Grave Humor: BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

Now here’s a welcome surprise—a belated sequel that’s more a cause for celebration than for cynicism. The movie is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a late-arriving sequel to 1988’s Beetlejuice. (It’s fun that there are few ways to discuss that fact without summoning the eponymous ghoul.) And, contrary to current trends in legacy sequels, this isn’t some lengthy, ponderous brand extension. It’s just more Beetlejuice, which finds the characters from the original simply experiencing more Beetlejuice in their lives.The movie doesn’t meaningfully add to a mythos (though we get a stylish origin-story black-and-white foreign-language flashback to the ‘Juice’s death). It’s simply gleefully and grotesquely itself—a cheerfully mean comedy about the afterlife careening into one family’s actual life. Here’s Winona Ryder’s Goth teen all grown up—and now with her own disaffected daughter (Jenna Ortega—a perfect Burton performer with her wide eyes and flat affect). They’re called back to the family ghost house by the matriarch (Catherine O’Hara) upon the death of her husband. (Extra-textually a gigglingly gorily appropriate killing-off.) There, wouldn’t you know it, they just might need the horn-dog demonic Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) to work a Faustian bargain to fix their problems. The result is an energetic throwback, both to the original and to a time when sequels were content to just serve up more of the same.

By doing so, it’s also an occasion to find director Tim Burton at long last back at peak Burton—mischievous, macabre, and mocking. (Of course a bureaucratic purgatory is a cartoon nightmare, and there’s plenty of haunted satire to small town life and big city pretensions, too.) He’s his most himself in a way he hasn’t fully unleashed in nearly two decades. Us Burton auteurists forged in the golden days of Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns and Ed Wood and Mars Attacks and Big Fish and Sweeney Todd could still find some glimmers of fun here (Dark Shadows’ Gothic goofiness) and there (Big Eyes’ kitschy exaggeration). But even then it felt like the early edge he had was sanded down and his unbounded imagination suddenly bound. Here he is back in full prickliness and earnest eccentricity again, with wit and vigor. Every kooky corner is chockablock with vintage Burton antics, from the cockeyed production design and physical sets, all stripes and canted angles, to the frantic Elfman score and manic mayhem of all sorts of wild and wiggly gross-out effects. If nothing else, it’s a pleasurable aesthetic experience—so deeply familiar to Burton-heads it’s even comforting in its discomforts.

A riot of old-school techniques—stop-motion animation, puppets, models, animatronics, squibs—are married seamlessly to digital exaggerations and embellishments and put to use for madcap Looney Tunes logic and Fangoria fetishes. Corpses shamble about missing chunks from shark bites, growing moss, bulging with puss and gore. A dead actor (Willem Dafoe) struts about missing the side of his skull so bits of brain show through. A gorgeous dismembered witch (Monica Bellucci) staples herself back together so she can resume sucking souls. (She discards the empty bodies like flaccid water balloons.) The plot piles on these grotesquely cartoony ghostly dilemmas to ping off funny, but sincerely felt, family melodrama, leading to a fine, freaky scurry through a complicated finale that crisscrosses the lands of the living and the dead. This is an eruption of inspiration and imagination all the way, overstuffed and overflowing with a blend of the serious and silly, from a chalk-outline bomb exploding, to a recurring Dostoyevsky motif, a possessed disco song-and-dance number, and a literal Soul Train complete with a Don Cornelius lookalike as conductor to seal the pun. The whole production is on this level of manic entertainment, a delight from beginning to end, a quirky effects comedy about nothing but its style and itself. But what a great self, and one only Burton could bring. It’s nice to see him again at last.

Self-defense: HOMEFRONT

If there’s one thing Breaking Bad taught us, it is to avoid injuring the pride of anyone involved in the meth business. But Jason Statham isn’t too worried about doing so in Homefront, especially when the meth-heads he’s dealing with are a skeletal Kate Bosworth and her brother, the local dealer named Gator who is played with satisfied teeth-gnashing and deep fried accent by the omnipresent James Franco. Too bad for all involved that, after Statham’s daughter (Izabela Vidovic) defends herself from Bosworth’s bully son on the playground by beating him up, the meth people won’t let the insult stand. Bosworth gets her brother to menace Statham, who is new to their small town in the backwaters of Louisiana. This leads to all manner of complications, including the revelation of Statham’s character’s undercover D.E.A. past, which is all the incentive Franco needs to call in the big guns. As it must, this means Statham is going to have to spring into action and punch people in creative and effective ways. Once he stabs a bad guy’s arm to a post and smashes a mason jar on the back of the guy’s head. Hey, you use what’s around you.

Statham has become one of our most reliable action stars, eking out an appealing B-movie career for himself. He’s now the kind of guy with tremendous affection from his core audience, who gets applause and attention simply for turning up. Even so, he’s not coasting. He’s hard at work being compelling. In a cameo in a big movie earlier this year he single-handedly made for the most exciting mid-credits teaser in a long time (and maybe ever). Something about his stubble-covered dome and virtuosic working of his smirk – from deadly serious all the way to happily serious – makes him an aerodynamic charmer, ready to leap into any conflict if it means saving himself, his mission, or those he cares about. He’s always a man with a code, and when that code breaks, duck. Unlike overly muscled action stars of the past, he’s lean and compact, like an average fit guy who can knock you senseless in no time at all.

Homefront isn’t one of his better efforts, but it’s often tense and gets the job done. The script, adapted from a book by Chuck Logan, is written by Sylvester Stallone. Yes, that Sylvester Stallone. He’s a man capable of churning out an effective actioner, even if he’s rarely cast as an everyman. Here he writes a part for his Expendables pal Statham that’s grounded in a sense of reluctant action. Here’s a guy retired from the force after a drug bust turned violent. He is called to punch, stab, scheme, and shoot his way to safety in order to keep a protected environment for his little daughter. Statham’s a guy who can do these things, but would rather not. They just leave him no choice. He’s personally insulted and assaulted, his tired slashed and cat kidnapped. That’s one thing. But threaten the safety of his daughter and watch out! It’s a clear cheap ploy for audience identification – the child-in-danger thing works every time, no matter how earned or unearned it is.

It raises the red meat knee-jerk vengeance quite well in a movie that’s frontloaded with exposition. If Stallone’s script tells you once it tells you three or four times every pertinent bit of plot information. Gator is dangerous. The town finds Statham suspicious. The sheriff (Clancy Brown) seems awfully buddy buddy with the meth operation. But for all this repetition, it’s strange to see characters drop in out of nowhere, like a gang of thugs who snarl at Statham on two separate occasions before he beats them all up, both times. Who are they? Who do they work for? Why are they angry? Where do they end up? Beats me. Same goes for the daughter’s teacher (Rachel Lefevre) who has a promising subplot dropped entirely after a couple of scenes. Other characters, like a welcome Winona Ryder who provides Franco access to a hitman, are nicely detailed, but ultimately exist to bumble the plot towards a conclusion.

It all builds to the shoot-‘em-up climax it continually foreshadows. Along the way, director Gary Fleder, who ten to fifteen years ago was a go-to guy for James Patterson and John Grisham adaptations or imitations, finds merely competent ways to make this interesting. It’s a watchable, straightforward and grungy B-movie all the way down the line, mostly worth it for Statham’s charmingly stoic loving father and the few passably exciting action beats, although there are fewer than you’d expect or like. You want to be on Statham’s side, not just for the plot’s sake, but for the sake of his persona. You just know that no matter the outcome, no matter the obstacle, even if said obstacle’s a middling thriller, Statham’s going to be okay. 

It's Alive: FRANKENWEENIE

A black-and-white, stop-motion animated, family-friendly monster movie about life, death, and the ethics of scientific research, Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie is definitely not the kind of film that you see every day. It’s a skillful, inventive expansion of his 1984 live-action short of the same name. In this telling, it all starts when little Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) reacts in horror and disbelief when he sees his beloved dog Sparky flattened by a car. His parents (Catherine O’Hara and Martin Short) try to help their mourning son the best they can, but his movement through the stages of grief gets stuck at denial. And so, being a precocious, science-minded young fellow, he uses the excuse of the impending science fair to do a little reanimation in his spare time.

The core sentimental pulse of the story is simple, resting on nothing more than the love between a boy and his dog.  But when said love involves harnessing lightening to spark Sparky back to life, it’s clear that complications are inevitable. Burton, working with a screenplay by John August, has created a lovingly handcrafted little world into which this new scientific discovery can be introduced. Victor’s science teacher, a stern European émigré (Martin Landau) has put the love of science and competition into his class, a creepy collection of kids (voiced by Winona Ryder, Atticus Shaffer, Robert Capron, and James Hiroyuki Liao) with huge eyes, furrowed brows, and a jumble of thick accents and odd traits. One looks like Igor; another owns a poodle that looks a little like Elsa Lanchester. They’re a cast of characters that are poised for some kind of trouble. It’s only a matter of time before Victor’s secret resurrection becomes known, not only to his parents, but also to his classmates who will only be too eager to best him in pursuit of the top prize at the science fair.

This is a sharply made film, lovely in its high-contrast homage to Universal’s monster movies of the 30s and 40s filtered through a standard family film framework. It is also, of course, beautifully, obviously, clearly, a Tim Burton Film. It’s not just that he’s adapting his own earlier work. Here he’s made not his best film, but one of his most self-referential. One can find connections between this film and his earlier works: from stop-motion (Corpse Bride), black-and-white cinematography and Landau (Ed Wood) to Ryder and O’Hara (Beetlejuice); from a focus on coming to terms with the death of a loved one (Big Fish) to a quirky small town with a penchant for mob mentality (Edward Scissorhands). Not just a well-intentioned romp through his own greatest hits, Frankenweenie is the work of director taking some of the big ideas that course through his career and reworking them at a smaller scale.

Much like the dog at the center of the story, the film is a patchwork of inspirations that have been sewn together, repurposed for new life. They’re also both charming and appealing in an eager-to-please way. There’s a jolt of energy coursing through this rather short feature – just 87 minutes, including the end credits – that really ramps up in the delightful climax that finds Victor’s competitors trying their hands at reanimation. The sequence that follows is a cheerfully macabre – a little girl’s cat appears to explode with a grim, hilarious pop and fizz – smash of monster mayhem, building slowly to an agreeably towering goofy monstrosity. If Burton overdoes the sentimentality in the final seconds of the picture, arriving (as he did in his early short) at perhaps the wrong way for little Victor to get over the death of his dog, it can almost be forgiven. After all we’ve been through with these two, it’s just nice to know that the love between a boy and his dog can be immortal.

Stage Fright: BLACK SWAN

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan has the kind of opening scene that gives a good idea of the film to follow. It starts with a spotlight slicing through inky black surroundings. In the center a ballerina is perfectly poised with elegant movements. The music of Tchaikovsky begins to boom. The ballerina spins. As the camera draws closer, we can hear the ragged, athletic breaths of the dancer. This is all set to be a film that will scrape away the surface glamour of the ballet, but then a darkly monstrous figure begins to dance with her. Then, Nina (Natalie Portman) wakes up, the opening scene fading like a dream. The film’s truest intentions burst forth. This is a film that will clamber around inside her head, bumping into all kinds of unsettling, destabilizing elements that are eating away at her psyche.

She’s a hardworking perfectionist ballerina in a well-established ballet company and has just been given the lead role in a new production of Swan Lake. It’s a high-pressure moment for her, the wrong time altogether to lose her mind. (Though when would be a good time?) The people that circle around her life are all menacing figures. Her mother (Barbara Hershey) is a controlling, domineering force of emotional manipulation. Her ballet director (Vincent Cassel) is a sleazy, molesting presence of abusive power. An older ballerina forced to retire (Winona Ryder) scowls drunkenly from the sidelines while a young ambitious ballerina (Mila Kunis) seems all too ready to worm her way into the lead role.

This is a terrifying collection of characters made all the more unsettling because of the unreliable narrator Nina proves to be. Are all of these characters as dangerous as they appear to be? It’s possible. Nina thinks that is the case. Could it instead be the case that a rattled mind of a naïve perfectionist has developed a harmful persecution complex that causes her to lash out irrationally? It’s possible. At first glance, the characters can seem one-dimensional, shrill and without nuance, but in the growing craziness of Nina’s mental state, who can say with absolute certainty how trustworthy these portrayals are? The performers involved give wonderful intensity to their roles, but also show glimmers of other possible readings. What to make, for instance, of a particularly devastating shot-reverse-shot at the film’s climax that shows Nina’s mother sitting teary-eyed in the audience? What is she thinking? I, for one, take this small moment, rich with overwhelming emotion, as the most indelible moment with which to contemplate just how dependable the film’s characterization really is. I haven’t yet made up my mind.

Aronofsky accentuates Nina’s growing madness with small touches of unnerving hallucinations that flicker to life in unexpected moments, sometimes bold and obvious, other times lingering in the shadows of peripheral vision. Doppelgangers flit through Nina’s field of vision. Danger seems to sit in wait around every corner. Leering strangers and intimidating pretenders alike gaze at her with creepy, unknowable intent. All the while, Clint Mansell’s kaleidoscopic Tchaikovsky-infused score swirls around, the frames are filled with mirrors, and the dark, evocative grains of the varied film stocks seem to reflect the increasingly cloudy thinking of our protagonist.

Fits of body horror both real and imagined grow in frequency. Nina scratches at rashes. She obsessively pushes her body to its limits, practicing a routine just once more and then again, and again, and again. She doesn’t just want to be perfect; she needs to be perfect. One particularly agonizing moment finds Nina picking away at a hangnail until her cuticle is covered in blood. She claws and claws until finally, terrifyingly, a thin ribbon of skin pulls up and away down the length of her finger.

Nina’s drive and madness congeal in a film that’s so confidently told with its declaratory sensationalism that it just barely covers up its messy, lurid, clammy, calculated insanity. I mean that as a compliment. This is a movie that grows progressively over the top in beautifully horrifying ways. Imagine the brutal, grueling realism of Aronofsky’s The Wrestler mixed with a bit of Cronenberg. This is a film of pounding sensations, a film of color and music and frenzied outbursts of sex and violence. It’s an intense experience, a horror film with a florid luridness and confident craziness.

Funny Business: THE DILEMMA

The funniest thing about The Dilemma is that, despite being sold as director Ron Howard’s return to comedy, it’s not very funny. In fact, every time it tries to be funny in a broad, silly way, it falls embarrassingly flat. The comedy seems jammed up into the corners of a somewhat serious drama. If it weren’t for all the straining for laughs in Allan Loeb’s screenplay, this could be a much better film.

It stars Vince Vaughn as a man who plans on proposing to his longtime girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly), following the advice of his happily married best friend (Kevin James). As he scopes out the perfect spot to pop the question, a lovely botanical garden, he notices his friend’s wife (Winona Ryder) making out with some younger guy (Channing Tatum). He takes it upon himself to learn more and ends up sneaking around town peeping in windows and trying desperately to avoid revealing anything before he’s sure of all the facts.

Now saddled with secrets and questions, he squirms about and ends up making each and every social situation more and more difficult as he struggles under the pressure of being the only person in the room tuned in to all of the nasty subtext. So many comedies draw their laughs from the unspoken comedic tensions between characters, that it’s strange, but not entirely unpleasant, to see one throw away the comedy to focus solely on the tension.

After wading through deadly dull scenes of formulaic comedy windup, especially a nonstarter of a subplot involving an awfully miscalculated use of Queen Latifah, things get interesting. For the majority of its runtime, the film functions well as a compelling, wild-eyed melodrama, a darkly depressing look into seemingly normal relationships with deep dysfunction hidden just below the surface. Funnily enough, there are some genuine laughs found amidst the pleasurably agonizing drama in sequences of acute social discomfort. As the web of secrets that supports these characters’ interactions grows more prominent, the romances and friendships involved threaten to collapse altogether.

And then, the movie deflates the tension quickly and clumsily. Tension falls away in favor of a queasily pat and tonally odd ending that feels like it belongs to the opening attempts at comedy instead of the moments it follows. It’s a movie that recovers very nicely from an opening stumble only to fall back into the same traps by the end.