来自网友【他他】的评论Title: BeetlejuiceYear: 1988Genre: Comedy, FantasyCountry: USALanguage: EnglishDirector: Tim BurtonScreenwriters: Michael McDowell, Warren SkaarenMusic: Danny ElfmanCinematography: Thomas E. AckermanEditor: Jane KursonCast:Alec BaldwinGeena DavisWinona RyderMichael KeatonCatherine O’HaraJeffrey JonesGlenn ShadixSylvia SidneyRobert GouletAnnie McEnroeDick CavettPatrice MartinezMaree CheathamAdelle LutzSusan KellermannTony CoxRating: 8.1/10Title: Beetlejuice BeetlejuiceYear: 2024Genre: Comedy, FantasyCountry: USALanguage: English, ItalianDirector: Tim BurtonScreenwriters: Alfred Gough, Miles MillarMusic: Danny ElfmanCinematography: Haris ZambarloukosEditor: Jay PrychidnyCast:Michael KeatonWinona RyderJenna OrtegaCatherine O’HaraJustin TherouxWillem DafoeMonica BellucciArthur ContiSantiago CabreraBurn GormanDanny DeVitoGeorgina BeedleAmy NuttallFilipe CatesSami SlimaneRating: 7.1/10Welcome to Tim Burton's morbidly captivating netherworld! BEETLEJUICE and its title-duplicated sequel, are two peas in a pod, in spite of the latter belatedly materializes after an uncharacteristically long gap of 36 years.In BEETLEJUICE, a happily married couple Adam and Barbara Maitland (Baldwin and Davis) returns to their hilltop manse as ghosts after perishing in a car accident. After going through the afterlife's red tape (a Lynchian realm of black-and-white checkered slanting floors, peopled with a bevy of wackadoodle recently deceased, however none of which is due to natural causes), they receive the dreadful news via their caseworker (a chain-smoking Sylvia Sidney who cannot suffer newbies gladly, definitely an inspiration for Joey Tribbiani's agent Estelle in FRIENDS) that they are going to be stuck in the house (aka. the limbo) for another 125 years before their souls can move on. After the house is acquired by New York real estate developer Charles Deetz (Jones), Adam and Barbara try unavailingly to scare off his family, but surprisingly establish a close bond with Lydia (Ryder), Charles's teenage daughter, a black-clad ghoul who can see ghosts, while her stepmother Delia (O'Hara), a sculptor of grotesquerie, is busy with remodeling the house into a post-modernist pastiche with the help of her friend, Otho Fenlock (the late Shadix, sashaying through his scenes with a divine look of judgment and implacable annoyance, a pure delight!), an interior designer, who will also moonlight as an inept medium. All that leaves the titular Beetlejuice (Keaton), a self-publicized underworld bio-exorcist, to be invoked to carry on the spooky business. However he is instantly taken by Lydia, who makes a perfect goth bride for him. After a farrago of contretemps, including a seance going awry, accelerated aging in a ghastly fashion and a sandworm (operated as a stop-motion puppet) from another domain, Beetlejuice is subdued, and the Deetzes learn how to co-inhabit with Adam and Barbara in the happy-ever-after coda. BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE takes Delia and Lydia back to the haunted house after Charlies gives up the ghost in a most spectacular egress (shot in an animation sequence and reportedly stems from Burton’s own dreams), together with Astrid (Ortega), Lydia's daughter and Rory (Theroux), Lydia's eager-to-please boyfriend. Adam and Barbara are gone (thanks to a loophole in the system, a throwaway the screenwriters have no patience to elaborate on) and the funeral gathering is usurped by Rory’s unseasonable marriage proposal, yet Lydia acquiesces. Meanwhile Beetlejuice is alert by the resurfacing of his vengeful ex-wife Delores (Bellucci, roving around with a corpse-bride assembled gracefulness, and whose soul doesn’t want to be sucked by her? Just ask the dead janitor played by Danny DeVito!), whom he met in Italy during the Black Plague, and before soon they rubbed each other out. After Astrid is cozened into the underworld on the pretext of meeting her late father Richard (Cabrera) by a parricidal ghost, a desperate Lydia reluctantly invokes Beetlejuice to rescue her daughter. All hell breaks loose on the Halloween night, where living persons entering the dead’s realm and shrink-headed zombies, a team of ghost policemen run amok in the town of the living, not to mention that Beetlejuice hijacks Lydia and Rory's midnight wedding as the new groom with Delores nipping at his heels. It takes another sandworm and Lydia's resolute spurn to bring everything back to normalcy. But rest assured the possibility of another sequel (BEETLEJUICE x3 seems inevitable because that is the invocation!) is teased in the advent of a murderous baby Beetlejuice that is more Chucky than his biological father. In the original film, Beetlejuice is basically a supporting role, but Keaton’s deliriously mental antics and transmogrified outward form (a sort of combination of a maniacal Joker and a striped loony Einstein) are so astounding that Beetlejuice’s every movement and line delivery grabs our attention and stokes our amazement. A creature dumped in a twilight zone, neither fish now fowl, cartoonish but also unremittingly energetic, not shying away from his nympholeptic proclivity, Beetlejuice is a mischievous incubus, and Keaton’s unbridled embrace of absurdity and hilarity is among his best works. And in the sequel, such traits are multiplied and thanks to the outlandish appearance, the age gap does not show. As for Lydia, whose character arc from a suicide-mulling teen to a careworn mother is a letdown. Reducing Lydia to a common woman is, in a way, a betrayal to the original film because that is most likely what is going to happen in reality to a girl like her, but shouldn’t be in Burton’s sky-is-the-limit fantasy world where her alterity shall be fostered rather than homogenized. In the sequel, Lydia’s erstwhile recalcitrant sensitivity and airy solitude have been tamed in the process of time, transformed into something more neutral and banal. Her life seems rudderless and becomes a TV celebrity capitalizing on her psychic faculty isn’t what one might consider a good cause for inspiration, just saying. While Ortega is tasked with a less idiosyncratic version of Wednesday Addams (from the Addams Family’s spin-off TV series WEDNESDAY, which Burton serves as a producer and director) in the sequel, it is O’Hara’s Delia, who sustains Burton’s undiluted eccentricity (besides Keaton of course). A supernal comedienne unburdened by self-consciousness, O’Hara swans through the films like a diva unmasked by any pretension and normal thinking. Her comedic bent stands out exquisitely in the original’s hilarious possession scene to the tunes of Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)”, and in the sequel, she adds a soupçon of wisdom to Lydia and Astrid’s strained relationship offhandedly, even her unwitting choice of death is very “Delia”. It is a pity she isn’t the “right one” for Beetlejuice as age has never been just a number in Burton’s creations. Practical special effects are deployed stupendously and Danny Elfman’s lilting and eldritch scores are superbly squared with Burton’s singular vision in both films. The original boasts state-of-the-art perspective shifting shots in the town model and the juxtapositions of two different dimensions. Props are ingeniously constructed and the chthonic ambience is pervaded by neon-green and deathly-blue. It is understandable for Burton to replicate (from the town, the house, the otherworldly desert, up to the sandworm cropping up in the finale), upgrade (the underworld bureau and many a new get-up for the recently deceased) and repurpose (“The Banana Boat Song”is transposed to a mourning song and Richard Harris’“MacArthur Park”is chosen to emulate the former’s success in the climax with bizarre dance moves) many tropes and ideas from its predecessor in the sequel, but is it also too slavish to the original’s innovation? If BEETLEJUICE is an unconventional trailblazer by astonishing and amusing audience with its facetious, demythologizing, sunny-side-up attitude towards the morbid department, BEETLEJUICE x2 barely offers anything new, albeit cleverly drawing on audience’s fond nostalgia and giving a second wind to a director rallying from the nadir of his career owing to its surprisingly spectacular box office proceeds, $435 million and counting (especially after a similar fare HOCUS POCUS 2 is dumped unceremoniously to the streaming platform without a whimper). referential entries: Tim Burton's BATMAN (1989, 7.3/10), EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990, 8.9/10), ALICE IN WONDERLAND (2010, 6.1/10), BIG EYES (2014, 5.4/10); Ivan Reitman's GHOSTBUSTERS (1984, 7.3/10); Kenny Ortega's HOCUS POCUS (1993, 6.6/10); Anne Fletcher's HOCUS POCUS 2 (2022, 6.4/10).
