Watched two movies for the first time last night on streaming. The first, my wife and I watched together. The second, my wife ducked out after ten minutes.
The first was Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. We both concluded that it was a worthy sequel that has a reason to exist, insofar as anything in the Beetlejuice franchise has a reason to exist. Michael Keaton plays his signature character as if he just finished acting in the first film a week ago. The character hasn’t lost a touch. The other characters, the few who return, are a bit changed with thirty years of time, but in a way that is understandable and expected, so nobody seems wildly different. The fact that there are three other villains aside from Beetlejuice, and he and the main cast all team up to stop them for mutual benefit is fun, although I think the character of Delores was built up too much for how little a role she actually played. For a sequel to a movie so weird it never felt like it needed one, and to be made thirty years later to boot, it succeeds where so many sequels fall short.
The second movie was My Dinner With Andre’. If you want a movie that’s different from any other you’ve seen, that’s more about thinking and imagining the moment rather than actually seeing it, this is a movie everyone should see just once. The premise is the easiest to describe in the history of cinema: two men sit in a restaurant and talk. That’s it. Like, no bullshit, that’s the entire damn movie. There’s a two minute period of the first character arriving at the restaurant while his voice-over explains the situation, and another two minute period at the end as he leaves the restaurant and his voice-over describes his feelings at the end of the evening following the dinner, but the rest of it is just listening to these two guys talk, and watching their facial expressions as they each listen to what the other has to say. But what they talk about, and how they describe it in such a way that you cannot help but visualize for yourself the events they reminisce about, is an examination of human nature and the philosophy of who we are as beings in a modern society full of mediocrity and enslaved to capitalistic fascism. Think of it as attending a lecture in a philosophy class, only instead of a professor addressing a class, it’s two professors addressing each other and the class is just watching and listening. It may be dull to the minds of some (my wife just couldn’t stand the concepts being discussed because human nature annoys her already), but to those with an inquisitive mind, or if you just like to listen to people, watch this one.