Tag: Tim Burton

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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Catherine O’Hara, Jenna Ortega, Winona Ryder, and Justin Theroux as the Deetz family.

Flappers, greasers, beatniks, hippies, punks, yuppies, and new wavers have all come and gone. But for some reason, goths endure. What is it about the floridly morose aesthetic that still compels kids and adults (excuse me, “elder goths”) to wear black and walk by night? Some say Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, the first novel that is unambiguously science fiction, was also the first goth chick. It’s hard to beat her commitment to the bit: She lost her virginity on her mother’s grave and kept her dead husband’s heart in a jar on her desk. The modern goth package started to come together in the post-punk era of 1979, with Peter Murphy’s plaintive wail on Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi Is Dead.” Siouxsie Sioux, one of the Sex Pistols’ Bromley Contingent, adopted the fright wig haircut and turned out songs like “Halloween” and “Spellbound” with her band, the Banshees. Her sometimes guitarist Robert Smith made depression sound fun (or at least cool) with the Cure. 

In 1986, Siouxsie and the Banshees hit it big on U.S. college radio with “Cities in Dust,” a song about wandering through the ruins of Pompeii. Two years later, Winona Ryder copped her look for Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice. Ryder came by it honestly. At the time Tim Burton cast her as the girl who could see ghosts, she was a 16-year-old daughter of bohemian parents, who had raised her on a commune. LSD pioneer Timothy Leary was her godfather. When the literature-obsessed teen was introduced into a conventional California high school, she was relentlessly bullied by the popular girls, and retreated into theater. The combination of wide-eyed innocence and cynical angst she brought to the role of Lydia felt real because it was real. 

Ryder and Micheal Keaton reunite in their roles after 36 years.

Beetlejuice was an unexpected hit. It was only Tim Burton’s second movie, after the rollicking Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, but his goth aesthetic was already fully formed. It was a manic free association of Hammer horror films and carnival fun-house craziness. Ryder would get goth with him again, opposite her real-life boyfriend Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands, and further burnished her goth bona fides as the outsider anti-hero in Heathers and as Mina Harker, for whom Gary Oldman “crossed oceans of time” in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. She proved herself to be one of Gen X’s best actors throughout the 1990s by stealing the show in Little Women and Night on Earth. 

But Ryder, and everyone else, always had a soft spot for Lydia the proto-goth. When she signed on as the mom in Stranger Things, her only request was that they had to make room in her shooting schedule if the long-awaited Beetlejuice sequel happened. And now, after many stops and starts, it has. 

Like its predecessor, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a glorious mess of a film. I’ve been rhapsodizing about Winona’s return to the black, but Michael Freakin’ Keaton is also back as the ghost with the most. He’s still stuck in the afterlife, but he’s moved up in the netherworld, now commanding an office full of freelance bio-exorcist ghosts and ghouls. On his desk is a picture of the one who got away, Lydia. But while he’s living his best afterlife, his ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci) reappears and starts re-murdering ghosts. This attracts the attention of ghost detective Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe). 

Meanwhile, on the prime material plane, Lydia has committed the worst Gen-X sin: She’s sold out. She uses her supernatural detection talent as the host of Ghost House with Lydia Deetz. But while she’s taping the latest episode, she sees Beetlejuice, the only thing that ever really scared her, in the audience, and storms off the set. Her boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux) is also her show’s producer, and their relationship is troubled and uneven. “This is the last time I dig pills out of the trash for you!” he gripes, knowing full well he will do it again. Her first husband Richard (Santiago Cabrera) disappeared on a research trip to the Amazon, and their daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) is parked at a swank boarding school, where she’s relentlessly bullied by the popular girls. She’s there because her grandma Delia (Catherine O’Hara) made a big donation to the art school. 

One of the cool things about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is that the characters have actually grown and changed in the years that have passed. Lydia’s taken the cool-teen-to-troubled-adult pipeline, familiar to many Gen-Xers. Delia was a hopeless dilettante artist in the first film. Now, she’s got a huge gallery show in New York alongside the “Picasso of graffiti art.” While she’s still a raging narcissist, her art’s pretty good now. Astrid, like Lydia before her, sees right through the adults’ carefully constructed facades, and kinda hates them for it. 

The plot of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is episodic and scattered. Burton’s visual sense remains impeccable, but he still misses the level of writers he had for Batman Returns and Ed Wood. What saves the film is its sheer exuberance. Michael Keaton is 72, but his manic energy is still intact. Ryder lets a little of the old Lydia peek out from beneath her exasperated mom routine. The whip-smart Ortega is a worthy successor to Ryder’s effortless intensity. 

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice never quite recaptures the original’s dark magic, but you’ll be having too much fun to care. 

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
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Horrortober: Beetlejuice (1988)

Micheal Keaton rules as Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice is not a horror movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it almost was, according to IMB: 

The original script was a horror film, and featured Beetlejuice as a winged, reptilian demon who transformed into a small Middle Eastern man to interact with the Maitlands and the Deetzes. Lydia was a minor character, with her six year old sister Cathy being the Deetz child able to see the Maitlands. Beetlejuice’s goal was to kill the Deetzs, rather than frighten them away, and included sequences where he mauled Cathy in the form of a rabid squirrel and tried to rape Lydia. Subsequent script rewrites turned the film into a comedy and toned down Beetlejuice’s character into the ghost of a wise cracking con-artist rather than a demon.

Perhaps a route to pursue for the sequel? 

And while Beetlejuice is most certainly a comedy, and arguably director Tim Burton’s best film, it is filled with plenty of true-life scares: goth teen poetry, modern furniture, bad art, spackled paint, polyester suits, small closets, living in Connecticut, etc.

The plot: the Barbara and Adam Maitland live an ideal life out in a quaint country home and then they die. The Deetzes, straight from New York, move in and disturb the peace, so the Maitlands call a bioexorcist, Beetlejuice, to spook the family out. 

Beetlejuice is a lesson in economy; every second bounces along for its compact 90 minutes with many great moments, such as the Netherworld waiting room scene and Calypso-spiked dinner party.  

Winona Ryder, with to-die-for bangs, as Lydia

The cast is sharp as well: young Winona Ryder (with to-die-for spiky bangs) as Lydia Deetz and Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara as her clueless and pretentious parents; Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin as the Maitlands (Baldwin at his most personable and harmless); plus Dick Cavett and Robert Goulet! But the film belongs to Michael Keaton as the title character, a centuries-spanning creep who put the ouch in louche. 

If you haven’t seen Beetlejuice, stop what you’re doing and watch it now. It’s that good. And, if you’re wondering what a comedy is doing in a series about horror films, get into the spirit of the season. We have Beetlejuice, after all, for all those great Halloween costume ideas. 

Horrortober: Beetlejuice (1988)

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Big Eyes

You’ve seen the work of Walter Keane: kitchsy paintings of doe-eyed children staring plaintively out from pastel-colored canvases. Your grandmother probably had one in her kitchen or rumpus room, while the print of Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy was in the formal living room. Keane sold millions of paintings, prints, postcards, and anything else that could hold an image in the ’50s and ’60s and counted Andy Warhol as an admirer. And he was a complete fraud.

Big Eyes is the story of Margaret Keane, Walter’s wife, played by Amy Adams. The film opens just as she has left her first husband and struck out to make her artistic fortune in San Francisco with her daughter Jane in tow. She struggles as a single mother, making ends meet by painting babies and storks on cribs for a furniture maker, until she meets Walter (Christoph Waltz) while the two are selling paintings to tourists in Golden Gate Park. She is immediately smitten with the worldly artist, who had attended art school in Paris, while she is so hopelessly naive that she asks her girlfriend DeAnn (Krysten Ritter) the difference between espresso and reefer. When Jane’s father sues for custody, Margaret hastily accepts Walter’s marriage proposals.

Amy Adams as Margaret Keane in Big Eyes

At first, things go great. Walter’s got a lucrative career in commercial real estate that allows Margaret to stay home with Jane and paint. After being spurned by a pretentious art gallery owner (Jason Schwartzman), Walter hangs his and Margaret’s paintings in a rowdy jazz club, where they are soon noticed by the hep cats. Margaret’s sometimes haunting portraits of children with unnaturally large eyes start selling better than Walter’s conventional French landscapes, and so one day when a buyer mistakes Margaret’s work for Walter’s, he doesn’t bother to correct her. From there, the deception grows. Walter is a great self-promoter and natural entrepreneur, and he finds Margaret’s proto-anime girls easy to sell. Since women can’t be taken seriously in 1956 America, and the money is rolling in, Margaret tacitly agrees to the deception. But lying to the world, and the fact that a man is getting credit for her work, slowly eats away at her.

Tim Burton, who is usually seen twisting reality into new shapes, re-teams with screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who wrote Ed Wood, the 1993 biopic of the “worst director in history” that many consider to be the filmmaker’s best work. Like all of Burton’s work, Big Eyes is meticulously designed, but here it is in the service of transporting the viewer into the mind of a real person in the real 1950s. The colors are vibrant, reflecting the inner worlds of the people who inhabit the lovingly crafted mid-century modern houses. Adams, who was fantastic in last year’s American Hustle, inhabits Margaret fully. You can see it in her eyes when she agrees to go along with something she knows isn’t right, but she knows the other choices look even worse. And besides, who could turn down Waltz at his coolly convincing best? Late in the story, when the situation has deteriorated into a courtroom drama, Burton, who usually at this point in his movies would be throwing all manner of absurdities up on the screen, instead channels the restraint of Douglas Sirk and lets the absurdity of the situation play out between the two great actors.

Big Eyes works because it gets the fundamentals of acting, directing, and screenwriting right. As in music, individual genius is great, but there’s just no substitute for a band with good chemistry.

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Time Warp Drive-In: Tim Burton

CREDIT: Lauren Rae Holtermann

Lauren Rae Holtermann

The September installment of the popular Time Warp Drive-In series celebrates American auteur Tim Burton. Like Stanley Kubrick, the subject of a past drive-in tribute, he is a director whose name has become an adjective. “Burton-esque” means a film with a Gothic outlook, elaborate set design, and a misunderstood outsider for a hero.

The program begins at dusk with Burton’s first feature film, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Even though it was made in 1985, many consider it to still be Burton’s best work, and it contains most of the elements that would eventually become Burton trademarks. Pee-wee Herman was the creation of Paul Reubens, a Los Angeles comic actor and Groundlings cast member. His somewhat creepy children’s show for grown-ups originated as an experimental theater show that got noticed by HBO and turned into a late-night special. By 1984, it was selling out Madison Square Garden. Reubens and his co-writer Phil Hartman tapped Burton to direct the movie after seeing his legendary short Frankenweenie. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure showcases Burton’s visual inventiveness with the long introductory sequence that takes the audience inside the world that Pee-wee has built for himself. As it always happens with Burton’s characters, the trouble begins when the outsider is forced to deal with the mundane world: In this case, Pee-wee’s prized bike is stolen, and he must embark on a scary trip to grown-up land to retrieve it. There are also hints of Burton’s gothic side, as with the unforgettable Large Marge scene, which is as scary in its own way as any given scene in the slasher films that dominated the horror box office of the mid-1980s.

Michael Keaton as Burton’s Batman

The evening’s second feature is Batman. Looking back from the 21st century, it seems that Burton’s biggest single contribution to popular culture is the superhero comic book movie. When it was released in 1989, more than a decade had passed since Richard Donner’s Superman had dominated the box office without a repeat performance by a cinematic superhero. Befitting the character, Batman is much darker than Donner’s Superman, both visually and thematically. The switch from the campy 1960s take on the Caped Crusader to the attempt at psychologically grounding the character mirrored the cynical turn comics had taken in the 1980s in the wake of Alan Moore’s The Watchmen and Batman: The Killing Joke, and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. But Burton’s Batman is a long way from the glowering Christian Bale of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy. Michael Keaton plays Bruce Wayne as a guy who has enough self-awareness to understand that this whole setup is ridiculous, and yet he can’t help himself: He has to dress up like a bat and fight crime. Jack Nicholson is terrific as the Joker, and his clown-themed accouterments give Burton a chance to let his cartoonish visual imagination run wild on the screen. Mix in a soundtrack by Prince, and you’ve got a stone-cold Hollywood classic whose influence is still being felt today.

1988’s Beetlejuice is a critical part of Burton’s filmography. The Ghostbusters-influenced supernatural comedy was the first time the director’s Gothic aesthetic was fully unleashed. It was the first time he had worked with Keaton, and it launched the film careers of Winona Ryder and Alec Baldwin. This pre-CGI special-effects fest mixes live action practical effect, stop motion, and every other visual trick Burton had learned from studying classic horror and monster movies. The jokes in Beetlejuice hold up surprisingly well, mostly due to the deadpan commitment on the part of the actors.

The final film of the evening is my personal favorite of all of Burton’s work, Ed Wood. The stylized biopic of the man known as the worst director in the world benefits from a terrific script by screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who would later team up on the Memphis-filmed The People vs. Larry Flynt. It was the second time Burton would team up with Johnny Depp after 1990’s Edward Scissorhands. Depp is terrific as the unflappable, cross-dressing title character, as is the entire cast, which includes Martin Landau (who won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Bela Lugosi), Bill Murray, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Patricia Arquette. Those staying late for the final movie will find that the Time Warp has saved the best for last.

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The Sweet Thereafter

In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Memphis Flyer (our first quarter quell, as it were), I have chosen my personal favorite film from each year since the Flyer began publication. Then, for each of those films, I unearthed and have excerpted some quotes from the review we ran at the time. — Greg Akers

1989: #1 Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch (#2 Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee)

“While all the scenes in Mystery Train are identifiable by anyone living west of Goodlett, their geographical relationship gets altered to a point where we start to trust Jarmusch more than our own memories.” — Jim Newcomb, March 8, 1990

“Filmed primarily at the downtown corner of South Main and Calhoun, Jarmusch does not use the Peabody Hotel, the Mississippi River, Graceland, or most of the other locations that the Chamber of Commerce would thrust before any visiting filmmaker. His domain concerns exactly that territory which is not regularly tread by the masses, and his treatment of Memphis is likely to open a few eyes.”
— Robert Gordon, March 8, 1990

1990: #1 Goodfellas, Martin Scorsese (#2 Reversal of Fortune, Barbet Schroeder)

“This may not be De Niro’s best-ever performance, but he’s got that gangster thang down pat. His accent is flawless, his stature is perfect, and, boy, does he give Sansabelt slacks new meaning.”
— The Cinema Sisters, September 27, 1990

1991: #1 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, James Cameron (#2 The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme)

“Terminator 2 is an Alfa Romeo of a movie: pricey, sleek, fast, and loaded with horsepower. By comparison, the first Terminator was a Volkswagen. On the whole, I’d rather have a Volkswagen — they’re cheap and reliable. But, hey, Alfas can be fun too.” — Ed Weathers, July 11, 1993

1992: #1 Glengarry Glen Ross, James Foley (#2 The Last of the Mohicans, Michael Mann)

“Mamet’s brilliantly stylized look at the American Dream’s brutality as practiced by low-rent real estate salesmen who would put the screws to their mothers to keep their own tawdry jobs doesn’t relax its hard muscle for a moment. In the hands of this extraordinary cast, it is like a male chorus on amphetamines singing a desparate, feverish ode to capitalism and testosterone run amuck.”
— Hadley Hury, October 15, 1992

1993: #1 Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater (#2 Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg)

“Dazed and Confused is a brief trip down memory lane. The characters are not just protagonists and antagonists. They are clear representations of the folks we once knew, and their feelings are those we had years and years ago. Linklater doesn’t, however, urge us to get mushy. He is just asking us to remember.”
— Susan Ellis, November 4, 1993

1994: #1 Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino (#2 Ed Wood, Tim Burton)

“Even though Tarantino is known for his bratty insistence on being shocking by way of gratuitous violence and ethnic slurs, it’s the little things that mean so much in a Tarantino film — camera play, dialogue, performances, and music.”
— Susan Ellis, October 20, 1994

1995: #1 Heat, Michael Mann
(#2 Toy Story, John Lasseter)

“I’m sick of lowlifes and I’m sick of being told to find them fascinating by writers and directors who get a perverse testosterone rush in exalting these lives to a larger-than-life heroism with slow-motion, lovingly lingered-over mayhem and death, expertly photographed and disturbingly dehumanizing.”
— Hadley Hury, December 21, 1995

1996: #1 Lone Star, John Sayles
(#2 Fargo, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Although Lone Star takes place in a dusty Texas border town, it comes into view like a welcome oasis on the landscape of dog-day action films … Chris Cooper and Sayles’ sensitive framing of the performance produce an arresting character who inhabits a world somewhere between Dostoevsky and Larry McMurtry.”
— Hadley Hury, August 8, 1996

1997: #1 L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson (#2 The Apostle, Robert Duvall)

L.A. Confidential

“L.A. Confidential takes us with it on a descent, and not one frame of this remarkable film tips its hand as to whether we’ll go to hell or, if we do, whether we’ll come back. We end up on the edge of our seat, yearning for two protagonists, both anti-heroes … to gun their way to a compromised moral victory, to make us believe again in at least the possibility of trust.”

— Hadley Hury, October 2, 1997

1998: #1 Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg (#2 The Big Lebowski, Joel and Ethan Coen)

“Spielberg is finishing the job he began with Schindler’s List. He’s already shown us why World War II was fought; now he shows us how. … Spielberg’s message is that war is horrifying yet sometimes necessary. And that may be true. But I still prefer the message gleaned from Peter Weir’s 1981 masterpiece, Gallipoli: War is stupid.” — Debbie Gilbert, July 30, 1998

1999: #1 Magnolia, Paul Thomas Anderson (#2 The End of the Affair, Neil Jordan)

“Magnolia is a film in motion; there’s a cyclical nature where paths are set that will be taken. It’s about fate, not will, where the bad will hurt and good will be redeemed.”
— Susan Ellis, January 13, 2000

2000: #1 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee (#2 You Can Count On Me, Kenneth Lonergan)

“Thrilling as art and entertainment, as simple movie pleasure, and as Oscar-baiting ‘prestige’ cinema. Early hype has the film being compared to Star Wars. … An even more apt comparison might be Singin’ in the Rain, a genre celebration that Crouching Tiger at least approaches in its lightness, joy, and the sheer kinetic wonder of its fight/dance set pieces.”
— Chris Herrington, February 1, 2001

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

2001: #1 A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg (#2 Amélie,
Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

“What happens when Eyes Wide Shut meets E.T.? What does the audience do? And who is the audience?”
— Chris Herrington, June 28, 2001

2002: #1 City of God, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund
(#2 Adaptation., Spike Jonze)

“The mise-en-scène of the film is neorealist, but the cinematography, editing, and effects are hyper-stylized, as if The Bicycle Thief had been reimagined through the post-CGI lens of Fight Club or The Matrix.”

— Chris Herrington, April 3, 2003

Lost in Translation

2003: #1 Lost in Translation, Sofia
Coppola (#2 Mystic River, Clint Eastwood)

“Lost in Translation is a film short on plot but rich with incident; nothing much happens, yet every frame is crammed with life and nuance and emotion. … What Coppola seems to be going for here is an ode to human connection that is bigger than (or perhaps just apart from) sex and romance.”
— Chris Herrington, October 2, 2003

2004: #1 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry
(#2 Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino)

“This is the best film I’ve seen this year and one of the best in recent memory. Funny, witty, charming, and wise, it runs the gamut from comedy to tragedy without falling into either farce or melodrama. Its insights into human loss and redemption are complicated and difficult, well thought out but with the illusion and feel of absolute spontaneity and authentic in its construction — and then deconstruction — of human feelings and memory.”
— Bo List, March 25, 2004

2005: #1 Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee (#2 Hustle & Flow, Craig Brewer)

“The film is a triumph because it creates characters of humanity and anguish, in a setup that could easily become a target for homophobic ridicule. Jack and Ennis are a brave challenge to the stereotyped image of homosexuals in mainstream films, their relations to their families and to each other are truthful and beautifully captured.” — Ben Popper, January 12, 2006

2006: #1 Children of Men,
Alfonso Cuarón (#2 The Proposition, John Hillcoat)

“As aggressively bleak as Children of Men is, it’s ultimately a movie about hope. It’s a nativity story of sort, complete with a manger. And from city to forest to war zone to a lone boat in the sea, it’s a journey you won’t want to miss.”
— Chris Herrington, January 11, 2007

2007 #1 Zodiac, David Fincher
(#2 There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson)

“[Zodiac is] termite art, too busy burrowing into its story and characters to bother with what you think.”
— Chris Herrington, March 8, 2007

2008: #1 Frozen River, Courtney Hunt (#2 The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan)

“Frozen River is full of observations of those who are living less than paycheck to paycheck: digging through the couch for lunch money for the kids; buying exactly as much gas as you have change in your pocket; popcorn and Tang for dinner. The American Dream is sought after by the dispossessed, the repossessed, and the pissed off.”
— Greg Akers, August 28, 2008

2009: #1 Where the Wild Things Are, Spike Jonze (#2 Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron)

“I know how ridiculous it is to say something like, ‘Where the Wild Things Are is one of the best kids’ movies in the 70 years since The Wizard of Oz.’ So I won’t. But I’m thinking it.”
— Greg Akers, October 15, 2009

2010: #1 Inception, Christopher Nolan (#2 The Social Network,
David Fincher)

“Nolan has created a complex, challenging cinematic world but one that is thought through and whose rules are well-communicated. But the ingenuity of the film’s concept never supersedes an emotional underpinning that pays off mightily.”
— Chris Herrington, July 15, 2010

2011: #1 The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick (#2 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson)

“The Tree of Life encompasses a level of artistic ambition increasingly rare in modern American movies — Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood might be the closest recent comparison, and I’m not sure it’s all that close. This is a massive achievement. An imperfect film, perhaps, but an utterly essential one.”
— Chris Herrington, June 23, 2011

2012: #1 Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow (#2 Lincoln, Steven Spielberg)

“Zero Dark Thirty is essentially an investigative procedural about an obsessive search for knowledge, not unlike such touchstones as Zodiac or All the President’s Men. And it has an impressive, immersive experiential heft, making much better use of its nearly three-hour running time than any competing award-season behemoth.”
— Chris Herrington, January 10, 2013 

2013: #1 12 Years a Slave, Steve
McQueen (#2 Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón)

“Slavery bent human beings into grotesque shapes, on both sides of the whip. But 12 Years a Slave is more concerned with the end of it. McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley are black. It’s one of those things that shouldn’t be notable but is. If you consider 12 Years a Slave with The Butler and Fruitvale Station, you can see a by-God trend of black filmmakers making mainstream movies about the black experience, something else that shouldn’t be worth mentioning but is.”
— Greg Akers, October 31, 2013