Posts Tagged ‘Winona Ryder’

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: 2024

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Arthur Conti, Santiago Cabrera, Danny deVito, Willem Dafoe

Running Time: 1 hour 44 minutes

Film Rating: 6.5 out of 10

To make a sequel 36 years after the original film is always a risk. Tom Cruise pulled it off but Michael Keaton doesn’t.  

In this case, director Tim Burton returns to direct Beetlejuice: 2024 with Michael Keaton returning as the pesky phantom Beetlejuice along with Oscar nominee Winona Ryder (The Age of Innocence) as Lydia Deetz and Catherine O’Hara as the hilarious Delia.

Beetlejuice 2024 is a simulacrum of all previous Gothic fantasy films laced with dark humour and serves as a fitting tribute to the highly successful Addams Family films.

When Lydia’s teenage daughter Astrid, superbly played by rising star Jenny Ortega gets taken to the underworld by a mysteriously creepy young man, Lydia has to summon up the crazy Beetlejuice to enlist his help in tracking her down before she boards the soul train, with the last stop being the Pearly Gates.

Meanwhile down in the underworld, Beetlejuice’s crazy ex-wife Delores wildly played by Italian actress Monica Bellucci (Spectre) in a role which pays tribute to Anjelica Huston, is a member of a soul sucking death cult and is out to exact revenge and plans to kill Beetlejuice.

Oscar nominee Michael Keaton (Birdman) must have been offered a substantial sum to return as Beetlejuice yet one thinks it was more a cinematic opportunity to reunite with Tim Burton who directed Keaton in the original Batman film way back when Jack Nicholson played the Joker in 1989. To put that in perspective it was when I was a teenager.

Filled with lots of 1980’s nuances and some fantastic scenes including the Soul Train dance number, Beetlejuice 2024 starts off really promising with some great supporting actors including Justin Theroux (The Girl on the Train) as Lydia’s slimy producer fiancée Rory and Catherine O’Hara making the most of her recent fame as Moira Rose in Schitt’s Creek as she reprises the role of the eccentric Delia. Soon Beetlejuice turns literally into a nightmare trip of pastiche and unoriginality as Tim Burton rips off recent films like Dune while paying homage to older more memorable films like Psycho and Rosemary’s Baby.

Unfortunately, the story of Beetlejuice 2024 is chaotic nonsense and despite the odd laugh and garish ghoul, the film comes off as a desperate attempt to reclaim the original success of the 1988 version.

While the makeup is brilliant, the storyline gets derailed by some truly bizarre dream sequences which feature a mash up of A Nightmare Before Christmas and Addams Family Values.

The idea was there, but the execution failed in every sense, except for Monica Bellucci and Jenna Ortega the rest of the cast did not look happy to reprise their roles which should have stayed buried at the end of the 1980’s.

Sometimes the original film is enough without having to make a sequel so long afterwards. For all its craziness, Beetlejuice 2024 failed to impress and gets a film rating of 6.5 out of 10. Infantile and slightly inane.

Black Swan

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Cast: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey, Vincent Cassel, Winona Ryder, Sebastian Stan, Patrick Heusinger

Darren Aronofsky’s masterpiece is a taut psychological thriller about a prima ballerina who delves into her dark side, so she can perform the complex role of the Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.  Natalie Portman gives a stunning and frenzied performance as Nina Sayers. As well as the physical demands of playing the lead Ballerina in Swan Lake, Nina is trapped in a claustrophobic and co-dependent relationship with her mother, a wonderfully obsessive performance by Barbara Hershey (Portrait of a Lady).

Whilst rehearsing for the final act, the ballet master a seductive and sadistic Thomas played with relish by Vincent Cassel, taunts Nina and reproaches her continually for not bringing out her dark qualities to dance the antithesis of the White Swan, the Black Swan. The fact that Nina is prone to episodes of self-mutilation smothered by her overbearing mother and is generally an exceptional sexually frustrated and fragile young woman who uses dancing to quench her repressive state, makes Black Swan a highly intoxicating psycho sexual thriller set in the bitchy and uncompromising world of ballet.

Aronofsky always has his central characters stripped away to the vicious core, from The Wrestler, where in a break-out performance by Mickey Rourke as a washed up Trailer Park, drug-addicted wrestler angling for a comeback to heroin addicts played by Jennifer Connelly and Jared Leto in Coney Island, who resort to extreme methods for their drugs, as detailed in the inventive and shockingly brutal Requiem for a Dream.

Black Swan is no exception, as Portman gives a ground breaking performance of a Ballerina rapidly losing her grip on reality, delving deeper into her own troubled and shattered psychosis to satisfy the dreams of an obsessed mother who compromised her own stage success.

Black Swan is about the rigours of Ballet training along with the mental deterioration of a young woman driven beyond the edge of sanity, surrounded by a gallery of heinous characters from an overbearing mother, a cruel ballet instructor and a tempting rival, Lily played with an unforgiving relish by Milas Kunis slyly plotting to derail Nina’s debut as the Swan Queen.

This is a classic psychological thriller, from the drab and daunting world of the dance studios, filled with giant mirrors reflecting Nina’s inner torment to the dingy apartment shared with her mother, an entire film bathed in black and white with only the occasional gashes of blood to break the diametric colour palette. Watch out for a great cameo performance by Winona Ryder as the broken ballerina Beth who declines as savagely as Nina’s star rises dramatically. Black Swan is a debut etched in blood and director Aronofsky, like in The Wrestler and Requiem for Dream shows this grueling Ballet world in its entire stripped down depravity, with obsessive dancers driven and searching for a depreciating gratification. A far cry from the graceful triumph associated with Ballet exemplified in such films as The Company and Mao’s Last Dancer.