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. 

2 recent films: Super 8 and Rise of Planet of the Apes

CAUTION: spoilers

Super 8 is proof that Steven Spielberg has been making the same film since the late 1970s.

First the good part - it's got some good pre-teen actors playing the young protagonists. However, apart from the fact I went with my good friend Connor to see it, there isn't much else I can say.

This is seriously Spielberg by numbers. It's set in the late 70s about a group of kids who find an alien who wants to go home (Close Encounters / ET). At one point they are trapped in a vehicle at night that is being attacked by a large beast (Jurassic Park). The military are after the alien for their own ends (ET). There are tunnels under the town (The Goonies / Temple of Doom). The main adult protagonist is a small-town sheriff (Jaws). There is hardly one original element here.

Except he's teamed up with JJ Abrams, the creative behind Lost, Alias, the excellent Star Trek reboot from a couple of years ago, and, er, Cloverfield. Which might be why the alien in this movie looks less like ET and more like the bastard brother of the thing that attacked New York, crossed with a spider. The only other thing Abrams brings to the party is unneccesary screen glare at every opportunity. It's his trademark.

So was it worth watching. Well, yeah, it was well made and not too long. I'd give it 6/10.

And so to Rise of Planet of the Apes, which is onto it's second reboot after the messy Tim Burton attempt, that even he admits went awry. Unlike the 2001 film, the 2011 one got most things right.

It's interesting that in the original films the audience was expected to side with the human hero. It perhaps shows how in a generation we have generated a racial self-loathing that puts the ape, Casear, at centre stage and has you rooting for them.

There were two stand-out moments for me. The first was when Caesar realises that he is being treated like a pet and reacts by getting into the back seat of the car instead of the trunk. The second was when Caesar was given the opportunity to leave the Guantanamo-like primate 'sanctuary', but chooses to stay with his ape brethren rather than return to a servile life.

There were weaknesses. I'm not sure how the intelligence-boosting toxin that boosts Caesar's brain power also enables him to evolve human-style vocal chords. Also, when the apes break free from the sanctuary there seem to be an awful lot more of them than you ever saw in the cages.

But apart from those mild gripes, I really enjoyed this film and would thoroughly recommend it: 9/10.

A massive list of films I’ve seen recently (and some spoiler ‘best bits’)

I seem to have seen quite a few films in the past few weeks both in the cinema and on DVD and not blogged about them, so here goes…

Alice in Wonderland (IMAX 3-D)
Tim Burton’s much-hyped remake that plays a bit fast and loose with the Alice story. I enjoyed it and it was very good but I felt it lacked a certain something, probably because I was very excited by the prospect what with being a bit Tim Burton fan. There’s always that thing that if you go expecting something amazing you’ll end up disappointed. In the end it was a bit more miss than hit really. The visuals like the way the card soldiers were conceived were very good though.

Best bit: An armoured Alice starts listing the six impossible things she believes before breakfast. “Number six! I can kill the Jabberwocky!”
Jongudmund’s rating: 7/10


How to Train Your Dragon (IMAX 3-D)
Dreamworks do a Viking saga with dragons, explosions and lots more. The storyline veered from average e.g. formulaic outcast inventor kid (see A Bug’s Life, Jimmy Neutron, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) becomes the hero and earns the love of a pretty girl, though to something a but unique, e.g. the reason the dragons have to keep stealing sheep. The film succeeds because by the end I wanted to own a dragon, so obviously it had an impact. My only (minor) gripe was giving the Vikings Scottish accents.

Best bit: The IMAX came into its own with the scene in the ash cloud as wispy ash seemed to float all around me. Otherwise any of the dragon swooping and soaring sequences.
Jongudmund’s rating: 8/10


Date Night (Cinema 2-D)
I have not laughed so much at anything labelled a comedy. That’s because usually Hollywood comedies are usually dire retreads of vaguely funny ideas. This was busting with funny moments, from Steve Carell’s exasperation that Mark Wahlberg won’t put a shirt on, through to lowlife criminals having a domestic, and constant horror that the main characters took someone else’s restaurant reservation. It had a bit of a too neat ending, but I can’t begin to count the laugh out loud moments, and there were one or two excruciating bite-your-knuckles-with-embarrassment moments too.

Best bits: Steve Carell licks a stripper pole (gross!); Tina Fey seeks to play down Carell’s insult to a mob boss – “It’s okay, when he says vagina, he means your face!”
Jongudmund’s rating: 9/10


Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (DVD)
Average animation really. A few laughs. As in How to Train Your Dragon (above), the nerdy protagonist inventor becomes a hero, although his creation (a machine that turns water vapour into food) eventually threatens all life on earth. I think kids would enjoy it, but it’s not going to be one I watch frequently.

Best bit: Honestly hard to think of one. Nice to hear Mr T doing one of the voices.
Jongudmund’s rating: 5/10


Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (DVD)
I loved the first Ice Age movie. The second one was okay, and this is similarly mediocre. For some bizarre reason Sid the Sloth decides to hatch some eggs he finds in a hidden underground valley. Turns out they are dinosaur eggs. What I liked about the first Ice Age movie was the vaguely realistic depiction of strange Ice Age animals, like giant sloths. But I’ve seen enough dinosaurs. Some of the other side characters like the possums are starting to get annoying. This franchise just ain’t cool any more. Although Scrat’s dalliance with a femme fatale who is trying to steal his nuts just about rescues it.

Best bits: One of the dino hatchlings has to cough up other ‘kids’ that he tried to eat in the play-park and keeps coughing up the wrong ones much to Sid's embarrassment; the Scrat versus Scratte love triangle with an acorn
Jongudmund’s rating: 6/10


Sweeney Todd (DVD)
Tim Burton’s bloody filmic version of Sondheim’s blood-letting musical. Bit of a complicated plot (although I followed it), and the usual grimy gothic sets you’d expect with Burton, plus lots and lots of blood. Spurting and splashing and oozing and bubbling blood. Johnny Depp is just scary as Sweeney. Helena Bonham Carter brings a lot of pathos to pie-maker Mrs Lovett. Sacha Baron Cohen is very amusing as a rival barber. And Timothy Spall and Alan Rickman are suitably loathsome as corrupt beedle and judge respectively. Pretty much everyone dies in bloody throat-slitting fashion and for good measure their skulls crack when they drop down the chute under Sweeney’s chair. Oh, yeah, and there’s blood.

Best bit: Feeling betrayed by his accomplice, Sweeney waltzes Mrs Lovett into her pie oven and slams the door on her as she burns.
Jongudmund’s rating: 7/10

Just occasionally I get to say 'told you so'

Terri, our current resident waif and stray, has just started working down the local Odeon and brought home some bad news the other day.

"We're not getting Alice in Wonderland for the IMAX," she announced. "Apparently Disney are being arses and no one's going to show it."

Now, while it was true there was a spat between Disney and the cinemas because Disney want to release the DVD a mere 12 weeks after its cinematic release instead of the industry standard 17 weeks, I thought it was unlikely nowhere would show it at all. True enough a few days later the Cineworld chain broke with its movie-showing brethren and said they would have it.

But apparently Odeon were holding fast. Tez insisted it wasn't going to happen. I went 'Yeah, it will...' And then today the BBC reported that... 'Yeah, it will.'

Which in a way is a shame because Disney do perhaps need someone to stand up to them. And stuff comes out on DVD so fast now anyway it's slowly killing off the joyous wait for the film you really crave to see again. Pretty soon we'll all have films beamed instantaneously into our heads whether we want them or not.

But in another way it's cool, because I'll get to see a Tim-Burtonified Wonderland at the IMAX just down the road. Oh, yes, and because I got to say the most satisfying three words in the English language to Tez.

Told you so.

Films and DVD review: 9, Up in the Air, Cloverfield

Two trips to the cinema within a week is unusual for me. The first one was to the newly revamped Chapter Arts Centre (which is very swanky indeed) to see an oddball animation called 9, produced by Tim Burton, no less.

The set up is this: a small stitchpunk doll comes to life in a strange room in the ruins of a bombed out city. He has the number 9 on his back. He goes outside and meets other like him (numbered 1 to 8). Together they try to work out what happened to all the people.

It’s a promising start, and the animation was done well, but as Cathy said it lacked that certain something. It wasn’t a film I’d take small kids to as it was distinctly more grown up than most animations. There were a few problems with the script – characters seemed to act in quite self-contradictory ways, particularly the traditionalist number 1. So, all in all, I enjoyed it, but it’s not one I’d watch again in a hurry.

We did get to see a trailer for Tim Burton’s next cinematic foray: Alice in Wonderland, which looks like it will be a relatively faithful version of the book in all its weirdness. It’s being made by Disney, but hopefully will still be as dark as a Lewis Carroll/Tim Burton crossover could be.

The second cinema trip was to see Up in the Air, the new George Clooney vehicle. This was made by the same guy who did Thank You for Smoking, which surprised me when I saw it a couple of years ago.

The formula is similar: the main character is a smug git who does a fairly reprehensible job, but does it well, but then has some sort of awakening. There were a lot of thinking points in the film – why is the main character so obsessed with accruing airline miles and loyalty points when he also gives ‘motivational’ lectures telling people to abandon all the relationships that tie them down. That was interesting. What kind of person avoids commitment to people yet value loyalty to corporations?

Helped by a relatively sharp script and some genuinely funny lines, and of course, George in fine form, this film moves along at a good pace. Cathy and I both spotted the twist that was to come near the end, but someone in our audience didn’t, letting out a very loud gasp that caused most of the other punters in the cinema to titter. And generally, I left feeling glad I went, which isn’t always the case.

And now a DVD review. I watched Cloverfield the other day, which I have discovered is a film that bitterly divides people between those who thought it was interesting and enjoyed it and those who thought it sucked mighty ass. As all JJ Abrams projects seem to do.

Personally I’m glad I didn’t see it in a cinema as the handheld camera angle, the running and the shaking were tiresome. But, as a monster movie I thought it worked okay. There were no answers, and characters were left in the dark, which meant you the viewer are in the dark too (literally at one point), but in a way I liked that. I like having to think in a movie and I find them more effective when I have to engage my imagination.

So, for me, Cloverfield worked. I probably won’t watch it again, simply because of time constraints, not because I didn’t like it.

Jongudmund’s Ratings:
9 ~ 5/10 Worth a look
Up in the Air ~ 8/10 Like!
Cloverfield ~ 6/10 One for DVD

An hour of my life I won't get back

I hate being late for things and today I managed the mother of all late arrivals, showing up late to my own house with invited guests standing shivering on the doorstep.

How did this all come about? Blame Asda. That's right. It's all their fault.

We were in Asda buying some pizzas to feed our guests, when we noticed a chap buying two Nintendo Wii consoles. It looked a bit odd, so I asked the girl on the computers and DVD desk how much the Wiis were. She said they were the amazingly low price of £99.97.

Cath and I conferred for all of a minute before deciding this was such a bargain we really had to get one. The only problem was they only had two left and they were both reserved for other customers. But the girl said if either of the other customers hadn't turned up in an hour she'd sell one to us.

There are only so many ways to kill an hour in Asda. I read a couple of magazines. Cath looked at the clothes. I found a copy of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes in a special edition tin, and Cath said she'd give it to me for Christmas, to help me nearer my goal of owning every Tim Burton film on DVD. But still it was a drag until the hour was up.

The reservers hadn't turned up and I excitedly thought I was getting a baragin Wii. But then when they rang through the Wii, it came up at £179.97. I queried the price and the stupid shopgirl told me the price she'd originally said had been for a Nintendo DS, not a Wii.

I was tamping.

Not only had we waited a bloody age for a bargain that never was, we then had to queue up to buy all the other crap in our trolley and that made us late to get home to our waiting guests. And I hate being late, as I said. So imagine how much I hated being late for a get-together at my own house!

Burton on Burton

Back when Planet of the Apes came out in 2001, a great number of people left the cinema saying "What happened at the end? Did you get it?"

Reading Burton on Burton, a collection of interviews Tim Burton has done through the years, it would seem Tim Burton doesn't really know either, except he didn't want to copy the Statue of Liberty ending:

"We just went back to the overall mythology of Planet of the Apes, of the book, even the other movies. For me the whole thing has got a sort of circular structure to it, it goes round on itself somehow - parallel universes, time travel, man/ape, evolution, religion. Where do we come from? Where are we going? Do we just keep re-evolving? There was a feeling of wanting to do something where it was a parallel world but it was all apes, and there was something about that I liked - I had this image of a weird twisted parallel universe. I thought about it in a big picture - even though I couldn't give a shit about sequels, but if you do something like this you think about a bigger picture of the material. So there was the idea of going back in a sort of twisting of time, and again going through this juxtaposition of human/animal, and coming back into a world where you think its normal, but something has happened."

Or you could just paraphrase it as: "Hey, I had to end the damn thing somehow..."

Geek film note: Nightmare Before Christmas afficionados might be interested to know the scarecrow designed to keep everyone away from the Ape holy site (which is actually the crashed spaceship Oberon) is modelled on the King of Halloweentown, Jack Skellington.

Man flu film reviews

Being off for a few days with a particularly vicious form of man ‘flu meant I’ve watched quite a few films, including quite a few where I had to take the shrinkwrap cellophane off before watching it! So, after Return of the King, Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Beetle Juice and Pirates of the Caribbean, I got onto a couple of films I hadn’t seen before…

Collateral is perhaps the film which proves Tom Cruise can actually act (unless you think the whole ‘Katie had a baby, so I guess Tom's straight’ thing is a diversion). As in Heat, Michael Mann uses the urban wasteland of LA to great effect, with the city effectively the third major character in the film. The ending is a bit contrived, but the plot works and everybody’s favourite Thetan in disguise puts in a great performance as Vincent. Playing against type as a bad guy clearly works for Tom, so hopefully he’ll take on a few more villainous roles.

Jongudmund’s rating: 8/10

Do you remember when pre-recorded videos were expensive and so you taped films off the telly? I revisited those deprived days of yesteryear and watched a film Cath taped back at Christmas. Down with Love is a ‘screwball comedy’ starring Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor.

The film’s passable. Ewan McGregor is always good value and David Hyde Pierce is surely one of the most gifted comic actors around, even if he is playing yet another version of Niles Crane. While there are some funny scenes, and some decent dialogue, most of the key scenes are contrived and the performances smelt so much of ham I thought I was in the sandwich meat aisle in Tesco.

The thing which struck me most though, about the film, is that seeing him in thick glasses and a side parting, Ewan McGregor would make a great Clark Kent. Why wasn’t he signed up to play Superman in the limp ‘Returns’? With a knowing smile and a slightly feral glint in his eye, he’d be a fantastic Superman.

Jongudmund’s rating: 5/10

And is it nerdy that when I watched Beetle Juice I recognised Glenn Shaddix's name because he played the Mayor in Nightmare Before Christmas...?

Ah, the elicit yumminess of banned chocs

Yesterday we went to a VIP screening of A Good Year, the new Russell Crowe film directed by Ridley Scott. I quite like Ridley Scott films and this one was as visually impressive as I’d expect, although the story had a bit of a twee ending. Freddie Highmore, last seen as Charlie of Chocolate Factory fame in Tim Burton’s gothic homage to Roald Dahl, played the young Russell, and was excellent, as was Albert Finney (who bizarrely was in Burton’s Big Fish and voiced a character in Corpse Bride). It did make you ask the question though: Is it worth winning the rat race if all you get to be is king rat? (Jongudmund’s rating: 7/10)

The great thing about these VIP showings is that you get a free drink and sweets. Last night I had a pack of Rolos – usually forbidden because they’re made by Evil Nestle (their full name, apparently), while Cath had a pack of Revels for what she maintains is the first time ever! It’s amazing how she can still surprise me after almost 12 years together. “You must have had Revels before!” “No, I never have.” I believe her because she got totally caught out by the coffee flavoured ones. Blurgh.

Irony of the night
Besides free drinks and sweets there’s also a raffle, which Cath and I both had a strange feeling that we’d win. And we did. The prize was a case of 12 bottles of award-winning wine. …And neither of us drink at the moment due to our meds.

Weird coincidence of the night
Irony Boy’s fiancée is out of town so he brought a housemate along as his ‘date’. Bizarrely she used to work at the cinema and left very shortly before I started there back in 2001.