Movies - Beetlejuice

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	Movies - Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice is a film directed by Tim Burton, first released in the USA on March 30, 1988, and produced by The Geffen Film Company for Warner Bros. Pictures. It features two recently deceased ghosts, Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin) and his wife, Barbara, (Geena Davis), who seek the help of an obnoxious bio-exorcist, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), to remove the Deetz family — metropolitan yuppies who recently moved from the city and now occupy their old house. The Deetz family consists of Charles (Jeffrey Jones); his second wife, Delia (Catherine O'Hara); and moody goth teenage daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder).

The film

The name of the film is Beetlejuice. Repeating this name three times is all that is required to summon him and also makes him leave. Adam and Barbara are not his only victims, for scams are his specialty. He used to be an assistant to Juno (Sylvia Sidney), the Maitlands' case worker, before getting into trouble. Beetlejuice is rude and vulgar, eats insects, and loves to terrify people.

In this typically dark and humorous Tim Burton film, most of Keaton's lines were apparently improvised on set. Notable guest appearances include those of Robert Goulet and Dick Cavett (Delia's art agent). Songs from Harry Belafonte are featured quite heavily in the movie, especially in a scene in which Delia starts belting out "Day-O" (The Banana Boat Song) in Belafonte's voice (thanks to some spectral trickery) at a dinner that she and Charles are hosting. The movie paints a picture of the afterlife as stuffy and bureaucratic rather than Dantean, with waiting rooms, oceans of red tape, and required reading (The Handbook for the Recently Deceased). People who commit suicide, for example, are bored civil servants (the receptionist Adam and Barbara meet who slit her wrists, Juno slit her throat, the worker who called Adam and Barbara jumped in front of a vehicle, and another worker hung himself) rather than trees, as in the Inferno. Adam and Barbara are trapped in their house. The world outside is a parched nightmare of sand dunes and a sandworm (Beetlejuice calls this place Saturn). Lydia is the only living character who sees the couple, and is tapped to help them deal both with her obnoxious parents and with the crass and impetuous Beetlejuice.

Afterlife and bureaucracy

Beetlejuice seems to be inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist novel Les jeux sont faits (1952), which prominently features death as meaningless bureaucracy. Another, although not as extreme, example is the 2004 TV series Dead Like Me, in which the characters need to work as grim reapers before they can leave limbo. Also, in the LucasArts adventure game Grim Fandango, people who commit crimes in life are forced to work off their time at the nightmarishly bureaucratic "Department of Death". All these are examples of Bangsian fantasy.

Effects work

Beetlejuice was not granted an extravagant budget, particularly after Little Shop of Horrors ended up costing more than expected. As a result of this—and of the director's improvisatory style—some of the effects work may seem cheap and old-fashioned, especially by today's standards. Sometimes, however, the need to produce effects quickly and cheaply added to their quality. The shot of Barbara lifting up a toy horse in front of a mirror (demonstrating that while it cast a reflection, she did not) was achieved entirely in-camera, using an empty mirror frame, a partial set built beyond and two toy horses bolted together. The resulting shot is an illusion with no matte work and consequent loss of image definition.

The TV series

An animated television series loosely based on the film, also called Beetlejuice, ran on ABC from September 1989 to December 1991, featuring the voices of Stephen Ouimette, Alyson Court, and Tara Strong. Lydia and Beetlejuice are friends, and she frequently visits him at home in the Netherworld (called the Neitherworld in the cartoon). Many of the jokes revolve around toilet humor and visual puns. Beetlejuice had a cast of wacky neighbors including Jacques, a French skeleton fitness buff; Ginger, a tap-dancing spider; The Monster across the Street, a boisterous Texas redneck; and a nasty clown named Scuzzo, who is his arch-nemesis. Notably missing are the characters of Adam and Barbara Maitland.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Beetlejuice ]

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Movies - Beetlejuice

The film

Afterlife and bureaucracy

Effects work

The TV series

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