Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”, Yawn, Shrug

Greil Mar­cus, famous­ly, lament­ed that no one had so ful­ly betrayed their innate tal­ent as enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly as Rod Stew­art. No doubt Stew­art will be rais­ing an eye­brow at this, as his lat­est para­mour wraps her legs around his neck in whichev­er of his coun­try estates they are cur­rent­ly reclin­ing in. But it’s hard not to view Tim Bur­ton as his cin­e­mat­ic equivalent.

Because for all their mate­r­i­al suc­cess, they must both know, at some lev­el, that it was nev­er meant to have been about the money.

Burton’s prodi­gious raw tal­ent was imme­di­ate­ly spot­ted and very quick­ly he was able to direct his first fea­ture, Pee-wee’s Big Adven­ture, in 1985 at the age of 27. And over the next ten years, he made Beetle­juice (‘88), Bat­man (’89), Edward Scis­sorhands (’90), Bat­man Returns (’92) and Ed Wood (’94). 

Which looked like he’d struck that ide­al com­bi­na­tion of doing one for the stu­dio, fol­lowed by one of his more per­son­al projects. The stu­dio pic­tures man­aged to make mon­ey while still bear­ing his very par­tic­u­lar per­son­al stamp, and allowed the stu­dio to jus­ti­fy fund­ing the more idio­syn­crat­ic fare that Bur­ton was clear­ly more inter­est­ed in. 

But in the 30 years since mak­ing Ed Wood, Bur­ton has made around a dozen oth­er films most of which are nei­ther one nor the oth­er. Some of them look like they start­ed out as per­son­al pet projects, but quick­ly grew to become bloat­ed stu­dio pic­tures. Oth­ers were clear­ly designed to fund what came in between. 

None of them are bad films. Burton’s not capa­ble of mak­ing a bad film. They’re just not ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing. And now this, the so say long await­ed sequel to Beetle­juice

If you were try­ing to be char­i­ta­ble, I sup­pose you could say, isn’t it great to see all that tal­ent up on screen? Willem Defoe, Jen­na Orte­ga, Justin Ther­oux and Mon­i­ca Bel­luc­ci join Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder and Cather­ine O’Hara from the orig­i­nal. But it’s hard not to con­clude, what a shame they weren’t giv­en a bit more to get their teeth stuck into.

I hope they all enjoyed the expe­ri­ence of the shoot and were suit­ably com­pen­sat­ed for their time. And the stu­dio put a huge amount of heft into their mar­ket­ing efforts, so hope­ful­ly they’ve recov­ered their invest­ment and won’t feel the need to blame any­one for the film that resulted. 

But it’s hard not to be a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ed that Burton’s best film, Bat­man Returns, turns out to have been one of the stu­dio films that were sup­posed to have been fund­ing his more per­son­al projects, all those years ago. 

You can see the trail­er for Beetle­juice Beetle­juice here

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