The Crucible

At times, the 1996 film version of The Crucible feels merely a notch above a History Channel re-enactment of a day in the life of the Puritans. But then, especially as the film develops, and the complexities of the characters from Arthur Miller's play swirl together in an increasingly murky dish of passion, wrath, desire, and vindictiveness, you find yourself pulled into the spectacle of it and taken hostage by the performances of Daniel Day-Lewis as John Proctor and Winona Ryder as Abigail Williams and Joan Allen as Elizabeth Proctor.

We so rarely get operatic drama anymore, that there's something deeply comforting about the way The Crucible shatters us emotionally. Daniel Day-Lewis masterfully shows us a man tormented by his own guilt but equally convinced that the authorities in his community are utterly insane fools, at best, and abusive dictators at worst. The tension builds and builds until the thing lies bleeding before us, and it's a deeply affecting experience. We've achieved what the Greeks all along told us was the purpose of tragedy: catharsis. 

And of course, Crucible is a really fun ensemble piece. Everyone gets to play dress-up, do their best cocktail of Anglo-Colonial accents, and shout beautiful, intense prose from the rooftops. It's delicious, it's powerful, it's touching, especially when Joan Allen weeps into her husband's shoulder, "Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me," as the music swells, or when Abigail leads the other girls in their hysterical accusations of witchcraft, and the camera actually moves and twists, as though Sam Raimi's demon-camera in Evil Dead has temporarily invaded this play. The more the film lets loose, the more wonderful it all is.

Directed by Nicholas Hytner. The screenplay was adapted by Arthur Miller, who doesn't shy away from the bleak ending, thus letting his criticism of the ignorant and stupid mob mentality of both the witch trials and the Red Scare remain as stinging and powerful as ever. With Rob Campbell, who does good work as the beleaguered witch-hunter Reverend Hale, Paul Scofield as the imperious Judge Danforth, Bruce Davison as the cowardly Reverend Parris, Jeffrey Jones as Thomas Putnam, and Charlayne Woodard as Tituba, the Barbados slave.

Ed Wood

Oh dear Lord in Heaven. If you're tired of watching Johnny Depp play a wise-cracking pirate or a freaky candy factory owner or a cheeseball 18th-century vampire with lots of money or a wise-cracking freaky cheeseball something else, go back and watch Tim Burton's Ed Wood from 1994. (Also, if you feel Tim Burton has lost his touch, this movie may just perk up your mood.) Yes it's a weird movie, true to the Burton-Depp collaborations, but it's also a delightful one, a faux-morbid chronicle of the infamous career of cult filmmaker Edward D. Wood, Jr., who's infamous as the director of some of the worst movies ever made, including the transvestite trash-gem Glen or Glenda? and the outer-space-invasion spectacular Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Ed Wood is probably one of the best movies about the movie-making business. It's certainly one of the only ones that doesn't genuflect with banal reverence toward Hollywood. Instead of getting some high-minded, self-congratulatory glamor parade, we're treated to the ersatz side of the movie-making business: the world of not just deferred dreams, but squandered dreams, where a guy with too much enthusiasm and too little talent will work his heart out and still struggle to pay the lab fees for his own films. (Thus one of Wood's movies, Night of the Ghouls, sat unreleased and virtually lost to curio-aficionados for years and years.) Somehow, Tim Burton prevents Ed Wood from being a tragic figure: the movie successfully walks the line of sympathy and ridicule, never partaking in either too carelessly. It revels in his sheer, exuberant love of the medium, and I feel like it wants Ed Wood to make a successful movie, even though he never does.

Leave it to Tim Burton to try and do justice to the man who was arguably the worst director in history. (John Waters is the only other director I'd like to see take a crack at the career of Ed Wood.) If you appreciate the deliciousness of failure, you'll find a kindred spirit in Ed Wood. Johnny Depp plays him with wide-eyed, gleeful aplomb, and taps into the intriguing inner-world of a man who loved two things: making shitty movies (although he didn't seem to think they were shitty) and wearing women's clothes, particularly argyle sweaters. (In the movie, Ed swears he isn't gay, just a really uninhibited hetero.) This has to be one of Depp's most engaging and fun performances. In so many of his more recent movies, he plays these cartoonish characters who stand in front of the camera and crack jokes. Luckily, Johnny Depp is still in great shape and can move around convincingly, or he'd really be in trouble. But if you've neglected to go back and re-visit some of his older work, I encourage you to do so. You'll see the Johnny Depp we all fell in love with: the actor who made the grotesque lovable and beautiful and funny.

Depp invests such heart into Edward D. Wood, Jr. that the movie's admittedly cynical (at times) tone is much easier to take. The movie does have a bitter side, much of it expressed through the brilliant performance of Martin Landau, as an aging Bela Lugosi. (Wood meets Lugosi by chance, and the two strike up a friendship that leads to collaborative work on several films, ultimately proving to be both the comeback and the swan song of the legendary ham.) With Bela we get a truly depressing window into the dark side of Hollywood, in which older stars have faded completely from view. Landau's performance (for which he earned an Oscar) recalls the mad pathos of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, and in fact Ed Wood lives on the same edges as Sunset: it's Hollywood in decay, black-and-white, vaguely noirish, out of money, and forgotten by audiences who have long ago moved onto the next big thing.

But ultimately Ed Wood is a loving, blissed-out tribute to sheer audacious zeal and the irony of failure. How could you not love a movie like that? The supporting cast is like a gaggle of amusing and uniquely scary figures in a wax museum or a carnival house of horrors. Ed Wood doesn't have the zany madness of Beetle Juice, but in a way, it is Tim Burton's Citizen Kane. (Orson Welles, incidentally, shows up in a chance meeting with Wood. He's played here by Vincent D'Onofrio.) With Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Juliet Landau, Jeffrey Jones, G.d. Spradlin, Lisa Marie, and Bill Murray.

Beetle Juice

The creators of Beetle Juice (1988)--it was conceived by Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson, scripted by McDowell and Warren Skaaren, and directed by Tim Burton--must have grown up on a healthy dose of EC Comics, The Addams Family, and B horror films. This was Burton's second film (following 1985's Pee-wee's Big Adventure), and it remains his most imaginative comedy, a dazzling display of creativity and ghoulish humor that could have been concocted by the likes of children's author Roald Dahl if he and Stephen King were both writing a book together, on acid.

The plot, for those who haven't seen this, involves a self-employed married couple (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) who are trying to enjoy their vacation in their large Connecticut house, until a tragic accident leaves them dead, newly inducted in the afterlife, and confined to their house as prisoners. This wouldn't be so bad, except an obnoxious New York couple (Catherine O'Hara and Jeffrey Jones) buys the house, and the wife proceeds to remodel it according to her decidedly abstract artistic tastes, with the help of an eccentric interior decorator named Otho (Glen Shadix), who's also interested in all things paranormal. The ghosts find a friend in the NYC couple's depressed teenage daughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder), whose natural attraction to dark things allows her to see them when almost no one else can.

While Beetle Juice is obviously the product of minds that were immersed in all things macabre and darkly funny, it doesn't feel derivative. Its unusual story continues to develop in unexpected directions, and the cast creates amusing, eccentric performances that make this purely fun, not weird or off-putting. Baldwin rarely played likable guys until his wonderful performance on the television show 30 Rock, but in Beetle Juice he's sort of an easy-going guy who's not trying to snow anybody in. Geena Davis, with her puckered face and her dark, curly hair, looks very maternal. O'Hara generates an almost kinetic weirdness with her performance as the fruity stepmom, who's devoted to her "art" (tacky-looking abstract sculptures that look like enlarged, black insects).

And Michael Keaton, as the bio exorcist hired to scare the new family out of the dead couple's beloved home, gives new meaning to the term "loose cannon." In Batman, Keaton was completely overshadowed by the performance of Jack Nicholson as the Joker. If it weren't for Beetle Juice, we wouldn't have known how insane Keaton can be. It adds such a delightful comic side to his acting abilities that almost every performance afterward is tainted, imbued with a tacit reminder that "this is the guy who played Beetle Juice."

There are few movies as original as Beetle Juice, and out of all the comedies to come out of the 80s, this one ranks as one of the most enduring and enjoyable. Also starring Robert Goulet and Dick Cavett. Music by Danny Elfman, the lead singer of the 80s rock band Oingo Boingo, who has composed the scores of every Tim Burton film.