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2 items from 2012

11 May 2012 10:00 AM, PDT | The Playlist | See recent The Playlist news »

It's curious that a director as idiosyncratic and...well, just plain weird as Tim Burton has become one of Hollywood's A-listers. But from 1989's "Batman" to 2010's billion-dollar-grossing "Alice in Wonderland," the helmer has managed to turn his dark, gothic imagination into something that genuinely captures the hearts and minds of the general public. Indeed, even films like "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and the upcoming "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter," which are produced by Burton, show that he, like Alfred Hitchcock before him, has become one of the few directors who's a true brand name, with audiences knowing what they can expect when they purchase a ticket.

But despite his success, Burton, like every filmmaker, isn't necessarily able to get everything he wants made. The path of his career has been littered with a number of projects that either didn't get made at all, or got made with radically different interpretations and visions to them. »

- Oliver Lyttelton

16 March 2012 11:27 PM, PDT | SoundOnSight | See recent SoundOnSight news »

We know the greats; movies like Metropolis (1927), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Wars (1977).

And there are those films which maybe didn’t achieve cinematic greatness, but through their inexhaustible watchability became genre touchstones, lesser classics but classics nonetheless, like The War of the Worlds (1953), Godzilla (1954), Them! (1954), The Time Machine (1960).

In the realm of science fiction cinema, those are the cream (and below that, maybe the half and half). But sci fi is one of those genres which has often too readily leant itself to – not to torture an analogy — producing nonfat dairy substitute.

During the first, great wave of sci fi movies in the 1950s, the target audience was kids and teens. There wasn’t a lot in the way of “serious” sci fi. Most of it was churned out quick and cheap; drive-in fodder, grist for the Saturday matinee mill.

By the early 1960s, »

- Bill Mesce

2 items from 2012