A had a strange experience w.r.t. in-flight videos recently.
I had queued up a few Youtube downloads to watch (much prefer the content there these days), but in the end thought I’d pick ONE movie to watch.
There were all the usual recent ones (e.g. Fabelmans), but next to this list was something intriguing that I’d never heard of: Ed Wood
I assumed I’d just missed its release (I’ve stopped keeping up with movies for some time now), but it looked intriguing, since it mentioned Tim Burton’s name — perhaps it was a new work he’d decided to come back to?
As I watched this, I recognized Jonny Depp — and then remembered how frequently he’d collaborated with Tim Burton, and that perhaps they’d got together again as a retro-throwback work after all these years; the movie being set in black-and-white added to this retro feeling too.
I then recognized Bill Murray and Sarah Jessica Parker, and thought — huh, what an odd cast, how different from the other movies they were in.
All of them looked so much younger— but I put this down to “great make up” or some sort of recent CGI effects applied to them.
I was sucked into the movie and wasn’t consciously aware of this, which gave the characters a feeling of strangeness — adding to the weirdly amazing script itself.
There’s a lot going on in it — the way Bela Lugosi was weaved into the story felt particularly throwback-to-cult-movies-ish and added that magic touch.
Towards the end I realized the movie they were making (in the movie; sorry, I’m making it sound more complicated than it is) was 1 2 Plan 9 from outer space !!
It turned out to be a true story (!) I was blown away and couldn’t help taking a few photos of scenes in the movie while I was watching it (see above).
A month later, today, I thought I’d check up when this was made, wondering how I missed it.
I looked at Tim Burton’s 3, thinking I’d see it in the recent work. I didn’t see it, thought I found the wrong
A quick IMDB search showed me: 1994 , or roughly thirty years ago!
All of this left me feeling like I’d been through an episode of the twilight zone.
All I can say is: go watch it.
- which has other meanings for some of us … ↩
- The title of this post was the initial title of the movie ↩
- While doing this, discovered he’s lent his creative influence to “Wednesday”, which explains why it has that feeling to it. ↩
Abacus Noir 