Beetlejuice (dir. Tim Burton)

Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice incorporates 1950s-sci-fi-esque Claymation scenes with gorgeous New England vistas and odd, 80s-style interior decorating. It’s about the Maitlands, played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, who accidentally die on their vacation, and end up having to haunt their own house for the next 150 years – and the Deetzes, Charles, Lydia, and Delia, who have moved from New York City to rural Connecticut so that Charles can relax. The rest of the family is not so thrilled about the move – and the Maitlands want them out of the house.

The entire cast is marvelous. Winona Ryder as Lydia is strange and unusual; Glenn Shadix plays the flamboyant Otho, who knows just as much about the supernatural as he does about interior design; Michael Keaton is the ghost with the most in the title role.

Delia Deetz, played by Catherine, is a self-serving "artist" who is described by her agent as a "flake". She is horrified that her husband would move her away from the social NYC scene to a place that doesn’t even have Szechuan Chinese food – and tries immediately to gut out the house and make it her own – or she will go insane and take everyone with her.

Her makeup is cartoonish, her fashions amusing (at one point she wears a long black glove as a headband), but she’s not the normal caricature of an evil stepmother. If anything, her worst quality is that she is so insecure and wrapped up in her superficial "artistic" life – and her art is dangerous – that she hardly has time to pay attention to her odd stepdaughter’s claims that the house is haunted. She is very self-serving, but she is really more pathetic than anything else – the audience can even have a bit of sympathy for her when the ghosts won’t show up to her dinner party, and she claims to have "never been so embarrassed".

Even though this is a more mainstream role for her, Catherine still gets to show off her talents; her facial expressions in the famous Day-O scene are a cross between shock and amazement that only she can pull off (and her dancing, however strange, is hot!), and her interactions with Lydia show some of the “less-is-more” acting that Sheila Albertson in Waiting for Guffman would like to try out...




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