Also checked out the best movie Tim Burton has released in ages – Big Eyes, a very curious topic for a movie from a guy who loves his curious topics. Based on the true story of Keane – the artist who created and popularized pop art that you buy as prints and posters at the drug store instead of the original works at an art gallery. The art in question are paintings of little girls with big eyes… you may be aware of them as a modern-ish thing… or not (they were apparently huge in the 50s and 60s and I vaguely remember them in the 70s). But it’s also about how the husband takes credit for the work that his wife does… because he’s a failed painter himself, or because he thinks no one buys “girl art”, or because he’s just a much better salesman than she would have been.

It’s just the kind of quirky and seemingly random topic for a movie that Tim Burton would gravitate toward… think also of Ed Wood (a movie I disliked). It’s got just the amount of weird and incredible but Burton doesn’t overplay it make it faux-gothic, creepy, overly stylizied, or weird. It’s probably his most restrained work and honestly his best pic since Big Fish (though I will modestly, distantly, vaguely defend his Alice in Wonderland as not such a bad movie).

The film stars Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz and they are both very good in it… though Waltz is clearly on a different stage of exuberance in his performance as he needs to be for the role. He’s really good (as usual) and has a great comic sequence in a court room scene at the end that is worth seeing all by itself).

It’s not all perfect… it gets bogged down in the middle telling the same story over and over again about how he’s stealing credit for her work and how the art scene and critics think the work is pop tripe. But that only brings the movie down to earth and into the realm of good – but not great – movie.

Score: 86