Tim Burton’s latest film, “Big Eyes”, was released on Christmas day this year without much of a marketing push or fanfare, and while I had originally planned to write about the Sony hack this week, that’s all pretty well-traversed territory at this point, and since “Big Eyes” is a film that I suspect few people have even really heard about and aren’t already planning to see, I thought I would take this opportunity to encourage others to check it out.
“Big Eyes” is set in early 1960s San Francisco, and is based on the fascinating (mostly) true life story of artist Margaret Keane (played by Amy Adams), a divorced, single mom and painter of children with anime-proportioned eyes, and her swindling husband Walter (Christoph Waltz) who fraudulently claimed credit for her work for over a decade. The film relies heavily on the dynamic between Margaret , who is shy and submissive, unsure of herself and her talents; and Walter Keane, a gregarious man whose charm and con artistry helped make the pair millions of dollars selling Margaret’s ultimately kitchy pop-art to the beat generation’s hoi polloi.
It opens with a fittingly vacuous quote from the king of all pop-art hucksters, Andy Warhol:
“I think what Keane has done is terrific! If it were bad, so many people wouldn’t like it.”
Indeed.
For Tim Burton fans, some of the themes in “Big Eyes” will be familiar. His work regularly blurs the lines of fantasy and reality, 
fact and fiction; and it often centers around the contradiction of outsiders struggling to find their place in more conservative societies. Margaret Keane is a woman who bravely left a controlling husband and moved to San Francisco with her young daughter to become a painter in an era when women simply didn’t do that kind of thing, yet she ended up producing hundreds of pieces of art under another man’s name because “nobody would buy art painted by a woman”. Also a man of jarring contradictions, Walter seemed to have no talent as an artist, yet presented himself as a trained and successful painter to San Francisco’s rising fine art scene. Perhaps ironically, his lies and guile ended up selling countless originals and prints of his wife’s work when few galleries even wanted it by passing it off as his own. In a way, the pair was perfect for each other, and had it not been for the fraud it’s likely that no one would ever have heard of Margaret Keane.
But over time the deception also ate away at Margaret’s self-worth, Walter’s desire for fame and money couldn’t be satiated, and the whole enterprise couldn’t survive forever.
The film itself is tightly-paced at just 105 minutes, and the production design is actually subdued by Tim Burton’s usual standards, even given the brightly colored vibe of California in the 1960s. “Big Eyes” is one of Burton’s most mature films to date, more “Big Fish” than “Alice in Wonderland”, and that’s a very good thing. Burton is a director who can sometimes be a victim of his own artistic excess, but this is a film that reserves his trademark surrealism for just a few really effective scenes as Margaret slowly loses her sense of self, consumed by her husband’s ego and the secret she’s unable even to share with her own daughter.
Danny Elfman’s score is similarly subdued, and as somewhat of a sidenote, the soundtrack also features some incredible Latin jazz by one of my favorite vibraphone players, Cal Tjader. If you’re not aware of his work, allow me to suggest “” and perhaps ““.
There’s obviously a lot of competition for your movie-going dollar this time of year, but “Big Eyes” features a truly interesting story, a couple of incredibly strong performances from some extremely gifted actors, and a lightness of directorial touch that we so rarely get to see from Tim Burton.
And let’s be honest, none of that can be said of Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit”.
Watch the trailer for “Big Eyes”:
This week on The Rear View podcast I had the pleasure of sitting down with film composer 
In the wake of Sony’s decision 
(embedded below). It describes Chaplin’s foresight into the future that Hitler would impose on the world. Chaplin had admitted afterwards, that if he knew the extent of Hitler’s barbarism, he couldn’t have made fun of the Nazi insanity. But this was before the world would fully know the horrors. Still, Charlie Chaplin forged ahead and fought for what he believed in, Liberty. The film’s final scene, a 4 min speech that speaks truth to power is a daring climax for any filmmaker – but to do so in the face of pure evil, the kind of evil I need not describe as “since Hitler” but, actually Hitler – is what lovers of liberty and human freedom should strive to champion.
We’ve all had our share of hard winters, and with the latest polar vortex causing record lows as far south as Hawaii, we may be in for another doozy this year. And even when the weather isn’t cold, shorter days and overcast skies can still take their toll on a person’s spirits, even with holiday cheer to provide light in the darkness. Imagine, though, a winter so severe that it lasts a full century—and a government so evil as to forbid holidays altogether, on pain of a fate worse than death. That’s the nightmarish situation in the land of Narnia when Lucy Pevensie stumbles into it from war-ravaged England through a magic wardrobe in C. S. Lewis’ classic 
Now, if The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has any emphasis aside from the Pevensies’ adventures and growth as characters, it’s on the spiritual elements. Lewis’ supposal about Aslan’s identity, on which the book and the whole Chronicles of Narnia series hinge, has been both loved and reviled since the book’s publication in 1950. (Aslan’s not a Christ figure, as would be the case in allegory; he answers the question of what incarnate form Christ would take in a world full of mythical creatures and talking beasts.) But given the state in which we currently find our society, with hysteria over global warming and efforts to eject Christianity from the public sphere, it’s not hard to imagine certain groups on the Left taking “always winter, never Christmas” as their creed. Maybe this Christmas is a good time for us to step through the wardrobe ourselves… and take heart at the idea that even when we can’t see spring’s approach, Aslan’s still on the move.
The Rear View is a chance for filmmakers to take a glance back at film history while driving forward into the future of cinema and television. Each episode, or reel as we’ll be calling them, I sit down with a filmmaker – be it writer, director, cinematographer, visual effect artists or composer – to discuss a film that influenced them in their craft. Or one they simply can’t talk about enough. Whether they liked the film or not, there is always something to learn about it.
Writing to Santa is a time-honored tradition among English and American families who celebrate Christmas. But did Santa ever write you back? If so, I hope his letters were as entertaining as the correspondence “Father Christmas” carried on for over twenty years with J. R. R. Tolkien’s children, preserved with as much love as shone through their writing and published after Tolkien’s death as The Father Christmas Letters (later revised as ). Tolkien’s humor, inventiveness, and artistic talent made these letters a wonderful family tradition well worth sharing.
And such adventures Father Christmas has! Most involve his friend and helper Karhu, the Great North Polar Bear, who causes all manner of mischief and often adds marginal peanut-gallery comments in a runic-looking hand, with spelling errors that would be completely at home on 
Occasionally, however, Father Christmas has to deal with a more serious threat: goblins who live in caves under the North Pole and steal presents. Cave Bear, Polar Bear, and Father Christmas stumble upon a nest in 1932 quite by accident, and though they drive the goblins out that time, other years see the goblins return in force to try to conquer the North Pole. One attempt, not coincidentally, comes during 1941; Father Christmas tells Tolkien’s daughter Priscilla, “I expect the Goblins thought that with so much war going on this was a fine chance to recapture the North.” Other real-life concerns intrude during the Depression and the war, with Father Christmas explaining a shortage of presents several times by saying that he needs more room in his sleigh to deliver food and clothes to families that have none. On a lighter note, however, after Oxford’s hosting of a flood of evacuees during the Battle of Britain in 1940, Father Christmas writes that the North Pole has also had evacuees—penguins!
During that time, Wally West, the former sidekick Kid Flash, took over as the Flash. Wally was introduced in the late 1950s as the young nephew of Barry’s girlfriend Iris. (Unlike their TV counterparts, Barry and Iris were together from the Flash’s first appearance, and they did not grow up together.) When Barry and Iris eventually married, Barry became not only Wally’s mentor and idol, but his uncle as well.
Just as Wally is starting to feel comfortable as the Flash, the man he always saw as “the” Flash seemingly returns from the dead. Barry Allen shows up on his doorstep, alive and well, if a bit disoriented. At first, Wally loves having his uncle back. Sure, he starts to feel a little redundant as the Flash, but that’s a small price to pay. But then Barry’s behavior becomes…erratic. He soon snaps, leaves Wally to die in a hi-tech trap set by a new criminal organization, and announces himself as the one, true Flash. Wally escapes, of course, but he has to process the fact that the man he’s dedicated his life to has turned out to be anything but heroic.
It’s great stuff, one of the best comic book storylines of the early 1990s (which, admittedly, is not saying a lot. Those were dark, dark times for comic readers.)