Halloween movie review - Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice!

Hey, remember when I posed with this guy?

Well, I finally got round to seeing his new film. I went this week with Bryan and Elaine. Considering the film was released in early September I was surprised how many other people were watching it too - but then it was half term week in the run up to Halloween. The further mystery is why the studio didn't wait to release this as a big Halloween release, considering it's set at Halloween and is a ghost story (of sorts).

Mild spoilers follow...

This is a sequel that rides the current trend of very late sequels, arriving 36 years after the original movie. Alongside Michael Keaton as the titular Beetlejuice, Winona Ryder and Catherine O'Hara both revive their roles as Lydia and Delia. We get a throwaway line explaining why Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin's characters aren't around and Jeffrey Jones's character, Charles, appears in an animated segment and is sort of in it thereafter but in a way they didn't need to use the actor.

I was a fan of Tim Burton's movies for a long time but lost a bit of faith in him as a director more recently. This felt like a return to form - as if someone had said to him 'Hey, Tim, go and make a Tim Burton movie!' And he definitely maxed out the trademark black humour and silly gore. The writers must have had fun imagining as many different gruesome deaths for the residents in the afterlife. I particularly chuckled at the escapologist who was still chained inside his box that was full of water. 

It's a short, fast-paced film with a lot going on. Lydia is now a TV ghost whisperer. Her stepmother Delia is a successful artist. After Charles dies, the pair travel back to the 'ghost house' where they first met Beetlejuice for a memorial service. Lydia's daughter. Astrid (played by Jenna Ortega) is with them. She definitely doesn't believe in ghosts and thinks her mother is a fraud. She changes her mind during the course of the film.

Because there is a lot going on, some storylines feel rushed and unnecessary. Monica Bellucci is frankly wasted as Beetlejuice's angry ex-wife seeking to kill him for good. Willem Defoe as a dead actor who thinks he's a cop steals the scenes he is in, but it's also an aspect of the story that gets squeezed. Meanwhile there are some scenes that are overplayed - while I like any scenes featuring trains in movies, the "Soul Train" dance sequence could have been cut despite the energy it brought to the perilous journey into the underworld for the mortal characters. 

After a great dance number during the wedding scene, with the characters bewitched to sing along to MacArthur Park (with the wedding cake dissolving as they sing about a cake left out in the rain), the film ends with the characters suffering a variety of fates - some pleasant, some not so. There is a mixed bag of happy ever afters for the main characters, again playing to Tim Burton's strength of not ending a character's storyline conventionally. One happy ending turns into a horrible nightmare and then the credits roll.

As very belated sequels go, this was great fun. I laughed a lot, winced at some gory bits, laughed again, enjoyed the spectacle of the musical sequences, and overall thought it was great. It extended the Beetlejuice story without just rehashing the original film and was well worth seeing on its own merits too. 

Pumpkin spice reaches a new extreme

"Autumn" in recent years could more accurately be called "pumpkinspice" given the ubiquity of this mysterious flavour. I'm not really sure what it's meant to be - an ersatz pumpkin pie taste, maybe? It's definitely very sweet.

And it's everywhere. Every coffee house has at least one pumpkin spice brew. There are seasonal pumpkin spice baked goods in stores. Pumpkin spice candles (don't eat those). Pretty much everything.

And now you can pumpkin spice your ride as well.

(Spotted at the Asda car wash in Cardiff Bay; photo by Cathy)

Ultimate American patriotic footwear

Our friends Bryan and Elaine have recently returned from a trip to the USA. They went to Las Vegas and New York and somewhere on their trip they bought me a present - the ultimate American patriotic pair of socks!

A well-muscled bald eagle? Nothing screams 'Merica more than that!

Snack of the Month - grape sherbet candy

Knowing how much I like grape flavoured things (jam, soda, sweets), Cathy bought me these in TK Maxx.

Not just grape. American grape!

All packaging should have info as clear as this. However I'm not quite sure why it needs vegan and vegetarian labels.

Inside the purple carton is a packet of sweets.

They are all individually wrapped.

And up close look like a typical boiled sweet.

They had a nice fruity flavour and a bit of fizzy sherbet that leaked out as I was sucking the sweet. I don't know if I would automatically place the taste as "grape" if this was a blind taste test. I'd probably have guessed they were going for blackcurrant. No surprises they are very sweet - and Cathy is very sweet for buying them for me! 

Book of the Month - British Rail

After several months reviewing fiction, here's something a bit different. 

British Rail by Christian Wolmar sets out an alternative view of the state-owned rail network in Britain - away from the jokes about sandwiches and the wrong kind of snow. His argument is that this portrayal of costly ineptitude is underserved and was deliberately created to justify the privatisation of the railways, which has in fact ended up costing the taxpayer more while charging more for tickets on a worse service.

I was half expecting this to be a nostalgic look back to the good old days on the railways, but actually there is little nostalgia for the steam age or the pre-Beeching era. Beeching was the civil servant whose name is synonymous with railway closures, especially many rural branchlines. But Christian gives him a fair assessment - many of those lines were in disrepair and no longer served any industries or centres of population. Many of them hadn't turned a profit before being nationalised and actually 'British Rail' extended their lives longer than they would have lasted if run commercially. 

There are some fascinating insights in this book. In the 1950s British Railways had an ambitious plan to build helipads at major stations because helicopters were the transport of the future. But it's not just flights of fancy like that - there are plenty of actual railway practices that seem hilariously wrong-headed now.

One of those was the use of slip coaches. Basically, this was a system that meant fast trains didn't have to slow down at stations. At a given point, the last coach on the train would be uncoupled and roll to a halt in the station while the train thundered on. This meant that lots more staff were needed, one for each coach to apply the brakes and make sure it stopped in the right place. And the coaches needed to be collected up and shunted somewhere else until they were used again. It was crazily inefficient just to shave a few minutes off the time it took for a train to get to its eventual destination. 

The other thing I found interesting is that although Beeching's plans were made under a Tory government, the cuts were almost all carried out under a Labour administration. That's despite the opposition of unions to the cuts and lay-offs.

Most of the Beeching cuts in the 1960s were in the name of modernisation, but actually real modernisation didn't happen until a new generation of managers came through the system in the 1970s and 80s. Power shifted in favour of managers and away from engineers meaning that priority was given to joining up timetables and improving the experience of train travel. There were even marketing campaigns - many of which triggered memories of seeing the TV ads in the 80s. (Like "Let the Train Take the Strain.")

The real big shift was away from regionalised thinking - the country was basically split into four competing regions that mirrored the original four companies that were merged into British Railways. Instead of region-based organisation, the bosses at British Rail decided to focus on 'sectors' - passenger, freight, post and so on. The InterCity brand that I really remember from my childhood came in around then - along with Regional Railways which I remember seeing a lot more on trains operating out of my home town. 

I was very interested in the way focusing on the service being delivered, rather than the region services were being delivered in, transformed the railways. Some sectors started turning a profit, which was invested back into new trains, creating a virtuous circle of profit generation. A lot of this happened under Margaret Thatcher's Tory government, which is surprisingly depicted as broadly supportive of British Rail and less inclined to meddle with the railways than previous governments.

But, sadly, then came privatisation. Christian presents this as a gross act of political vandalism, implemented entirely, and incompetently, for ideological reasons. It was a loose statement in John Major's manifesto in 1992, enacted without any real plan or sense of purpose by his unpopular government. The epilogue about the quarter century post-privatisation is a panoply of failures.

I think the highest credit I can give this book is that it's a book about railways that's ideal for people who don't get excited about railways as much as for people who do. There are lots of interesting tidbits of information - like the sheer number of steam engines built by British Rail that all ended up on the scrapheap by 1970 - and the overall story of a state owned industry achieving success is a compelling narrative. 

Wolverhampton graffiti Jedi wisdom

Star Wars graffiti spotted in Wolverhampton. Poor old Artoo getting clamped!

Yoda's advice was very timely as we were on our way to a gig!

Monthly round-up - September 2024

We are clearly heading into Autumn now. It's getting colder. At the end of the month, the Friends of Grange Gardens had a work-day and we ended up shovelling a lot of leaves!

Speaking of leaves... I had a week's annual leave and we spent it in Shropshire. Our week started with a lengthy wait in an A&E because Cathy had a poorly leg. But it got better after that. We had a night in Wolverhampton on our wedding anniversary and went to a Terrorvision gig - read my blog post here. And we had some nice times with family and pootling around Shrewsbury, Ironbridge, Bridgnorth and Much Wenlock.

I also did quite a bit of travelling for work, including going up to North Wales to attend a charity fashion show, and a midweek two-day trip to London. The train journey to London was chaotic due to a fatality on the line at Didcot, so I ended up diverted to Bristol Temple Meads. It meant I saw some different bits of the railway network than I normally do.

Football-wise I went to four games this month. I've blogged about my double dose of "Corinthian" football in the middle of the month. I also saw Cardiff Draconians play a cup match and made my first visit of the season to the Meadow to watch a Shrewsbury home game. I was in the safe standing section with my friend Jim and his son Nikolai.

When we were teenagers, Jim and I used to stand on the Wakeman End at Shrewsbury's old ground, Gay Meadow. So it was a bit of a throwback to thirty years ago when we both had more hair and possibly more optimism about Shrewsbury's chances of winning. With a bit of luck we might well still be watching football together in another thirty years time. 

My Futbology totals at the end of September: