Childhood Memories in the Nursery.

Martindale Hall, Mintaro, South Australia.

© 𝓐𝓵𝓵 𝓡𝓲𝓰𝓱𝓽𝓼 𝓡𝓮𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓿𝓮𝓭 𝓫𝔂 𝟐 𝓟𝓮𝓮𝓹𝓼 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓪 𝓒𝓪𝓶𝓮𝓻𝓪.

(𝒟ℴ𝓊𝒷𝓁ℯ 𝓉𝒽ℯ 𝒫ℯℯ𝓅𝓈, 𝒹ℴ𝓊𝒷𝓁ℯ 𝓉𝒽ℯ 𝓅ℯ𝓇𝓈𝓅ℯ𝒸𝓉𝒾𝓋ℯ!)

#Photo #Photography #2PeepsAndACamera #Australia #SouthAustralia #TeddyBear #VintageBedroom #AntiqueFurniture #MartindaleHall #Nostalgia #InteriorPhotography #SouthAustralia #History

A somewhat unusual "Macintosh" for this year's MARCHintosh offering...

Here is my Atari 520ST running Spectre, a Macintosh emulator which features actual Macintosh Plus ROMs (user must provide) and in 1989 (along with Magic Sac which preceded it in 1986) was "the only legal Macintosh clone." Gadgets by Small, who made the device, called it 20% faster than a Mac Plus, with a 30% larger screen size (640x400 on the ST monochrome display vs. 512x342 on the early Macs).

The Atari 520STm shown here features an 8MHz MC68000, has been expanded to 4MB RAM (up from 512K), features an HxC2001 floppy emulator, an ACSI2STM hard disk emulator, and dual Atari RGB and monochrome monitors, switchable with a Monitor Master switchbox. The 12-inch SM124 monitor showing Pinball Construction Set for Mac is nearly identical to the early Mac monochrome displays in terms of clarity, the distinctive bluish P4-class phosphor, and its overall "presence." It is a very nice display running at a rock-solid 71Hz.

(A similar series of devices, beginning with the A-Max, was released by ReadySoft for the Commodore Amiga in 1989, though I found the ST options more appealing, in large part due to the superb high-res, non-interlaced monochrome display the ST supported.)

#MARCHintosh

#Macintosh #Mac #Apple #vintageApple #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #retrocomputers #computing #computers #CRT #emulation #Finder #Spectre #MagicSac #Atari #AtariST #Atari520ST #photo #photos #nostalgia #vintage #BillBudge #tech #ElectronicArts #ByteCellar

@taylorswift@tube.matrix.rocks

The Story of Taylor Swift. The Video are from the Taylor Swift Speak Now World Tour Live album

Embark on a nostalgic journey through Taylor Swift's life in this touching visual tribute. Featuring a collection of photos from her first month to the exhilarating moments of the Speak Now World Tour, this video beautifully encapsulates her growth as an artist and individual. Accompanied by the heartfelt song "Never Grow Up," witness the milestones and memories that have shaped Taylor into the icon she is today. It's a celebration of her journey, reminding us all to cherish every moment along the way!

tube.matrix.rocks/w/ht18fJg64N…

#TaylorSwift #SpeakNow #WorldTour #NeverGrowUp #StoryOfTaylor #BTS #Nostalgia #MusicJourney #LiveConcert #ArtistEvolution #Swiftie #Swifties #MusicFeatures #TaylorNation #countrymusic #country

Taylor Swift

2025-08-11 07:05:34

Taylor Swift Speak Now World Tour Live (2011) - [Story of Taylor]

Embark on a nostalgic journey through Taylor Swift's life in this touching visual tribute. Featuring a collection of photos from her first month to the exhilarating moments of the Speak Now World Tour, this video beautifully encapsulates her growth as an artist and individual. Accompanied by the heartfelt song "Never Grow Up," witness the milestones and memories that have shaped Taylor into the icon she is today. It's a celebration of her journey, reminding us all to cherish every moment along the way!

#TaylorSwift #SpeakNow #WorldTour #NeverGrowUp #StoryOfTaylor #BTS #Nostalgia #MusicJourney #LiveConcert #ArtistEvolution

In a better film we’d see Morbius evolve into Morpheus and leave the Grid for the Matrix.

When I was 10, the original Tron was one of the last films I saw at the Westlake Drive-In before it closed a month later. I remember being bored, my typical response to a lot of Disney live-action, and got more fun out of the 4-in-1 arcade game even though some malls charged double to play it (i.e., fifty whole cents, a ripoff at the time). My son was a teenager when we saw Tron: Legacy and quickly forgot most of it, though the action sequences were impressive enough that I noted fledgling director Joseph Kosinski’s name before he went on to bigger, better works. In between those wobbly goalposts, Nine Inch Nails’ 1989 debut Pretty Hate Machine was in heavy rotation in my various high school cassette players, so a young Trent Reznor’s industrial synth-metal assaults hold a certain place in my pop-culture heart even though I haven’t kept up with his later, lesser albums. (Fun trivia: Reznor and I share a birthday!)

Nostalgia isn’t an automatic drug of choice for me, but sometimes I’ll play along with its corporate pushers just to see what they think might get me high by injecting my own liquefied childhood into my eyeballs. Fifteen years later Disney has turned Tron‘s CPU off and back on again to install its latest IP expansion pack Tron: Ares, whose marketing tries awfully hard to target Gen-X as if anyone my age yearned for this to be a trilogy to save on our DVD shelves until we die and our beneficiaries give all our boxed sets to Goodwill. The thin dimensional boundaries between video games and the real world have been breached quite a bit since 1982 (Wreck-It Ralph! Pixels! Ready Player One!), to say nothing of invasions from their kid cousin Virtual Reality (from The Lawnmower Man on up), so really, what’s Tron have to offer besides grasping for an extended warranty on its own obsolescence?

As superficially contemplated by Disney’s trained sequel handler Joachim Rønning (Pirates 5, Maleficent 2) along with screenwriters Jesse Wigutow (Daredevil: Born Again) and David DiGilio (The Terminal List), the answers are derivative. In the not-too-distant future, Greta Lee (Past Lives, Russian Doll) is ENCOM CEO Eve Kim, in charge of the company once run by Tron OG Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) and passed down in Legacy to his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund), who’s Sir Not Appearing in This Film after his character ostensibly writes himself out due to “personal reasons”. In honor of a Family Tragedy in Her Past, Eve pursues a passion project of using the Flynns’ game-lasers to create resources out of nothing and solve world hunger, carbon footprints, and other consequences of scarcity, which could wreck large portions of the world economy if such magical machines were mass-produced for every household. Like, how cool would it be if we could all manifest our own Starbucks drinks — maybe even coffee that’s not burnt! — and put the entire company out of business? Or, y’know, feeding the impoverished is also a choice.

Meanwhile on the Dark Side: Dillinger Systems, the competing company started by Tron villain David Warner (whose face adorns one office wall), is now run by his grandson Julian, played by Evan Peters (American Horror Story, the last four X-Men films) as Evil Tech-Bro #600,000,000 in a series — collect all their trading cards from Hollywood films of the last fifty years! (Yes, evil tech-bros do suck, but true-to-life or not, bandwagons get boring.) Kid Dillinger’s people have pretty much the same game-laser magic-tech as ENCOM, but they want to make trillions off the potential military applications, which translates into churning out disposable space-motorcycling soldiers in goth-rave Iron Man armor and slightly redesigned 45-year-old video-game weapons and vehicles. That’s the best his Silicon Valley castoffs could imagine, because in their world no other games exist — no tamed RPG dragons, no Borderlands arsenals, no grenades, no cool swords, not even the ridiculous gun from Fallout 3 that shot literal nukes and nearly always killed its own wielder within the same blast radius. (Or was it just me?)

Despite some online chitchat, Tron: Ares isn’t really about the current A.I. debate so much as it’s about greedy deviants wanting to co-opt Star Trek replicators for 3D-printing guns and ammo, though the film pretends only the American government would have the means, not other countries and totally not lone gunmen aspiring to be a quickly forgotten mass shooter or the internet’s Antihero Assassin Dreamboat of the Week. One major setback, though: the printouts only last 29 minutes before they disintegrate and more have to be printed. Hypothetically this wouldn’t be an issue if a prospective warlord could print an army-on-demand large enough to win every battle in 29 minutes or less, but that’s a big “if”. In Eve’s favor, she starts the movie with a fetch-quest in the middle of nowhere where the treasure is top-secret computer code written by Flynn that would make the VR print-outs permanent. With the code in hand and saved on a single MacGuffin-brand flash drive, the chase is on to see whose team can implement it first, whether for philanthropy or profit.

At no point does Greta Lee appear to enjoy herself half as much as she did in her great episode of The Studio.

Caught in the middle is the titular figure himself, Academy Award Winner Jared Leto as Dillinger’s head toy soldier Ares. At first he works fine, obeys all directives, shoots and kicks and power-Frisbees where he’s told. Then, after a few scenes of staring expressionlessly at the other characters, at some crucial moment that’s imperceptible to the human eye and the finished script he decides being a murderous minion is bad and he should help Eve win the movie so he can become a real live boy, or at least reset his Infamy score to zero. “Living weapon yearns to become sensitive human” is a familiar path that intersects with Short Circuit, The Iron Giant, and a plethora of others, to say nothing of non-weaponized tools who envy our humanity. (Frankenstein’s Monster! Data! The Vision!) One character does make sure to name-check Pinocchio, a weak “we’re in on the joke!” signal from the writers. Thus begins and ends any nostalgic sop to Gen-X irony.

Leto has squandered much of the goodwill he earned from My So-Called Life up to Dallas Buyers Club in more recent questionable choices such as Morbius, House of Gucci, and Suicide Squad…but honestly, in this case I think he’s simply playing what was (under)written. In the middle of the chases and explosions is a two-minute intermission where Ares inexplicably turns motormouth and begins yammering away about how he just can’t get enough of Depeche Mode and randomly decides the coast is clear enough that he should psychoanalyze Eve after consuming her entire texting history. That Leto performance would’ve been more engaging than his nimble-yet-numb T-800 bodyguard.

For prospective audiences with simpler demands of their popcorn flicks: sure, everything looks expensively cool. A Tron vintage lightcycle duel in our world — with all those frustrating jetwalls they leave in their path that’ll crash you into Game Over every time — finesses some creative corners, while a dogfight between human fighter jets and CGI flyers offers nifty visuals as long as you don’t fret about the fact that American soldiers engage the enemy over civilian airspace freely and without double-checking the rulebook first. The inner world of the Master Control Program has all the requisite neon track-lighting and green-screened sci-fi shininess. So the trilogy is three-for-three on super awesome laser light-shows.

Razzle-dazzle can only mesmerize us so far. The ground-level Frisbee-fights are julienne-edited into Taken-esque tedium, and the contractual fixation on the original Tron‘s gadgetry prizes repetitive familiarity over innovation. Look, we know the in-universe Space Paranoids game had sequels! The latest release in the franchise is a plot point! Have they never added any new robo-creatures, or new cyber-cars they could license to the Hot Wheels people? I couldn’t stop laughing at the climactic set piece in which the villains materialize a full-size Recognizer — those massive, flying, sideways-bracket warships that look like The Claw with a prong missing — to chase a single running human clumsily through the streets of nighttime Vancouver. It has zero maneuverability, its dangling legs can’t fit between the skyscrapers, and its sad takedown has all the grace of a drunken Godzilla.

The highly anticipated score helps in some parts, but veers a bit too close to dated Tangerine Dream homages at times. The trailers trumpet the Nine Inch Nails brand as if we weren’t aware of Reznor’s more recent accomplishments with fellow Oscar-winning composing partner Atticus Ross. We only get snippets of two vocal tracks before the end credits (even the lead single “As Alive As You Want Me to Be” barely gets in a full verse) and, during the end credits, “Who Wants to Live Forever”, which subverts a Final Fantasy main-menu homage into a sappy love-ballad duet For Your Oscar Consideration. In the background you can almost hear Nobuo Uematsu sighing and face-palming. As recent Reznor/Ross films go, Challengers hit much harder, as did the discord of The Gorge even though it irritated my wife so much that I had to turn the TV volume down for my own safety.

The general NIN mood points toward the overall biggest liability: for a series about an ancient arcade game run amuck, Tron: Ares takes itself far too seriously. 21st-century games aren’t all necessarily lighthearted fun for the whole family, but Steven Lisberger’s extremely era-specific quaintness is a poor fit for Hollywood’s rapacious grim-and-gritty revival machine. The VFX crews clearly had a blast in their Day-Glo explode-o sequences, but what straw-audience do they imagine craved further adventures, an antiwar political statement, and complicated canon in a “What if we had to fight actual Space Invaders” lark from the same studio’s era that brought us Herbie Goes Bananas?

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Yes, Jeff Bridges returns for a few scenes as OG Flynn, basically playing a digital Saint Dude. We get absolutely no mention of former costar Bruce Boxleitner or his character who was LITERALLY NAMED TRON.

TV legend Gillian Anderson is Kid Dillinger’s mom, the ex-CEO who comes to regret retiring and turning the company over to her spoiled brat. Dillinger’s other programmable lackeys include Jodie Turner-Smith (Apple’s Bad Monkey, Star Wars: The Acolyte) as Ares’ partner Athena and Cameron Monaghan (the Joker from Fox’s Gotham).

Eve’s employees include comedian Hasan Minhaj as a super-coder and Arturo Castro (The Menu, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story) as her Sancho Panza. If you can squint through all the pyrotechnic flash, Reznor and Ross have cameos as fighter pilots.

How about those end credits? To answer the burning question that MCC is always happy to verify: yes, there is indeed a scene during the Tron: Ares end credits, but it’s like fifteen seconds in. For those who were dying for a bathroom, had to sprint out the door immediately and really want to know…

…

…

[…insert space for courtesy spoiler alert in case anyone needs to abandon ship…]

…

…

…Julian Dillinger lives! He sprouts anew in the virtual world inside his company’s evil mainframes, pushes a big glowing red button that screams PRESS HERE FOR SEQUEL, and gets enveloped by glowing red armor and an augmented archival recording of David Warner’s voice as Sark, the Big-Bad from the original Tron. To be continued in 2040, maybe!

As for the end credits themselves: the designers cutely typeset everyone’s names with underscores in them instead of spaces, a very ’80s computing touch. It’s probably for the best that they didn’t abide by all MS-DOS rules and limit every name to eight characters. For example, “TRONARES.EXE” would be an acceptable filename, and all the easier to find using the BASIC “dir” command and then “del TRONARES.EXE” to make it go away.

Midlife Crisis Crossover!

2024-01-25 03:13:13

My Oscar Quest 2024 Quick-Start Scorecard

“Now I am become Oscar, the booster of careers.”

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: every winter is my annual Oscar Quest, during which I venture out to see all Academy Award nominees for Best Picture, regardless of whether I think I’ll like them or not, whether their politics and beliefs agree with mine or not, whether they’re good or bad for me, and whether or not my friends and family have ever heard of them. I’ve seen every Best Picture winner from Wings to Everything Everywhere All at Once, and every Best Picture nominee from 1987 to the present, many of which were worth the hunt. You take the good, you take the bad, and so on.

Starting in 2020 I upgraded to the Oscars Quest Expanded Challenge, in which I see how many nominees I can watch in all categories before the big ceremony. Thanks to the expansion of streaming services I’ve seen every Oscar-nominated feature and short for the years 2021 and 2022, even in minor categories like Best Original Song. I enjoyed surprises and suffered regrets. Sometimes I have to wait for smaller nominees to arrive at the art-house theaters here in Indianapolis. Sometimes I luck out and they’re on our subscribed streaming services of choice. Sometimes I go for a streaming rental. In extreme cases a Redbox disc rental might be warranted. I go wherever the Quest takes me.

Of this year’s nominees, I’ve already watched the following ten in theaters and written about them in previous entries:

• Barbie
• The Boy and the Heron
• The Creator
• Godzilla Minus One
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
• Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1
• Oppenheimer
• Poor Things
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Since January 1st I’ve seen two more in theaters that need their MCC entries finished ASAP:

• American Fiction
• The Color Purple

I caught the following five nominees on home video in 2023 and wrote about them as part of a single 4800-word marathon:

• Elemental
• The Holdovers
• Maestro
• May December
• The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Since January 1st I’ve streamed five more films that tested Oscar-positive after the fact, then threw in a sixth last night. Doing my homework early sounded like a good idea at the time and (mostly) paid off. Results varied as follows:

* Anatomy of a Fall (Vudu rental). Every year the critics fly at least one film below the populist radar and into the awards limelight, where they infiltrate my sometimes shamefully narrow bandwidth and bring balance to my amateur art-patronage. Such is the case with this French courtroom drama about a German woman (Sandra Hüller, who also headlines fellow Best Picture nominee The Zone of Interest) accused of pushing her French husband off the roof of their mountain chalet while their son was out on a walk. Writer/director Justine Triet avoids American legal-potboiler cliches as the authorities scrutinize every facet of the family’s life to the point of marrow-level lab dissection (the title isn’t a lazy Preminger homage) and speaking to those awful situations where so many unknowable factors require the observer’s perception of what really happened is a decision rather than a discernment. Also, our nominee for the Best Dog of the Year goes to Messi, the border collie who plays family companion Snoop and who (I Am Not Making This Up) won the Cannes Film Festival’s coveted “Palm Dog” award. If you’re hung up on all the ambiguity, keep your eye on Snoop. A dog knows.

* The Eternal Memory (Paramount+). I’m shocked the Academy overlooked the Michael J. Fox documentary, but we caught one that did make the cut. This bittersweet piece from Chilean director Maite Alberdi (whom we last saw with 2021’s also-nominated The Mole Agent) charts the ups and downs of an aging power couple of sorts — TV journalist Augusto Góngora, whose career dates back to the Pinochet regime; and actress Paulina Urrutia, who was elevated to the position of Minister of Culture and the Arts once democracy took hold. Fast-forward a few decades: Góngora is in the throes of Alzheimer’s and only really has Urrutia to guide him through the twilight years. They’re both super lovable and it’s heartbreaking to see her limits tested as his consciousness flits from keenly jocular to sudden befuddlement and back again, alternating with clips of their glory days, especially through the most turbulent of times. It is also the end credits’ sad duty to inform us Góngora passed away in 2023, making any and every souvenir of his very self and his contributions critical to make known to those like us who didn’t.

* Killers of the Flower Moon (Netflix). In a sweeping epic 25 minutes longer than Avengers: Endgame, Martin Scorsese avails himself of today’s cinematic tech to spotlight another wave of toxic white criminals who ransacked the lives and property of less powerful people to build their warped vision of an American empire. Once again this means centering the bad guys that his A-lister buds always love to play, though a more traditional and satisfying structure would’ve put Lily Gladstone up front as the Osage woman whose family suffers the most casualties, which weigh immeasurably upon her nonetheless unbreakable will. But nope, the camera saves all its most special hugs for Leo as an impressionable thug who’s five IQ points short of being Forrest Gump’s pa, because without the team-up star-megawattage of DiCaprio and DeNiro, this might not have been made in the first place…or if it had been, it would’ve had maybe one-one thousandth the budget at best. I still might’ve preferred that version.

I have to watch how many more movies? Piece of cake.

* Nimona (Netflix). It’s been wild watching ND Stevenson escalate from the comics world (Lumberjanes, Sleepy Hollow) to TV showrunning (Netflix’s cutely brawny She-Ra reboot) to feature-film animation. Now here we are with a loose, blustery graphic-novel self-adaptation about a sometimes aggravating rogue changeling with a murky past (voiced by Chloë Grace Moritz) who chooses the sidekick’s life alongside a future-kingdom’s knight (Riz Ahmed) framed for murdering the queen. Viewers sensitive to, er, “culture war” issues may blink at one or two of its core romantic entanglements that are very much Of The Times, but it’s also a spry, surprise-packed, EXPLOSIONS-forward reaffirmation for any lonesome outsider who’s ever drowned in so many crowds that their anguish convinced them they were the irredeemable villain.

* Past Lives (Vudu rental). Every year the critics fly at least one film below the populist radar and into the awards limelight, and it’s a rare year for lightning to strike twice. 24 years ago a South Korean boy and girl have their friendship torn asunder when the girl’s family moves to America. 12 years later the internet is a thing that reconnects them in ways that were once the stuff of sci-fi. Then they let another 12 years slide and see what happens. Greta Lee (Russian Doll) is no timid rom-com quarry as the now-grown NYC writer who gracefully navigates the awkward discussions of What Might Have Been, What Could Be, and, most importantly to her, What Is. Writer/director Celine Song shows what can happen when we do or don’t allow tears, and helps us accept – despite our incredulity – that sometimes people love who they love for deeper reasons that are none of our business, even/especially if their heart’s desire is a schlub who’s named his literary magnum opus Boner.

* Society of the Snow (Netflix). Remember when Hollywood adapted the true story of the Uruguayan rugby team who survived for 72 wintry days after a plane crash stranded them in the Andes under the most unthinkable conditions? And the lead Uruguayan was Ethan Hawke? The whole team’s back, 100% less white, retaining far more of their real-life names, and menaced by state-of-the-art effects and Oscar-nominated Makeup and Hair-Styling (mostly for accurate ravaging by the elements). With a resume ranging from The Impossible to Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom to Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, director J.A. Bayona retells their story – from its uniquely terrifying plane crash to subdued yet gripping survival horror – powerfully, sensitively, and without a trace of the sensationalism that always distorts a First-Worlder’s expression whenever they crack wise about post-disaster cannibalism.

…

Per MCC annual tradition, I plan to catch all five Animated Shorts and the other four Live-Action Shorts (plus a Henry Sugar big-screen encore!) in their annual Shorts.TV theatrical runs in mid-February. That leaves me with 21 more nominees to go before I sleep. Some are still in theaters, some proprietary to specific services, some available for rental, and some in unwatchable limbo as of this writing, which is not cool and hopefully temporary. Those other nominees on my to-do list (including the Documentary Short Features) are:

• 
  

The ABCs of Book BanningAmerican SymphonyThe Barber of Little RockBobi Wine: The People’s PresidentEl CondeFlamin’ HotFour DaughtersGoldaIo capitanoIsland In BetweenThe Last Repair ShopNapoleonNai Nai & Wai PoNyadPerfect DaysRobot DreamsRustinThe Teachers’ LoungeTo Kill a Tiger20 Days in MariupolThe Zone of Interest

So: Oscar Quest has begun! Updates as they occur, only here on MCC! And maybe on social media if I’m in the mood! And in our living room if you’re my wife and prone to putting up with me!

the-mcc-2021-oscar-nominated-documentary-revue

^{midlifecrisiscrossover.com}

Who’s gonna believe the star of such dramas as Dopesick and Clean and Sober could possibly headline a comedy?

Seems only fair if the Ghostbusters can stage a comeback tour decades past their prime, so can one of the biggest ghosts they never caught, right?

I was 15 when a young Tim Burton followed up his feature debut, the wacky and eminently quotable Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (in theaters when he was only 27!), with the even wackier and definitely more expensive Beetlejuice. The first few times I saw it, his hyperactive imagination, his fanciful take on afterlife bureaucracy, his mixed-media creations, and the ensemble’s zest were a welcome escape from reality into fun-house tomfoolery. But the more times I watched it, the more I noticed cracks in the seams and nitpicking got easier. Apart from a few low-key exceptions over the next few decades (Big Eyes, Big Fish) I’d come to accept Burton generally has little vested interest in narrative coherence. Many of his works are thin clotheslines from which he hangs edgy gags, fantastical monstrosities, and non sequitur set-pieces that were fun to draw in his concept sketchbooks and entertain best if you don’t pay close attention to what’s happening. They’re popcorn flicks for us art-class loners.

Now Burton is 66, our ghost-with-the-most Michael Keaton is a 73-year-old Emmy Award Winner, and I’m a middle-aged married loner, but 36 years later, here we all go again with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. The old pals and two-time Bat-collaborators have locked elbows for a new nostalgia-fest with much of the same gags, same lines, same makeup ‘n’ wardrobe, same nearly everything.

Decades after the events of the first one, Beetlejuice manages an entire office for his scare-assistance business, which, as guys with offices go, has about as classy a reputation as Saul Goodman. If you’re a ghost seeking his assistance, of all people, there must be a terrible reason why you can’t do better. He hasn’t spent the intervening decades pursuing his onetime quarry Lydia Deetz (former teen Winona Ryder), but he never forgot her or his failed plan for a shotgun marriage. Per the first film’s mostly random Rules of the Dead, if someone would marry him, then he can stay in the Land of the Living. The spirit realm is just another foreign country and he was an immigrant trying to score a green card into our land of liberty and living.

He revisits that plan when his past comes back to haunt him and leads to revealing the unnecessary Secret Origin of Beetlejuice. Once upon a time during the Black Plague when he was alive, he had a wife named Delores (Monica Bellucci, from The Matrix sequels and The Passion of the Christ) whom he murdered before she could murder him first, except she also succeeded even as she lay dying. Yadda yadda yadda, her parts were boxed up in an afterlife backroom and forgotten like the Ark of the Covenant, until they aren’t, and she’s loosed and lusting for revenge. Her entirely SFX-driven reassembly sequence is the film’s genuinely scariest moment, setting her up as a force of reckoning who can actually kill ghosts and consume their souls. Then she disappears from the film for about an hour because Burton can’t be bothered and besides, she wasn’t in the first one, so he figures who cares. Her part in the climax is a dashed-off afterthought, like a response to some studio exec’s Post-It after watching a rough cut asking, “Hey, where’d Delores go?”

And what of the Deetzes? Boys my age may recall Lydia being pretty cool, or even cute, when she was a nihilist teen poet wallowing in depression that she soon forgot after being chased around by a phantom perv in pinstripes and a lot of puppets. Sadly, like a lot of us fellow Gen-X-ers, she grew up cheerless and apparently self-destructive. She’s a widow who still hangs out with her performance-artist stepmom Delia (huzzah for Catherine O’Hara!). She can still see ghosts, but wastes this power on hosting one of the sixteen thousand ghost-chasing reality shows out there, indistinguishable from the rest even though her power actually works. She’s moved on to a boyfriend named Rory, played by Justin Theroux (HBO’s The Leftovers, Apple’s The Mosquito Coast remake), who’s also her producer — a selfish clod who passive-aggressively manipulates her into a meal-ticket relationship. Did grief make her stupid, or was she always this bad and we were too similarly self-absorbed to notice?

She also has a teen daughter named Astrid who, apropos on too many levels, is played by TV’s new Wednesday Addams herself, Jenna Ortega (whom I last saw avoiding ghosthood in the last two Scream sequels). Astrid inherited Lydia’s angsty-goth moodiness but stubbornly insists there’s no such thing as ghosts and thinks her mom is a charlatan. For reasons that may or may not be related to the disappearance of her father, she’s escaped her mom — or was banished from her presence? — and gone off to boarding school, where no angsty goth in recorded film history has ever graduated, flourished, or accomplished anything besides trash-talking the popular kids in self-defense.

The surviving cast members from the first one reunite when tragedy strikes: Lydia’s father Charles is dead! That’s to be expected as former star Jeffrey Jones is Sir Not Appearing in This Film for highly publicized and understandable reasons. But in a story where the line between the lands of the living and the dead is a barely enforced formality, “all the way dead” means “basically honorarily alive”. Rather than exiling Charles to the same remote island prison as Dr. Lewis Dodgson and Steven Hyde, Burton keeps Charles around — not only illustrating the means of his demise, but tagging along where he goes next. His sub-subplot is largely pointless, but his new Great Beyond form feels like a virtual, extended middle finger to Jones. Also, I guess, they had to leave him in because he was in the first one.

The occasion of Charles’ funeral arrangements brings the cast together and entangles the disparate plot threads. Two marriage proposals are made, both at inappropriate times from potentially awful grooms. Ghosts mince and prance hither and yon. The law enforcement offices of the dead are visited but don’t affect much. Astrid visits her step-grandma’s attic for seemingly the first time in her entire life and discovers the town diorama from the first film. Inevitably Our Villain’s name is said three times and Keaton gets to act obnoxiously in both worlds again. Quotes are re-quoted. The otherdimensional sandworm performs an encore. Characters face the prospect of a permanent relocation from one realm to the other. Composer Danny Elfman plays the hits. Yet another ghost-controlled lip-sync dance number is performed because they did it in the first one, but with the added benefit of Ortega teaching TikTok another new dance-meme set to a bloated oldie.

Our credited screenwriters are Wednesday showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (also the team behind Smallville) and Seth Grahame-Smith (Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter; Burton’s Dark Shadows revamp), who seemingly fought to keep in every draft they wrote, resulting in a frantic, exhausting busyness. Burton clearly enjoys this “return to form” as he veers back and forth between practical effects, animation styles, and/or visual homages (stop-motion! Claymation! Miniatures! Heavy makeup! Italian Expressionist cinema, if that was a thing!), but he refuses to engage with any serious implications of his defiantly individualistic interpretation of post-corporeal existence. One unexpected reunion with a dead loved one is fleetingly weightless, handled with all the gravitas of bumping into a familiar barista at a party. A heel-turn betrayal leaves no trace of an emotional stab wound or evinces one whit of a temper-shift after the truth is out. A five-second glimpse of Actual Hell, implying all this is not The Final Destination, is a throwaway gag to dump a new character who barely matters, not a foreshadowing of any deeper mythos or faith. A Major Character Death, which might amount to something in other franchises, is but a cutesy trifle. With everything going on, they ain’t got time to grieve.

The final act caps off everything by reprising Corpse Bride‘s madcap ending, where everyone’s running and running and running and the border between the living and the dead is an unguarded doorway jamb. The rules are all made up and the points don’t matter. The answer to every questionable choice is either “Because it felt fun!” or “Because we did it in the first one!” The antics are intermittently amusing, mostly whenever O’Hara’s self-unaware art-diva takes center stage and thrives on the utter ridiculousness. Longtime Burton fans may not care when the effects shift from practical to computer-drawn and back again, especially if all the noisy distractions do their job.

Keaton, for his part, does what he did best way back when, but doesn’t really exert much to one-up himself. His career has come a long way over the decades since everyone kept calling him “Mr. Mom” back when they wrote him off awfully quickly as a one-hit wonder, but Beetlejuice the character thoroughly hasn’t changed one bit. Our star performs exactly the job he was hired to do. Only the props he’s reacting to have changed. But the original Beetlejuice charmed and energized ’80s kids with the shock of the new, the audacious, the clash between thanatopsis and circus-colored silliness. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice doesn’t examine a new angle between that duality; it’s just more of the same, but also. It’s a popcorn flick for us art-class loners who’ve had a few more life experiences since then and won’t be wearing the same old dark outfits to the reunion because they don’t fit anymore.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: The always great Willem Dafoe occupies his own little corner of the film as a dead action star who parlayed his iconic Dirty Harry-esque franchise into a new career as afterlife police chief. He’s having a total blast, but all his scenes could’ve been deleted with nary a difference to the “narrative”. Burn Gorman (Pacific Rim, Enola Holmes) is the town preacher whose church hosts the big finale and who’s prone to garbled platitudes (among the best satirical bits here, albeit drowned out). TV’s Danny DeVito, a.k.a. Burton’s Penguin in Batman Returns, has two scenes as an afterlife janitor. Why the afterlife, whose average denizen was first admitted through six feet of cemetery dirt, needs or values cleaning services is not explained.

I’m actively irritated that I didn’t recognize Santiago Cabrera, once the cantankerous Captain Rios from Star Trek: Picard, who’s unrecognizable here — doused in mood lighting and covered in piranhas. Sami Slimane (the head rioter in Netflix’s galvanizing French thriller Athena) is a graffiti artist who assists Delia with an installation. Amy Nuttall (Downton Abbey‘s fired maid Ethel) is a local realtor.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice end credits, but they do confirm that the overlong Soul Train sequence — a single Dad-joke upconverted into an entire film-halting dance number — was indeed co-opted with the express permission of the current copyright holders as well as the Estate of Don Cornelius. I furrowed my brow a lot in the theater, and was gratified later to learn I wasn’t the only viewer who had a lot of questions.