Re: What Did You Watch? 2025-02-07 (Friday)

On 2/8/25 1:30 AM, Ubiquitous wrote:

What did you watch?

Yesterday, I managed to get through a movie - if I hadn't been so tired after a long week, I could have gotten through two (probably the new Tubi flick), but I was tried enough that I went to bed relatively early after the first movie.
I watched:
soaps: Y&R - Mon's ep. Not very interesting. Filis[sic!] is outraged, rightly, that Sharon will have no charges against her, but they ruin the character by having her knuckle under to Daniel and NuSummer rather than going after Sharon. Pathetic. Later, Billy pitches his new business idea to Filis and Daniel, and Daniel correctly points out that this seems like he's still going after Adam, just in a different way... After finding out about the Jordan/Ian stuff, Jack goes over to Nikki, and runs into the whole Newman clan, including the vile Mustache who acts like his typical asshole self. In the least interesting storyline, it's revealed that the guy Nate has been talking to is not his brother, but instead is working for his brother. Meanwhile, Audra keeps talking about her mother, which makes me wonder if the show is going to introduce Audra's mom to the show.
Then, the reason I haven't watched "Beeteljuice Beeteljuice" yes is because I felt like I had to watch the original "Beeteljuice" (which I haven't seen in decades!) first. So I finally got to that last night:
Beetlejuice (back on Max, after a month on Peacock) - In "glorious 4k!" - or, rather, it would have been had Max not taken that away from us cable subscribers!!  >:/
    I admit - I was fooled by the opening credits fly-over shot. In fact, I still can't figure out if that was partly real footage of a fly-over of the actual Vermont(?) village (note: the film is actually supposedly set in Connecticut, though I missed this if it was said onscreen...) they filmed that seamlessly transitions to a fly-over of the model, or if it was the model 100% of the time (which means the first part of the model was so life-like as to fool the audience!).
    This is an enjoyable film. I am not a Burton fan, but this may be the most easily enjoyable film Burton has ever done. Yes, it's still "weird", but it's weird in fun ways, rather than being either precious, annoying or overdone.
    More amazingly - it's pleasingly *short*, clocking in at just 92 minutes.
    I honestly had forgotten the "plot" of this movie, and didn't realize going in that its "stars" were really a young Alec Baldwin (puh-TUWIE!!) and Geena Davis (easy to forget how attractive she was back in the 1980s!), whose characters are heinously and deliberately murdered (with malice of forethought!) by a small dog on a bridge into town.
    They soon realize they are ghosts, trapped in the country house they were trying to fix up before they died.
    Soon enough, though, a nouveau riche family moves in, led by the awful "artist" stepmom (Catherine O'Hara) married to a schmuck (Jeffrey Jones, before getting nailed as a child predator) - his daughter is a sullen weirdo teen (patented Winona Ryder of the era). O'Hara's stepmom has got a gay best-friend/partner in crime (Glenn Shadix).
    The now-ghost couple can't stand the parents (they come to like Winona Ryder's weirdo teen, as the only one who can initially see them as ghosts) and want to drive the family out of the house.
    That's where Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton, at his most enjoyably, and gross! "wacky"!) comes in, as 'independent contractor spirit' who specializes in "bio-exorcism" (IOW, driving living folks out of places that ghosts don't want them in!).
    Of course Beetlejuice is more than anyone bargained for. Oops.
    This has a lot of fun people in it (e.g. Robert Goulet, Dick Cavet), but Sylvia Sidney probably steals the show as the couple's "spirit case worker".
    This isn't deep, but it's mostly fun...
    What is with this flick and the almost non-stop Harry Bellafonte tunes?!
    I am now curious as to how the sequel is going to explain the absences of Baldwin and Davis (and without them, it will be easy to omit Sidney, who died in 1999, as well), not to mention Jones...
What did you watch?