Review of Pee-wee's Big Adventure

This is a really strange film. Like the title suggests, this is at least as much Pee Wee Herman's film that it is Tim Burton's. In fact Herman has also made the script. Tim Burton's movies are important to me, just like to so many people who grew up in the late eighties and nineties. This don't feel like a Burton movie very much, so I try to review it as an independent movie. It's a movie about a weirdo guy who lives in his own childish fantasy world. To me it feels more like a pictorial of some kind of mental problems than, say, a funny comedy for children. Anyway the main character is about 35 years old. The viewpoint of the movie is from this guys perspective, from where everything seems miraculous. Pee Wee is more like a sad clown, not someone who would make you, or at least me, laugh. In all his strangeness he's kinda unhuman and distant. I think this film portrays this guys "communication" with the world quite interestingly; he don't have much contact with it. But, there is another possible way to watch at least some parts of this film, and I realised that only after the first twenty minutes or so: As an old time-style comedy. Pee Wee Herman is just like some Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd or Chaplin -kind of mute comedy character. Only difference is that now we would have the sound, the capability to communicate by speaking. If you would want it. With no doubt this is also a tribute to those old movies. In any case, I think this movie is quite boring; at least it don't manage to get me interested of itself. Maybe it is a children movie, that only children are "able" to watch. Generally I think that most of the best "children's" stories work also for adults, and have many different dimensions and depths to see for people of any age. But this don't work like that. I think the other Burton's work I've seen from the beginning of his career (I mean before he started to make REALLY great films), for example Amazing Stories episode "Family Dog" (with Brad Bird) and other animation "Vincent" are really great movies, and I would recommend those instead of this, if you'd have to choose. But because you do not have to choose, and if you're interested, then see this just for the general education. It's not bad, it's just boring.