After much anticipation and reading the novel twice, I got to see the movie today. It was longer than I had thought it would be and they didn’t include all the jokes and funny stories from the book, but it came out pretty well overall. Tim Burton and the cast did a fine job, though I thought Jessica Lange was underused. The photography is lovely too.
Questions/comments:
The conjoined singing twins were never really conjoined at all, were they? They are shown separate at the funeral, leading me to believe that it was all just an act or else another of Edward’s stories.
Did Norther Winslow ever make amends for robbing the bank? He certainly made enough money later on so that he could have.
I didn’t think Helena Bonham Carter did the Alabama accent quite as well as the others.
The conjoined twins were never conjoined in real life. They were, however, conjoined in Edwards stories. There were some elements of truth in all of Edwards stories with some liberties taken in all of them such as: the giant was in fact real (and at the funeral) but he was much shorter than he appeared in the stories - although still tall.
Overall, i loved the movie and I think Albert Finney deserves an academy award nomination. I thought it was a beautiful looking movie and it really pulled hard on the old heartstrings. I’m definately seeing it again.
My favorite part was Helena Bonham Carter’s explanation of Edwards view of woman (or his wife vs. other woman)…thought it was quite nice.
I must apologise for not going into more detail, I’m seeing it again in a few days. I saw it 3 weeks ago and details are escaping me.
There had been a thread before but my search did not turn it up.
I really enjoyed Big Fish; it was heartfelt without being corny, and the dialogue was spot on. As with other Tim Burton films, there is a certain whimsy to the movie, a mythical quality, but Big Fish seems a bit more accessible, the actors were more like real people.
I had started a thread on it a couple of months ago, I think, but I couldn’t dig it up either.
I do want to see it again. Some idiots disrupted parts of it by coming in very late and then more idiots came during the last few minutes. It’s the sort of movie that needs to be seen a couple of times to be completely absorbed, I think. Very enjoyable.
Did you folks know that Burton and Bonham-Carter had a baby boy? His name is Billy. Fits with the movie, don’t you think?
I didn’t like it much, didn’t hate it either though.
I was expecting a surrealistic, heady type movie, the likes of which Tim Burton used to be known for, and what I got was a sappy, conventional film punctuated with bursts of whimsy.
I liked it, but not overwhelmingly. The editing seemed really off, and the stories were more confusing than whimsical. They didn’t seem like the good yarns they were meant to be. I DID like the contrast of the stories with “Real Life” which had a very very different feel. And the ending was pretty good, sad but very appropriate. However, as many reviewers have said, there just wasn’t enough complexity to the father character: the movie lionizes him too unreflectively, almost too preachily.
There were the expected great visual bits from Burton. I’m with Apos regarding the stories, I did not find them particularly compelling. I also did not feel the father/son conflict was realized beyond the superficial. The conclusion was very well done, I’ll definitely take another look at the movie on DVD.
Ewen McGregor turned in another fine performance, he has an amazing ability to dissolve himself into a character. Somehow he seems to create a new set of facial expressions to use with each role he plays. I lack the experience to properly judge his accent, but I certailnly didn’t find it at all distracting.
I’m not sure I agree. I think Ewan played this role much the way he did his character in Moulin Rouge, an irrepressibly upbeat soul, full of energy, and grabbing life by the horns… or something like that.