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.

Dumbo (2019)

Free Dumbo
or
There's a 'PC' in Pachyderm

I was charmed by the 1941 Disney cartoon Dumbo when I was a small child—others have been, apparently, as it was inducted to the National Film Registry in 2017. Very slight, the film clocked in at a mere 64 minutes, barely over an hour, but it was big in detail in my memory. For instance, the train "Casey, Jr." was a big part of the movie for me, even though it only appeared for a few moments, Timothy Q. Mouse was an important character to me, and Dumbo...well, how could you not love twinkly-eyed Dumbo with his out-sized ears, who by mere suggestion of a feather could launch into flight, making him more akin to a bee whose ability to fly despite the wing to body-mass is one of the mysteries to science (but don't tell the bees because they don't care). 

I also liked it because it was all about animals and there weren't any humans of any consequence—they were all bastards, anyway—and the actions of the animals were easily understood by a young boy. I cried like a child (because I was) at the scene where Mama Jumbo cradles her baby 'phant from her prison car and was thrilled at watching Dumbo fly. I thought the crows were really good characters who helped Dumbo a lot because they had sympathy for him and I had no idea that they were actually racial stereotypes (how stupid I was as a child). 

As I've grown up I've encountered elephants, interacted with them (had lunch with one for a week once) and my respect for them as an adult has only increased as I've learned about their social interactions and group dynamics. Elephants are really cool animals.

My memories of Dumbo are happy ones and nothing can alter them.

Not even Tim Burton's downright clunky live action remake of the film—because the Disney studio is really scared of doing anything original these days—which is more "evolved" (let us say) than the '41 version but has none of the verve or emotional resonance that the first one had. 

I don't think it's the material, alone. I think it's director Burton. This saddens me because I'm a big fan of his, but Dumbo reveals an essential flaw of Burton's that will color my perception of his work now for everything he does in the future, and casts an awareness over his past work that changes them slightly and not for the better.

But, let's start with the material. The movie is longer, more involved, and has more irons in the fire than just a baby elephant learning to make advantages out of dis-advantages. Also, the movie is far more human-centric than the 1941 version and that makes it less about Dumbo than it does about his support system. The humans were background characters in the cartoon; they were merely the animals that ran the circus and didn't figure much in the story-line. Here, their machinations are front and center and Dumbo's story is just one of many. The animals don't talk—Dumbo doesn't, of course, he's a baby—but the elder elephants did, as did Timothy, the crows, all the animals commiserated. Now, animals have talked in these Disney CGI-fests before—The Jungle Book, for instance, as they do in the up-coming live-action The Lion King, but here, all the animals are mute, and merely animals. Given that so much of the movie centers on the proper treatment of animals, here they're narratively regulated to second-string treatment.

It is 1919 and The Medici Brothers Circus (it's so poor there's only one Medici brother—played by Danny DeVito) has fallen on hard financial times. They're loading up their train to start their circuit, but it's a smaller task than it was before. Influenza has taken the lives of many of the circus clan, and animals have had to be sold off to make some money. But, one purchase has been made, an Indian elephant named Jumbo, who is pregnant. Medici hopes that a baby elephant will bring in the crowds and restore their fortunes. Soon enough, storks are flying overhead (a nod to the earlier version) and Baby Jumbo is born.

One clever thing the screenplay does is create a parallel story for the humans that mirrors Baby Jumbo's: the circus has its collection of oddities, the un-normal who have found a home and community in the circus—it's a common theme in Burton's movies—but there are two children, Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins) Farrier, who are living with the circus. Their mother died of the influenza and they're being raised, basically, by the circus. Their father, Colt Farrier (Colin Farrell, doing a dead-on George W. Bush imitation) returns to the circus from World War I. But, he's a changed man. A former circus rider and sharp-shooter, he's lost his left arm in combat, and now must be a single father to his kids, who have grown up without him, and he must find a place with the circus—he can't do his lariat tricks anymore and Medici has sold his horse. But, he needs work to keep his family going, and the circus is all he has. 

Medici puts him in charge of the elephants, a task Colt isn't happy with (as he used to be a star-performer), but if somebody has to do the shoveling, he at least can do that, so grudgingly he takes the job, putting him at odds with the evil elephant wrangler (Phil Zimmerman). But, when Baby Jumbo arrives, he's immediate trouble. Mrs. Jumbo is very protective of him, so when she's "incentivized" out of her trailer, she starts to freak out. 

It is up to Colt and his kids to find the baby hiding in a big pile of straw, and coax him out. But, the sight of his big ears puts Medici in a conniption. "That's an abomination!!" he tells Colt. "You have until tomorrow to fix this!" Little Jumbo is locked away in a cage in isolation, and the kids start disobeying Medici's orders to stay away from the baby elephant, visiting to cheer him up. It's when he starts playing with Joe blowing a feather back and forth between his cage-bars that he snorts the feather into his trunk, and he immediately starts to levitate out of his open-topped cage and by flapping his ears, flying around the trailer, bumping into walls in his disorientation with the new ability.

It's not the only thing about Dumbo that produces a massive headache.

The kids keep his flying abilities a secret—little Milly wants to be a scientist and she wants to study this—but Baby Jumbo is made a part of the elephant act, riding a baby carriage with a bonnet covering "those" ears. It does not go well, as his deformity is revealed and the crowd—being a crowd—laughs and jeers, upsetting him. His cries provokes Mama Jumbo to charge out of her trailer and her resulting stampede to protect her baby causes one of the big top's support poles to topple, causing a panic, closing the show, and —oh yeah—killing the bad elephant wrangler (the jerk). Medici locks up Mama Jumbo, chaining her in the trailer, and sells her back to the original seller at half-price, orphaning little Dumbo (as he's been called by the jeering crowd and it's taken up by the supposedly sympathetic circus-folk).

To make a short story even longer, eventually Dumbo becomes a part of the circus and becomes renowned as the miracle he is—a flying elephant. He becomes a big draw for the Medici Circus, and business picks up as the shows start to sell out. This attracts the attention of one V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton, back working with Burton, and tries hard—maybe too hard—to make the character an eccentric in the manner of Johnny Depp), an entertainment entrepreneur out of Coney Island, who has a massive theme park called "Dreamland"—because Fantasyland©, Tomorrowland©, Adventureland©, and Frontierland© are *cough* apparently taken.

Keaton's Vandevere is so mercurially devious that one is surprised there isn't a casino in Dreamland. Any comparisons to Walt Disney or Donald Trump are merely superficial.

But, yes, it will occur to you.

Vandevere comes to Medici to buy the circus lock, stock and trunk to make them part of his Dreamland experience, a plan that Medici immediately falls for in order to gain the short term money. V.A.'s plan is to feature Dumbo in an aerial act with his courtesan Colette Marchant (Eva Green, who is, as always, marvelous) self-described as "one of the many gems he wears to reflect back on him."

It turns out all he wants is the flying elephant act, and once that act is shown to be a reality to his banker, J. Griffin Remington (Alan Arkin, disappointingly underutilized), he'll cut the rest of the circus loose including Medici. There's a lot of corruption going on at Dreamland, with Vandevere calling the shots and cutting corners...like safety ("There's no net!" "There is, but it's invisible...") that makes the character a cluelessly manipulative egotist and so entirely hissable that by the time the movie has run its course, there will be no audience satisfaction until Dreamland has crumbled around his ears.

At this point, Dumbo becomes less about its namesake as the Farriers and Vandevere, and that's not enough to engage one's interest. There are the occasional good lines as when Vandevere notices a particularly meddlesome monkey invading Medici's desk—"You keep a monkey in your drawer?" "Only for emergencies."—or when Colt meets Colette and the war veteran muses "I went to France once. I didn't like it." But, that's as clever as the script gets. It has its white hats and black hats, but there's no middle ground and precious little nuance.

It's a movie that says everything is okay because they say it is, even when the evidence points otherwise. There's a happy ending of sorts as Mrs. Jumbo and Dumbo somehow make their way to an East Indian paradise filled with their kin (and no poachers to thin their numbers) and the Medici Family Circus (as it becomes known) adopts a new policy of keeping no animals in captivity—except for horses. Somehow, they don't seem to count.

So, the script has problems—try as it might to fit in as many call-backs to the cartoon version as possible, with songs being quoted but minimally used, lines repeated, and even managing to squeeze in Burton's version of the original's weirdly psychedelic "pink elephant" sequence.

Try as they might to emulate the original, they cannot match it. There's one very good reason. The movie doesn't have the heart or sentimentality of the original. It might be a little unfair to fault them on this point; the original's a cartoon and the new one's "true-as-it-can-be" representation of Dumbo can't compete with the Disney animators drawings with big blue expressive eyes and the advantage of being able to make Dumbo have a wider variety of expressions that you just can't do if you're trying to create a more photo-realistic baby elephant.

But Burton, the director, also has a cynical, slightly demented side that doesn't allow for sentimentality. Think back on his work—has there ever been a movie that evokes tears? A sense of wonder, certainly. Even a sense of spectacle. But, Burton has always gone for emotion once-removed, even in films which should have manipulated the emotions like Edward Scissorhands, Big Fish, or—as close as I've come to being moved by one of his films—The Corpse Bride. Burton has always had a sense of beauty (and Dumbo looks gorgeous). But, they have always been a bit distant.

For example, the "Baby of Mine" sequence where baby Dumbo reaches out to his caged mother SHOULD have wiped the audience out, bringing out the handkerchiefs and reducing the audience to puddles—as the first one did. Burton pays trunk service to it—how could he not?—but, he doesn't have the sensibility to "push" it emotionally so that it resonates. That should have been the easiest trick in the book. But, irony—which Burton excels at—is not emotion, tugging at the brain and not the heart-strings.

Another moment that falls short by not achieving the Big Emotion it should have evoked is the sequence when Dumbo first flies in the circus. It should have been a magical, emotional event. But it isn't. This is partially because Dumbo is placed in such peril—and Burton enhances that to create as much fear and tension as he can muster—that the freedom evoked when he does fly should be cathartic. However, when Dumbo first soars, the movie should have too, and it just does not, no matter how much sublime cooing composer Danny Elfman throws on the soundtrack.

Unfortunately, Burton's Dumbo is a children's tale without joy or delight and that is a very sad, charmless thing. Can Burton ever cross the bridge from hip irony to deeply-felt soulfulness? I don't know. It may be his biggest weakness as a director, and before Dumbo—with his hand-chosen projects—the deficiency has never been so openly apparent. But, with this one, it stands out...like a flying elephant in the room.

But, I will say this: this version of Dumbo did not (as the fan-boys like to rant) ruin my childhood or my happy memories of the original. But I can't see how it could create that same joy in any current childhood being made. 

And that is a shame.

Gen Stilwell (Robert Stack) cries at Dumbo in Spielberg's 1941.

Dr. Seuss' The Lorax

Written at the time of the film's release...

Geiselling Up the Wrong Tree
or
What the Dr. Ordered (What the Patient Thneeded)

The Dr. Seuss library was getting a bad shake from the movies when they started. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (actually an expansion—and declination—of the excellent Chuck Jones Christmas special) was a live-action mess directed by Ron Howard. Then, the studio actually raised the ire of the estate (in the form of Geisel's widow, Audrey) with the live-action version of The Cat in the Hat. Then, someone had the brilliant idea of making them computer cartoons, starting with Horton Hears a Who (which did the book justice and stood out on its own as quite a good flick, being the closest representation of Seussian architecture, or lack thereof). Now, comes Suess' cautionary (and controversial) ecology tale The Lorax in the same format "from the creators of Despicable Me," Chris Renaud and his animation supervisor on that film, Kyle Balda.

And it's not bad. Despicable Me had a weird way of looking at the world all its own, and the creators have a tendency to take the "edge" off Seuss, (although preserving his architectural view of "no right angles") while still making a film that is lively, and with a comic timing that depends on the "ol' switcheroo" for laughs, not unlike a perpetual motion "Roadrunner" cartoon.

The expansion is interesting. Ted (Geissel's Christian name and voiced by Zac Efron) lives in a polluted plastic community of Thneedeville, run by a corporate overlord named O'Hare (Rob Riggle), who's a "zillionaire" from producing bottled air—a necessity since all the real trees have been cut done, owing to (and this where the book comes in) The Once-ler (voiced by Ed Helms) who used them all to make his fortune producing and selling Thneede's, which appear to be a scarf/sweater/hat contraption, which became a sensation. 

His initial tree-toppling leads to the appearance of The Lorax (cackled by Danny DeVito) who "speaks for the trees"—sarcastically, I might add—to try to set the young entrepreneur onto a more green-path when it comes to business (like that ever works without tax-breaks, cute woodsy animals be damned).

Ted, meanwhile, wants to grow a single, solitary tree for the woman of his dreams, Audrey (played by the woman of my nightmares, Taylor Swift, and despite my prejudices, she's quite good!) and the only way he can do that is to get by O'Hare, his burly security guards and escape Thneedville to find the Once-ler and let Nature take its course, Lorax or no Lorax.

It's not a bad translation of Seuss, story-wise. But one wishes that the visuals could be a little less plasticene looking, given the ecology story, which leads one to wonder if such a subject should even be rendered with pixels (and makes one cynical enough to note how much the End Title tune is auto-tuned to a semi-quaver of its unnatural life). Such thoughts should not be creeping into one's thoughts when one is watching a movie about how wonderful Nature's way is, and nature has nothing to do with it, no matter how "green" the movie declares itself to be.