Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

 A sequel that's been stuck in development hell for thirty-six years, from a director who hasn't made anything good in the last two decades and a half.

 There's nothing left of the original scripts for the sequel commissioned as soon as the first movie was deemed a success - the one that came closest to being made would have sent the Deetz family and Beetlejuice over to Hawaii. Instead, we get one written by geek goofball Seth Grahame-Smith, and heavily rewritten by Miles Millar and Alfred Gough. The final screenplay is... well, it's fucking dire, story-wise; A shambling, muddled mess of trite plot points, dropped threads and unnecessary characters.

 But. And this is a big but, I cannot lie: none of that matters, because it's funny and energetic.

 Lydia Deetz (Wynona Ryder) has grown into a bit of a mess, a minor celebrity cashing in on her minor medium powers to host a chintzy paranormal show on TV. She's fallen under the spell of Rory (Justin Theroux), a sleazy TV producer who's always looking for an angle, and has an estranged daughter - Astrid (Jenna Ortega) who detests both of them.

 The plot (we need to call it something) kicks in when Lydia's mom (Catherine O'Hara) informs everyone that the patriarch of the family has passed away (in a hilarious claymation plane crash/shark attack). So the whole family converges on the old family house, where that old wascally demon Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) awaits, chased by a ghost of his own - an old soul-sucking flame played by Monica Bellucci who, for all she gets to do, ends up being more of a live-action visual reference to Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas than anything else.

 It's a very busy plot which seems to hold most of its threads in contempt, judging by the way it resolves them in the laziest manner possible. I wish I could say that's because it's just there as a joke-delivering mechanism (AKA the ZAZ defence), but it often slows down and tries to deliver more conventional narrative goods as well; Try being the operative word here. There's a whole thing with Lydia's old husband (Santiago Cabrera), for one, and Astrid falling for a local boy (Arthur Conti). Both elements are extremely clichéd, feel forced, and are resolved in deeply unsatisfying ways.
 In any case - even if it was all about the jokes, that's still no excuse; there's been plenty of comedies goofier than this that have managed to deliver a decent story. Hell, this film is a direct sequel to one of them.

 So that's the bad. Luckily, aside from that, everyone - from director Tim Burton down to the actors, the set designers, and the people behind the wonderfully tactile special effects - is, well, completely there. Everyone just seems to be having a huge amount of fun, and it's infectious as hell. This is a huge deal for Burton, especially, as he'd spent the twenty-first century as a shadow of his former self.

 All the actors are great and obviously having a blast. Ryder is likeable as ever, O'Hara is hilarious, and new additions Ortega and Conti do wonders with fairly shitty characters and a cookie-cutter puppy love subplot.  And Keaton... well, he's a fucking national treasure, so it's no surprise how good he is.
 New characters like Father Damien* (Burn Gorman, hilarious) and especially Willem Dafoe's action-star-turned-ghost-detective probably shouldn't have as much screen time - and they wouldn't, if the movie was better written... but Dafoe in particular is having such a great time (and his character is so funny) that I can all but see Burton telling his editors "eh, screw it, leave everything in." I'm glad they did.

 The special effects favour practical over digital and are full of charm. A lot of it doesn't make sense - why does Beetlejuice preside a room-full of office drones with shrunken heads? Well, it's a callback, sure, but more importantly: they look hilarious. The underworld still has more than a hint of the surreal, and things are kept playfully gory, with comedy blood squirts deployed strategically throughout the movie. Danny Elfman returns to score; The soundtrack didn't bowl me over, but it sure is Beetlejuicy. The needle drops fare a little better - Sigur Ross for some vintage indie cred, and a gloriously campy pop standard that everyone is forced to lip sync to at the end. Turns out old Beets has just as terrible a taste in music as you'd expect.
 Don't expect much in the way of new cool concepts - the movie's biggest metaphysical expansion, The Soul Train, is a ridiculously obvious joke, but goofy enough to cause an amiable groan. The film is more about small, bite-sized gags and ideas tactically spread out all over the place.

 It is so good to have Burton back, fully engaged. This is probably closer to Mars Attacks than anything else in his filmography - the 'fuck it let's just have fun' vibe is strong in this one. And that is beyond fine.

*: I chose to believe he's a descendant of his In a Valley of Violence's priest, which enhanced his (already very funny) character for me by several magnitudes.

The Flash

  I don't really care that much for superhero stories. I've hated pretty much every comic-book event/crossover/franchise-flex film made thus far, except maybe Far From Home. The less said of the director's previous movie, It 2, the better.
 By all rights I should hate The Flash. And yet, and yet... I don't. Color me surprised, but it's a pretty fun movie.

 Maybe it's those contrarian reflexes kicking in; I don't really pay much attention to film twitter or any of the other online outrage echo chambers, but I get the sense that this film got a bit of hate from fans and critics; and it was a notorious box-office flop.
 However, I lean towards it just being a likeable film. And I never could take superheroes seriously, so the film's major stoner comedy vibes resonated with me a lot better than most of these things do.

 In any case. The Flash is heavily embedded within Zack Snyder's take on DC continuity; It picks up after the events of Justice League, and hinges on plot points from the 2013 Superman movie.
 You don't need to have seen any of those films - My son hadn't, and he liked the movie just fine - but you might at least want to read up a little.
 And yeah, having to include these sort of caveats are part of why I hate this shit. At least it's easier to stomach when it's just a couple of movies and not a bunch of them plus a streaming-service-exclusive series.

 Barry Allen (Ezra Miller, who's been the target of some pretty troubling allegations) is The Flash, and plays him as a sort of motormouth smart-ass; Think Peter Parker. He's tapped at the beginning of the movie by Alfred (Jeremy Irons), Batman's butler, to help Batman (Ben Affleck) with an operation that's gone awry; a hospital is falling apart, and people need to be saved. You know, standard Super Friends stuff.
 And that's where the film's overtly goofy sensibilities kick into overdrive (where they remain for most of the runtime). Allen strikes a cool pose, ready to set out, the music swells, the titles card starts to form... and then a bunch of kids interrupt him. Music goes off, the title slinks off, defeated.
 I mean, it's not like it hasn't been done before, but it's a bigger commitment to the humor side of things than the smart-alecky banter that usually takes the place of jokes and punchlines in most of these films. When things get going and the film's first action sequence breaks out, it's an over-the top, extremely ridiculous scene where half a dozen babies, a nurse and a cute dog get thrown out of a high-rise; the whole thing owes more to Looney Tunes than any sort of comic book escapade.

 On his way back (and after a pretty funny encounter with Batman and Wonder Woman) Barry discovers that he can run fast enough to go back in time. So he gets the notion to use his new-found power to save his murdered-when-he-was-a-child-mom. What could possibly go wrong?

 Soon Barry is stuck on a different timeline completely. Because of the similarities to Far From Home and stuff like that, this movie seems to have been lumped in with the glut of multiverse movies Marvel seems to favour lately, but it's actually more of a straightforward time travel yarn (complete with multiple references to Back to the Future), with the twist that when Barry change something, he doesn't just create a branching timeline; He jumps to a completely new one.

 ...One that already has its own version of Barry Allen, one who grew up with a full family and is a complete, over-the-top goofy idiot. So for most of the movie you get the two versions of the protagonist quibbling and riffing off each other. I thought Miller was really good at this: he's pretty funny in both roles, makes them fairly distinct, and even manages to give some personality and a smidge of pathos to the overtly cartoony stoner persona.
 That's not the only difference from his reality. It turns out that there are no superheroes in this version of events, except for Batman... who's played by Michael Keaton, and brings with him the vehicles, suits, and Danny Elfman theme from his movies. Keaton is great as usual, but I wouldn't take this as a huge selling point - he's only a guest here in Barry's story, a passenger. The rest of the film in no way, shape or form takes any cues from Tim Burton's Batman duology, leaving the character as a really odd fit in all the overtly modern action movie sequences.
 And finally, it all takes place during the events of 2013's Superman, with General Zod laying a siege to Earth. Except that... no Superman. So the Barrys and Batman need to step up.

 The movie is, and there's no other way to put it, extremely messy, mostly owing to a sort of late-stage superhero movie shapelessness that seems to come with the genre (and many other blockbusters) these days. The film is as well paced as it could possibly be given all its disparate mandates, but a lot of the plot points are glossed over and there are more than a few, shall we say, stupid moments. The script (by Christina Hodson, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein) also writes itself into several corners by the third act, resulting in a very bleak, strange message for a blockbuster movie - I actually appreciated that! But, like on No Way Home, it comes with a whole lot of problems as it glibly elides delving into many of its practicalities and consequences. Not to mention that it clashes badly with the tone of the movie. It's solution? Just... don't think about that, here's a bunch of goofy jokes. Look! His tooth fell off, hahaha.

 It does, however, have a very powerful emotional payoff, and a decent amount of clever twists. The fact that it constantly finds ways to puncture any gravitas it develops may irk the people who turned on Thor 4, but I'm all for this sort of thing in superhero films.
 The action has some decent beats and ideas, but it's of the entirely artificial variety where almost everything is very obviously an effect against a green screen. There's some cool imagery and a couple of badass moments (loved Zod simply going through a helicopter to get at his enemy), and the spectacle is above average once you get used to how it looks, but nothing to write home about.

 Director Andy Muschietti is a huge proponent of quantity over quality in his CGI, so there is a lot of iffy-looking animation here. The visuals for the Chronobowl, the way the Flash visualizes time-travelling, are the worst offenders by far... But to be honest, it's so stylized that it's got to be a conscious decision. A shitty aesthetic choice, but an aesthetic choice nonetheless.
 I'm less of a fan of the rubbery, synthetic look of most of the action, starting with the cheesy way the movie visualizes the flash's warp speed running, and encompassing all of the fights - but you know what? It fits well with the movie's live-action cartoon tone. It didn't bother me that much, and after a while I got used to  the  artificiality of it.

 So... yeah. I honestly enjoyed it, warts and all; It's an overtly silly movie, but that's fine: it's a silly genre.