Ed Wood: A

Let me being with an image from Tim Burton's Ed Wood that I just can't get out of my head. Edward D. Wood Jr. (Johnny Depp), his girlfriend Kathy (Patricia Arquette) and there entire posse of freaks and geeks have just arrived to the world premiere of Bride of the Monster, Ed's insanely sclocky goosebumps-in-the-night picture. From nearly the moment they set foot inside the theater they are bombarded by projectiles from every single audience member, and the film hadn't even started. The nature of the attack lay more in the sheer force of awful that surrounded Wood and his work than the actual awful of the work itself (although that, if ever viewed intimately, was quite formidable as well). Such is the life story of the "Worst Director Of All Time": he lacked talent and he lacked standing, but he possessed personality.

It's personality that has inspired director Tim Burton, who is himself a conjurer of the occasionally wacked-out monster flick. Ed Wood was never taken for a true talent because he wasn't, but to say he was't a filmmaker would be a lie: he was more a filmmaker than perhaps any other autuer of his era, and very few have approached his level of love for the cinema since. Burton, working with grandly rough black-and-white film, has staged a dramatization of Wood's life that is so wildly enjoyable that you may forget entirely that what makes the whole thing work is indeed what powered the original Ed Wood: personality.

Johnny Deep himself was lost to such personality, dissapearing behind a strange Mid-west meets military sergeant accent and women's clothing (Ed Wood was an audacious and open tranvestite). Using such props, his madcap interpretation (and spot-on impersonation) of Wood is one of the goofiest, heartfelt performances of his career and he is only strengthened by the skill of Burton as a director.

Working from a script by writers Larry Karaszewsi and Scott Alexander, Tim Burton has achieved the ultimate synthesis of everything he admires in movies: the wild, the personal, the humorously off-beat, strange characters with sincere dreams. The final product is a thing of sublimely clever and passionate beauty, the perfect alchemy of the ridiculous into the great. Not only has Ed Wood been memorialized on screen, his sprit has been captured there as well.