Planet of the Apes (Tim Burton, 2001)

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Helen Bonham Carter, Tim Roth, Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giamatti, Estella Warren, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, David Warner, Kris Kristofferson. Screenplay: William Broyles Jr., Lawrnece Konner, Mark Rosenthal, based on a novel by Pierre Boulle. Cinematography: Philippe Rousselot. Production design: Rick Heinrichs. Film editing: Chris Lebenzon. Music: Danny Elfman. 

I almost stopped watching Tim Burton's remake of Franklin J. Schaffner's 1968 classic Planet of the Apes when one character called another "the Homo sapien." Can we all get it into our heads that the taxonomic phrase "Homo sapiens" is singular? (If there were a plural it would be something like "Homines sapientes" -- Latinists may correct me if I'm wrong.) But pet peeves aside, I found Burton's version entertaining enough, with its sly references to the original film: One of the apes reverses a line spoken by Charlton Heston in the first film, saying "Get your stinking hands off me, you damn dirty human!" And Heston himself has an unbilled cameo as the dying father of Thade (Tim Roth), in which he reprises in a different context his line, "Damn them! Damn them all to hell!" The apes in the remake are more simian, with better ape-like behavior and movements. And the satiric edge feels sharper in an era in which government-sanctioned discrimination seems to be on the rise. But the narrative is a bit of a mess, especially the fudged-up ending, which could never have the impact of the revelation at the end of the 1968 film. It got a Razzie as the worst remake of the year and probably deserved it, but it's not unwatchable, thanks to some good performances, especially by Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, and Paul Giamatti, who never let the makeup do the acting for them.   

Big Eyes (Tim Burton, 2014)

It's a great idea for a movie: the downfall of a hugely successful artist who took the credit for the work done by someone else. It allows a filmmaker to explore such topics as fraud, the difference between capital-A Art and works that are just popular, the nature of value when it comes to works of the imagination, and in this case, the relationship between men and women. Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz) persuaded his wife, Margaret (Amy Adams), to let him pass off her work -- paintings of large-eyed waifs -- as his own. The trouble with the movie is that it never quite decides what it wants to say about any of the important issues it raises, other than that Margaret Keane was a victim of the male-dominated society of the 1950s and '60s. It doesn't even settle on the issue of whether Margaret's paintings were mawkish kitsch or actual works of Art, though I think it rather smugly assumes that viewers will be smart enough to have decided on the former. But it complicates this position by starting with a quote from Andy Warhol proclaiming that the Keane art is "terrific! If it were bad, so many people wouldn't like it." And it turns the critics of Keane into pretentious snobs, represented by the gallery owner (Jason Schwartzman) who resents the fact that the Keane paintings outsell his rather arid, minimalist abstractions, and by John Canaday (Terence Stamp), the New York Times critic who prevents a Keane from being exhibited at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. So what we are left with is Margaret Keane, the victim who finally has the courage to turn against her monstrously manipulative husband and become a hero. That she is a hero in the cause of women's rights is presumably fine. But is it also fine that she becomes a hero by asserting her right to profit from making bad art? I don't think either screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski or director Tim Burton have decided for themselves. So we are left only with Adams's terrific performance as Margaret, which could have been bolstered by a fuller backstory, and Waltz's somewhat overdone performance as Walter. What Burton does best in his movies is milieu, especially when he can caricature it, which he does here, with a little more restraint than usual, in his portraits of the business of art in the 1960s. And he gets us into the head of Margaret Keane: When she is grinding out big-eyed paintings for Walter she goes to a supermarket and hallucinates the clerks and customers as big-eyed grotesques. But the movie probably should have gone more in one direction or another: Either into a realistic portrayal of the relationship of the Keanes or into a more vivid and surreal lampoon of the art world. Trying to do a bit of both undermines the film.