HAUNT GENERATOR

Opening this weekend:

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice--To the list of Gen X-era movie favorites getting very belated sequels, the sweetly macabre 1988 comedy Beetlejuice may now be added. You may remember the title character (spelled, outside of the title, like the red giant star in Orion) is a manic ghost who specialized in exorcizing the unwelcome living from haunted houses. Like Clive Barker's Candyman, he could be conjured into the world of the quick by speaking his name aloud three consecutive times, after which he would wreak havoc.

It's one of the signature roles of the great Michael Keaton; probably his greatest comedic triumph. The film also featured a breakthrough performance by Winona Ryder as the endearing, self-consciously "goth" heroine Lydia, and was a showcase for the visual and comic style of director Tim Burton. It's unquestionably a classic of '80s popular cinema, and it gave rise to a TV cartoon, video games, comics, a long-running stage show at Universal Studios theme parks, and eventually a Broadway musical that put Representative Lauren Boebert into an uncommonly good mood.

None of which necessarily means, of course, that a sequel was required. But one has been made, directed by Burton, starring Keaton, Ryder, and Catherine O'Hara, and scored by Danny Elfman. It has, in short, the stamp of authenticity, and this many years later it's a bit surprising that the original makers have managed to infuse, if anything, even more craziness into it.

Ryder's Lydia, now widowed, is still able to see ghosts, including the occasional startling glimpse of her old nemesis. She's the host of a paranormal TV show produced by her intolerable boyfriend (Justin Theroux). Relations between Lydia and her teenage daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) are tense, but circumstances bring the two of them and Lydia's stepmother Delia (O'Hara) back to the old house in picturesque small-town Connecticut. Before long, the boundary between our world and the Kafkaesque, DMV-style bureaucratic afterlife has been breached, and the title ghoul is trying to insinuate himself back into the picture.

What ensues, strung along a script by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar from a story by Seth Grahame-Smith, are more of Burton's elaborate yet non-sequitur slapstick set pieces. The gross-out content is slightly higher here than back in 1988, but it works. The original, you'll recall, had a fixation with Harry Belafonte songs from which its most memorable sequences arose; the new movie is likewise enriched by similarly out-of-nowhere musical interests, even more grandly staged. There are sequence here that achieve true, weapons-grade silliness.

Ortega is touching, and there are other effective new additions to the cast, like Willem Dafoe as an afterlife cop--he was a movie cop in this life--with an exposed brain, or Arthur Conti, excellent as a local kid who charms Astrid. Best of all is Monica Belluci, formidable as the enraged ghost of the leader of a "soul-sucking death cult" who has an unhappy history with our titular hero. The scene in which she pulls herself together with the help of a staple gun is a Burton classic.

Keaton, though used somewhat sparingly, slips easily back into his role, tossing off asides in his muttering natter (or nattering mutter?) with the same moldered aplomb, and moving with the same light-footed exuberance, with which he conducted himself three decades ago. Ryder is also perfectly convincing as the middle-aged version of Lydia; tinged with a hint of emotional desperation in her interactions with Astrid.

I know it sounds ridiculous, and maybe I'm just projecting, but I thought that Ryder, O'Hara and even Keaton brought a subdued, rueful undercurrent to their performances, as if stirred-up memories of the first film's events had awakened genuine emotional pain. Don't misunderstand; if it's there, it's done without the slightest heavy-handed intentionality; it may not even have been conscious on the part of the actors. But it deepens both this film and the original.

WHEN YOU'RE STRANGE

Opening this weekend:

Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness--On the one hand, I'm a little over the Marvel "Multiverse." On the other hand, this newest adventure of Marvel's mystical mage is a lot of fun.

For those who may be unacquainted with this conceit in the "Marvel Cinematic Universe," I'll summarize as best I understand it: The Multiverse is the premise that our reality exists alongside countless concurrent realities in other dimensions, complete with other versions of ourselves and the people we know, including our favorite superheroes, and that many of these alternate realities are similar, but none are quite identical. When we dream, according to this movie, we're really experiencing a taste of the lives of other versions of ourselves.

The Multiverse has already played a major role in two previous entries, 2018's dazzling animated flick Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, where it was wittily used to explore racial, gender and other variations on comic book themes, and last year's Spider-Man: No Way Home, where it was used as an amusing excuse to mingle the actors and situations from various "reboots" of the franchise. In both cases, it was also a spoof (and a servicing) of the familiar, OCD nerd need to make every "canonical" version of a pop culture franchise at least technically consistent with every other version (Star Wars and Star Trek fans sometimes demand this too).

Enjoyable as both of those earlier movies were, I'm afraid that the Multiverse has the effect, for me, of diluting the dramatic stakes. Death has always been negotiable in superhero stories, of course, but in Multiverse-heavy yarns, major characters--iconic characters--are killed off, or lose their heroic status, and it doesn't feel like it matters that much, because there's an apparently endless and easily accessible supply of replacements from other Universes.

Thus I don't know how sustainable the Multiverse gimmick is for me; even though I greatly enjoyed the original 2016 version of Dr. Strange, I went to this sequel a little grumpily. It turned out to be a non-stop, vigorously imaginative blast.

This time the surgeon-turned-sorcerer Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is called away from the wistful experience of attending the wedding of his ex (Rachel McAdams) to come to the defense of America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez), a teenage girl who has innate magical powers she can't control. She's pursued by Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), who for some reason needs the kid to obtain a book that will allow her to steal the life, including two little boys, of a suburban-mom version of herself in another Universe. (All of this is related, I understand, to a Marvel TV show called WandaVision that I haven't seen.) Strange and his allies attempt to prevent this; tentacled Lovecraftian abominations interfere with his efforts.

Or something like that. Big-name Marvel characters from other franchises turn up, sometimes in new versions, sometimes in versions we've seen. Epic surreal action scenes leap giddily from Universe to Universe. And if you sense more than a nod or two to the Evil Dead flicks, it probably won't surprise you that the director is Sam Raimi, back after a hiatus from directing features. His wild headlong style is as exhilarating as ever, as is his flair for macabre slapstick, and both are splendidly abetted by a driving score from Danny Elfman.

Cumberbatch plays Strange with his usual old-school movie star suavity and aplomb, and Gomez is charming as America. The standout in the cast, however, is Olsen, who keeps her voice down and makes Scarlet Witch intimidating, but also poised and glamorous, with a strong undercurrent of the sorrowful.

BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED GEOPOLITICAL WATERS

Opening this weekend:

Bridge of Spies—This Cold War drama opens with one of those mesmerizing sequences that the mature Steven Spielberg does so effortlessly, as Soviet spy “Rudolf Abel” (Mark Rylance) is stalked by the Feds through the streets and subways of Brooklyn. After Abel, a British-born Russian who seems to have squeezed his espionage work in around his passion for painting, is captured in 1957, his defense is turned over to a staid Brooklyn insurance lawyer, James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks) who had worked on the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials.

From there on, Bridge of Spies, scripted by Matt Charman and Joel and Ethan Coen, becomes a reflection on the meaning of patriotic duty. Donovan regards it as a point of national pride to provide Abel with a genuine best defense, while everyone from the judge (Dakin Matthews) to his wife (Amy Ryan) to the CIA creep shadowing him (Scott Shepherd) regards his role as a formality in a kangaroo court, and roll their eyes with disgust at his idealism. The public is even less sympathetic, glowering at him over their newspapers on the subway.

But a few years later, when U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Sowell) is shot down and captured by the Soviets, Donovan’s spirited advocacy in keeping his client out of the electric chair seems prescient. He’s asked by Allen Dulles (Peter McRobbie) to travel to Berlin, where the wall is just then going up, to unofficially negotiate the swap of Abel for Powers at Glienicke Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam in February of 1962.

Hanks is terrific in the sort of Capra-esque hero part for which he’s the modern go-to American star—Spencer Tracy or James Stewart or Henry Fonda would have excelled in it too. But Hanks makes it his own, giving Donovan a certain wry perplexity at how those around him don’t seem to get it; don’t grasp that excluding foreigners or alleged enemies from full due process and civil protection is a betrayal of American values. These issues never seem to go away, alas—Donovan’s frustration will be familiar to anyone who ever felt like their head was going to explode in arguments over, say, waterboarding or Abu Ghraib.

Reliably fine as Hanks and several other members of the veteran cast are, the best performance in Bridge of Spies is by Rylance, as the mysterious, ethnically pied, imperturbable Rudolf Abel. Initially dismayed at his assignment, Donovan is almost immediately disarmed by his client’s dignity, resolve and ironic humor, while Abel seems moved by Donovan’s honor and good faith. Rylance and Hanks get all of this across without heavy-handed telegraphing; in each of their scenes together the two men are closer and closer friends.

I’m not historian enough to say to what degree this story has been streamlined and made symmetrical for dramatic purposes. Plenty, I’d guess. Nor can I say how much the movie’s version of Donovan, or any other character, reflects the reality. But as drama, it’s insistently absorbing. The final minutes—Donovan’s return to Brooklyn, just as his family is seeing a TV news report about him—are perhaps a bit too pat and burnished and reverent. It’s the only moment when Spielberg drops his impressive reserve here, and it’s brief. Otherwise, this low-key, sedately-paced movie builds quietly, earning its emotional payoffs with both a verbal and cinematic eloquence.

  

Goosebumps—Just in time for Halloween comes this comedy fantasy riff on the popular series of young-adult horror novels of the '90s. The work of the insanely prolific R. L. Stine, the formulaic Goosebumps yarns featured young protagonists going up against zombies, ghosts, werewolves, blobs, abominable snowmen, giant insects, murderous garden gnomes and just about every other imaginable horror motif (almost all of them, of course, pillaged from the movies).

Stine is an onscreen character in the film, played by Jack Black as a curmudgeon living in small-town Delaware. It turns out that Stine’s imagination is so potent that his monsters will “literally leap off the page” of the original manuscripts if their locked covers are opened. Our young hero (Dylan Minnette), a new kid in town who is drawn to Stine’s daughter (Odeya Rush), inadvertently liberates all of the Goosebumps monsters. Under the leadership of the evil ventriloquist dummy Slappy, they go on the hunt for their author, who they resent for their imprisonment in the books.

The storyline is silly, to be sure, but the script, by Darren Lemke (from a story concocted by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski), is a little wittier than you might expect, and Rob Letterman’s direction is exuberant. Black’s short-fused, fussy, vain, self-dramatizing Stine is a study in broad and happy hamming; he seems to be channeling Gale Gordon.

It's also great to hear the scherzos of Danny Elfman, in his classic style, on the soundtrack. Goosebumps is a trifle, certainly, but it’s a well-crafted, funny and colorful trifle. It would perhaps be a good family option for the season—grown-ups can get a kick out of it, and on any but the littlest viewers, it’s unlikely to raise any serious goosebumps.

PAPER DUNE

It’s a ridiculously crowded movie weekend here in the Valley; the two best I saw were, oddly, both documentaries about old men:

Jodorowsky’s Dune—Though an interesting, badly uneven film of Dune by David Lynch was released in 1984, it was not the first attempt to bring Frank Herbert’s ponderous sci-fi epic to the screen. In the early and mid-‘70s, the Chilean-born avant-garde director Alejandro Jodorowsky, famous/notorious for his Theater-of-Cruelty-style surrealist “midnight movie” western El Topo (1970) and a couple of other visually powerful but patience-taxing films, worked on an ambitious version of Herbert’s novel. Indeed, according to this documentary by Frank Pavich, Jodorowsky and his collaborators essentially finished the movie—on paper, in the form of a comprehensively detailed storyboard rendered by several of the top fantasy and sci-fi artists.

In Pavich’s film, Jodorowsky, still vital and garrulous in his eighties, recounts how he adapted Herbert’s tale, with considerable liberties—he refers to the process as “raping” Frank Herbert, “but with love”—and then recruited different artists to realize different aspects of his version: French comic-book great Jean “Moebius” Giraud for the characters, Brit sci-fi cover artist Chris Foss for the spaceships, Swiss illustrator H. R. Giger for the evil planet Harkonnen, American Dan O’Bannon for the special effects, and so on. Cast members were to include Jodorowsky’s son Brontis, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and Salvador Dali!

Studio financing never materialized, and not a frame of the movie was ever shot. The thrust of the new film is twofold: First, the documentary asks, what if this had been the big space movie of the ‘70s, rather than Star Wars? Second, the filmmakers assert that Jodorowsky’s magnificent storyboard material has been pillaged by countless sci-fi, horror and fantasy films of the past four decades.

The first question is specious. You can argue that the Star Wars franchise, enjoyable as much of it is, helped make pop culture more insipid. But it doesn’t follow that if Jodorowsky had managed to realize his Dune project, we’d be a culture of avant-garde spiritualists. As to the storyboard’s influence, however, the movie uses compare-and-contrast to build a pretty convincing case.

I enjoyed Jodorowsky’s Dune as much as any film I’ve seen so far in 2014. I’m nowhere near deep enough to say whether Jodorowsky’s a visionary or a conman, but either way he’s irresistible—a buoyant, exuberant raconteur.

Indeed, as I sat watching him, I thought, this movie is so much better than the pretentious space opera that Jodorowsky would probably have made back then. Instead of glacially-paced spacescapes and portentous pronouncements, we get to see the beautiful illustrations—likely far more beautiful than their onscreen realizations would have been—while Jodorowsky describes, with infectious enthusiasm, key scenes from the movie in his head, or dramatically narrates his failed struggle to get it out of his head.

Near the end, he notes that with modern CGI capabilities, his Dune could be made, even if he’s dead. I’d like to see the effort, certainly, but I’m not sure, after Pavich’s film, that it’s necessary. I’ll take Jodorowsky’s Dune over Jodorowsky’s Dune anytime.

The Unknown Known—This portrait of W. Bush-era Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is another jaw-dropper from the great Errol Morris. Rumsfeld is the only talking head here, and with the distance of retirement, and perhaps a bit chastened at the judgment even of many conservatives that the Iraq War was a disaster both morally and practically, the ruefully smiling fellow comes across as maybe the most unassuming of the rogue’s gallery from that administration. It’s startling when his mild-mannered interview footage with Morris—in this film we hear the director’s exasperated questions—is intercut with footage of his press conferences from the lead-up to and early days of the war, in which he’s condescending, combative, snidely dismissive of anybody’s doubts about the project.

The Unknown Known is a remarkable document, but it’s also a hypnotic, graphically complex piece of cinema, driven by Danny Elfman’s sad, tense music. As with 2003’s The Fog of War, the new film is about how an idiotically ill-advised military adventure can grow out of the intellectual abstraction of a bright, rational person. Rumsfeld’s arias of spin cross over into a gibberish that’s almost poetic, and at times he stops talking and grins in satisfaction at his own equivocations, as if they were Sufi parables.

An obsessive writer of memos—they were so abundant they became known as “snowflakes”—Rumsfeld seems to have gotten lost at times in a fog of words. In many memos he fixated on definitions, as if by using his terminology narrowly enough, he could somehow parse out a justification for the bloodbath.

Also opening this weekend:

Rio 2—The 2011 animated kidflick was about a romance between two endangered blue macaws who might have been the last of their kind. In this sequel the two of them, voiced by Jesse Eisenberg and Anne Hathaway, travel with their three chicks from the title city to the Amazon rainforest, where they learn that the female’s old flock is thriving. Some lovely musical numbers ensue, sung by the likes of Bruno Mars, will. i. am. and Jamie Foxx, and “choreographed” in the style of Busby Berkeley. Come to think of it, I bet Berkeley would love to have worked with parrots, if he could have.

The best strand, however, belongs to Jemaine Clement as a vengeful cockatoo, Ellen Chenoweth as the brightly-colored frog who regards him with unembarrassed adoration, and a silent anteater who puts his prehensile tongue to spectacular use. Clement’s rendition of “I Will Survive” was my favorite number in the movie.

But the flock’s home is threatened by deforestation, and if you think about the reality this conflict represents, then sweet and tuneful as Rio 2 is, and sincere as the wish of its makers to raise environmental consciousness may be, it may leave you feeling as depressed and helpless as The Unknown Known.

Southern Baptist Sissies—Playing in Phoenix one night only, this Saturday at FilmBar, this is only nominally a movie. It’s really a well-produced video of a live L.A. performance of the play by Del Shores, concerning four adolescent boys (played by adults) in a Baptist church in Texas, and their varying struggles with the awareness that they’re gay. Central character Mark (Emerson Collins), who chats up the audience between lines of the hymns, notes that they were four out of forty kids in the congregation, so the percentage was about right.

All of the acting is good—Leslie Jordan and Dale Dickey, as two barflies representing the middle-aged lapsed-Baptist contingent, put on an entertaining drawl clinic—and there is some fine music, ranging from choir offerings to drag numbers. Make no mistake, however, this is no festive musical comedy, but a bluntly didactic, often tragic drama, and the later scenes are painfully overwrought, though never, alas, implausible.

I just hope that Shores knows that you don’t have to be gay to feel forsaken by the conservative-Christian idea of God. You only have to have, say, a fondness for masturbation, or a belief in evolution, or, maybe, some gay—or nonbelieving or Jewish or Muslim—friends that you don’t think ought to be flung into the fires of hell for being who they want to be.

A STITCH IN TIME SAVES CANINE

Tim Burton gives the boy-and-his-dog movie a macabre but touching spin in Frankenweenie, a remake, from Disney, of his 1984 live-action short. Suburban boy-genius Victor Frankenstein’s beloved dog Sparky gets run over, but Victor, a science whiz, robs his grave and zaps him back to life in a makeshift lab in the attic, in the manner of James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein.

Other kids get wise to Victor’s revivifying technique and, dreams of science-fair glory in their eyes, try it on a dead turtle, rat, Sea Monkeys and other creatures. A “Weird Girl” even manages, inadvertently, to create a hybrid of her equally weird cat Mr. Whiskers with a bat. The results of all this weird science wreak riotous havoc on the town’s festival, and it raises an angry mob that chases Sparky toward the windmill on the hill…

Rendered in stop-motion and ravishing black-and-white, with a voice ensemble that includes Catherine O‘Hara, Martin Short, Martin Landau and Winona Ryder, all propelled by a splendid Danny Elfman score, this striking piece of movie craft is an homage, principally, to the Universal monster pictures, though it also carries references to everything from Gamera to The Birds to the Hammer films. Indeed, if the film has a fault it’s that it’s too dense and overstuffed with references, witty though they are, for its brief running time.

But the characterizations compensate for the feverish tone of Frankenweenie's parody. Victor has a beautifully long, gloomy face—a bit like a boy version of Burton, perhaps; he’s a junior filmmaker as well as a scientist—and his grief isn’t just a plot point. His parents are a bit generic, maybe by design, but the kids, the science teacher, Weird Girl and Mr. Whiskers, the monsters, the neighbor poodle with whom Sparky has a connection—all of them are vividly real beings.

As for the title pooch, he’s classic; one of the all-time great achievements in stop-motion characterization. Sparky is so deeply endearing that he ensures an authentic emotional response to Frankenweenie. Both visually and as a piece of sustained narrative, this may be Burton’s most satisfying movie since Ed Wood. It’s one of the better films so far this year.