Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is once again directed by Tim Burton and stars Michael Keaton returning as this iconic character and it's coming out 36 years after the first one. So after a family tragedy three generations of the Dietz family returned to Winter River. Still haunted by Beetlejuice, Lydia's life is turned upside down when her teenage daughter Astrid accidentally opens the portal to the afterlife. Whenever these sequels come out, like decades after the first one that everyone loves, nobody ever likes it as much as the first one because they were shown the first one in their crib, and they've seen it 3,000 times, and they watched it with a family member who no longer is alive, and they have memories about that, core memories that have influenced their entire life. And these people are never going to like a brand new movie that they just saw for the very first time in a theater filled with other people.
more than that first movie. It's just not going to happen. It never happens. Maybe it does every once in a while, like that movie, but it's rare.
When I say never, I mean mostly never, which is why I think I'm a good person to be talking to you about this movie, because I've only seen Beetlejuice twice. I was not allowed to watch it when I was a kid because of the way I was raised, so I saw it for the first time in my 20s and again like a couple days ago. So I don't have nostalgia for that movie, although I deeply enjoyed it and thought it was extremely fun, and Michael Keaton, of course, is awesome as that character, but my favorite character in the first movie was actually Wynonna Ryder's Lydia Dietz. She felt like a personification of how I felt as a kid and sometimes still feel as an adult, so I really like seeing her return in this movie because she has all of that still, clearly likes the same look, but she's also running a paranormal ghost hunting show. Which seems like the modern-day equivalent of exactly what Lydia Dietz would be doing.
Having seen the trailers for this movie, which really didn't do anything for me, I have to say this movie was much better than I thought it was going to be. Especially in the amount of screen time that Beetlejuice actually has. One of the things that shocked me the most when I saw the first movie, again, like I said for the first time as an adult, was just how little Beetlejuice is actually in the film. The title character is only in the movie for a brief period.
and he doesn't even really show up until something like after 45 minutes into the film. Obviously a temptation with a sequel, when you know you have a character that people love and have loved for like 30 years, is to give you more of that character. This movie has maybe a few more minutes of screen time for Beetlejuice compared to the first. It's really well balanced and his appearances liven things up considerably.
Wynonna Ryder is great once again. I loved seeing her back in this role. But I also really liked the no longer antagonistic relationship with Catherine O'Hara's character, who of course is the cliche artist who other artists are actually terrified of encountering because she's a miserable person.
But Lydia also has a daughter now, played by Jenna Ortega, and their relationship is very strained because she doesn't believe in the paranormal, and obviously her mom is this legend of the paranormal, and that makes things difficult. This is already a lot of characters, and it's enough characters, I think, but there's still some stuff going on. Justin Theroux plays a manager of Wynonna Ryder's character who really likes her, but also would like to be further into her life, and he's very creepy and off-putting, purposefully, in the role.
You've also got Willem Dafoe in the afterlife, and I won't spoil what he's doing because I think a lot of the fun is in the discovery of it, but what he was in real life is impacting what he's doing in the afterlife. And it brought me a lot of laughs. Monica Bellucci is in the film, and she has an incredible character introduction.
Genuinely brought this gigantic smile to my face, and I was so excited about what she was going to do in the film, which brings me into a few things I want to talk about. The high of her introduction sustained me for a while, but eventually, as she began to do less and less for the narrative, I realized that she just wasn't really going to be that much of an important part of the story, and that was a little disappointing. This is really the one thing of Beetlejuice 2 that I would pinpoint, is that there are an overabundance of characters, and all of them are focused on for a considerable amount of time.
That being said, when you look back on the whole movie, all of them lead to this specific thing that has to happen, and I thought that it worked really nicely. It's just that while you're watching a lot of these characters, inevitably, some of their storylines become more interesting than others, and you want to get back... to the more interesting storylines when you're stuck with some of the other people that aren't as fun. But Beetlejuice 2 is a great looking movie with impeccable production design, makeup, costumes, and animatronic effects and puppets. Things that I did not think would be in this movie.
I was really scared it was going to be filled with a lot of very noticeable... CGI, I think it's handled wonderfully. There are so many great dead people in the afterlife sections of the movie that are very unique and you can look at them and you know exactly how they died. Just like the first one, it has that same creative energy in all of that. And even things that are CGI for sure, you can tell that they have tried to make it look like stop motion, like in the original 88 film.
And with the movie taking place around Halloween, the whole look of the movie the set design, production design, all of it just made me very excited about spooky season. And that kind of thing is always going to sit right with me. So it didn't fall into that decades later sequel trap of having whatever character we like so much have way more screen time.
It was very careful with that. And this also in no way felt like a retread of the original, obviously. It's not about a family discovering that they're dead and then trying to figure out how to scare people out of their house.
It feels so much bigger than that. It feels like they've really explored the afterlife way more than they did in the first film. This movie is not going to please everyone, because as I said in the start of this video, it's not the thing you watched when you were five.
Like, there are going to be people who watch this right now, when they're like five or six, and we'll see how they feel about it in 30 years. I think we've seen that a lot recently, with a lot of films that people didn't love in the 90s and 2000s getting this burst of new love. because people who were kids when they came out aren't kids anymore.
I think Beetlejuice 2 is everything that I enjoy about that first film with a bigger world and more characters. It's not quite as focused as that first movie. It feels maybe a tad too big, like there's just a bit of an overabundance of characters and storylines, but it does all come together in the end, and it worked for me considerably.
So I'll be very curious to see what you guys think of the film. Thank you so much, as always, for watching. Look forward to more videos very soon.
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