Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Thelma and Maurice and I are in cinemas and Rebel Ridge is on Netflix
Greetings to new subscribers. On most weekdays, I recommend one film or tv show either from the archive, or something recently watched. On Mondays, I try and cover as many brand new releases as I can, as I used to do back when I was reviewing for Wellington’s alt-weekly Capital Times.
Tim Burton made Beetlejuice in 1988 when he was roughly 30 years old. Not a young man, as such, but as it was only his second feature film, it had plenty of that youthful, experimental, reckless energy. That pizzazz has slowly drained out of Burton, so much so that the last ten or twelve years of his work have been inessential to say the least. Tired.
He is 66 now and by returning to Beetlejuice and the Deetz family after all these years he seems to have got some of that mojo back. There’s a spring in his directorial step. He’s giving himself a bit of extra permission to let his imaginative freak fly once again. Or rather, he’s given his collaborators permission – everyone seems on top weird form, not least Colleen Atwood, the costume designer.
There are two parallel and semi-convergent storylines in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. In the first, below ground, Michael Keaton’s wisecracking green-haired demon is being pursued by his ex-wife (Monica Belluci), a ‘soul sucker’ who is determined to get what was promised to her on their wedding night centuries earlier.
Above ground, Lydia Deetz (Wynona Ryder), object of his affection in the earlier film, now parlays her ability to see ghosts into an exploitative paranormal investigation tv show, her mother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) is a wacky and self-involved artist and her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) is a cynical teen, embarrassed by the entire family.
These storylines eventually converge in a wild wedding sequence in which everyone concerned seeks to have their cake and eat it – or at least leave their cake out in the rain and then eat it.
I feel like this is a couple of drafts short of being truly satisfying but I did enjoy the physical craft on display – the puppetry, make-up effects and set dressing are all first rate.
More successful – at least more well-rounded – is Josh Margolin’s debut feature, Thelma, in which 94-year-old June Squibb (Nebraska) plays a widow who decides to take the law into her own hands after she is scammed by some reprobates.
Needing help getting across town to the PO box where she sent the money, she enlists the help of Ben (Richard Roundtree) from the local retirement village because he has a souped-up mobility scooter. For a while it becomes an LA road movie as they slowly make their way across town, ineptly pursued by her daughter (Parker Posey), son-in-law (Clark Gregg) and sympathetic stoner grandson Danny (Fred Hechsinger).
Based on the marketing, I was expecting it to have more action but in fact it’s a sweet and sensitive story about trying to balance the two competitive aspects of getting old – ‘denial’ in which we are determined to not go gently into that good night and ‘acceptance’ where we learn to live with our diminished capacities in the hope we can eke out another few trips around the sun. Thelma makes a strong case for both.
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Getting old is definitely not for sissies, as the saying goes, and that’s made clear by the presence of two of the most beautiful movie stars of the 20th century – Shaft’s Richard Roundtree and British star Malcolm McDowell – one of whom is desperate to get back to his retirement home in order to play Daddy Warbucks in an unlikely production of Annie and the other plugged into an oxygen cylinder and dependant on a gormless teen for internet skills.
Returning to local cinemas on general release after a successful run in the Architecture & Design Film Festival (and a lengthy local season in Christchurch), Maurice and I is a terrific documentary.
I wrote about it for RNZ when I previewed the festival:
Another film I really want to see made is about the hijacking of the Christchurch earthquake rebuild by central government and their donor class, all in the name of ‘certainty’ and ‘speed’. The Key government decided that their hundred-day plan was more important than effective community consultation and socially or environmentally sensitive solutions. Sound familiar?
Anyway, that thought came up during the Maurice and I by Rick Harvie and Jane Mahoney, receiving its world premiere in the festival, a film that starts as a celebration of two enormously successful twentieth century New Zealand architects but then morphs, thanks to the 2011 earthquake, into a film about heritage and priorities.
Sir Miles Warren and Maurice Mahoney were yin and yang (or chalk and cheese). Warren was the gregarious visionary and Mahoney was the taciturn draftsman with the meticulous attention to detail. Between them, they gave every client confidence that they were getting something beautiful – in mid-century modern terms – and also functional and effective.
If painted concrete block can truly be described as ‘beautiful’ then Warren and Mahoney beautified New Zealand. It was the 1972 Christchurch Town Hall project that made their name internationally. They had the help of genius acoustician Harold Marshall and the film certainly gives him his due.
The post ’quake section of the film is where the really gets a head of steam up, following the campaign against the government’s decision to demolish the Town Hall – and many other repairable buildings – in favour of a new masterplan of ‘precincts’.
There’s one sequence that all of New Zealand needs to see, of earthquake rubble being trucked out to the Canterbury countryside to be dumped into landfill, with an oblivious city seen in the distance.
On the surface, the small Louisiana town of Shelby Springs seems like a nice place to visit. Picture postcard courthouse on one side of the square, classic American diner on the other. But, like many localities in the US, Shelby Springs is too small to pay its own way. They can’t raise enough taxes to even run a small police department but the Chief – Don Johnson – has a plan.
If he shakes down every stranger who passes through carrying any cash – using the barely legal civil forfeiture rules that allow him to confiscate anything he and his team can argue is suspect – he can continue to pursue his own particular brand of law enforcement and Shelby Springs won’t be absorbed into one of the larger local municipalities.
I quite like the fact that the old cliché of a corrupt small town cop is actually grounded in some real world motivations for once, but that’s all about to change when his goons confiscate $36,000 of cash from the wrong guy. Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) is a former Marine who is desperate to get to town and bail his cousin out from a misdemeanour weed possession that might see him – thanks to several of screenwriter Jeremy Saulnier’s plot contrivances that make more sense when propelled by director and editor Jeremy Saulnier’s energetic visual filmmaking – held in Federal prison where he would be at considerable personal risk.
Richmond soon finds himself almost out of options – as he puts it, Primary, Alternative, Contingency are all gone so he’s left with Emergency – and forced to engage with a well-armed and motivated constabulary.
Rebel Ridge is very effective, ticking clocks and deadlines are everywhere, and it includes a great example of one of those shots where the dialogue ends just as a fully loaded goods train goes past. Great timing everywhere.
Discovering that Aaron Pierre is an English actor – trained at LAMDA, no less – was almost as big a surprise as when I saw Idris Elba in The Wire. This has to be a star making performance and it looks as if Hollywood is way ahead of me there.
