In Contention

Tag: Beetle Juice

  • “We’re grown men, right?”

    I didn’t realize there was a Michael Keaton retrospective at the American Cinemateque right around the corner — as in, this weekend — until I read about it in this Geoff Boucher profile of the actor at the LA Times.

    Reading the unique look back at Keaton’s career, in his own words, I was reminded how much I genuinely love every performance he’s given and wish we could see more from him than we do these days. Maybe it’s residual admiration from the “Batman” days, as that film is, after all, the first event film that had me (and I’m sure millions of others) obsessing over a release date that couldn’t come soon enough. But Keaton has a spark and a charm that is singular, regardless.

    Anyway, the best part for Bat nuts is his recount of the 1989 blockbuster, which saw the actor in a personal funk that he says may have been good for the character.

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  • THE LISTS: Top 10 horror films of all time

    It’s Halloween week and since we are a movie site, we are under some kind of unspoken obligation to provide our dear readers with a list to fit the festivities. You may remember a similar list popping up two years ago, in which all current contributors voiced an opinion and the final results represented a collective agreement. Since I was not a contributor at that time, Tapley asked me to offer up a new take this year.

    A little backstory on my relationship with scary movies seems appropriate. I was raised by two Christian parents who were very protective of the images that I put into my head. When I was six years old, I was playing at a friend’s house when he suggested we watch “Beetle Juice.” Knowing that it was a potentially objectionable title, I called my mom and asked if it was okay and she said it was not. Kids being kids, we watched it anyway.

    What did I think of it? It scared the crap out of me. So much so, that I understood why my mom didn’t want me to watch it and actively avoided scary images on my own free will from then on. When one or two infiltrated me, such as “Ghostbusters,” I was always a little rattled. As I’ve grown, I’ve only become slightly less sensitive to these types of images and only actively seek out scary films if I hear there is a lot more going on to make it worthwhile.

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  • Celebrating 25 years of Burton/Elfman collaborations

    In the “sign me up now, please” category today is a recently announced boxed set of Danny Elfman’s music collaborations with filmmaker Tim Burton.  I first heard about the limited edition set via the New York Times in a piece that went up on the Arts Beat blog yesterday.  It featured a video with Burton and Elfman discussing the monumental “Batman” score — talk about grabbing my attention.

    Anyone who knows me knows what role that 1989 superhero extravaganza played in my film-going youth.  But the idea that there might be some extra, never-before-heard material waiting in a vault somewhere?  Giddiness.  Pure giddiness.

    But it’s not just “Batman” stuff.  The set celebrates “the 25th anniversary of the ingenious collaboration” between the two singular artists, reads a press release that went out today.   “[The] numbered box set of 1000…collects expansions of the 13 original scores that Elfman has composed for Burton’s iconic films” and is “a newly produced library of 16 CDs each packaged with artwork by Burton, adding up to more than 19 hours of music.”  Wow.

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  • Best scares in film

    Janet Leigh in PsychoIt’s only hitting me today that we haven’t offered up any Halloween-y content yet.  Strange.  This is my favorite time of year, though season-less Southern California certainly does it no favors.

    Last year we got the contributors together to name the top 20 horror films of all time, an installment of The Lists I’m quite proud of.  This year I’ve been settling in each night to a new perennial favorite.  Last night it was “Beetle Juice.” I took another look at Carpenter’s “Halloween” earlier in the week and I expect Ill be tossing in the “Coraline” Blu-ray once again, maybe a little Romero.  “White Zombie” with Bela Lugosi was a novel distraction the other night.

    I don’t worship at the altar of genre, but I do enjoy getting in the spirit, so to speak.  Rather than cook something up for the holiday, I figured I’d point you to a pair of UK stories spotlighting the best in horror.  The first, in the Daily Telegraph, announces Bernard Herrmann’s “Psycho” theme as the scariest horror theme of all time.

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