Monday new releases: 9 September 2024

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.