Tim Burton Exhibit

Compliments to the curators and organizers:
A job well done with depicting the director's artistic progression in his film making career while keeping a strong emphasis on his idiosyncratic styles - the grin, frequent employment of Johnny Depp and stop motion animation techniques...etc.

The not-so-great part:
The $35 admission fee is too steep for the size of the exhibit, which is divided into approximately 10 sections and has an average viewing time of 45 minutes/person. It is as compact as it could get. Granted that the Tim Burton name is a brand/pop-art cultural representation by itself, it is still very much overpriced for a glimpse at a few of Burton’s learning pieces, art works, scribbled notes, film props and synopsis as well as less than a dozen sculptures by Rick Heinrichs. A lot more could have been shown given the repertoire of Burton's works but the organizers probably ran out of space.

Top 4 Tim Burton’s film moments (none of which were illustrated in the exhibit):
(1) Nightmare before Christmas - Kidnap Mr. Sandy (Santa) Claus musical scene
(2) Big Fish - the concept of a fish that cannot be caught as it shows itself in other forms other than a fish
(3) Beatle Juice - dinner over Banana Boat song scene
(4) Batman Returns - Suicidal penguins strapped onto candy-cane coloured explosives scene

What's yours?

April is Daffodil Month

The Canadian Cancer Society is fundraising again during this time of the year. Instead of going full frontal with live daffodil sales, which had been the tradition for the past 50 over years, the organization has adopted the Remembrance Day poppies approach and are selling daffodil pins, which are more practical for outreach in terms of cost efficiency, easy transportation and flower longevity. These plastic flowers are more likely to last a month long without wilting.

Since we inhabit a somewhat conspicuous consumerist society, at least according to people like Bourdieu and Baudrillard, please conspicuously support the fight against cancer and help promote cancer awareness by wearing a daffodil pin for the people you know whose lives have been/were touched by cancer. Here's to my aunt whom I’ve never met who had lost her battle to leukemia while she was in her thirties and to my grandfather who died from metastasized colon cancer. The last but not least, to my grandmother who followed him a few years after.