Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Revisiting Old Haunts

or

"I Dont Think That I Can Take It/

'Cause It Took SO LONG to Bake It/

And I'll Never Have That Recipe Agaaaaain"
 

Beetlejuice was an unlikely hit when it debuted away back in 1988. Director Tim Burton was virtually unknown. He'd made two shorts, one called Vincent and the other, his live-action version of Frankenweenie, the second of which convinced Paul Reubens to give him the directing job on Pee-wee's Big Adventure. That one had made money and when Burton became friends with writers Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson after directing their modern re-telling of "The Jar" for the television anthology re-boot "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", they began collaborating on McDowell and Wilson's original screenplay "Beetlejuice". As closely identified as he is with the film, it did not start as an original idea—Burton had already been working on his next film, Batman with writer Sam Hamm, but the project hadn't gotten out of the Warner Brothers' development Hell, when the McDowell-Wilson script found its way to him.

 

Beetlejuice changed everything. Burton's bizarre approach to the material garnered a large audience, and seeing the success that the young director had made of such a strange concept, Warner was more than happy to finance Batman. And Tim Burton became, if not a household name, a guarantor of original concepts and oddly-tilted projects that audiences fancied.

A sequel to Beetlejuice has always been talked about...but Burton has always been busy. For the longest time, it had been going through a series of concepts from many Burton collaborators under such titles as "Beetlejuice Goes to Hell," "Beetlejuice in Love" and..."Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian" (I think that might have been a joke-title for the press) but Burton always seemed to find something that attracted him more. Now, a whopping 36 years—and several Batmen—later, it's finally manifested itself in theaters.

A bit of personal back-story here: I must confess that the first Beetlejuice movie...at first viewing...I wasn't that crazy about. Brilliantly designed, yes. Ingenious and funny, sure. Keaton, terrific...if used a bit sparingly. All the elements were there, but it just seemed a bit wanting. Some of it might be attributed to Alec Baldwin's performance—this was before he became "Alec Baldwin"—which was a little bland, almost protective of himself as an actor. But, the big thing is I got the impression that the movie wasn't exactly true to its own rules...like if something needed to be resolved, Burton would just come up with something and excuse it as "it'll work" rather than making sense. This was before I started to appreciate Burton as Burton.* With a couple more films, I learned to let Burton be Burton and my reservations blew away like dust that obscures a snow-globe. Oh, he could still do a less than satisfying film, but a fully-engaged Burton film is a joy to behold...and experience.

Which is why I found Beetlejuice Beetlejuice such a breath of fresh air, albeit with a creepily crypt-like funk. One recalls that when Burton does a sequel—he's only done one, Batman Returns, far different in tone than the first one—he approaches it the same way he does one of his re-makes...as a "re-imagining." Yes, there will be call-backs (and there are plenty in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice), but, for the most part, Burton is vampire-staking new ground, and here he's doing it with such wild abandon that one turns giddy with each new development...however grisly or grotesque.

 
The story has three arcs that will progress and come together at the end.

1) It's 36 years later than the events of the first film and Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), the girl who could "see dead people," is the host of a cable-TV show called "Ghost House" where she visits haunted places. She has the experience. She is currently having the experience of seeing flashing visions of Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton)—well, he isn't "flashing" per se, but one wouldn't put it past him—which is making her more neurotic than normal and has her reaching for her anti-anxiety pills, much against the wishes of her producer/boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux). Lydia is a mess, anyway. Her surrogate ghost-family, the Maitlands have "found a loophole" and moved on. Her husband, Richard (Santiago Cabrera) has disappeared exploring the Amazon, and her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), in boarding school, hates her, blaming her for driving her father away and because she considers her mother's work with the supernatural "a sham." Lydia's mother Delia (Catherine O'Hara) is now a popular artist with a gallery opening pending, when she learns that husband Charles () has died and she insists that the three generations of women return to their old home in Winter River for a proper memorial.

2) Betelgeuse is now a functionary in Afterlife Management, running a boiler-room of shrunken-head employees and still holding a torch for Lydia, when he is called off the job by "ghost detective" Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), B-movie action star in his past life, who warns him that his past wife Delores (Monica Bellucci), a soul-sucking witch who murdered him during the Black Plague has somehow managed to reassemble herself—Betelgeuse hacked her into parts after discovering she'd poisoned him (it was the Plague Years, after all)—and is now seeking him out for revenge. Betelgeuse knows he won't out-run her for long and knows his only real salvation is to try to get back into the mortal world.

3) Astrid, on break from her boarding school (which she hates) and with her Mother (whom she hates) and step-grandmother (whom she tolerates) and her Mother's boyfriend (whom she despises), does just enough family-duty to go through with Charles' service, but then lights out on her bicycle where, by accident, she meets Jeremy (Arthur Conti), who feels like as much of an outcast as she does. They plan to meet up for Hallowe'en. Jeremy is the first decent boy she's met...but then, she hasn't had much experience with boys. If she wasn't keeping it a secret her mother or grandmother might tell her that boys are only after one thing...

That's a lot of story, and there are a lot of characters, and a lot of detail and the movie sails by with hardly a bump. In the meantime, Burton is having fun mixing things up with stop-motion animation (the sequence is ingenious on so many levels), or by telling the story of Betelgeuse and Delores' relationship in the style of a Mario Bava giallo film, in black and white and with Italian narration, and his parade of recently deceaseds all visually communicate how they died, usually in ways that would make them win Darwin Awards.

One of those awards would surely be deserving of someone who kept rambling on and on talking about how they loved everything about the movie and proceeded to tell you everything they loved about the movie and spoiling it. Those were just a couple of things that made me grin and grimace throughout the movie and there's so much more that should be left unsaid for full appreciation. But, leave it to say that Burton is working on all cylinders and with at least the same amount of joy he did with the first film...nearly four decades ago.

This time, I had no quibbles, from the first sequence to the last, each with their in-jokes and sense of the macabre to their giddy reveling in kitsch—a key component to understanding most of Tim Burton's work—all topped off with another happily galumphing Danny Elfman score. If I could grin any more, the top of my head would have rolled back like a PEZ dispenser. 

 

And laugh?  I thought I'd die.

* I had a REAL problem with Edward Scissorhands when the titular character stabbed his arch-nemesis to death, destroying the innocence of the character. The thing is...that was kind of the point. The "real world" of suburbia finally broke him, and it's why he HAS to go back to The Inventor's castle in self-exile. In practical terms, the death is unresolved—the police should be showing up at the castle-door (maybe with torches and pitch-forks), but—in story-terms, Edward's already punishing himself...in his own prison.

 

Burton tells stories with dream-logic. Real-world issues do not apply.

SPECTRE (2015)

Past-Tense
or
The Importance of Being Ernst

The criminal organization S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (The Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion) was the organization behind all the world's trouble in the first six of seven James Bond movies, and it's head, Ernst Stavro Blofeld (played by, respectively Donald Pleasance, Telly Savalas and Charles Gray) showed up for the first time in the fifth, although he'd been in two of them as a faceless entity stroking a white persian cat on his lap. In those films, his criminal organization had been responsible for toppling American missile launches, pitting the British and Russian spy networks against each other, hijacking nuclear weapons from NATO, sabotaging the Russian and American space programs to create a nuclear conflict, distributing a zero-growth virus as part of an elaborate blackmail scheme, and kidnapping a tech billionaire in order to put a laser firing satellite into orbit in order to offer nuclear supremacy to the highest bidder. These are bad-guys with a ruthlessly entrepreneurial streak.

But they haven't been around for 40 years? Where have they been? Where every bad corporation ends up (unless you're Goldman Sachs)—in court. SPECTRE was created for the first attempt at a James Bond movie in the 50's in a script written by Bond's creator Ian Fleming, producer Kevin McClory, and a screenwriter named Jack Whittingham, in order to create an alternate to the Soviet Union (a potential market for distributing their movie even then), which was traditionally the badski in Fleming's spy series. When the movie didn't pan out, Fleming took the plot and SPECTRE and wrote the novel "Thunderball," based on the screenplay. His co-writers successfully sued Fleming for plagiarism and McClory was given the exclusive rights to SPECTRE and Blofeld. The Bond series couldn't use them anymore. But McClory did when he re-made Thunderball with Sean Connery in 1983's Never Say Never Again (Max von Sydow played Blofeld).

A bevy of Blofelds: Donald Pleasance, Telly Savalas, Charles Gray, Max von Sydow*

The Bond producers (the children of original producer Albert R. Broccoli) only recently acquired those rights from McClory's estate—just as they had bought back the rights to "Casino Royale" to make their own version with Daniel Craig. Now, the long dormant plot element can be legally re-inserted into the series, to be re-invented for this current run of Bond films (the old one having been—oh, "parodied" is a nice word—into unusability by the "Austin Powers" films of Mike Meyers).

SPECTRE has a ring to it: "Vanity has its dangers."

Jesus, that's a lot of back-story for a James Bond movie, but then SPECTRE has a lot of back-story, too, encompassing the entire run of Daniel Craig's Bond. Way back in Casino Royale, there was a "Mr. White" who was part of an unnamed organization that was doing a lot of stock manipulation and he ended up killing the villain of the piece, LeChiffre, and subsequently being shot by Bond. The next film Quantum of Solace started with him being transported to Station I-Italy for questioning by Bond and "M" (Judi Dench at the time) where he cackled: "The first thing you should know about us is...we have people everywhere" then proves it by escaping with the help of one of the supposedly loyal MI-6 guards. "M's" reaction was succinct: "When someone says 'We've got people everywhere', you expect it to be hyperbole! Lots of people say that. Florists use that expression. It doesn't mean that they've got somebody working for them inside the bloody room!" A deleted QOS scene had Bond squaring off against White and a British government official in bed with the organization, which was called "Quantum." It was decided that was one too many endings for the film.**

They use a lot less stainless steel at SPECTRE nowadays.

They're wonderful at recycling at EON Productions—they've managed to make a whole movie out of that deleted scene, grafting "Quantum" into another layer of inscrutability to "SPECTRE," which is a nice touch. They've also thrown in a bit of Skyfall, too. After an unsanctioned hit that causes all too much property damage in Mexico City in the film's pre-credit sequence,*** Bond is disciplined by his new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss "M" (Ralph Fiennes) into some inactivity for the good of just about everybody on the planet.

Jimmy was very bad.

The planet, as it turns out, needs all the help it can get. Nobody's hijacking nukes or space-capsules these days, but there have been sporadic terrorist attacks throughout the globe, that incident in Mexico City being an example. Meanwhile, in London, MI6 is falling down, falling down—it's old HQ on the Thames crumbling from the attack in Skyfall and due for demolition. That's merely infrastructure, but inside the new Service, "M" is under siege. Whitehall is ramping up its "Homeland Security," given the MI6 attack, the previous Lady "M's" death, and the compromising of embedded agents in terrorist cells. There's a new security Czar, nicknamed "C"—Max Denbigh (played by "Sherlock's" mercurial Moriarty, Andrew Scott—whose methods of intelligence gathering involves fewer tailored boots on the ground and more intelligence gathering by remote control and electronic surveillance. There is a Global Surveillance Initiative in the works involving several nations that will soon be up for a vote and "M" is fighting against it, and the highly publicized cowboy tactics of 007 are working against him. Bond is put under heavy surveillance (like that's always worked) to keep him in line, but with the help of "Q" (Ben Whishaw) and Moneypenny (Naomie Harris), he's able to sneak off to Rome and Austria to investigate the terrorist he dispatched in Mexico, infiltrating the man's funeral and saving his widow (Monica Bellucci, finally playing a "Bond woman" after 25 years of internet speculation) from execution at the hands of her late husband's former business partners.

Caution: double entendre approaching

She gives him enough information (after some prodding) to infiltrate that organization's meeting, which is a combination Mafia conference, Mason's initiation, Illuminati planning session and WWE cage-match. He recognizes—and is recognized by—a man from his hazy past, Franz Oberhauser, (Christoph Waltz, not nearly as good as he could be) which forces an insane car-chase through the streets of Rome between Bond in a purloined Aston Martin DB10 and the assassin Hinx (a mute David Bautista) who has been assigned at that meeting to kill "The Pale King," a name Bond had heard in Mexico (but not from David Foster Wallace).

The "throne room" of "The Pale King"

Bond finds "The Pale King" in Austria and he turns out to have long connections to Bond from the beginning of his career as a "00." That visit is a nifty little scene that recalls one of Fleming's less active short stories, but it leads to a long story of revenge, inspired by another long story of revenge. It makes the final touch of the final confrontation that much more interesting and wise.

Saying anything more will just spoil a lot—some shocks, some surprises, some different zigs and zags from "the formula" as well as some bright spots—as SPECTRE takes another two full hours to complete (at 148 minutes, it is the longest of any James Bond film). I've always liked the tone of the Craig Bond's—hyper-serious even in the most outlandish of circumstances—no winking, no eyebrow-raising, no double-taking pigeons, no machine-gunning grannies, a minimum of slapstick (as was present during the Moore years), and in SPECTRE just a little bit of that starts to seep into the film. You won't see Craig mugging at the camera—he's too straight an actor to do that and he is more than aware of just how quickly one can shatter the illusion of tension.**** But, he will conveniently land on a couch when a building collapses around him—that will nicely pre-figure some stuff at the end.

Look at you looking at me

Performances are good throughout—with Craig, the series' longevity and current respectability, the producers can bring in some great talent without compromise, and Léa Seydoux is a great addition to the women of Bond and that's no tragedy this time. As the chief bad guys, Waltz and Scott are tamped down from their potential, and that seems a shame. Bautista is a considerable presence without words, and man, can that guy move fast. He's one of those things that take you aback and genuinely surprise.

If I have a complaint, it's that SPECTRE is not un-expected. There's a trend of making things neatly tied with bows of motivation in movies and the writers—John Logan, Purvis and Wade and Jez Butterworth—make things a bit too convenient. Everybody has fun with all the call-backs throughout the series—of course, SPECTRE HQ must be in a crater—but, one of the things about the SPECTRE stories is they had octopus-like loose ends. Not here. For all the dust-up's, everything is too tidy—right up to the point where we realize we've been watching a SPECTRE series all along.*****

For many, who have been cranky about the films not being "fun" anymore, SPECTRE will be the proverbial quantum of solace, a return to the more giddy days of Bond, just a dash of it, with a knowing panache that informs quite a number of scenes. ****** A bit of silliness here and there, like sugar in the salt-shaker. For me, someone who likes his spy satires in deadly earnest, it's a bit of a tactical retreat. I like it when the Bonds grab you by the scruff of the neck and wreck some furniture, rather than tickling you to death. I like Bonds to be respectable, even if they never, ever really were...in any incarnation. One worries that it's a trend to make the films more comfortable, more complacent, more what the public expects, which usually spells an approaching sea-change in the Bond movie series. "James Bond Will Return" as the last title says, but as what and for how long?

"Think on Your Sins"

* The cat, presumably, is also different every film. That Blofeld is a persian cat-fancier is a trope that has been used since the first Blofeld "appearance" (his face wasn't shown in either From Russia With Love or Thunderball), but it was never mentioned by Fleming for the character—it was purely an invention by the writers-producers. Or was it?

Here's Vincent Price as Richelieu in the M-G-M version of The Three Musketeers:

And I wonder if Marlon Brando was thinking about it when he picked up a studio stray for a scene in The Godfather.

** Which is funny. In the 60's, the "Bond formula" was that the film's ended with the big finale, only to have Bond have his post-mission relaxation spoiled by a determined henchman or something, who has to be dispatched before the credits can roll.

*** That sequence is a corker. After the opening gun-barrel (yay!) the movie begins with a sequence during the Day of the Dead that starts with one long continuous shot that is so elaborate and circuitous, Martin Scorsese is considering becoming a still photographer. In fact, Stephanie Sigman's entire role is contained in that one shot, detailing Bond's stalking of a target and his subsequent attempt to kill him "by any means necessary." It is one of the dizziest and throat-lumping sequences in the series.

**** Craig's commitment to the series has garnered him something that even Sean Connery could never get and caused him to quit the series—a co-producer credit. I didn't notice it, initially, in the Main Title sequence by Daniel Kleinmann (not one of his best) as I was too distracted by inky octopi crawling over naked silhouettes—that tends to happen to me for some reason.

***** I could go into detail, but the film just came out and I don't want to spoil what goes on and how the producers make the progression, or even point out similar examples in recent movie history. That would be telling. And there must be SOME secrets to the world's most well-known spy.

****** My chief problem is the motivation of the villain, who turns out to be Ernst Stavro Blofeld, on a mission to not conquer the world, but to control the knowledge of all the world's spy agencies, a super-NSA that can tap into any phone, any CCTV, rather like...oh, the NSA. That very lack of motivation could have inspired a nice little dig. For instance, after Bond's comment that Blofeld is "just a voyeur," really, he could have followed up with:
Bond: And what are you going to do with all this knowledge—this power? Feed the world? Heal the sick? (glances at Blofeld's cat) Open a spay/neuter clinic?

And when he finds out that Blofeld has been, basically, making Bond's life miserable the past few films as revenge for a disappointing past:
Bond: Why don't you act like a NORMAL person and just send me an insulting birthday card every year?