For What it's Worth

Burton’s classic comedy and cast deserved new life, and here are the Deetz

It’s been more than 35 years since we heard Harry Belafonte belting out the “Banana Boat” song (day-o!) as Winona Ryder’s dour teen danced on air in the original “Beetlejuice.” The 1988 film, now followed by “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” cemented Tim Burton as a quirky voice to be reckoned with. Sure, he made “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” three years earlier, but “Beetlejuice” was the game changer that would give Burton the keys to the castle to make future passion projects “Edward Scissorhands” (1990) and “Ed Wood” (1994) and of course, the crown jewel, the original big-screen “Batman” (1989), bursting box-office records and making Burton look like a man who could do no cinematic wrong. (The Ill-conceived “Planet of the Apes” reboot would drop inertly nearly a decade later, and there was “Mars Attacks!”). 

Plus there was Michael Keaton, a guy who started out as a minor cast member on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” dropped into comedy series such as the envelope-pushing “Maude” and even had a short-lived slapstick endeavor called “Working Stiffs” opposite John Belushi in 1979. He bit into the gonzo, undead title role with such effusive vim and vigor that the performance and the film became instant classics, more than just a little left of center. I don’t think we realized it then, but we were getting a glimmer of one of the most under-the-radar talented actors of our time. The gear shift from comedic to stoic (“Beetlejuice” to “Batman”) showed a range that would morph and reform seamlessly over the years, be it the crime classics “Jackie Brown” (1997) and “Out of Sight” (1998), in which Keaton played the same Elmore Lenard-penned FBI agent for auteurs Tarantino and Soderbergh, or his Academy Award-nominated turn in “Birdman” (2014) for director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, who won Best Director for his work with Keaton. In short, Keaton’s a director’s go-to third-down-back, a thespian safety valve who rarely errs. He’s done Bostonian as Globe editor Robby Robinson in “Spotlight” (2015), the Oscar winner about unearthing one of the city’s dark chapters. He’s even taken a few turns as a filmmaker, most recently the crime thriller “Knox Goes Away.” Did I mention his body of work isn’t well enough appreciated?

But enough with the accolades (all due and deserved) and history. Is “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” any good? It’s packed with nostalgia and some smart script rewirings. Ryder’s goth girl who could (and still can) see the dead, Lydia Deetz, is now a grown-up single mom who rakes in the big bucks with a paranormal TV show called “Ghost House.” Her daughter Astrid (Jenny Ortega, who rocks Burton’s Netflix Addams Family spinoff series, “Wednesday”) is off at a New England prep school and think mom’s a hoax. Catherine O’Hara’s back as Lydia’s stepmom, Delia, and still parading around with a vibrant shock of red hair. But her garish art has become a thing – a big thing, bringing in Banksy and Picasso dinero. 

Though life is relatively good for the Deetz women financially, Astrid’s father perished in a boating mishap while on a climate justice mission in Brazil and Lydia’s father, Charles, is also gone. Understandable: Actor Jeffrey Jones was convicted in 2003 for soliciting a minor to pose for lewd photos and is a registered sex offender. The film sidesteps the matter with a neat animation sequence and a shark.

His death is the reason for all to return to Winter River, Connecticut (shot in East Corinth, Vermont), where his funeral is to be held at his beloved country estate. In tow is Lydia’s TV producer and nasally love interest (Justin Theroux, replete with a cheesy short ponytail) hoping for the opportunity to spin the sojourn into a matrimony prospect as well. But it’s Astrid who sparks romantic tinder first, as she agrees to a Halloween-night date with a reclusive local boy (Arthur Conti of “House of the Dragon”). Without giving away too much, the date turns into the reason Beetlejuice is invoked and even mortals end up in the neon-green lit, checker-tiled, Dr. Caligari underworld – or its limbo waiting room, anyhow. 

ArCS connects asylum seekers with local hosts, helping ease an immigrant and homeless crisis

Somaya Ahmady was helped by the nonprofit ArCS Cluster in achieving her dream going to college in the United States. (Photo: Somaya Ahmady via LinkedIn)

State orders forcing migrant families to leave temporary overflow shelters – including one at the Registry of Deeds Building in East Cambridge – creates dire straits for people who fled hostile and dangerous environments in other countries, many of whom do not speak English well or at all.

As the administration of Gov. Maura Healey scrambles to manage the surge, individuals and volunteer organizations have stepped in help.

One such organization is the ArCS Cluster, which seeks to help Massachusetts meet its obligations as a “right to shelter” state. Founded eight years ago in response to the Syrian civil war by Eric Segal, a retired software professional in Arlington, the organization focuses on pairing asylum seekers with hosts in Arlington, Cambridge and Somerville.

The prospect of hosting a family that likely does not include English speakers and has a multitude of needs might seem overwhelming, especially given the confines of city spaces, but ArCS hosts say they are glad to participate.

Meredith Jones, of Somerville’s Magoun Square, a social worker at an area high school and mother of 5-year-old twins, described the process of helping a young woman escaping domestic violence in a South American country as “an extreme privilege.” The anticipation when picking up her guest from the airport was exciting, she said, “almost like having my twins.”

Shana Berger, a single mother who teaches English at Bunker Hill Community College and lives in Union Square, is hosting a Haitian family. She was paired with her family through the Boston Immigration Justice Accompaniment Network and Brazilian Workers’ Center. “We have the space, and it’s the right thing to do to help those who have nowhere else to go and those who have been failed by the system,” Berger said.

State of the shelters

Our state was the first – and is still the only – with a “right to shelter law” (New York City has a similar law, but not the state). The law, enacted in 1983, applies to pregnant women and families with children. It makes Massachusetts an appealing destination for those seeking asylum, and a prime political target; the rise in migrants entering Massachusetts is due to unrest in South American and Caribbean countries and the war in Ukraine, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, as well as a political tactics by mostly politically conservative Southern and Southwestern red states to offload their own asylum seekers.

By October nearly 7,000 families were in emergency shelter, costing the state almost $45 million a month, according to the Boston University School of Law’s Juliana Hubbard.

The formal state emergency assistance system has some 7,500 families, of which 3,700 entered as migrants, refugees or asylum seekers. The four overflow shelter sites in Cambridge, Norfolk, Lexington and Chelsea – a $125 million expense over the more than $1 billion the state spends in a fiscal year to shelter people – have been filled with families waiting to get into that shelter system, which Healy recently capped at its current number, City Manager Yi-An Huang told Cambridge’s City Council on Aug. 5. Cambridge’s registry building had around 80 families, and all are expected to be removed from the shelter by the end of the month as policies toughen.

Now called temporary respite centers, the shelters will house families and offer case management for only five to 30 days – and accepting that shelter means being barred for six months from entering a pool for longer-term help and access to up to $30,000 in aid, said Phoebe West, of Cambridge’s Office of the Housing Liaison. (The other option is “reticketing,” which will help get homeless families somewhere else that they believe they will have housing.)

“The challenge is, then, where are families going to go?” Huang said. “We’ll end up with families and children on the streets, and that is something that I know that the administration is really seeking to avoid.”

“If there are people in our community who want to help,” Huang said, they need information on “what they may be able to do.”

‘Strange Darling’ (2023)

Where “MaXXXine” and “Longlegs” stoked serial-killer fandom, looking to reinvent the genre but falling short, TJ Mollner’s “Strange Darling” gets the job done. Set in the Pacific Northwest, with a neat, retro ’70s vibe (though the action happens in the now) we’re told in the preamble that a killer’s been working the area. Just how many have fallen victim isn’t offered, just that the killer’s been at it for a while. Cut to a bloodied young woman in red scrubs running in slo-mo, fear in her eyes, mouth agape – a shot that would make Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven proud. This perpetual-panic chiller (with a script also by Mollner) is told in six nonlinear chapters. We begin with “Chapter 3” in which the young blonde in the scrubs (Willa Fitzgerald, “The Fall of the House of Usher”), tagged in the credits as The Lady, zips down a road in a vintage 1978 red Pinto hatchback chased by a determined ruffian in a pickup (Kyle Gallner), who’s listed as The Demon. Given the labels and the setup, you think you know what’s going on, but Mollner is brilliant at obfuscating and sliding puzzle pieces in and out, altering our sense of reality as we move back and forth in time without any sense of being untethered. “Chapter 1,” essential to be sure, is the least fulfilling and the one that goes on too long when it could have been tightened into a bloody fist like the rest. The deep performances by Gallner and Fitzgerald go far to sell Mollner’s prism-shifting narrative; if not for them this might have gone over the bait-and-switch edge. Ed Begley Jr. and Barbara Hershey check in with fantastic turns as eccentric doomsday hippies living off the grid. As for carnage, blood flows regularly and freely, and in creative new ways, with some “Saw”-like scenarios and risqué sex games tossed in for good measure. The real mind blow, and main reason for the film’s success, are the gorgeous blue-and-red filtrations laid down on celluloid by first-time feature film cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi – yup, that actor guy (he’s made Beck videos in the past and has a small part in the film too); the opening credits tell us emphatically that the film is shot on 35 mm. Every frame in every scene is lit meticulously and feels noodled over arduously in staging and composition. Somewhere in L.A., one can imagine old-school cinematography aficionado Quinten Tarantino pumping his fist in the air. If horror was a poker game, Mollner just laid down down a full house. Ti West, what’s your call?

‘Jackpot!’ (2024)

Perhaps the most repetitive and boo-rific tedium of this sad summer fare so far. I’ve been leveling low on many as of late – “The Instigators” and “Borderlands” to name two – but this one takes the mealy sawdust cake. Directed by Paul Feig, who showed his mastery of macabre comedy with “A Simple Favor” (2018), the action drops us into L.A. circa 2030 where, due to an economic downturn, there’s a 24-hour period in which the winner of the statewide lottery can be hunted after they’re announced, with the killer getting the winnings. You can’t use a gun or explosive devices, but knives, axes, sledgehammers and whatnot are acceptable and encouraged. It’s “The Purge” (2013) gone Daffy Duck on helium. Given the casting of Awkwafina and local buff body John Cena as Katie Kim, a failed actress who accidentally wins the lottery and Noel, a security expert who jumps into the fray to save Katie, it’s a wasteful misfire. Sure, novel for a second, but imagine being forced to rinse your mouth with Listerine for two hours, you’d be numb and angry – and perhaps more so here because Awkwafina (“Crazy Rich Asians”) and Cena (“Peacemaker”) have shown such ripe comedic skills in the past and are rendered relatively inert here. The “cheeky” outtakes at the end are a buzzing bowl full of unfunny scat humor that reeks. There’s nothing in this film that punches any ticket – not even a scratcher – and everybody loses.

‘Alien: Romulus’ (2024)

If you can’t get Ripley, go for Rain, or so that’s how this “interquel” between “Alien”  (1979) and “Aliens” (1986) rolls. In theory, Ripley is in a cryogenic sleep in a space pod elsewhere as this bombastic stand-alone episode unfolds on a grungy remote mining planet where Rain (Cailee Spaeny, “Priscilla,” “Civil War”) is indentured to labor 12,000 hours before she and her brother Andy (David Jonsson) can leave. Most who stay die from lung cancer – you’d think they’d have masks and clean-air breathing apparatuses circa 2130, but no, it’s like West Virginia 1956, canary in a cage and all. Andy is Black (Rain is white) and a synthetic (or droid) like Ash and Bishop in the ’79 and ’86 films respectively. This is no spoiler, as he oozes white goo after being harassed and beaten by a mob of ruffians early on because of his mild, quirky demeanor and penchant to spout corny dad jokes (“What did the claustrophobic astronaut want? More space”). Andy served as family companion to Rain as she grew up and her parents died from the ills of the planet, thus that “brother” tag. We catch up with Rain just after she has notched her hour quota, but when she goes to pick up her off-world pass, she’s informed that the corporation running the show (Weyland, so prevalent in “Prometheus” and perhaps an intergalactic rival to Atlas in “Borderlands”) has doubled the ante; she’s got another five years to go. Syncing up with her posse of hipster hackers (an uber generic lot who, like Rain, rage against the machine) they discover a dormant space station is drifting by the plant and hatch the idea to take a mining shuttle up to the structure, fire it up, slip into cryogenic pods and jet off to somewhere with clean air and fresh water. What begins as a pipe dream quickly becomes a nightmare when the adrift Romulus turns out to be a hive of the jaws-within-jaws xenomorphs that so voraciously ate their fill of other all-too curious humans in other “Alien” deep-space chillers. “Alien” director Ridley Scott must have green-lit the full-on cut-and-paste pastiche on display here, as he serves as a producer on the film directed by Fede Alvarez (“The Girl in the Spider’s Web”). There are whole scenes and lines from the films it spans incorporated to stoke franchise fans’ glee in knowing “in space, no can hear you scream,” but the execution’s shoddy, not the least bit nuanced (or nostalgic), and mostly falls flat. The nifty special FX and the Imax-Dolby surround sound (which is how I saw it, and suggest as the way to go, if you go) elevates the grinding bang of cargo ships belly-to-belly to a near Disney-ride experience. That said, much of the action is muddled and, as far as character development goes, Rain’s synth sibling probably has the deepest backstory of all … and it’s on a programmed chip that can be slipped in and out of a slot behind his ear. Speaking of synths, AI is used to bring back the likeness of Ash – or an android like Ash. The actor Ian Holm died in 2020, so the result is creepy but cool if ultimately just another reheated “Alien” ort. Of future events, one can only imagine the additional rage Ripley spouts when she awakes in another 30 years (“What, you made a Ripley movie without me? Get my agent on the line!”). Then again, one could see Ripley and Rain teaming up and going all “Thelma & Louise” (1991, another Scott film) on the Weyland Corp. honchos and studio execs, let along the duplicitous droids and skittering xenomorphs in their way.

‘Borderlands’ (2023)

This lackluster sci-fi adventure based on the hit video game gets an extra half-star just for its fine cinematic framing of Cate Blanchett’s alluring cheekbones. You could see “Borderlands” as a project with possibility, helmed by Eli Roth as a maestro of mostly lo-fi shock fare (“Cabin Fever,” “Hostel” and “The Green Inferno”) and featuring poker-hot thespians Blanchett (“Blue Jasmine,” “Tár”) and Jamie Lee Curtis (“True Lies,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once”) with Kevin Hart as the X-factor. Unfortunately, it never clicks, and the troubled production was allegedly taken away from Roth and reshot by “Deadpool” (2016) director Tim Miller too late for a script that’s a pileup of tired lines such as “I’m too old for this shit.” Blanchett is Lilith, an intergalactic bounty hunter impossible to miss with her cool, punky pink shock of hair and tasked with reluctantly retrieving the wayward daughter (Ariana Greenblatt) of universe-spanning Atlas Corp.’s swaggering CEO (Edgar Ramírez, putting some buzz in his Jeff Bezos bit) from a rust-bucket planet named Pandora. As the storyline has it, the youth is a divine being and third key to opening something known as “the Vault” on the far-flung planet where Lilith was born. “The Fifth Element” (1997) this is not, and loose (and lame) pokes at “Star Wars” are seated here and there (Hart’s soldier in a Vader-esque mask jokes that it’s hard to breathe in) with Lilith as a Han Solo stand-in. The concept of “the Vault” as an endgame likely makes more sense in online play; here, it’s a dull, uninspired MacGuffin. Giving chase to Lilith and her posse, soon including the sassy adolescent Greenblatt tossing exploding teddy bears at friends and foes with snarky glee, are Hart’s buttoned-up soldier and Curtis’ archaeologist, Atlas security forces riding hoverboards and a blood-lusting tribe of the wasteland so originally branded as “the psychopaths” who clearly have taken their hockey mask and half-naked fashion cues from Lord Humongous and Jason Voorhees. Hart, who has motormouth comedic skills to rival Chris Tucker in “The Fifth Element,” is uncharacteristically mute here; it’s Jack Black voicing beat-up ’bot Claptrap that notches the film’s few genuine laughs. To give you an example of just how little faith the studio had in releasing the film, it was already shot and sitting in the studio vault before Blanchett delivered her knockout performance in “Tár” in 2022. Its resurrection and theatrical run, adding to this summer’s dismal screening season, is further evidence of the downstream ills of the writers’ strike.

‘Queendom’ (2023)

“And yet, she persisted” would also have made an apt title for Agniia Galdanova’s gripping and pointedly political documentary about 21-year-old Russian drag performance artist Gena Marvin (birth named Gennadiy Chebotarev), who, alienated, ostracized and worse, never surrenders their identity, and in the process, takes on the draconian social politics of the Putin regime as well as the war in Ukraine. Gena, a striking, lithe figure evocative of Tilda Swinton in “Orlando” (1992) or Bowie as Ziggy or in “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (1976) mode, was born in the far eastern town of Magadan, a place that in lens feels like it would make a good hellish gulag of a work camp in a different movie. For the most, Gena and their art are not well received in the remote town, and when taking to the streets they are often harassed and even assailed. In one scene when strolling a supermarket aisle, pasty white, bald and towering over other shoppers in a fur coat and a loose-fitting bustier (just coming from a shoot to get some essentials), they are asked by security to leave the store and not return. Raised by their grandparents, Gena is often at odds with them – the identity thing, but also money. There’s genuine care and affection in the homestead, but the grandfather, trying hard, is unable to accept his grandchild’s feminine persona and wants to know how they can subsist  on TikTok likes (I did too, something that “Skywalkers: A Love Story,” another recent portrait of Russian artists, never fully plumbed). Identifying as nonbinary and still figuring it out, Gena heads to Moscow for college, where they don’t quite fit in. Meanwhile, during protests against the war and demanding freedom for Putin opponent Alexei Navalny, they take to the street, gliding through the unrest in stark, alluring costumes; like when Bowie made his way to the stage, everything seems to stop and focus on them – the stark difference being the pervasive air of hostility versus Bowie’s adoring sea of fans. While Gena doesn’t launch into particularly political diatribes onscreen, their art is inherently so, especially in light of Putin’s increasing crackdown on trans-queer culture. The access that Galdanova and camera operator Ruslan Fedotov have is immersive, intimate and in the moment. The scenes of performance art executed on the shore of a raging sea or in a muddy quarry pit are breathtaking in composition and framing, and made all the more alluring by Gena’s keen sense of presentation and otherworldly personas.

‘Knox Goes Away’ (2023)

John Knox (Michael Keaton) has a lot on his mind, or so he tries to keep it that way despite recent tests that indicate the onset of dementia. Not a good thing for a contract killer, but Knox is not your ordinary hand of riddance, no, he’s got two doctorates and is super methodical and thorough in his work. He’s never been nabbed; he did do a stint in the slammer, but that was more the way they got Al Capone, a subplot that folds back into the final reckoning. For Knox, waning cognition turns out to be a liability when on a job. He loses track of where he is and who he’s there to shoot. At the core is a botched hit, an ongoing investigation (Suzy Nakamura, scene-grabbing as the lead investigator) and things get get amped up when Knox’s estranged son Miles (James Marsden) shows up one night seeking professional help. To say more about the pieces and how they click and don’t click together would do a disservice to this thinking-person’s thriller helmed by Keaton (his second feature) doing double duty. As the addled, once razor-sharp lead, the versatile Keaton – who’s been Batman; Birdman (in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2014 Best Picture winner); Elmore Leonard-written detective Ray Nicolette in films by Quentin Tarantino and Steve Soderbergh; and Beetlejuice (a sequel on the way this year) – does a fantastic job of conveying a failing mind, the cold facade of a calculated killer and the jittery bridge in between. The robust cast includes Marcia Gay Harden as Knox’s ex, Al Pacino as his criminal handler, Ray McKinnon of “Deadwood” as Knox’s sometime partner and Joanna Kulig, so amazing in 2018’s “Cold War” as Knox’s Thursday afternoon lover. The Miles subplot is a little overbaked, as is Marsden’s performance, but overall Keaton and his immersion into a character in transition drive the film confidently.