Here's a supermegawesome article on
Edward Scissorhands being turned into a dance piece by Matthew Bourne, the guy behind the sublimely sexy
Swan Lake that was on Broadway a few years back.
Back at Tisch's Department of Dramatic Writing, we had a screenwriting class that began with us writing down our ten favorite films of all time. The one that showed up on almost everyone's list (mine included) was
Edward Scissorhands, which shocked the professor since he'd never even heard of it.
Most fairytales occur in some distant land in some long lost age.
Scissorhands occurs in middle-American suburbs of the '50s, which through most lenses is a decidedly unmagical place (think
The Hours), but here it's a fabulous, romantic place full of longing, passion and joy.
That's the function of fairy tales, after all; they take the painful sadness of the real world and show the life beating just under the surface.
Edward Scissorhands does it better than most and it does it in a world that looks tantalizingly like our own, only slightly funnier, slightly stranger and slighty kinder.
Random aside: One of the other movies on my list was
Dead Again. Does this make me a scissors fetishist?
