Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
A birthday present courtesy of Tim Burton
Looking back, 2012 was a strange and weird year and after careful consideration and a consultation with balls made of pure crystal, just as strange and weird as all the others. We were all going to die as a Mayan prophesy was realised and the earth presumably crashed in on itself or collided with the sun. Who knows. Or dares to dream? But we survived, life went on as another calendar, this time courtesy of a Pope called Gregory, tiptoed into 2013 and here we are in late 2024 with no need of year ending doomsayers anymore or people walking along the high streets of our local towns wrapped in an A-Board screaming “The End is Nigh!”. Now we’re told the world is ending every single day by that rectangular telescreen of doom that dominates our living rooms, but that is an awfully bad tangent with which to commence this spoiler free appraisal and rest assured, as sure as I am about returning to the year 2012 almost immediately, you’ll also find zero spoilers on this magnificent film here too. The Matrix is awash in spoilers for this and every other film, written by its cult-like children in blunt crayon and with very little human imagination. Alas this is the world we have created and one of the many reasons why I lose myself in the surrealist world of others and visionaries such as Timothy Walter Burton.
2012 was very much a year of personal death and rebirth, a theme shared with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice here and the only hint of a spoiler I’ll provide, together with a recommendation to see this beauty of a film in the pitch black darkness of your local cinema and with those closest to you and the ones you love next to you, smiling at the absurdity of someone else’s twisted and surreal imagination. It’s good but not as great as the original but that was 1988 let alone 2012 and we, Tim Burton too, have all got a little older along the way, maybe even watched little ones become fully fledged and much larger adults, and there are two more themes of this film you probably won’t find in the other more juvenile spoiler heavy reviews of this film and you’re very welcome. As you are to the host of similarly spoiler free reviews of the films of Tim Burton linked immediately below.
You see, I’ve penned my thoughts on every one of Tim’s twenty career films to date and my original blog article “The Magic of Tim Burton” was one of the very first in depth career retrospective articles I ever wrote (my first three as I recall were on Tim, Christopher Nolan and the Coen Brothers) and the starting point for this writing madness was the year 2012 and as a self defence mechanism to a self inflicted wound of familial heartbreak, the death of a corporate career, and the rebirth (of sorts) of the writer whose very words you’re reading today. Beetlejuice was my entry point to a lifetime of utter devotion to the cinematic works of Tim Burton and although a couple of befuddling clunkers would pepper his first ten films, Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands a year later, Ed Wood (1994) and Sleepy Hollow five years later would cap an incredible first decade before, by the middle of the next, I was watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Corpse Bride, and on endless repeat too, with the light of my life, a brand new fan of Tim Burton in the making and of course, today’s birthday boy. From young boy to young man in the blink of an eye and all via the magic of Alice in Wonderland, Frankenweenie, and, most recently in 2019, Dumbo.
So no spoilers here and just a rambling musing as ever. There’s also a story here you won’t read anywhere else in our collective Matrix of doom: that of a young boy who has grown into a man across a lifetime of trips to the cinema, the product of a best friend and mentor as a mother and a daydreaming gooseberry of a father, and a boy to man so overflowing with excitement for his birthday today I could never adequately describe this to you in words. Bacon sandwiches were devoured. Presents ripped open. A mother’s love brilliantly realised by our local Odeon cinema who made good on their promise of a birthday surprise that left the light of my life almost (almost) speechless. Tim Burton’s latest creation enjoyed on the big screen of the cinema. Mum singing on one side of him. Dad laughing on the other and now giggling at our own shared in-joke reference to the original film.
“10 out of 10 Dad”.
Yes son, it most certainly was.
The magic of Tim Burton strikes again.
Thanks for reading. Talking of birthdays, well, I’m sure there’s a birthday in your future, so why not treat yourself or hint at a loved one that you’d really like to take a chance on the book below. Or there are 8 others that might pique your interest on my Amazon page. And it’s Christmas soon, so you really don’t have any excuses left not to buy this beauty now. There’s a handy link too.
"Tales I Tell Myself" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.