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The High-Low Triumph of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice at Venice
The crème de la crème of the global cinema community came together to watch Tim Burton spill his guts.
Jury president Isabelle Huppert was on hand to officially open the festival in three different languages at once, and though I didn’t catch whether she stuck around for the movie, if she did we would’ve finally be able to answer the question of what Isabelle Huppert thinks of children’s choruses somberly intoning “Banana Boat (Day-O)” and extended dance sequences set to “MacArthur Park.” (The singer who opened the evening with a mournful Italian love ballad, whose name has apparently gone unreported in the English-language press, did sit through all of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, though I was unable to get her full review.) Clad in mandatory black tie, the Venice audience chuckled at jokes about Santas getting burned up in fireplaces and environmentalist do-gooders getting eaten by piranhas as well as a scene in which Burton’s partner, Monica Bellucci, playing Beetlejuice’s ex-wife from hell, sucks Danny DeVito’s character’s soul out of his body, leaving him a crumpled-up bag of flesh. Perhaps some of these luminaries noted, as I did, how the movie sidesteps the unpleasant fact that original cast member Jeffrey Jones has since become a convicted sex offender by only depicting his character via animated flashback, and then (spoiler alert) turning him into a walking gushing corpse missing the entire top third of his body.
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