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.

London Film Fest 2012 Day 1 - FRANKENWEENIE

Tim Burton's FRANKENWEENIE is, despite its black and white mock horror gothic style, a warm-hearted and cuddly family feature, quite at home in the Disney stable.  It transports the story of Frankenstein to that typically Burtonesque 50s style contemporary American suburbia, where little kids can be see the weird and cruel in the everyday.  There are even characters that look and feel and sound like previous Burton characters - notably Winona Ryder voicing a little girl who could've become Lydia in BEETLEJUICE.  Her male counterpart is Little Victor Frankenstein, a good-hearted loner so upset when his beloved pet dog Sparky dies, that he uses the town's preternatural lightning to re-animate him.  Problem is, his creepy school-friends (all junior versions of well known horror tropes) find out about his scientific breakthrough and perform their own reanimations with gruesome and chaotic results.

It took me a while to warm up to the characters - I spent the first twenty minutes more wrily smiling at the horror movie in-jokes and admiring the beautiful hand-made stop-motion animation.  But soon Sparky and Victor stole my heart, and anyone's who's ever had a dog will appreciate the wonderful observation that went into capturing just how a pet dog acts.  As the movie built to its dramatic Godzilla inspired climax, I became genuinely nervous about Sparky's fate!  I can confidently say that if you go and see this movie with an open heart, whether or not with kids, you'll have a good time.

But this film is far more interesting than "just" a superior kids film - not that there's anything wrong with that.  Because FRANKENWEENIE is an absolutely darling film full of affection for the power and history of cinema, and simple delight of making things.  It opens with a film within a film - little Victor showing his parents his home made super eight starring Sparky as the Sparkosaurus.  The celluloid burns, but Victor's unpeturbed -"I can fix it!" he declares.  So much of the mood and spirit of the movie is set by that phrase.  It's a film about the wonder of film - the crazy illusions that we build with props and costumes and trick-shots - the almost juvenile glee that lurks behind even the most accomplished film.  

Tim Burton at the European
Première of Frankenweenie

Of course, director Tim Burton is making a more profound statement about the nature of good film-making.  He's saying that it's better to make a film with love and sticky-tape, then with crass showmanship in mind.  Science and celluloid can be used for good or ill - it needs to come from the heart.  Burton also makes a subversive political comment about the contemporary American anti-intellectual strain within the religious right.  The poor scientist is evidently a European emmigre, who knows what horror he has seen.  He finds himself attacked by a mob of suburban parents angry at "science". This leads to the funniest and most profound scene where he angrily calls them ignorant and stupid: "they like the things science gives them but fear the questions that it asks".  

Maybe I'm being too earnest about the political metatext of FRANKENWEENIE? But I don't think you need to scratch too hard on the surface of the seemingly Spielbergian family adventure to get to its more scabrous heart. And it's that doubling, that wonderful enchantment coupled with deeper provocation, that makes this by far Tim Burton's best film in year - maybe since EDWARD SCISSORHANDS.

FRANKENWEENIE played Fantastic Fest and is currently on release in Canada, Colombia, Paraguay, Romania and the USA. It opens this week in Russia and Spain and next week in Belgium, Ireland, the UK, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Thailand, Ukraine and Iceland. It opens on October 25th in Australia, Chile, Malaysia and Switzerland and on October 31st in France. It opens on November 2nd in Brazil; on November 22nd in Argentina, Greece and Lithuania; on November 29th in Singapore; on December 15th in Japan; on December 28th in Turkey; on January 3rd 2013 in the Czech Republic and Hungary; on Jnauary 11th in Sweden; on January 17th in Denmark, Italy and Norway; and on January 24th in Germany.

BLACK SWAN - glorious trash

Darren Aronofsky's much-praised new film, BLACK SWAN, is beautifully-produced trash, and I say that with all respect and admiration. It brings an auteur sensibility to material that is basically a camp psycho-sexual horror flick, in the style of Polanski's REPULSION or Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA. While the material may superficially resemble Powell and Pressburger's seminal ballet melodrama, THE RED SHOES, BLACK SWAN contains none of that film's elegant framing or love for high-art. Rather, BLACK SWAN is the ultimate B-movie - a genre movie that wears its balls-out craziness on its sleeve. The result is beautiful and exhilarating, but I can't say that it affected me as emotionally and as profoundly as Aronofsky's previous film, THE WRESTLER.

In fairness to Aronofsky, the B-movie craziness of BLACK SWAN can be traced back directly to its roots - the ballet Swan Lake - a Gothic melodrama containing elements of body-horror, psychotic doubling and ending in transformative suicide. If that isn't the stuff of a Polanski horror flick, I don't know what is. In the ballet, an evil wizard transforms the innocent princess Odile into a were-swan. The love of the handsome prince should set her free, but her evil doppelgaenger Odette seduces the prince, with results varying depending on which version of the ballet you watch. In the film, Natalie Portman's Nina Sayer has been infantilised by an over-bearing mother (Barbara Hershey). Under pressure to be the perfect "sweet girl" and ballerina, Nina self-harms, is bulimic, has a pathological desire to please, and a psychotic fear of imperfection. When given the role of the Swan Queen, Nina has to bring her innate sexuality, so suppressed by her mother, out into the open, to inform her dancing of the Black Swan. She simply cracks trying to reconcile her mother's expectations of pre-pubescent innocence and her ballet director's (Vincent Cassel) aggressive demands that she be as instinctively sexual as her understudy (Mila Kunis).

What follows is a movie that creates a sense of building tension through the use of claustrophobic interior shots; invasive close-ups; visual trickery with mirrors; and sound editing that suggests an inner self trying to break through. The movie is never pure horror despite plenty of shots involving nail-clipping and skin-scratching.  After all, we never really doubt whether what we are seeing is real or imagined. Nina is shown to be an unreliable witness too early in the movie for that. What we do have is a powerful display of hysteria - but heightened to the point where it is sometimes unintentionally funny (an early scene bedroom scene, for example) and moves so far beyond realism that one feels almost disengaged from it. Nina is less a person to sympathise with than a delicate compendium of every single neurosis that can arise from intensely un-boundaried parenting.

The thematic material in BLACK SWAN is very similar to THE WRESTLER. In both movies we have individuals who are so dedicated to and defined by their profession, that they ultimately sacrifice their physical and mental well-being to it. The Wrestler staples himself and batters himself to entertain, just as Nina breaks her toes and punishes her body. The Wrestler and Nina may be extreme examples of self-destruction, but they hint at the systematic physical abuse that their professions entail. That's why Aronofsky's shooting style is so perfect. By taking the cameras on-stage, by using tracking shots that immerse us in their worlds, Aronofsky is making us look behind the costumes to see the grueling physicality. He wants us to see the sweat, the muscles, the bleeding toes and the broken bones. 

In a sense, Aronofsky is making a bigger point about the demands the entertainment industries make of its professionals, begging the obvious question of how far this applies to his profession, with its pressure to maintain youthful good looks with botox, plastic surgery and aggressive dieting. To that end, one can only view the casting of Mickey Rourke in THE WRESTLER and Barbara Hershey in BLACK SWAN - both self-mutilated by plastic surgery and injury - as provocations. By casting these actors, Aronofsky is himself blurring the line between actor and character - just as Nina can't separate reality from fiction. Similarly, the use of Winona Ryder to play the prima ballerina Nina supplants is inspired. Ryder was a beautiful young actress whose early success morphed into career stagnation and personal humiliation.  Who else better signifies crushing rejection in reality and on screen?

Still, for all the similarity in material, and in the vérité shooting style used in the apartment scenes, to my mind BLACK SWAN is at once a greater and lesser film than THE WRESTLER. It is a greater film insofar as it shows Aronofsky and DP Matthew Libatique in perfect command of vérité shooting style but also able to inter-cut this with its exact opposite - a super-heightened gothic horror shotting style using chiaroscuro and close-ups. It also shows that Aronofsky can do genre cinema with the best of them. But BLACK SWAN is a lesser film insofar as that willingness to leap into melodramatic horror is ultimately a distancing device. Nina Sayers is such a compendium of crazy - under such extreme pressure - that she becomes a device rather than a person. Accordingly, as the film moves into its final act, it is beautiful but it isn't emotionally arresting. Nina's self-destructive tailspin is transfixing, wonderful, crazy and all-consuming - but it never made me feel the visceral hurt that The Wrestler did. That is BLACK SWAN's only flaw - but it is a serious one.

BLACK SWAN played Venice, Telluride, Toronto and London 2010. It opened last year in the US and Canada. It opens this Friday in the UK, Australia, Denmark, Germany, Ireland and Poland. It opens on the 27th in Chile, Greece, Slovenia and Lithuania, It opens on February 4th in the Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil, Iceland and Norway. It opens in France, Singapore and Mexico on February 10th. It opens on February 17th in Argentina, Hungary, Israel, Russia, Estonia and Spain. It opens on February 24th in Belgium, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Finland and Turkey. It opens in Sweden on March 4th, Italy on March 11th and the Czech Republic on April 7th.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE is a movie that is utterly, wretchedly disappointing. Despite an all-star cast, and handsome production values, the resulting film is uneven in tone, superficial where it wants to be profound, and undeserving of the big emotional punches it tries to pull.

The film was written and directed by Rebecca Miller(THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE), based on her own play. It features the eponymous Pippa Lee (Robin Wright Penn) as a middle-aged woman, questioning her life choices through a series of flashbacks. Despite her picture perfect middle-aged existence, we learn that, as a young girl, Pippa was damaged by her exposure to her mother's addiction to speed and resulting psychological problems. The young Pippa (Blake Lively) thus high-tails it to New York where she almost falls into become a soft-porn model for her aunt's girlfriend (Julianne Moore) out of sheer boredom, develops a drug habit of her own, but then is rescued by an older man (Alan Arkin.) Fast forward to her present day crisis, and Pippa is living with her aged husband in a retirement community. She is insulted by his affair with a damaged even younger woman (Winona Ryder) and so trips into an affair of her own with an equally damaged young man (Keanu Reeves).

As I said, this is a well-cast film, and handsomely photographed. I have no doubt that Miller is trying to earnestly explore middle-aged feminine angst and to say something profound about self-esteem and addiction. The problem is that none of it seems real. It all seems like a very stage-y very contrived set of scenes, clumsily shuffled into a movie. At times it almost seems like a caricature of one of those Woody Allen films, except without the wry humour, where old men seem to be able to attract ever younger more attractive women and everyone spends the whole time discussing their neuroses and committing suicide.

Enough already.

THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE was released last autumn and is available on DVD and on iTunes.

STAR TREK - deus ex singularity

I am not a sci-fi fan. I've never seen an episode of Star Trek in any of its guises. I only watched the new Battlestar Galactica because Melvin and Sam convinced me that it wasn't, in fact, sci-fi but a consideration of US politics post 9-11. In fairness, I did get pretty addicted to BSG up until season 4 when it transpired that, not only Ronald D Moore NOT have a plan, he also had NO respect for his viewers. So my brief dalliance with sci-fi was over.

Still, I approached J J Abrams re-boot of STAR TREK with curiosity and an open-mind. He did a good job injecting the MISSION IMPOSSIBLE franchise with some emotional heft, and allowed us all to vicariously get off on Philip Seymour Hoffman beating the crap out of Tom Cruise. Moreover, much of the team from MI-3 were reunited on STAR TREK - not least writing duo Kurzman/Orci and cinematographer Daniel Mindel.

Imagine then, my horror, when a few minutes into this new flick, I'm greeted with a rip-off of one of the worst scenes from the new Star Wars trilogy - James T Kirk's mother screaming through childbirth as her heroic (read: unemotive, square-jawed, blonde) husband suicide bombs into the nasty Romulan ship so that his crew can escape. I had traumatic flashbacks to the Natalie Portman birth scene.

Fast forward through Kirk and Spock's childhood (Kirk an enfant terrible a la Dubya; Spock a half-human, half-Vulcan misfit) and we end up with Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quino), Sulu (John Cho), Uhura (Zoe Soldana) and Bones (Karl Urban) aboard the brand new Enterprise and on their way to aid Vulcan. Kirk doesn't inspire me with much confidence. He runs round the ship like a five-year old who's eaten too many E-numbers. And seriously? Would Starfleet really staff up a ship with 17 year olds? Maybe I'm just taking this too seriously, but it's these sort of crazy details that pulled me out of the film.

Now the one thing I had always liked about the concept of STAR TREK was its liberal, pioneering political message and racial inclusiveness. So I was particularly keen to see how the new movie pushed forward the envelope. Would they have an Indian officer? More woman? An openly gay crew member? Nope, they stayed true to the original. Indeed, I was particularly dismayed to see the only female crewmember strip down to her bra and knickers within the first half hour of the flick - a crass and unnecessary move only partly mitigated by the fact that she ends up with the brainy Vulcan rather than the brawny Kirk.

Next up, the Enterprise realises that Vulcan is actually being attacked by aforementioned Romulans; there's some fighting that hints at light-sabers; Kirk is ejected off the ship onto a planet that looks suspiciously like Hoth; and the movie totally jumps the shark. As soon as it became clear that time-travel was going to play a major part in the flick, I was lost. It has always struck me that the ramifications of time-travel are too mind-bendingly complex and insane to grapple with in a movie, and that screen-writers tend to use it (as with religion in BSG) as a lazy, unsatisfying deus-ex-machina, or rather deus-ex-singularity.

The plot unwinds with lots of technically superb action shots; a good comedy turn from Simon Pegg as Scotty (despite an unnecessary Willy Wonka rip-off); and the only really engaging and convincing performance from Zachary Quino as Spock.

Overall, I just didn't see what all the fuss was about. The movie was well-made but unconvincing. It's hard to get too excited about fight scenes when you know that all the main characters are going to survive. And I was utterly unconvinced by Chris Pine's Kirk as the hero of a new movie franchise. Still, it's taken shed-loads of phat cash, and the fanboys seem happy, so I guess these actors are made for life.

STAR TREK is on global release.

A SCANNER DARKLY - very funny, less profound

A SCANNER DARKLY is a new film from director Richard Linklater. To my mind, Linklater yo-yos as a director. DAZED AND CONFUSED and BEFORE SUNRISE & SUNSET are some of my favourite films, but BAD NEWS BEARS was one of the worst films I saw in 2005. A SCANNER DARKLY is a bit of a mixed bag.

It's based on a story by acclaimed sci-fi writer, Philip K. Dick, and, according to Doctor007, Linklater has managed the rare feat of adapting a Philip K Dick novel well. (I wouldn't know, as I haven't read the book upon which the movie is based.) At any rate, the movie is based in the near-future. California looks pretty much like it does now, just moreso. Government surveillance of its citizens is extreme and explicit and civil liberties have been eroded. Twenty percent of the population is addicted to a class A drug called Substance D and the Government is subservient to big pharma in the form of a company called "New Path" which may be peddling the drug as well as the cure. The only out-and-out neato sci-fi gadget is the "scramble-suit". This is basically an all-over body-suit that projects an ever-shifting array of faces and clothes to other people, totally disguising your identity.

In this world, we hang out with a bunch of junkies, played by Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Junior, Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves. Philip K Dick and Downey Junior clearly know whereof they speak and the resulting script and delivery is absolutely hysterical. The drug-fuelled paranoia and doped-out logic of the dialogue made me laugh so much I cried.

But the book and the movie are clearly not just there for laughs. There is serious matter to be considered. The role of the Government and Big Pharma in our lives; the severe medical damage caused by heavy drug use; the difficulty of keeping hold of your identity when you are an under-cover agent. I feel that Linklater is a lot less successful at getting a handle on the serious stuff, perhaps just because the laughs are so good and come so often that the thriller part of the plot is obscured. At any rate, Philip K. Dick's lament for his friends who died from drug over-doses at the end of the movie came as a hard slap to the face. It made me question whether I had missed something in what had preceeded it.

Anyways, despite that slight mis-step, A SCANNER DARKLY is still definitely worth checking out because it IS really funny and secondly it just looks so damn cool. The movie was shot on digital film and then, using a technique called roto-scoping, animaters sort of traced over the film images, colouring them and distorting them where necessary. What you get is a sort-of other-wordly feel. The characters all look like the actors but seem somehow at a distance. It's like watching a really well-made live-action comic. Awesome.

A SCANNER DARKLY premiered out of competition at Cannes 2006 and went on limited release in the US in July. It is currently on release in Brazil and the UK. It opens in Portugal and Australia in September and in Italy, Japan and Spain in October.