BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE**

Director Tim Burton has set himself a high bar in making a sequel to his beloved black comedy BEETLEJUICE. It was a film that blended live action and animation - a heartbreakingly wholesome couple and a ghoulishly dysfunctional family - macabre jokes about suicide and an iconic possession sequence set to Harry Belafonte. How do you top the inventiveness, the zaniness and the hilarity of Michael Keaton's titular performance? How do you make us love characters in the way that we loved Lydia Deetz and wanted to protect her just as the Maitlands did?

Sadly, except for a couple of flashes of brilliance, the sequel fails to live up to the original. We waste a good half hour simply catching up with characters and it must be 45 minutes before The Juice Is Loose.  Over thirty years have passed.  Lydia (Winona Ryder) is now a schlocky TV presenter with an oleaginous TV producer love interest (Justin Theroux). Her stepmother Delia (Catherine O'Hara) is now fantastically successful as an artist, but in mourning for her beloved Charles. Delia and Lydia have made a kind of peace since the original film, but Lydia now has problems with her own teenage daughter (Jenna Ortega).  The family gathers at the original house for Charles' funeral. Shenanigans ensue.

What's to love?  Michael Keaton, underused, but fantastic. Monica Belucci and Danny DeVito criminally underused.  Catherine O'Hara's occasional killer line, especially playing off Justin Theroux.  A fantastic flashback played as a foreign-language black-and-white melodrama. A brilliantly funny use of Richard Marx' Right Here Waiting. But too much of it was plodding through character catch-ups. Not enough of it was funny. Are we really surprised by the silly sandworms as deus ex machina? No. There are no stakes. There are no feelings. What's it for?

BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 104 minutes. It played Venice and is on global release today.

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

Aaron Sorkin follows up his directorial debut MOLLY'S GAME with a movie whose subject is far more in his wheelhouse, and what an energetic, pointed, anger-making film he has created in THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7.  Its concerns are those that Sorkin has explored throughout his career:  the liberal fight against injustice, corruption and political repression.  He cast these ideas in a warm-fuzzy light where optimism won in his hit TV show The West Wing. He was angrier and more cynical in The Newsroom.  And in the Trump era, the anger is rightly turned up, and the absurdity of a system wherein the rule of law has been bent out of all recognition fully explored.  

The film opens with a montage that takes us back to the 1960s and the potent combination of the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam protests. We see RFK beg for calm after the assassination of MLK before himself being assassinated. We then zoom in to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  Protestors flooded into the City hoping to protest Vietnam in front of the media outside the convention hotel soon clashed with the police brutally trying to keep them away.  Once Nixon is elected his regime decides to prosecute the so-called ringleaders of the riots for Conspiracy to Incite Riots and other charges, even throwing in iconic Black Panther Bobby Seale, who had no part of it, for good measure.  The charges were clearly trumped up, the judge (Frank Langella) was clearly biased and bogus, the jury was tampered with to ensure a friendly verdict, and the defendants were clearly there just to be made an example of.

Sacha Baron Cohen is absolutely note perfect as Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman. He gets all the funniest lines because he is most comfortable with showing the absurdity of proceedings.  But it's Eddie Redmayne that has the more interesting role as Tom Hayden - the apparently more sensible, less showy leader of a student protest movement who hates Hoffman's grandstanding. Much of the intellectual back and forth of the movie comes between them as they throw barbs about how best to serve the movement.  And they are joined in a kind of Sorkin Triumvirate of Repartee by Mark Rylance as progressive attorney William Kunstler. It's so clear that the prosecution is bent (despite an ill-conceived attempt to soften Joseph Gordon-Levitt's prosecution attorney) that all the real intellectual fun is to be had in the arguments WITHIN the defense.  

The result is a courtroom drama that is thrilling and rightly anger-making, and a movie where Sorkin's trademark razor-sharp combative dialogue is absolutely right for the job.  But he has also come on leaps and bounds as a director of action. The way in which he reconstructs the riot as he interrogates the version of events that Tom Hayden is telling himself is a visual and editorial tour-de-force.

THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 has been released on Netflix due to Covid. It has a running time of 127 minutes and is rated R.

SPOTLIGHT

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MINIONS

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

THE MINIONS, as any fule kno are the ridiculously and surprisingly popular side-kicks of Gru, the star of DESPICABLE ME. These yellow-bean-like energetic, gibberish-speaking cheeky chappies arguably already hijacked that franchise, as evidenced by the fact that they, not Gru and his daughters, were on most of the posters. So I suppose it was inevitable that we would get a spin-off.

The fantastic news is that the movie more than stands up on its own two feet.  Despite the quasi-unintelligible talk, we absolutely understand that our protagonists, Stuart, Kevin and Bob, are different personalities.  This is more than helped by an hilarious deadpan witty voice-over from Geoffrey Rush (PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN) at the start of the film.

We open with a natural history of the minions - starting as little amoeba in the opening credits - haplessly following whoever is the Big Bad of the moment, until the dinosaurs become extinct and they have to find evil men to follow.  In classic minion style, their eagerness overmatches their competence and they end up stuck in an icy waste having followed Napoleon into Russia.  At this point, the story truly picks up, with three minions going on an adventure to find a new evil henchman to follow. They sail to the USA and journey to Villaincon (a wonderful satire on the insanity that is Comicon) where they fall into the service of Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock in a self-satirising villain role).  I guess the moral of the story is be careful what you wish for - and through a series of accidents Bob becomes king of England, and then has to rescue the nation from Scarlett and find their new master on the way.

Kudos to co-director Pierre Coffin who also voices ALL of the minions  - creating separate characters and also enough actual language that we can keep up with them.  The movie has wit, a warm heart and is a worthy addition to the DESPICABLE ME world.  There's nothing here not to like!

MINIONS has a running time of 91 minutes and is rated PG.  The movie was released in June in Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Armenia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Croatia, New Zealand, Slovakia, Uruguay, the UK, Ireland and Poland. It was released earlier in July in the Netherlands, Sweden, Argentina, Austria, Colombia, Germany, Denmark, Israel, Estonia, Spain, Finland, Iceland, Lithuania, Latvia, Norway, Belgium, France, Iceland, Jamaica, the Philippines, Trinidad and Tobago, Azerbaijan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Macedonia, Mexico, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Canada, Cuba, India, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Romania, Taiwan, the USA and Vietnam. The movie opens in Cambodia on July 14th, in Peru & Portugal on July 23rd, in Albania on July 30th, in Japan on July 31st, in Serbia on August 20th, in Italy on August 27th, in Turkey on September 4th, in Greece on September 25th, in South Korea on October 15th and in China on November 25th.

BIRDMAN

BIRDMAN is a laugh-out loud satire on the insecurity of the actors and bitter negativity of critics that also plays as a tragic tale of mental illness.  It's also a technical tour-de-force of cinematography that's meant to take you right inside the claustrophobic mania of its lead character - a device that both impressed and alienated me and made the experience of this film less visceral than it should be.  It's a great film and a failed film all at once - ambitious both in its subject matter and style - way beyond anything Hollywood is currently giving us.  Noble in its pitch and flawed in its final act. 

Michael Keaton riffs on his own past to play Riggan Thomson, a Hollywood star who used to play a superhero called Birdman.  Today, he's old, divorced, with a daughter just out of rehab and a legacy he's unsure of.  Still beloved by the public, Riggan wants more - he wants artistic credibility.  He wants to literally be the star who makes the front page when he goes down in a plane crash with George Clooney.  The fine line the movie walks is whether Riggan is just another insecure Hollywood star or whether he's genuinely unwell - is he really seeing Birdman and the musicians who form the backing track to this film?  Does he really think he has superpowers?  The evidence in favour of the first theory is that everyone else in the theatre is as insecure as he is, from the ageing starlet played by Naomi Watts to the self-parodying method actor played by Ed Norton. In fact, it's arguably Ed Norton who cuts closest to the bone in his portrayal of the gifted actor who can't be real in real life, and self-sabotages every project he's in.  You have to wonder at the psychology behind Norton - the real Norton - who is so willing to portray himself as a vulnerable douchebag on film. 

Random DVD Round-Up - NEED FOR SPEED

NEED FOR SPEED is so much macho bullshit it makes the FAST & FURIOUS franchise look like the Ingmar Bergman of car-racing flicks.  We're in the sort of clumsy, asinine movie-making that epitomises THE EXPENDABLES except without the self-knowing irony. Some lazy reviewers have argued that you shouldn't expect better from a movie based on a video-game, but that's to do video games a disservice. The simple fact is that ex-stunt driver and director Scott Waugh only knows how to direct by pasting together action set-pieces  and scriptwriters John and George Gatins (REAL STEEL) have either no interest in or no talent for depicting real human emotion.  

CARS - auto-porn for the under-twelves!

CARS is an almost perfect summer kids movie. The pedigree is flawless: it comes from the people who brought you TOY STORY, THE INCREDIBLES and MONSTERS INC. The execution is flawless: technically superb, imaginative, innovative. The characters are cute, funny and tug at the heart-strings. The jokes vary from slapstick to satirising Hollywood agents and 60s stoners to cow-tipping. The race scenes are exhilerating and will get your blood pumping. The plot - well, it actually exists and it really sucks you in. And while the movie has those usual earnest life-lessons we always find in kids flicks, it has some extra too: a narrative that is against the corrosive youth-culture of our times and which takes to heart the philosophy of Ferris Bueller: "life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you may miss it."

The story features a cute little red racing car called Lightning McQueen. He's a successful but selfish rookie racer on the verge of his first championship prize/phat endorsement cheque. On the way to his final race he finds himself stuck in nowheres-ville Doc Hollywood-style. Condemned to re-tarmacing Main Street road by the local fuzz, Lightning learns the real meaning of friendship, team-work and success. As cheesy as this stuff is, it's delivered with such good humour and by such endearing characters that I defy you not to get completely caught up in the final grand prix.

So, kudos to the animators and all of the voice cast, not least Owen Wilson who reprises his familiar role of charming but obnoxious frat boy who discovers he has a heart. Jeremy Piven is also especially hillarious as Lightning's sleazy agent, Harv, and as much as I love UK car guru Jeremy Clarkson, I hope it isn't the case that he is replacing Piven in the UK version.

I just can't say enough about how cool this movie is. The only very slight defect is that at 2 hours it's a bit long for really little kids.

CARS is already on release in Australia, Singapore, Canada, the US, France, Switzerland, Hungary, Netherlands, Israel, Aregntina, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Belgium, Czech Republic, Spain, Hong Kong and Poland. It opens in the UK on July 28th 2006 and Italy, Finland, Norway and Sweden on August 23rd. It reaches Denmark on September 1st, Germany on September 7th, Greece on September 14th and Turkey on September 15th.

HERBIE: FULLY LOADED - harmless fun

Whatever the tabloid image, I believe that Lindsay Lohan is an entertainer of great merit. I find that the common thread to all of her movies is that she is charming and engaging: you genuinely want to spend time with her. I am happy to report that her latest offering, HERBIE: FULLY LOADED, is another light, heart-warming, mildly amusing family movie, fully in the tradition of those cheesy old Herbie movies that I used to love as a kid. This is not great cinema by any means but it ticks all the genre-specific boxes. The plot is simple enough. Lohan plays a young girl called Maggie Peyton who desperately wants to be a racing driver, much to the gentle disapproval of her father (Michael Keaton) and her less talented brother. However, her father does buy her a beat up old VW Beetle, a.k.a Herbie. Maggie restores Herbie with the help of the obligatory love-interest Kevin (Justin Long, who also played the “hero” in the awful gross-out comedy WAITING…). Herbie is soon running around town causing a commotion. In particular, thanks to Herbie, Lohan finds herself competing against the obnoxious racing champ, Trip Murphy, played by a beautifully cast Matt Dillon in full-on sleaze-mode. The plot then unfolds in a completely predictable manner and without the post-modern ironic overtones that many parents have come to expect when they take their kids to a flick. Nonetheless, as basic old-skool family movies go, I can’t fault this production: you could definitely do worse.

HERBIE: FULLY LOADED is on global release.