Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
Directed by Tim Burton
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by Gian Luca Pisacane
Masters never fail behind the camera; at most, it’s we who, over the years, are no longer capable of understanding them. It’s a provocation, of course. But perhaps there’s some truth in this. Tim Burton is among the best creatives of our time. He has been able to rework the history of cinema (German expressionism and beyond) and offer it to the public with a pop spirit, always transversal and never elitist.
Beetlejuice is for him the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, from which to start anew. In 1988, the original seemed like madness. It was another decade, and the less attentive immediately thought of an improbable revisitation of Ghostbusters. But it wasn’t so. In reality, we were once again very close to masterpieces like Cole Porter’s Hellzapoppin’, where delirium became a way of life, laying the foundations for future cinema.
Thirty-six years later, Tim Burton revives his creation. He brings back his longtime collaborators (Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder), introduces today’s loves (Monica Bellucci), and reinvigorates his incredible, colorful, and unconventional talent. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was chosen out of competition to open the new edition of the Venice Film Festival. And rightfully so.
The old fairy-tale atmospheres are rediscovered, and the gothic returns in a transversal adventure that captivates all audiences. Beetlejuice becomes a character born from the madness of our society. He’s a wild little ghost, somewhat “naughty,” as the old subtitle not so kindly suggested, but he has a big heart. His feelings, though always stemming from something repellent, manage to make him extremely human. This is where Burton’s magic lies: the inhuman becomes tangible, an essence, the fuel for an imagination that risks being lost.
Many have tried to imitate his direction, but only he can remain true to himself despite the difficulties, impositions, and inevitable more complex moments. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice thus becomes a mirror of ultra-fast contemporary life, where there is no room for empathy towards others. It’s a warning to a world racing full-speed into a wall. It’s a rollercoaster to the future, yet firmly rooted in the present.
The spirit is irreverent, the focus always on solitude and marginalization. In the chiaroscuro, Beetlejuice is likewise confined to a parallel dimension and needs to be summoned to come back to life. He could be the other side of Edward Scissorhands. In that case, the tone was more tear-jerking; here, it’s more of a fierce comedy, like The Addams Family taken to the extreme, trying to turn despair into hope. The kitsch, the punk, the musical, and the heavy makeup blend with sleight-of-hand tricks and a question that never fades: can the living and the dead coexist? Maybe.
Behind this question, seemingly out of any known galaxy, lies the reflection of a perpetually disillusioned Tim Burton, who hides ordinary, fragile people behind his ghosts. In the clarity of his vision, even cell phones suck us in; we are all besieged. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice reflects on inclusion, on meeting others, on adolescents clashing with adults who are not very open to dialogue. Tim Burton’s Generation Z is the one that calls for freedom, but above all, for listening. Chills mix with smiles, and the curse remains: never say Beetlejuice three times, or he might appear. But it’s here that Burton’s antiheroes manifest to save what is now a portrait of a world in flames.
Cinematografo, August 28, 2024
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Beetlejuice 2 Review: Tim Burton Unleashed
by Paolo Falletta
Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. And we wouldn’t be afraid to say it a third time because the return of the mischievous ghost is a commanding summoning, a revival that, after the 36 years since the first film, feels overdue. Partly because, after Disney’s live-action Dumbo and the lackluster Miss Peregrine, there was hope that Tim Burton would return to the qualitative and stylistic roots that made him successful. And partly because a schizophrenic, unstoppable movie has been sorely missing from a cinematic landscape obsessed with strict narrative structure, linearity, and unbreakable suspension of disbelief.
The Ghost of the Generation Gap
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice opens with the same soaring movement as the 1988 film, with a spectral camera floating over Winter River County to the iconic haunted Deetz house. But the Maitlands are no longer there, Lydia (Winona Ryder) has found a way to capitalize on her special sensitivity, Delia (Catherine O’Hara) has maximized profits from her artistic delusions, and Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) is hunted by a vengeful corpse bride. Meanwhile, new arrival Astrid (Jenna Ortega) channels her resentment towards her mother into a blind rejection.
The film still focuses on the irreducibility of a generation gap that hasn’t softened with time, presenting it as a doubled tension. Lydia and Delia’s relationship is still marked by misunderstandings, and now Lydia finds herself as a mother struggling to repair her troubled relationship with her own daughter. Miscommunication is once again embodied in a perceptual gap between faith and skepticism, but this time it’s the teenager who’s distant from the supernatural. Here, Burton paints a Gen Z that is less credulous, perhaps less dreamy, and certainly more cynical and rational (because they’re inundated with information) compared to their peers from decades ago. Yet, in portraying this diminished dreamlike quality and compromised flexibility, the director takes us into ambiguous territory. Without condemning or celebrating, he problematizes this shift by pulling teens away from screens and putting Dostoevsky novels in their hands, offering a redemptive portrayal of a generation often stigmatized by unflattering media depictions.
Beetlejuice + Beetlejuice
Beyond its underlying themes, it’s clear that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice doubles more than just its title—it also doubles its subversive energy, references, and fun. It often feels like watching a Tim Burton fully unleashed, finally realizing that talking about death—anti-pathetically—doesn’t require rigid narrative discipline.
The American director sheds any last vestiges of a structure that rejects imaginative madness and expressive exuberance, which instead become the perfect tools for a story about death, where death is anything but serious. Farewell, linearity; tragedy (which is at stake, which creates tension, and consists of conventions that here dissolve) is also dismissed. What remains is pure playfulness, the surprise and wonder of a childlike audience, the thrill of a peekaboo game that teases absence and provokes laughter upon appearance.
This play also becomes combinatory, as Burton mixes genres and codes (even languages), nodding to Mario Bava, alluding to Wednesday, parodying crime dramas (with a hilarious Willem Dafoe), and reaffirming his love for stop-motion. This penchant for pastiche is a celebration of heterogeneity, stylistic eccentricity, and directorial stream of consciousness, which finds its perfect figurative counterpart in the character of Beetlejuice.
Tim Burton’s Afterlife
Beetlejuice is still a nightmare and a solution, an unsolved problem and a deus ex machina, a grotesque reversal of divine providence, decaying and deadly but still effective.
But he’s above all the personification of the unexpected, the holder of the privilege of inconsistency, the organic container of all possibilities, whether visual or narrative. Foul-mouthed, cartoonish, an incorrigible trickster, he inhabits an Afterlife that Tim Burton retouches and expands. This is where the first Beetlejuice stood out, not only by refunctionalizing horror figures and remythologizing them through the lens of grotesque comedy, but also in its set design. The original surprised audiences by giving new shape to the underworld, portraying a geography of the afterlife made up of waiting rooms and bureaucratic spaces. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice continues this exploration, delving into its recesses to uncover further oddities and expanding a fascinating afterlife mythology, ripe for potential sequels or spin-offs. In fact, Burton has already mentioned a third Beetlejuice.
Of course, it lacks the revolutionary spirit of the 1988 cult classic. The first film set a high point for horror-comedy and ghost stories, reversing the haunted house trope and offering a consoling, even optimistic view of death, rooted in the idea of a soft boundary between the two worlds, an almost nonexistent dichotomy. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, then, takes on the mission of overdoing everything, doubling down and surprising through a postmodern, citation-heavy impulse, rewriting itself both as repetition and anarchic reinvention.
The mischievous ghost’s return brings with it a generational rift and a desire to surprise: it succeeds when it understands that the only way to discuss unmet death is by rejecting limiting structures, and it struggles when compared to the first film’s subversiveness in a different context and time. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice quotes and self-references, and it shines when it revives the mythmaking elements of the original, constructing an afterlife that’s part decay, part celebration, and something we’d never tire of exploring.
Everyeye, September 5, 2024
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by Nicola Cupperi
An alternate reality exists in which, in the early 90s, the stars aligned just slightly differently, and it became both necessary and urgent to capitalize as quickly as possible on the unexpected commercial success of Beetlejuice (1988), leading to the creation of the sequel script that most appealed to Tim Burton at the time: Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian. Hypnotized by the dream of juxtaposing the sunny aesthetics of surf culture with the dark tones of German Expressionism, Burton came this close to filming a sequel in which Lydia’s family (Winona Ryder) moves to Hawaii to build a resort on land that is home to an ancient Kahuna spirit, who awakens rather vengefully and is only defeated thanks to Beetlejuice’s heroic surfing skills.
Let’s take a moment to appreciate Tim Burton’s patience, as he was able to curb his misplaced enthusiasm and wait for the right moment (and script). He waited for his gothic flame to reignite after years spent in slippers, and when Alfred Gough and Miles Millar handed him the scripts for Wednesday, something clicked. The project for the Beetlejuice sequel emerged from its ectoplasmic form and was revived thanks to the pens of Gough and Millar, supported by the ideal presence of Jenna Ortega and the return of almost all the original cast members (Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, and Catherine O’Hara), joined by Monica Bellucci, Willem Dafoe, Danny DeVito, and Justin Theroux. It’s produced by Brad Pitt’s former Plan B company, which has won three Best Picture Oscars since 2009 (The Departed, 12 Years a Slave, Moonlight), confirming that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice isn’t just about cashing in on the cult status of the first film but also about trying to renew it. The final official seal of approval came with the announcement that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—in theaters in Italy from September 5, distributed by Warner Bros.—would open, out of competition, the 81st Venice International Film Festival on August 28.
Thirty-six years ago, a series of calypso-filled events led the gothic teenager Lydia Deetz to the brink of marriage with the ghost Betelgeuse (deliberately mispronounced as Beetlejuice just for the fun of saying “beetle juice” in front of old ladies without them understanding), a professional bio-exorcist capable of removing any unwanted humans from any house already occupied by a spirit. Today, after the untimely death of family patriarch Charles, the Deetz family returns to their former haunted home in Winter River, Connecticut, where Lydia spent her youth. After the remarkable experiences she had as a girl, Lydia has now become an esoteric educator and hosts a popular show titled Ghost House. Her teenage daughter, Astrid, hates it.
At school, Astrid is teased because her mother is weird, but she’s the type of high schooler who responds to bullies by pointing out that she’ll be the one laughing last when they’re stuck filling the voids in their lives by cheating on their husbands with their Pilates instructors. In short, she’s quite a character—cynical and with impeccable aim, since refusing to believe in ghosts is the best and most painful way to rebel against a mom who’s decidedly spirit-obsessed. She will have to radically change her mind when she gets sucked into the world of ghosts, and Lydia is forced to summon her least favorite spirit to try and save her. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Don’t turn around too quickly, or you’ll strain your neck.
Film TV, August 27, 2024
