Big Fish
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Movie Reviews of Big Fish
Movie Review: Big Fish is a tale thats as large as life itself
Summary: 5 Stars
Big Fish is one of Tim Burton's films that doesn't leave you depressed and struggling to find a dry hanky. What it will leave you with is a feel-good feeling while you'll be searching for a clean hanky.
Better known for his oddly different movies such as Edward scissorhands, and sleepy hollow, Tim Burton has constructed a movie that seems impossibly fairy-tale like in its intense beauty of story telling and lush settings, while still keeping the draber side of the story (reality) enthralling.
Williem Bloom (Billy Crudup) is a man who grew up with his storytelling father, (Albert Finney, Ewan McGregor) who always seemed to have wonderful exciting things happening to him. Even if they seemed to wild to believe, Edward manages to make them truly real. However children cannot stay young always, and finally Will grows up to despise his fathers storys, believing its the lies of a man who is has been discontent with his life and family. Lies he has invented to soothe himself that his life didn't turn out the particulare way he wanted. The people he has met, the things he has done never happened, only in his imagination that is. People alive only in the reality of his father dillusional mind
Unable to listen to his father any longer, he tells him that he justs wants to know the real him. "But I've told you!" Edward replies, " You just haven't been listening." So begins the journey through the fantastic mind of one man who believed the world was designed to be lived to the fullest. He was the master of his destiny and death was just yet another adventure to be looked forward to.
The end is the best part of the fairy tale, when Edward is dying and tells William to tell how he dies. Coming from a man who has spent his life polishing his life up, it is his son's turn to follow his footsteps. Follow Will does, turning his fathers death into one of the most touching part of all the previous stories told. Even in the realm of fantasy there is reality, which is proven by his fathers actual funeral when mostly all of what the son has told his father happens in the reality realm. Not as colorful of fantastic, but just as wonderful.
Tim Burton strikes again, with yet another movie that will leave feeling as though life is truly as beautiful as portrayed here. One must only be ready to open their eyes to the truth
Movie Review: Dream Big
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an amazing adult fairy tale filmed by the ever impressive imagination of Tim Burton with several great messages contained within the disguise of an old man's dreams.
Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) is dying but he refuses to leave behind his tall tales about all of the situations he has encountered in his life. His wife (Jessica Lange) remains humored by her husband's fantasy life but is troubled that her son cannot seem to warm up to this extraordinary man. Edward's son Will Bloom (Billy Cudrup) has grown weary of his father's inability to deal with reality and is sick of hearing about oversized fish, perfect Southern towns, spectacular circuses, Siamese twins, glass eyes that see the future, haunted forests and gentle giants who don't exist. But upon returning home for his father's final days Will warms up to the possibility of his father's life as he sees it. With flash backs to Edward's youth (played by Ewan McGregor) all the tales seem come to new life.
This is a wonderful movie that brings an intimacy back to a family torn apart by false hopes and scattered communication. It shows the despair a child experiences when shadowed from the truth and the distance a father creates by telling tall tales hoping to make himself appear more than he seems. But it also shows the ties of a family never quite severed and so close to the core. With brilliant imaginative scenes Tim Burton has created an adult fairy tale for the ages that can appeal to children as well. This is Burton's most mature venture and he rises to the occasion managing to combine sentiment beside fantasy with great ability. At times touching this film also contains a touch of horror and moments of comical relief while maintaining integrity to the original book written by Daniel Wallace. Only Tim Burton could have managed to bring this book to life. For anyone who has experienced that bedside chat with a dying loved one or anyone who wished for those precious moments this movie will tug at your heart strings and leave you weeping. But in the end what is a tall tale? In a world of differences trying to understand another's reality may seem blurry at times but imagine the possibilities if we allow others to envision our most precious dreams.....Tim Burton opens up that other world so grab your pole and go fishing!
Movie Review: Suspend disbelief and prepare to be enthralled...
Summary: 5 Stars
To truly enjoy "Big Fish" depends on how easily you can remember how you saw the world when you were a child. Exaggerated, unreal and totally engrossing we all created fantastic, dream-like stories of who we'd like to be and how the world could be that dominated our lives. Fortunately or unfortunately, most of us have forgotten how to do it, unlike Ed Bloom, a man who is incapable of believing and therefore retelling a story without exaggerating it into a childishly idealistic view of how things were.
And that's what "Big Fish" is all about - the retelling of Ed's highly entertaining, charming, enthusiastic, at times very funny and, of course, ridiculously unbelievable tales which provide a bizarrely surrealistic canvas that's perfectly suited to Tim Burton's skills in creating "fantastic" cinematic visualisations.
Or is it? His stories enrich his own life but their telling is a completely self-centred and even self-destructive exercise. On the one hand, they reveal a wonderfully romantic man who only sees the beautiful and exciting things in life and whose memories amplify the "good things" out of all proportion to reality; on the other, a man who is so wrapped-up in his fantasies that he completely alienates his son who, having once been captivated by his tales, now sees them as repetitively boring and corrosive to his father's relationships. And here's where the real interest of the film lies. Tenderly and carefully explored, their wholly different views of the world and the tensions this causes elevate it from a superb slice of pure entertainment to a thought-provoking and deeply reflective insight into life, culminating in an intensely moving "twist" in which the son weaves an equally idealistic dream-story of the perfect death for his father, as he's dying, and, in doing so, realises that exaggerating the "truth" can be a powerful source of joy.
Beautifully constructed and superbly acted the question "Big Fish" poses is, "is it wrong for an adult to exaggerate things in such a childish way?" And the answer?... well that's for you to decide, but, if you can suspend disbelief and remember what it was like to fantasise, it will absolutely enthral you.
Movie Review: It doesn't always make sense, and most of it never happened.
Summary: 5 Stars
Young William Bloom grows restless with his father Edward's tall tales of wild circus life, World War II heroics, and lost mystical hamlets rising up at the end of the lagoon. For 3 years, they don't speak. Then, returning home to Alabama from France, William tries mending his fragile relationship with his dying father, now stricken with cancer. Edward Bloom's stories of fame and fortune are hard to believe. "A giant man can't have an ordinary life!" he barks. Related in flashbacks, Edward tones back to life as a charming traveling salesman. One day he wandered out of a creepy Southern swamp and stumbled into a forgotten, magical town called Spectre, where the grass is green, and the girls are barefoot...15 years ago, Hollywood veteran Tim Burton began a famous career in a Batman cape. He floundered for years as a wierdo-movie director. Now, for the first time in "Big Fish", Burton measures human emotion with his penchant for the quirky and the macabre. Tim Burton has come of age. Disturbed by his own father's recent death, Burton focuses clearly on the traumatic loss of a parent. Here is gravity and restraint we have not seen before. "Big Fish" stars a marvelous Ewan McGregor as the youthful Edward Bloom. McGregor delivers another enchanting, facile performance. Co-stars include Albert Finney and Billy Crudup. Extending the Tim Burton movie legacy is Danny DeVito(from "Batman Returns") and several sword-glove props lifted directly from "Edward Scissorhands". AllMovieGuide lists uncredited cameo parts by Julianne Moore and Faye Dunaway(as a witch). Filmed entirely in Alabama and France, Columbia's "Big Fish" DVD is a rich, textured anamorphic transfer(1.85:1). Extras include trailers, previews, 9 featurettes, a trivia quiz, and Burton's own commentary. An Easter egg is hidden on the main menu page. "Big Fish" is a mature fantasy surrounded by death's cold-hearted earthly truths. And there's a sense of wonder here. As William Bloom says: "The best I can do is tell it to you the way he told me. It doesn't always make sense, and most of it never happened. But that's what kind of story it is..."Movie Review: A Film For Fathers and Sons
Summary: 5 Stars
At the beginning of this film, I must confess that I was skeptical as to whether or not I really wanted to invest much time into it. It seemed to meander, providing a fantastic, satyrical "Burtonesque" view of a world of askewed reality. It seemed to meander some...the premise, a boy and his father, fallen out from one another due to the son's embarrassment at his father incredible stories, are reunited when the son learns that the father is dying of cancer.The balance of the movie is told in vignette flashbacks, jumping from the present day narrative to the many incredible stories of Edward Bloom, the "Big Fish" of the story, whose tales stretch credibility to its limits. The film, which is so definitely Tim Burton, is also more. Although I was slow to pick up on it at first, I came to realize that the film was, in fact, a reflection on the complex relationships between fathers and sons. It touches on the believable infallability we all have for our fathers as children, and the "fall from grace" of our fathers when we discover they are as human as we are.
Though the story provides plenty of whimsy, and at times, plays more like an episode of "Amazing stories" than anything else, at its core is a powerful story about relationships. This is a bit of a departure from the standard Burton fare, whose narrative stories are generally pure fantasy, without a thread of realism to them...such examples include "Beetlejuice", "Sleepy Hollow", "Batman", "Edward Scissorhands" and even "A Nightmare Before Christmas". This story is more human than any of those, focusing not on the fantastic, but using the fantastic stories of a father whose life was incredible without the tall tales to explore the psyche of a man who never knew how to fail.
In the end, this film is a great tribute to fathers and sons everywhere, and is a film worth sharing. With the approach of Father's Day, this might make for a nice gift to share with Dad, and more, it is an entertaining romp through the fascinating world of Edward Bloom, Burton's newest slightly-askew-but-ever-so-human hero.
-Scott Kolecki