Big bore. Tim Burton, to inhibit erosion of his "fan base," needed to bounce back in a big way from the commercial conservatism of Planet of the Apes, and in Daniel Wallace's slender novel he has found a fund of peculiarity: the sententious and sentimental memoirs of an Alabama fabulist, none of whose tall tales and fish stories -- literally tall in the case of a twelve-foot giant, literally fishy in the case of a freshwater Moby Dick known as The Beast -- explains how the moles on his cheek and forehead vanished between the time he was Ewan McGregor and the time he was Albert Finney. (Helena Bonham Carter remains roughly the same age opposite each of them.) The narration-heavy narrative is inescapably bookish, demoting the director to an enslaved illustrator, much the same, come to that, as in Planet. And inasmuch as his come-and-go visual gifts have on this occasion mostly deserted him, there is not a lot to recommend it. The perilous parachute mission into a Red Chinese encampment in the middle of a variety show (ventriloquist for warm-up, Siamese twins for headliners) is funny, but not notably Burton-y. With Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Alison Lohman, Danny DeVito, Steve Buscemi. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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