These are more like art songs than show tunes, attempts at Brechtian insight and scale, which I presume is Sondheim's design: Anyone looking for hummable toe-tappers of the "Chicks and geese and ducks better scurry" variety should go play elsewhere. Only a shallow person would expect an actual melody to accompany lyrics of such nihilist significance as "There's a hole in the world like a great black pit/ and it's filled with people who are filled with shit/ And the vermin of the world inhabit it." This is complex, important music, people! Not for simple, cheerful folk by any means.

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The visual and narrative beauty of "Tim Burton's Corpse Bride" captures the essence of that line -- it hurts a little to watch the movie, not just because it's so deeply touching but because the medium itself is calling out to us from a lost world. Stop-motion animation of the sort Burton uses here -- and that he and director Henry Selick also used in the glorious 1993 "The Nightmare Before Christmas" -- has been virtually wiped off the filmmaking landscape in favor of CGI. So while the story that's told in "Corpse Bride" -- a Victorian Gothic romance adapted from a Russian folktale -- is affecting in itself, the vitality and beauty of the textures and movement on-screen have a special poignancy. "Corpse Bride" isn't the sort of thing you see every day. It's in touch with the real world, yet out of step with it. This is filmmaking straight from the land of the undead.

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We get wordy preambles -- often delivered by a wise elder, usually a Southerner -- about how stories tell us who we are and where we've been. In a state of innocent hopefulness, we wait to hear the tale: Who knows? It might actually be good. But more often than not it turns out to be some magic-realism baloney about a giant fish in a stream or some similarly numbing metaphor for the unpredictability of life, or the brevity of life, or the importance of taking chances in life -- choose your own larger meaning and insert it here. Maybe the story would have been OK without the big windup. Then again, maybe it needed the advance advertising campaign because it wasn't such a great story to begin with.

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"It was a dissected vertebral artery in her neck," Bronstein explained to E! News Daily. "They went in, not surgically, and they fixed it ... There's no chance of a recurrence, and she's really doing well."

So well, in fact, that she's starting to explore new film projects. If Sharon has her way, she'll soon be starring as Lana Turner in "Stompanato," a film about the actress and her rocky relationship with mobster Johnny Stompanato.

According to Variety, nothing's a done deal yet, but Antonio Banderas' name is being bandied about to play Stompanato, and Canadian director Francois Girard ("The Red Violin," "Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould") may direct.

And aren't you proud of me for getting through that entire item without even once mentioning undies or komodo dragons?

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Biography (8 p.m., A&E) continues "Planet of the Apes" week with a new profile of Tim Burton, director of the "Apes" remake (and "Edward Scissorhands," "Batman" and "Ed Wood," among other films). The Downer Channel (8:30 p.m., NBC) spoofs the fear of clowns. Nova (9 p.m., PBS, check local listings) reruns a December 2000 report on anorexia that includes interviews with patients and a look at new approaches to eating disorders. The Sunrise Killer continues to make short work of the valiant and extremely deluded "detectives" on Murder in Small Town X (9 p.m., Fox).

Specials

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Burton, with the help of master cinematographer Philippe Rousselot and production designer Rick Heinrichs, has built the perfect primate planet. But he doesn't know quite what to do with it once he has set it up, and that's the major failing of this "Planet of the Apes." Burton catapults us into a world we've never seen before only to use it as a backdrop for a rather conventional battle picture, complete with a venerated war hero and a ploddingly simplified St. Crispin's Day speech. Past the first third, "Planet of the Apes" is entertaining enough, but it stops far too short of being completely seductive.

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The apes had taken over after the humans wiped out civilization with nuclear weapons. "Damn you! Damn you all to hell," shouts Heston, his misanthropy resoundingly justified.

The political message is ham-fisted but crystal clear: A nuclear holocaust will ruin us all. And then apes will take over the planet. Or something.

"Planet of the Apes," despite a couple of iconic images like that final scene, is a dreadful film, a compendium of clumsy dialogue, one-dimensional characters, risible plot turns and long silences broken by incomprehensible meaningful looks. But it has stayed with us because in conception, if not execution, the film had something to say.

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When you're a kid, the scant two months between Halloween and Christmas seem interminable. Tim Burton bridges the gap with his wickedly delightful stop-motion animated feature "The Nightmare Before Christmas," which features Santa Claus being kidnapped and -- gently -- tortured by a trio of giggling little hobgoblins and their beastly boss. It just doesn't get any better than this.

But that's just one angle of the story. "The Nightmare Before Christmas" tells the tale of how Jack Skellington, a dapper denizen of Halloween Town, becomes entranced with -- and later obsessed by -- the neighboring village of Christmas Town and its corresponding celebration. As the gorgeous patchwork girl who has a crush on him, Sally, looks on, he rallies his fellow townspeople to create a Christmas of their own. They get into the swing of things without missing a beat, gleefully wrapping trinkets in coffin-shaped boxes and packing scorpions inside nesting dolls.

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The only thing wrong with "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" is that the real world looks so drab and colorless by comparison. After the last frame, reacclimation to normal surroundings can be tough: You wish you had a giant box of magic crayons so you could rev up the hue of everything in sight.

That's no accident. As production designer David Snyder notes in one of the special DVD features, there wasn't a lot of time or money allotted for the project, so he and his crew had to use colors and shapes wisely to get the right look. Their motto, he says, was: "If it ain't bright, it ain't right."

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In Burton's loose, highly stylized re-imagining of Washington Irving's "The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) isn't a knobby,
awkward schoolteacher but a constable who's prone to rather
dignified-looking bumbling. The story opens in 1799 New York: Ichabod has
been assigned to investigate a number of horrific murders upstate, in which
people's heads have been lopped off (with a fire-hot sword, no less) by the
Headless Horseman. The Horseman was formerly a ruthless Hessian mercenary
(played in the flashback sequences by a deliciously deranged Christopher
Walken) who'd been beheaded and plopped into a sloppy grave by
Revolutionary War soldiers, and who now haunts the nearby wood doing his
dirty work.

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Now he's taken on an American icon, Ichabod Crane, in Tim Burton's
exquisitely phantasmagoric adaptation of Washington Irving's "The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow," titled, simply, "Sleepy Hollow." He's given it his usual
(that is, unusual) Depp charge. He transforms the icon into a complicated
modern figure while staying true -- in some mysterious, intangible fashion --
to its post-revolutionary America sardonic grotesquerie. (Irving set his
fable in the 1790s and published it in 1820; the movie takes place
specifically in 1799.)

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