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Sleepy Hollow
viewed October 2,
1999 on PBS
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An immensely beautiful and quickly forgettable rendition of the Washington
Irving story, with a lot of headless bodies and harmless camp signifying
nothing. Sized up among the profundity of scary movies this year,
there is no horror here, nothing to chill the bone, just some obvious studio-
and CGI-bound gothic artifice. The fakeness of the sets has a beauty
of its own, but calls to mind nothing more than its own uniqueness, with
no lingering effects. Disappointingly bound to a formulaic script
from the writer of Seven, Tim Burton puts a lot of resources into a story
that seems awfully slight. A talented cast plays amiably with each
other, as if they were cats declawed. Depp plays an awkward, prudish
Icabod Crane like an unintended impersonation of Hugh Grant. It seems
that since Ed Wood, Burton has settled for camp for camp's sake
-- unlike his brilliant Batman, this time the struggle between a
man-child with a supernatural villain doesn't touch any deeper than the
surface.
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Roger Ebert's review |