A Movie I Love

Here is a recommendation: A Tim Burton masterpiece detailing pride, hubris, and the human spirit overcoming adversity in even the most impossible of situations. A study in full of how far one will go for platonic love. Vibrant, dramatic, vivacious and never stopping to look back on its actions as it scales half of the United States in an epic journey of Homeric proportions. At its forefront is a vigilant, flawed, complex anti-hero who will stop at nothing to attain his one true love: his bicycle.

If you haven't already guessed, this is the plot of Tim Burton’s magnum opus, Pee Wee's Big Adventure, and I do not exaggerate my thoughts in the initial description of this criminally overlooked and underrated comedy starring an Americanised (and in this case, vocal) version of sorts of a Mr.Bean archetype; an eccentric and endearingly naïve loner. However, the movie is so much more than this, as Bean relies mainly on physical and silent comedy, Pee Wee's Big Adventure has hilarious dialogue and 'gags' that fly across the screen with a strangely childlike ease and confidence with brilliant set-piece after brilliant set-piece in its fantastically ludicrous development on an age-old Hollywood sub-genre: the road movie. Like many great examples of that sub-genre, what gives the movie an excuse for its unabashed vibrancy is the fact that it is constantly moving, both in location and tone (somewhat), allowing for the maximum number of jokes and situations to occur in its modest length of 91 minutes. Continually ludicrous and absurd throughout, the film has that rare and brilliant quality of appearing normal within the confines of its frankly absurdist world. Viewing the film as a child I, and I assume many other children, were able to submit themselves a lot easier to the film's oddness and eccentricity, whilst an adult would find the plot preposterous and central man-child protagonist 'annoying', 'creepy'. I would advise trying to get past these cynical viewpoints in order to enjoy the film and its absolutely juvenile hilarity to the full.

Despite being the feature film debut of Burton (and, in my unsurprising opinion, one of his best) the movie is notoriously hard to find in Britain, especially on DVD, and though I would never suggest succumbing to illegal means in order to watch the film, I would take some responsibility in inadvertently placing the idea into your mind (he says rubbing his hands together whilst somehow still typing). The film contains all of Burton's most brilliant qualities, the cynical yet somehow loving portrayal view on humanity, a fantasy-like world borne out of the ordinary and a wonderful Danny Elfman score, whilst leaving out his more tiresome tropes (the constant inclusion of Johnny Depp I'm looking at you.) In summary, I would recommend this film to only two categories of people: those who are fans of Burton and those who are not.

It is a kitsch, fantastical, ludicrous, weird, sometimes irritating cliché of a movie and yet I love it and hope you do too, the jokes are at times genuinely brilliant, and its endearing quality lies in its subtle frankness of its stupidity, wearing its immaturity on its sleeve. I urge you to watch this movie, bathe in its lunacy and revel in its immaturity. If you dislike it or hate it, this is understandable. If you love it, this is even more understandable. Most criticisms I have read of the film and heard from others I have understood in some way, but I would never ever fully understand how someone could honestly describe such a film with the most insulting of criticisms: boring.