KWIF is Kent's Week in Film, after a few weeks away.
This week:
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024, d. Tim Burton - in theatre)
The Instigators (2024, d. Doug Liman - AppleTV+)
Orion and the Dark (2024, d. Sean Charmatz - Netflix)
Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths Part 1 and Part 2 (2024, d. Jeff Wamester - AdultSwim)
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I haven't seen a new film Burton has made since 2003's Big Fish. There was nothing ostensibly wrong with Big Fish that made me say "no more", and besides the terrible Planet of the Apes, pretty much every on of his films before that I enjoyed quite a bit.
But post-2003, I couldn't even stand to look at the trailer for his monstrous Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and Corpse Bride, looked like low budget The Nightmare Before Christmas devoid of the Henry Selick magic. The parade of Johnny Depp features that followed Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows didn't even come close to intriguing me, and I would say whatever Burton train I had been on in the '90's, I had jumped off and could barely see it chugging along in the distance.
Of his first 10 features, if you were to ask me what was my favourite, I would probably say Ed Wood, or I would have up until the trailers for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice started popping up. The excitement for a return to that world was shockingly intense and immediate. The sudden surge of sense memories, of watching the original Beetlejuice countless times and being so stimulated by it every time... besides Star Wars, there was probably no other film series from my youth that I desired more of. I had forgotten.
And so, 36 years later, we finally have a sequel.
As someone who eyes his movies critically, I know it's merely fine. I wanted it to be everything that it was for me as a pre-teen, but I was a different person, and Tim Burton was a different filmmaker, so there's no way it can recapture the magic. Truth is, no sequel or prequel or remake can ever recreate the experience of watching an original, because times, places, people change and evolve. The best a film can hope for is to create a new experience for the viewer.
As a fan, though, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice did transport me, not back and time, not back to my youth, but back into the world I'd always wanted to spend more time with, and I cannot discount that exceptional feeling, even if the movie is only just... fine.
Why just "fine"? It just takes too long to get going is all. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, with a 30-year gap to fill, can't just get up and going, it's got to catch us up with some characters and introduce new ones, and explain what happened to old ones, as well as establish a plot contrivance or two, or three, or four that will bring everyone together.
The film opens with Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder, Stranger Things), now a widowed mother of a nearly estranged teen daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega, X) and host of a paranormal investigation show. She still sees dead people, but has recently started seeing Beetlejuice everywhere and it's freaking her out. Her boyfriend, Rory, is also her producer and a bit of a new age twerp. The Lydia and Astrid are reunited when stepmom Delia (Catherine O'Hara, SCTV) breaks the news that her husband, Lydia's dad, has died. A return to Winter Falls is necessary.
Meanwhile, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton, Birdman) is running a scare business, when he learns that his ex-wife, the soul-sucking (literally) Deloris (played by Monica Belucci, The Matrix Reloaded) has returned and is coming for him. He also has never stopped pining for Lydia, which is gross, but then that's on-brand for Beetlejuice.
Eventually Astrid gets caught up in some supernatural business, and Lydia needs Beetlejuice's help to save her.
I'm skimming over a lot of plot set-up here because there's really five or six threads at play that all eventually collide about mid-way when nearly everyone has made their way into the afterlife. Once this happen the film is crackling with energy. Keaton is clearly having a blast, O'Hara is in top comedic form, and Ryder treats Lydia like she slipped into her favourite pair of slippers...absolute comfort.
Once we see Lydia and Beetlejuice team up, I suddenly got a jolt of the Beetlejuice cartoon, which spun out of the movie in a very unfaithful way and was primarily about the weird adventures Lydia had with this weird demon creature in the afterlife. This film sparks that notion but doesn't sustain it long enough which is why I wish it got to it much sooner.
The sub-plot that takes Astrid to the afterlife...well, it's doesn't not work, but it doesn't have the time to fill it out properly, and it resolves abruptly. There were ways to get Astrid into the afterlife that would connect her to her mom, and Beetlejuice that wouldn't have to involve a complete extraneous threat (when there's already another complete extraneous threat).
Speaking of, Deloris would have been just a great central plot on her own. I could see if this were, say, the fifth Beetlejuice movie, that it would revolved entirely around the threat Deloris presents. Instead it's a subplot that never feels fully integrated into the central character story here, as enjoyable as it is.
Is Tim Burton back? I dunno. Even in its overstuffed form, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice still ultimately delivers what I wanted from it, which was more Beetlejuice. And, much like how I felt after each time watching the first movie, I would still like more.
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Damon and Affleck together again. At this point, it's like Matt and Casey are in just as many projects together as Matt and Ben. It doesn't matter, these guys have decades of friendship under their belt, great affection for one another, and so pairing Damon with an Affleck on screen is always going to deliver.
The younger Affleck co-wrote the screenplay here with Chuck MacLean, and it's a script that has far more surprises and laughs than expected. It's a fairly lighthearted romp, but one that doesn't ever dismiss the characters, and toys with themes of corruption in political and legal circles. I've seen criticisms that there's no sense of threat or danger to these guys, and it is true that Damon and Affleck don't play like they're in mortal danger, but that's more of a case that both of these characters are far more troubled by their inner demons than external ones. These are men with nothing left to lose. This is why the fake kidnapping of Rory's therapist, Dr. Rivera (Hong Chou, The Watchmen), is so integral to the story, in helping to explore the mindset of the men and perhaps reframe what it is they're hoping to achieve and provide them a path back to living.
Damon pairs up with Doug Liman for the first time since The Bourne Identity, a film with a pretty great car chase sequence. This film has a pretty big car chase, but it's not terrific. It's evident the production was limited in the speeds they were capable of going through the streets of Boston, and there's no amount of cross cutting and editing that can mask just how slow this chase really was going. There are fun aspects to the chase, but overall it's missing a lot of the oomf. But the rest of the production looks pretty good.
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In this Netflix animated feature, Orion is a boy of about 10 or 11, and is an absolute nervous mess of a kid. He's anxious and afraid of everything. He doesn't want to say the wrong thing, or embarrass himself which pretty much leads him to saying the wrong thing and embarrassing himself all the time. He doesn't want to draw attention to himself, which invariably draws attention to himself. His school days are nightmares, and at night, well literal nightmares. In the dark, when everything gets quieter, and time seems to slow down, all he's left with is his anxious thoughts and an absence of light.
Enter The Dark personified. The literal darkness who is tired of this kid always cursing his name. So The Dark takes Orion out for a spin in the night sky, to experience the beauty of the night world, introduce him to his nighttime crew: Sleep, Insomnia, Sweet Dreams, Quiet and Unexplained Noises. But Orion's reluctance to accept The Dark leads to near disastrous consequences that Orion needs to face up to.
Orion and the Dark is a charming enough film in the Pixar-knockoff vein of personifying things or ideas, but as a full blown adult, I'm not certain I was absolutely sold on the execution of the conceit. Kids will probably dig it just fine though. The voice cast is rock solid with Paul Walter Houser, Angela Bassett, Natasia Demetriou, Carla Gugina, Nat Faxon, Colin Hanks and more, and Kaufman constructs some narrative twists that kind of work but also kind of break the film at the same time(?). What really holds me back from liking the film is the animation, which is, as most CGI animation has been for the past 25 years, very soft, rounded, and charicature-like. The characters have their eyes set together, Jim Davis' Garfield-style and, well, I hate it. Hate hate hate it. It's a design decision that I never got comfortable with and threatened to soil the whole movie for me.
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I think the answer is they are not good enough to really waste time thinking about too much, nor are they bad enough to really vent about. They aren't part of the main cultural discourse, nor really part of film discourse. They are animated features, typically based off one DC Comics mini-series or story arc, made for DC Comics fans. It's a miracle if anyone who's not a DC fan happens to watch them.
Over the past four years, much of the DC animated movie output has been connected in what's casually called the "Tomorrowverse", culminating in three movies that retell the classic comics epic Crisis on Infinite Earths. The gist of it is the Multiverse is being destroyed, universe by universe, a wave of energy destroying everything in its path. An eons-old being called the Monitor diverges from his observational duties to intervene, assembling heroes from across the Multiverse who may have a hope of finding a way to salvage...somthing.
This is not the first time the classic event was adapted, as it was used as the denouement of the Arrowverse, but this is a somewhat more faithful adaptation. The thing is, in the comics, there was 50 years of comics history and thousands of comics stories and characters to bridge together. In the Arrowverse, there was nearly 10 years of shows and hundreds of episodes of TV, and the Crisis there started bridging gaps with all the other DC superhero TV shows past and present. It made sense. This... this Crisis... only really makes sense if you know these characters from the comics.
I don't think I've actually watched any of the Tomorrowverse movies and it didn't seem to matter, because I have 45 years of DC Comics reading history under my belt, and I've read Crisis on Infinite Earths at least a half dozen times over the years. This does tailor the story a little to the Tomorrowverse animated universe, but there's not a great history that it's bringing together.
Part Two is a story that could have been told in scant minutes, but it drags out its plots over roughly 85 of them. It opens reminding the audience that, indeed, there's a crisis, but there's been a temporary patch put in place thanks to Barry Allen's sacrifice (spoiler for a 40-year-old story). And then it jumps back in time across two character storylines, first exploring Kara Zor-El (Supergirl)'s originals with The Monitor, and secondly delving into the tortured drama of the Psycho Pirate. It's some of the most tedious cartooning I've ever watched.
Eventually it comes out of these flashbacks but by then it's too late and all the momentum of Part One is utterly lost. Any attempts to build up momentum fall flat, and the emotional beats it's hoping to convey never quite land. To be honest, if I wasn't such a nerd for this stuff, for just seeing how it plays out differently than what I know, I would have turned it off. It's not great, and I certainly couldn't recommend it.
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