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.

Monster House: MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a Tim Burton movie through and through. It’s yet another of his stories about pale loner weirdos confronting an abrasive normality that has no idea what to do with them. Here’s where I’d list off a few relevant comparisons from the filmmaker’s back catalogue, but we all know in this case it’d just be a complete list of his work, from Pee Wee and Beetlejuice to Batman and Edward Scissorhands to Ed Wood and Big Eyes to Sweeney Todd and Dark Shadows and on and on. This particular iteration, adapted by screenwriter Jane Goldman (Stardust) from the book by Ransom Riggs, locates a group of fantastical freak show oddities hidden in an orphanage in Wales wilderness and a time-bending bubble of stasis that protects them from prying normal eyes. Their secret is out, though, in the creepy bedtime stories of a grandfather (Terrence Stamp) whose mysterious death sends his teenage grandson (Asa Butterfield) off in search of the peculiar children.

That sounds simple enough, and it’s certainly sufficient reason for Burton to play around with eerie horror imagery. By the time the grandson finds the peculiars he sees an invisible boy, a girl as strong as ten grown men, a firestarter, tiny twins in spooky masks and white burlap suits, a surly teen who can animate the inanimate, and a girl lighter than air who must wear lead shoes to keep her grounded. It’s the sort of hard-edged whimsy that’s fine creature fantasy and can also hit genuinely unsettling notes, especially by the time their headmistress, Miss Peregrine (Eva Green, underplaying her wild-eyed chirping mode), informs the lad that they’re being hunted by tall, pale, long-limbed, faceless tentacle-squirming invisible monsters and their haunting masters (led by a campy, pupil-less, white-haired Samuel L. Jackson). It involves a disgusting plot to eat the eyeballs of peculiars everywhere in a bid for immortality, a slight shift after the villains’ plan to suck the lifeforce out of shape-shifting birds backfired in gnarly fashion.

As I recount the basic facts of the plot this doesn’t sound so complicated. But in practice it plays out as a ton of unwieldy setup that must be hurdled to get to the fun parts. Instead of drawing its point-of-view character – and, by extension, the audience – into the world, clearly establishing lines of conflict and reasons for suspense, the film progresses as a jumble of fits and starts. It leads to confusion. As I watched grotesque tableaus and cute creepiness I took some delight in the off-kilter Burton-y visual aspects – although its images are curiously scrubbed clean of the textures and atmosphere with which his other films excel – but it wasn’t cohering. Worse, it wasn’t providing a narrative engine, or a reason to care. It’s one of those teen fantasy novel adaptations where every faction has a name and every backstory has its corresponding jargon and every gesture is imbued with meaning readers can intuit while leaving the unfamiliar in the cold. By the time it is finished introducing everybody and sets up the stakes, it turns into something much more reasonably diverting. But even then it’s hard to be too invested in the happenings.

There’s a fun conclusion involving nonsensical time travel, a tapestry of teamwork powers in action, teeth-gnashing villain monologuing, and fun unreal effects work. Burton’s facility with CG still doesn’t match the thrill of his early days with makeup, miniatures, and stop motion tricks, but at least here it’s blended in with the slightly softer visual sense. Until the movie finally dispenses with cloudy setup and gets down to action, there’s no sense of true invention, all the best moments passing quickly while the plot follows a glum drumbeat of its own convoluted internal logic. There’s an artifice that’s not like the giddy creativity of early Burton or even the confident self-referential Gothic Hammer Horror-riffing that he’s played so enjoyably before. No, here it’s just phony, with a stiff lead performance (Butterfield clearly stifled under a so-so American accent) animating a painfully routine Chosen One secret-powers-and-totally-unconvincing-romance-subplot scenario. Even the peculiars themselves aren’t full characters so much as visual gags we’re meant to love for their adorable qualities while being alternately charmed and creeped out by their macabre features. The whole movie is a mixed bag, with maybe just enough to like jumbled in with a lot to endure.

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.

Barnabas A.D. 1972: DARK SHADOWS

Running for over 1,000 episodes in the late 60s and early 70s, Dark Shadows was a supernatural soap opera about a vampire and his mortal descendents living in a big spooky house on the coast of Maine. The slapdash but committed show has a devoted cult following, the members running the gamut from scary earnest to entirely ironic. It’s easy to imagine that director Tim Burton falls somewhere in the middle. His films have always had a sly approach to the supernatural and a baroque gothic style that suits itself nicely to deathly serious, but deeply cracked, tales of smirking dark fantasy.

Now Burton (surely one of the few working auteurs who is a recognizable brand to the general public) and author Seth Grahame-Smith (his novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has been turned into a big studio release for later this summer) have adapted the show into a feature film. I have no idea how accurately the show’s tone and content have been adapted – I simply haven’t had the time nor the inclination to give it much of a go – but what is clear is that Burton has created a sumptuously imagined film that builds its own crooked world out of a variety of influences. It plays like a Hammer horror film, specifically one of Christopher Lee’s Dracula pictures – he, Lee, not Dracula, has a cameo here – filtered through an American gothic (with additional shades of Washington Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow” or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”), all told in a groovy half-camp Burton style.

The story starts in the 1700s when the family Collins leaves Liverpool and sails for Maine. There, the family establishes the seaside town of Collinsport on the back of a productive fishing business. A big beautiful mansion is built and all seems well. But young Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp, of course) spurns the attentions of a servant girl (Eva Green) who turns out to be a witch. And so she puts the Collins family under her devious curses. She conjures a situation that kills Barnabas’s parents and later, her broken heart still smoldering, puts Barnabas’s fiancé (Bella Heathcote, big-eyed and pale) into a trance and forces her to walk off the edge of a cliff. To top it all off, the angry witch turns Barnabas into a vampire, which adds layers of whitish-grey makeup to his face and hands. (When he feeds, bright red dribbles of blood dot either side of his lower lip in a clear reference to Christopher Lee’s vampiric look.) She turns the town against him, and watches as the angry mob locks him in a coffin and buries him deep.

The plot picks up in an exquisitely detailed and beautifully heightened 1972, filled up with period fashions and super-cool vintage music cues to set the mood. (And Lee’s Dracula A.D. 1972 is playing at Collinsport’s downtown theater, a nice touch.) The Collins remain a cursed family. Their fishery is shuttered and the remaining family members are cooped up in the cavernous mansion: the matriarch (Michelle Pfeiffer), her surly teen daughter (Chloe Grace Moretz), her brother (Jonny Lee Miller) and his troubled son (Gulliver McGrath). Also on hand are the alcoholic groundskeeper (Jackie Earle Haley), the new nanny (Bella Heathcote again, some nice visual foreshadowing), and the youngest Collins’s boozy, tragically vain child psychiatrist (Helena Bonham Carter). This is a wonderfully droll cast giving terrific performances that underplay the oddities and eccentricities of the family’s life, which only enhances the hilarious gags and heightened tones. A couple of early dining room scenes have some of the same pacing and likable snap of similar moments in Burton’s Beetlejuice. Also like that film, this one soon becomes a movie in which an odd outsider shakes up the routine of an eccentric family in surprising, supernatural ways.

When construction workers dig up Barnabas’s coffin, they awaken a deadly fish-out-of-water movie as this long-lost relative stumbles back into town and, despite befuddlement on his part and confusion on theirs, wants to help his skeptical kin regain control of the town’s fishing empire. It’s a quest made all the more urgent when the porcelain-skinned C.E.O. of the rival fish company turns out to be none other than the same immortal witch who cursed him two centuries prior. Theirs is a twisted love affair, less love-hate, more she loves-and-hates, he mostly just hates. She’s an exuberantly frisky kind of evil; he’s just puzzled by his surroundings and only wants what’s best for his family and would very much like her out of the way. It’s a juicy hook, for sure, but with all of these other characters interacting with Barnabas as well, and each with their own little subplots of varying importance, the movie’s biggest flaw is its overstuffed qualities.

The movie is overflowing with plot and character in ways that obfuscate a strong central interest, making the whole thing lumpy and often without momentum. What are we supposed to think about Barnabas, a good man and a cursed man who is at once a source of humor and a scary monster? He’s the butt of culture clash jokes, but he also kills (no spoilers) some characters who are quite likable and hardly wholly villainous. The film’s never quite sure what to do with him and if Depp knows, and I suspect he might, he isn’t given the chance to let us in. That leaves this main thread curiously unresolved. But the other characters wander in and out of the film as well, moving in and out of focus. Some go missing for long stretches of time, even ones that are so very prominent to emotional beats of the overarching narrative. Still, I shrugged off such nagging thoughts rather easily, filing them away as an unsuccessful attempt at feature-length homage to soap opera plotting.

Besides, this is a movie with characters that are just plain fun to be around and with a style to luxuriate in. Burton, with the great French cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, films it all with a colorful style, genre piece as groovy period piece. Here’s a movie rich in atmospherics both comic and mildly frightening, dripping with a great sense of visual play. I particularly liked a scene in which a person gets their blood sucked while they’re in the middle of getting a blood transfusion. Burton leaves the I.V. bag in the foreground as it slowly then suddenly crumples in on itself like a used juice box.

Some have found Burton’s use of computer-driven effects in recent years to be excessive and, oddly enough, a limit on his imagination. Fair enough, if we’re talking about his Alice in Wonderland, which, aside from a few nice touches, felt more like a generic movie he was hired to coat in a Burton gloss. To me, Sweeney Todd and, to a lesser extent, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory feel just as wonderful as, though certainly different from, his earlier, more tactile, effects work. With Dark Shadows he shows admirable restraint, so that by the time the effects hit the fan, it’s a natural outgrowth of the satisfying strangeness that’s come before, spectacle that’s been very well earned. It’s a film that wears its darkness lightly and falls into a satisfyingly funky groove.

Curiouser and Curiouser: Tim Burton's ALICE IN WONDERLAND

Over the years, Tim Burton has proven himself to be a master of whimsically ghoulish imagery, but he has also proven to not always match his visuals to an equally inspired plot. When he’s at his best his style and content are fused and focused, honed in on the particular obsessions of the film’s protagonist, for nearly all Burton protagonists are haunted and fascinated, attracted and repulsed, by a certain object or concept that drives their goals in tangible ways. This can be seen starting with his first feature, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, which finds Pee-Wee Herman tracking down his stolen bike, and continuing with Beetlejuice, which has Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin as ghostly homeowners. You can trace this feature through all of Burton’s best work: from Edward and his Scissorhands to Ed Wood and his filmmaking and cross dressing, from Ed Bloom's tall tales to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory to Sweeney Todd’s revenge with bloody barber’s blades. When there is less of a clear focus on characters and their possessions, Burton seems to lose focus as well. When that happens, despite retaining great, inventive imagery, the films grow manic and inconsistent. That’s the case in Mars Attacks!, a scattershot B-movie send up that is fun at times but ultimately a mess. Unfortunately the same can be said about his latest film, Alice in Wonderland.

It’s an oft adapted tale originating in the late 1800s with Lewis Carroll’s books about a little girl that falls down the rabbit hole, but Burton, working with screenwriter Linda Woolverton, have staked out new ground for themselves that separates their adaptation from all those of the past. This film is pitched as a sequel (of sorts) to the original story, with a 20-year-old Alice believing her earlier time in Wonderland was a dream. As the film opens on a stuffy Victorian life, we find her on the verge of getting a marriage proposal from a sniveling twit. Alice is simply too graceful, too imaginative, too modern for the times. She fits the Burton hero type very well, a discontented misfit with pale skin and dark eyes. As played well by Mia Wasikowska, the early scenes establish an interesting different take on Alice, one with interesting feminist implications, that the film decides to drop as soon, and as quickly, as she falls down the rabbit hole chasing that waist-coat clad, pocket-watch wielding creature.

Upon landing in Wonderland, which is appreciably more post-apocalyptic than any prior incarnation, Alice promptly becomes a pawn in an elaborate, yet charmingly disproportionate, fantasy world. She fades into the background of her own story as we are given a parade of characters and events that make only small impacts that never add up to a bigger one. Besides, Burton seems much more fascinated with the characters played by his regular actors Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.

As the Mad Hatter, Depp takes risks with his performance, slipping in and out of a murderously gravely Scottish brogue while the rest of his lines come out in a whispery, giggly, high-pitched lisp. His eyes are oddly cold, yet always moving, staring out from underneath a coat of sickly clown makeup and frizzy hair the color of rotten carrots. It almost works, but falls flat simply because there’s no character under the shtick. He’s out on a limb with no support from the script.

Carter, on the other hand, is a whirlwind scene-stealer as the Red Queen, playing her as a whiny, stunted monarch, managing to make a shout of “Off with his head!” ring with shifty insecurity and deadly impulsiveness. She’s warped with special effects to have a big head that is quite literal, balancing on a too-thin neck. She’s part fairy-tale villain, part spoiled brat, part demonic bobblehead. Carter marches through the film, chewing scenery, spitting out her lines, and overshadowing everyone. She’s clearly having a great time and it’s infectious.

The other characters are a mish-mash of the familiar and the unknown who all coalesce around a plot that becomes a fairly standard fantasy-quest story that involves recruiting Alice to find a sword and slay the Jabberwocky to restore peace in the fantasy world. Various creatures with the voices of British character actors show up including a delightful Stephen Fry Chesire Cat, squashy Matt Lucas Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and a smoking caterpillar with too few lines for being voiced by the always excellent Alan Rickman. Live action Anne Hathaway shows up as a pearly-white Gothic good girl whose hands seem to float about on their own accord. Also live action, and wholly welcome, is the reliably odd Crispin Glover as a glowering henchman of the Red Queen, digitally stretched in an oddly disorienting and heightened way.

There are fun moments and memorable images to be found throughout these characters’ interactions and the quest’s progression. I loved the look of the Red Queen and her castle, from the gulping frog butlers, the chandelier held by birds, the table held by monkeys, and the pig ottomans, all the way down to the small heart drawn in lipstick on her cold, grey lips. I especially enjoyed the shivery gross-out moat filled with the proof of her love for beheadings. The story moves along quickly and goes down without complication, but unfortunately the movie never quite fits together. It’s bewitching, bothersome, and bewildering.

About three-fourths of the way through the film, I found myself realizing that the movie just wouldn’t resolve satisfactorily. The movie’s simply too manic, too frantic, too eager to show the next cool-looking thingamabob. Too many strands and plot attempts formulate for the movie to conclude simply, and so maybe it’s to the movie’s benefit that it doesn’t try. There seems to be a reluctance for the thing to end at all given the circuitous route to the fairly rote big battle that’s both unneeded and uncommitted. If Burton and Woolverton really wanted to go there, it needn’t be so wishy-washy and over almost before it begins, especially since we’ve known what’s coming since we were shown a scroll that predicts the future very early on.

And yet, all of this wouldn’t matter so much if the dreamy nightmare world of Alice’s weren’t so completely disconnected from the framing device of stifling Victorianism. I would have liked to see her experiences in phantasmagoric confusion relate to some kind of arc or voyage of self-discovery. Instead, Alice starts the film fully formed, experiences some weird stuff, and then ends the film slightly more bold. There’s no sense of any real psychological or emotional stakes. As fantastic as the film is to look at, and as much as it did at times sweep me away in wonderment, it’s simply too hollow and messy to form a cohesive experience.