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7 Best Tim Burton and Danny Elfman Collaborations, Ranked

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7 Best Tim Burton and Danny Elfman Collaborations, Ranked

There are two professional relationships a director has that seem to attract attention when they become ongoing: with actors and composers. Collaborations with the former are readily evident on screen, but the latter can underpin an entire film. Director/composer teams like Hitchcock and Herrmann and Leone and Morricone left their mark on classic cinema, but the pairs modern audiences know best are probably Steven Spielberg and John Williams or Tim Burton and Danny Elfman.

The Burton-Elfman team has put out fewer movies than Spielberg-Williams, but they include some truly iconic marriages of picture and music, covering loss, terror, fantasy, hysterics, and all manner of quirks. Burton’s visuals and Elfman’s themes may carry definite fingerprints, but there is more variety to the pair’s work than they’re sometimes credited for. Their next collaboration is still a way’s out, but here is a ranking of seven of their finest efforts to date:

RELATED: If You Love Tim Burton, You Have to Watch ‘The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari’

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7. Big Fish

Over the years, Elfman’s scores for Burton have felt less protrusive. If the opening titles and character leitmotifs of their early work together – say, in Beetlejuice – were more like major movie stars with unforgettable faces and voices, the score for Big Fish is more like a character actor, less immediately striking but no less talented or important to a film’s success. I couldn’t hum you any of the themes from Big Fish, but the story of generational divide wouldn’t play as well without its gentle support. The contemporary American South was also an atypical setting for Tim Burton, and Elfman’s music reflects the place without descending into cliché. This flavor carries into the movie’s many fantasy sequences, most effectively in Ed Bloom’s moderately exaggerated account of how he met his wife.

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6. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Neither adaptation of Roald Dahl’s subversive children’s book made much effort to portray the eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka as Dahl described him. But Burton and Elfman retained Dahl’s lyrics for the Oompa Loompas, and as good as “Pure Imagination” and “I’ve Got a Golden Ticket” are in isolation, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory boasts the more consistent and impressive soundtrack. Elfman and Burton looked to various musical archetypes to build the Oompa Loompa songs around, ranging from Bollywood and funk to theme parks and Queen. All these styles helped inspire a great variety to the sequences as filmed. They’re a marked contrast from the non-musical portions of the film, and from the underscore. There, you’ll find familiar rhythms and instrumentation to the Burton-Elfman collaboration. And contrary to what I just said about the evolution of Elfman’s main titles for Burton, the opening music for Charlie – released two years after Big Fish – is one of his most aggressive.


5. Batman

Even now, with flood after flood of comic book movies that just won’t stop, Tim Burton’s Batman is pointed to as a seminal movie for the genre. Action sequences have gotten bigger, effects have become slicker, and other interpretations of the Dark Knight have taken the spotlight (though I still prefer Burton’s take), but along with John Williams’s theme from Superman, Danny Elfman’s Batman theme remains unrivaled as a musical expression of a superhero. Its haunted yet unrelenting heroism serves as the foundation for the entire score, one of the most well-defined leitmotifs Elfman has written for Burton. Like the production and costume design, it’s an irresistible cocktail of classic Hollywood noir and contemporary psychological melodrama. Its best variations in the film come in the cue “Descent into Mystery,” written for the Batmobile ride into the Batcave, and the triumphant finale played over the unveiling of the bat signal.


4. Planet of the Apes

People love to rag on Burton’s Planet of the Apes, and I’m not about to tell you it’s got an Oscar-worthy screenplay, but the film’s a lot more fun than it’s given credit for. Some movies are taken better as experiences or experiments than as narratives. Nearly all the good in the 2001 Apes comes from Burton’s exploration of a more primitive ape culture of pre-industrial, pre-firearm war, wardrobe, locale, and movement. Elfman complemented this with an aggressive score that led with percussion, Elfman’s first love as a performer. He tends to record percussion lines himself, which led to an unusual main title track that was largely made up of his own playing. That title track is the best place to hear the full range of unusual percussive sounds and rhythms he has up his sleeve; once the film is underway, they’re not so evident in the final mix. But the score remains a unique entry in the Burton-Elfman canon.


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3. Batman Returns

As wonderful as Elfman’s Batman theme is, in the 1989 film it was the only major building block for the score (the Joker’s waltz is fun but only sporadically used). Batman Returns revived the theme, but it also provided the Penguin and Catwoman with fully developed leitmotifs of their own. For how grotesque Danny Devito’s Penguin becomes, his theme speaks more for the abandoned child than the vengeful man-bird, while the theme for Catwoman is equal parts insanity and tragedy. As the characters face their inner demons and clash with one another, their themes constantly interweave. This is the finest score written for a comic book movie, and any contenders for second place are running several yards behind. Of the Burton-Elfman discography, Batman Returns’ score is also one of the most fun to listen to in isolation. Each character is so well-defined musically that it’s like listening to Peter and the Wolf or the instrumental music to an opera.


2. The Nightmare Before Christmas

This Burton-Elfman collaboration carries an asterisk: Henry Selick was the director of The Nightmare before Christmas and deserves all due credit. But Jack Skellington was still a Tim Burton creation, and even before Selick came on board, Burton and Elfman were collaborating on the first few songs. And if Batman Returns can feel operatic, Nightmare is damn near close to being an opera, with nearly every major story beat and character turn handled through music. They’re such a part of the story that Elfman’s lyrics make him just as much a writer for Nightmare as screenwriter Caroline Thompson. Elfman even pulled triple duty on the film by providing Jack’s singing voice as well as the lyrics and the underscore. The soundtrack for Nightmare holds up on its own better than anything else on this list and perfectly encapsulates its two featured holidays.


1. Edward Scissorhands

Unlike the last two scores on this list, I don’t think the music for Edward Scissorhands carries the same punch when listened to as a soundtrack. More than any other collaboration between Burton and Elfman, the images and the music are inextricably linked. This goes for comedy as well as drama; the music’s sudden turn into driving action for so pedantic a shot as the neighborhood dads driving off to work still cracks me up. But it’s Edward’s theme, just as raw and vulnerable an expression of tenderness as the character himself, that lingers in the memory. Its children’s choir vocals and choices in instrumentation have popped up in subsequent Burton-Elfman scores, but Edward Scissorhands still offers their most heartbreaking and beautiful application.

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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

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Review: SAMARITAN, A Sly Stallone Superhero Stumble

Hitting the three-quarter-century mark usually means a retirement home, a nursing facility, or if you’re lucky to be blessed with relatively good health and savings to match, living in a gated community in Arizona or Florida.

For Sylvester Stallone, however, it means something else entirely: starring in the first superhero-centered film of his decades-long career in the much-delayed Samaritan. Unfortunately for Stallone and the audience on the other side of the screen, the derivative, turgid, forgettable results won’t get mentioned in a career retrospective, let alone among the ever-expanding list of must-see entries in a genre already well past its peak.

For Stallone, however, it’s better late than never when it involves the superhero genre. Maybe in getting a taste of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) with his walk-on role in the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel several years ago, Stallone thought anything Marvel can do, I can do even better (or just as good in the nebulous definition of the word).

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The property Stallone and his team found for him, Samaritan, a little-known graphic novel released by a small, almost negligible, publisher, certainly takes advantage of Stallone’s brute-force physicality and his often underrated talent for near-monosyllabic brooding (e.g., the Rambo series), but too often gives him to little do or say as the lone super-powered survivor, the so-called “Samaritan” of the title, of a lifelong rivalry with his brother, “Nemesis.” Two brothers entered a fire-ravaged building and while both were presumed dead, one brother did survive (Stallone’s Joe Smith, a garbageman by day, an appliance repairman by night).

In the Granite City of screenwriter Bragi F. Schut (Escape Room, Season of the Witch), the United States, and presumably the rest of the world, teeters on economic and political collapse, with a recession spiraling into a depression, steady gigs difficult, if not impossible, to obtain, and the city’s neighborhoods rocked by crime and violence. No one’s safe, not even 13-year-old Sam (Javon Walker), Joe’s neighbor.

When he’s not dodging bullies connected to a gang, he’s falling under the undue influence of Cyrus (Pilou Asbæk), a low-rent gang leader with an outsized ego and the conviction that he and only he can take on Nemesis’s mantle and along with that mantle, a hammer “forged in hate,” to orchestrate a Bane-like plan to plunge the city into chaos and become a wealthy power-broker in the process.

Schut’s woefully underwritten script takes a clumsy, haphazard approach to world-building, relying on a two-minute animated sequence to open Samaritan while a naive, worshipful Sam narrates Samaritan and Nemesis’s supposedly tragic, Cain and Abel-inspired backstory. Schut and director Julius Avery (Overlord) clumsily attempt to contrast Sam’s childish belief in messiah-like, superheroic saviors stepping in to save humanity from itself and its own worst excesses, but following that path leads to authoritarianism and fascism (ideas better, more thoroughly explored in Watchmen and The Boys).

While Sam continues to think otherwise, Stallone’s superhero, 25 years past his last, fatal encounter with his presumably deceased brother, obviously believes superheroes are the problem and not the solution (a somewhat reasonable position), but as Samaritan tracks Joe and Sam’s friendship, Sam giving Joe the son he never had, Joe giving Sam the father he lost to street violence well before the film’s opening scene, it gets closer and closer to embracing, if not outright endorsing Sam’s power fantasies, right through a literally and figuratively explosive ending. Might, as always, wins regardless of how righteous or justified the underlying action.

It’s what superhero audiences want, apparently, and what Samaritan uncritically delivers via a woefully under-rendered finale involving not just unconvincing CGI fire effects, but a videogame cut-scene quality Stallone in a late-film flashback sequence that’s meant to be subversively revelatory, but will instead lead to unintentional laughter for anyone who’s managed to sit the entirety of Samaritan’s one-hour and 40-minute running time.

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Samaritan is now streaming worldwide on Prime Video.

Samaritan

Cast
  • Sylvester Stallone
  • Javon ‘Wanna’ Walton
  • Pilou Asbæk

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Matt Shakman Is In Talks To Direct ‘Fantastic Four’

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According to a new report, Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct the upcoming MCU project, Fantastic Four. Marvel Studios has been very hush-hush regarding Fantastic Four to the point where no official announcements have been made other than the film’s release date. No casting news or literally anything other than rumors has been released regarding the project. We know that Fantastic Four is slated for release on November 8th, 2024, and will be a part of Marvel’s Phase 6. There are also rumors that the cast of the new Fantastic Four will be announced at the D23 Expo on September 9th.

Fantastic Four is still over two years from release, and we assume we will hear more news about the project in the coming months. However, the idea of the Fantastic Four has already been introduced into the MCU. John Krasinski played Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The cameo was a huge deal for fans who have been waiting a long time for the Fantastic Four to enter the MCU. When Disney acquired Twenty Century Fox in 2019 we assumed that the Fox Marvel characters would eventually make their way into the MCU. It’s been 3 years and we already have had an X-Men and Fantastic Four cameo – even if they were from another universe.

Deadline is reporting that Wandavision’s Matt Shakman is in talks to direct Fantastic Four. Shakman served as the director for Wandavision and has had an extensive career. He directed two episodes of Game of Thrones and an episode of The Boys, and he had a long stint on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There is nothing official yet, but Deadline’s sources say that Shakman is currently in talks for the job and things are headed in the right direction.

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To be honest, I was a bit more excited when Jon Watts was set to direct. I’m sure Shakman is a good director, but Watts proved he could handle a tentpole superhero film with Spider-Man: Homecoming. Wandavision was good, but Watts’ style would have been perfect for Fantastic Four. The film is probably one of the most anticipated films in Marvel’s upcoming slate films and they need to find the best person they can to direct. Is that Matt Shakman? It could be, but whoever takes the job must realize that Marvel has a lot riding on this movie. The other Fantastic Four films were awful and fans deserve better. Hopefully, Marvel knocks it out of the park as they usually do. You can see for yourself when Fantastic Four hits theaters on November 8th, 2024.

Film Synopsis: One of Marvel’s most iconic families makes it to the big screen: the Fantastic Four.

Source: Deadline

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Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase Star in ‘Zombie Town’ Mystery Teen Romancer (Exclusive)

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Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase have entered Zombie Town, a mystery teen romancer based on author R.L. Stine’s book of the same name.

The indie, now shooting in Ontario, also stars Henry Czerny and co-teen leads Marlon Kazadi and Madi Monroe. The ensemble cast includes Scott Thompson and Bruce McCulloch of the Canadian comedy show Kids in the Hall.

Canadian animator Peter Lepeniotis will direct Zombie Town. Stine’s kid’s book sees a quiet town upended when 12-year-old Mike and his friend, Karen, see a horror movie called Zombie Town and unexpectedly see the title characters leap off the screen and chase them through the theater.

Zombie Town will premiere in U.S. theaters before streaming on Hulu and then ABC Australia in 2023.

“We are delighted to bring the pages of R.L. Stine’s Zombie Town to the screen and equally thrilled to be working with such an exceptional cast and crew on this production. A three-time Nickelodeon Kids Choice Award winner with book sales of over $500 million, R.L. Stine has a phenomenal track record of crafting stories that engage and entertain audiences,” John Gillespie, Trimuse Entertainment founder and executive producer, said in a statement.

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Executive producers are Trimuse Entertainment, Toonz Media Group, Lookout Entertainment, Viva Pictures and Sons of Anarchy actor Kim Coates.  

Paco Alvarez and Mark Holdom of Trimuse negotiated the deal to acquire the rights to Stine’s Zombie Town book.

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