arrived home in the evenings (at exactly the same time every day), but as demonstrated that doesn't happen either.
No, at the end of the day, it takes an entitled thuggish douchebag teenager to ruin everything by getting Edward to commit a crime and driving him up a pole until he scares the neighbors by lashing out with petty vandalism.
He's just a genuinely evil character and it stretches belief (on top of everything else, including the Overnight Romance which stretches belief) that Ryder's character would fall for him despite these glaring character flaws. Not that those sorts of relationships don't happen, but so little is communicated about their relationship to begin with and seemingly less is communicated about his motivations to antagonize Edward. We could INFER that maybe he's jealous, because Edward apparently likes her and she pities him back, but that's never made explicit or even implicit by any of the dialog or acting.
It's just suddenly "WHAT UP FREAK!? YOUR KIND DON'T BELONG HERE!"
I guess you could wax philosophical about things like "the court of public opinion" and all that, but the way in which this movie is presented, from it's music, to it's aesthetic, to it's story, and it's characters, this really does seem like it's intended to be, dare I say, a young adult fable.
It seems like an innocent modern fairy tale at first, but it really does juggle some heavy concepts behind the back and it's appreciable in both capacities.
I also just appreciate that Depp wasn't doing puppy-dog eyes the whole movie and actually has a character arc. He manages to be adorable and funny and there's a fair amount of subtle body language in his performance to help communicate what Edward is thinking or feeling even though he's largely a silent character.
I still really like this movie. Only takes 15 minutes to get started, which is a pretty strong pace all things considered. I do wish the ending wasn't such a downer, but it was meant to be a bittersweet story, and there's still some value in that.
A modern classic.
Final Verdict: [Pretty Good]