Video/DVD Review: Beetlejuice
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What Parents Should Know
Parents need to know that there are some serious themes in
this outrageous film: a young married couple comes to grips
with the fact that they're dead, and a teenager contemplates
suicide. Because of this, it's not suitable for children
younger than 9. But there's nothing here that older kids can't
laugh at.
Families can talk about why Lydia was so sad. How did she deal
with it, and was her way of coping effective? How do you deal
with it when you're sad?
Swerving to miss a dog in the road, Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) drive off a bridge into a river. Arriving back home, they realize that not only are they dead, they're trapped in a sort of limbo in their own house. The cryptic "Handbook for the Recently Deceased" they've been left with offers little guidance. When a new family moves in and assertive Delia Deitz (Catherine O'Hara) starts remodeling, the ghosts decide they want them out. Their attempts to scare off the new inhabitants fail miserably, though. The only one who can see them is terminally morose Lydia (Winona Ryder), the Deitz's teen daughter. Sympathizing with the Maitlands' predicament, she summons Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), "the afterlife's leading bio-exorcist," to their aid. It doesn't take her long to regret the decision.
Tim Burton has an abnormal talent for capturing morbid, cartoonish imagery onscreen. There were glimpses of that sensibility in his grandly peculiar first feature, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, but that was only a teaser. In his follow-up feature, BEETLEJUICE, a wild burlesque of a movie, Burton lets all of his snakes out of the bag. The wriggliest of those snakes is Beetlejuice himself. Played by Michael Keaton, he's a scum-covered, bug-eating ghoul dressed in something akin to a soiled umpire's uniform. Kids and adults alike will find it hard to resist him. Keaton gives such pungent life to the title character, and to the movie as a whole, that it's no wonder Burton defied Hollywood logic and cast him as the unlikely star of his next film, Batman, and the grittier Batman Returns.
A few other things you'll see in this movie that you won't see anywhere else include a room where the recently deceased mingle while waiting to see their afterlife case workers, and Dick Cavett and company dancing as puppets of the supernatural to Harry Belafonte's "Day-O."
The Nightmare Before ChristmasTim Burton's Corpse Bride
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
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