Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

I was a casual fan of the 1988 original, having regularly viewed the tamer TV adaptation before that. When I felt like going to a theater again, this sequel was the only feature to grab me. Ordinarily, I'd save its genre for next month, but that slipped my mind.

The decades have not been very kind to Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder). Her husband (Santiago Cabrera) died in an unlikely accident, and despite her success as a televised ghost whisperer, she hasn't been able to contact him. Disbelieving teen daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega, fresh off Wednesday) wants as little to do with her as possible. She still freaks out every time she sees someone wearing black and white horizontal stripes, rightly suspecting that the titular source of her PTSD (Michael Keaton) hasn't given up on coercing her hand in marriage so he can return full-time to the land of the living. In some ways, she has it together even less than her eccentric artist stepmother (Catherine O'Hara), who now reports that Lydia's father also died in an unlikely accident. At his wake, her unorthodox producer (Justin Theroux) aggressively talks her into an imminent Halloween wedding. And when Astrid gets involved with a local boy (Arthur Conti) who's not as harmless as he acts, Lydia fears that her worst nightmare has become her best hope.

Coco (2017)

Whew, I almost finished 2017 without seeing any of its animated features. Honestly, it was awfully low on promising ones. Even Coco seemed iffy to me, given its conceptual similarity to The Book of Life. Further research assured me that Pixar was planning it before TBoL got started. My folks joined me for the former in a theater.

The title oddly refers to a character with little screen time: the senile great-grandma of 12-year-old protagonist Miguel. Her father abandoned the family to pursue a career in music, so her mother, Imelda, banned music from the household. In what I take to be the present, albeit in a Mexican town poor enough to pass for the '80s, Imelda's rule is still in full effect, but Miguel loves music and has no use for the family business of shoemaking. Hoping to enter a talent show, he swipes a guitar from the local tomb of a celebrated musician. But grave robbing on the Day of the Dead takes him straight to the realm of the dead, and only a blessing from a dead relative by dawn can return him. Since the first dead relatives he meets include Imelda and don't dare bless him without a promise that he give up music, he sets out to find his estranged great-great-granddad....