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After Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" left me yearning for the days of his earlier work, I thought it would be a good idea to showcase one of his past films.
While he's well-known for his fantastically dark comedies like "Beetlejuice" and "Edward Scissorhands," one of his films tends to get overlooked, due its lack of Burton's trademark style.
I'm speaking of 1994's "Ed Wood," which gained an Oscar nomination for star Martin Landau but didn't bring in much money at the box office.
Frequent Burton collaborator Johnny Depp stars as Edward D. Wood Jr., a man widely known as the worst movie director of all time.
Wood rose to fame in the '70s when his 1959 film "Plan 9 from Outer Space" was voted as the "worst movie ever made" in "The Golden Turkey Awards," a book which focused on bad B-movies.
Burton's film tells a highly fictionalized version of Ed Wood's life as a director, which begins when he is working on a Hollywood backlot and directing theatrical plays that are critical and financial failures.
Dreaming of being the next Orson Welles, Wood tries to pitch his films to Hollywood without much luck until the day he has a chance meeting with "Dracula" star Bela Lugosi (Landau).
At the time of their meeting, Lugosi was no longer a major Hollywood player, but Wood still sees name potential in his fading star.
Things all start to come together for Wood, when a low-budget exploitation studio puts out an ad looking for a director of a movie about tabloid sensation Christine Jorgensen.
Jorgensen was the first widely known case of a man having sex reassignment surgery, and Wood approaches the studio with a claim that he is the only director who can tackle the subject correctly.
Wood's rationale for being the best director for the job is due to a secret life he has kept from his girlfriend, Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker): He loves to dress in drag.
Soon, Wood finds himself writing and directing the film, which he turns into a film about cross-dressing that he stars in, titled "Glen or Glenda?"
After the film is dismissed as trash, Wood continues his passion for filmmaking, despite not having money or the interest of those around him.
The stories surrounding Ed Wood's films are already amusing enough, but seeing them come to life with talented comedic actors make them even more humorous.
It's not all fun and games, as "Ed Wood" touches upon the very serious relationship between Wood and Lugosi, including Lugosi's addiction to morphine and Wood taking him to a rehab clinic.
Burton did a fantastic job with "Ed Wood," even choosing to abandon his usual style for a more subdued black-and-white look, which is more suited to the time period portrayed.
Also, Depp is terrific as Wood, giving him all the charisma that one would expect the man to have had in real life.
The only real problem with the movie is how much of the information has been changed or ignored to fit the film's narrative.
For example, Wood's life was much more depressing than what the movie would have you believe, and many events in the film were written in to make the story flow better and never actually happened in real life.
When this material is mixed in with the already unbelievable true facts surrounding Wood's productions, it's hard to differentiate what is fact and fiction.
That's not really a problem with "Ed Wood," as the film is still a highly entertaining look at one of Hollywood's most interesting legends.
Grade: A
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