| Big Fish | 
 enlarge | Director: Tim Burton
Actors: Ewan Mcgregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup, Jessica Lange, Helena Bonham Carter
Studio: Sony Pictures
Category: DVD
List Price: $14.94
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Avg. Customer Rating:  452 reviews
Sales Rank: 1827
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dts Surround Sound, Dubbed, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), French (Original Language), English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), French (Dubbed)
Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 125
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6
MPN: COLD00837D
ISBN: 1404930388
UPC: 043396008373
EAN: 9781404930384
ASIN: B0001GOH6Q
Theatrical Release Date: January 9, 2004
Release Date: April 27, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A magical journey that delves deep into a fabled relationship between a dying father & his son. The son recreates his fathers elusive life in a series of legends & myths inspired by the few facts he knows discovering both his fathers great feats & his great failures. Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 03/27/2007 Starring: Ewan Mcgregor Jessica Lange Run time: 125 minutes Rating: Pg13 Director: Tim Burton
Amazon.com
After a string of mediocre movies, director Tim Burton regains his footing as he shifts from macabre fairy tales to Southern tall tales. Big Fish twines in and out of the oversized stories of Edward Bloom, played as a young man by Ewan McGregor (Moulin Rouge, Down with Love) and as a dying father by Albert Finney (Tom Jones). Edward's son Will (Billy Crudup, Almost Famous) sits by his father's bedside but has little patience with the old man's fables, because he feels these stories have kept him from knowing who his father really is. Burton dives into Bloom's imagination with zest, sending the determined young man into haunted woods, an idealized Southern town, a traveling circus, and much more. The result is sweet but--thanks to the director's dark and clever sensibility--never saccharine. Also featuring Jessica Lange, Alison Lohman, Helena Bonham Carter, Danny DeVito, and Steve Buscemi. --Bret Fetzer
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| Customer Reviews: Read 447 more reviews...
 Life is nothing but invisible marvellous wonders November 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
It turns all around the father and his son and their difficult relation. It was perfect as long as the son believed in the stories the father was telling him all the time, that is to say as long as Father Christmas really was a childhood hero. But older age came and those stories sounded all silly, even sillier and sillier and they led to a complete break between the two, the father and the son, till the father came to the point of departing from this life. The son and his wife came back and he was confronted to the stories again. But one day when he was sorting out some old documents of his father's for his mother he came across a strange deed that showed the existence of an estate under the name of his father. And he went there and discovered that this estate had some tremendous reality and that the witch of the old stories was the young girl from some other old story who had become a piano teacher and had benefited from this estate. She sure was in love with the father but the father was faithful to his wife. The son then discovers that all the stories were just embellished true stories. The Siamese Chinese twin women were in fact true Chinese twins though not Siamese. And an epiphany takes place. When the son was keeping watch over his father at the hospital one night, the father called him and the son understood the father was asking him to tell him a bedside story to put him to sleep, the big sleep. And the son is inspired to tell him his own version of his father's embellished stories and that story enables the father to go to his long sleep with all the characters of his own stories. And when the funeral arrives, the son, his wife and his mother can only see with their own eyes that all the characters of these stories are true people. But in the meantime some miracle had happened. The son on the command from his dying father had taken him away from the hospital to the river where he had put him back into the water, as if the father was only a captured big fish living among the humans and waiting for this last minute to recapture his true nature and swim away down the river where he had come from. That's when the film could have turned grotesque or just funny strange. But Tim Burton is a genius of the paranormal and how to make it look so natural that we are obliged to believe in it and to go back to our infancy, when we believed wonderful stories full of unbelievable wonders that we could only believe in deep in our hearts because they were so beautiful. Tim Burton is a magician that mesmerizes us with surrealistic images.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
 Soooooo slllloooooowwww November 6, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
I give it 2 stars for cinematography and acting. Other then that I can't recommend this film, especially if you aren't fond of slow, long, drawn out movies that really have no point and whose characters are blah. It does remind me of Forrest Gump a little but Ewan McGregor is no Tom Hanks! And his adventures are no where near as interesting or believable as in Forrest Gump.
My husband loves it and wanted me to see it, so I said yes. Most of the time I was sitting there thinking "can we fast forward, because I don't get the point of this scene and it's really boring" And after it was over I was thinking "was that only two hours, because it felt like four" I should have know better. My husband was never a good judge of movies.
I guess I kept expecting something to happen, but it never did. Every scene led up to what I thought would be a big wow factor, but never was. They built up tension in every scene that fizzled out moments later.
Never trust a film packed full of big time well known actors. It is most likely that they are hoping the actors will carry the film, and they did, but not nearly far enough.
Big Fish October 13, 2008
Great movie. Reminds you not to take yourself so serious and enjoy life and older peoples stories.
A Fairy Tale for Adults September 28, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
"Big Fish" may be Tim Burton's best film. At the very least, it's his most underrated. Everyone always talks about his concept work/production on The Nightmare Before Christmas and his older work, but I'd argue that this is a more solid film than those. Instead of comparing, though, I'll just talk about what makes this movie so great.
The basic plot is this: Edward Blood was never the best father, especially through his son's eyes. He'd always tell patently false tales about his life, often hogging the attention with his fantastic stories. Now, as he gets closer and closer to death, he recounts his stories to his son and his new daughter in law, in hopes that his son will finally come to know who he truly is. This sort of story was perfect for Tim Burton, because he gets to finally flex his creative muscle and pull it in multiple ways, since the "telling stories" parts of this movie make this more like an anthology than a straight film. Burton's over-the-top style often seems like it is just TOO much in some of his films, but his direction was perfect for this movie.
It's a whimsical, heart-breaking, fantastic fairy tale for adults. Not in the dark way that people often assume "for adults" means, but what I mean is that the themes in the story are very much about growing up, what it means to be a man, and the pain and joy and terror of getting old. A lot of it is silly, but certainly in a good way. This film is funny, quirky, weird, beautiful, tragic, and hopeful--much like life itself.
9/10
Very touching.... September 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
When I first heard of this movie I expected something crazy and dark (coming from Tim Burton previous movies). I was wonderfully impressed but how meaningful this movie is. Tim Burton taps into the common problem with children and their parents not understanding each other. He beautifully shows how the son of a very imaginative man, doesn't not have a good relationship with his father because he doesn't believe his father's tales of his life. Unfortunately, his father is dying and he goes to see him before he dies. I don't want to give too much of the movie out because i think it is too beautiful to give away. However it is not a easy movie to understand for some you have to look at the detail of the plot to really grasp it. Open your mind and you will not be dissatisfied.
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