MY MOVIE SHELF: The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 181  Days to go: 183

Movie #196:  The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Nightmare Before Christmas is my son’s favorite movie. He loves everything Jack Skellington and, if I could afford it, would be a-okay with me giving him an entirely Jack Skellington bedroom and wardrobe. Not kidding.

Me, I’ve seen this movie about a dozen times, but I’ve never really paid attention to it. It’s pretty cute. Somehow I always kind of assumed it wasn’t of interest to me, but I liked it. It’s got gorgeous animation, for one. I think it’s possibly my favorite claymation work ever. It’s simply beautiful and artistic and dazzling. It also has interesting and unique voice work — actors you don’t normally see in these types of films. And it’s a fun and clever story.

Jack (Chris Sarandon, though Danny Elfman does his singing parts) is the Pumpkin King of Halloweentown. But he’s disillusioned about his life. Halloween has lost its fun and meaning for him. He wanders off and stumbles across a portal grove in a forest filled with doors to other holidays (where is my sequel, The Nightmare Before St. Patrick’s Day??) and falls in the gorgeous Christmas tree door to Christmastown. There he experiences the crazy joy of Christmas and goes back to Halloweentown a changed skeleton. He tries to explain how great Christmas is to all the zombies and witches and whatnot in his hometown, but they don’t get it. Still, he decides he wants to be Santa Claus, and who could blame him?

Of course, Jack gets a little misguided, but given his upbringing it’s no surprise. The real problems with his Christmas Eve debacle, however, (and a debacle it is) stem primarily from his townspeople totally not getting Christmas and screwing it all up by making presents of dead turtles and bat hats and shrunken heads and bullet-ridden ducks. Those just aren’t the things on a kid’s Christmas list, y’know?

Fortunately for everyone, there’s a level-headed Frankenstein’s Lady Monster named Sally (Catherine O’Hara, being great some more) who continuously poisons her evil scientist captor so she can escape him and sews herself back together any time she falls apart, proving just how resourceful a girl she is. Honestly, I’ve had to sew myself back together a time or two. It’s not as easy as Sally makes it look. She’s really a kickass (and surprisingly shapely, for a Frankenstein’s Lady Monster) role model. I can see why so many people like to dress up as her for Halloween. In fact, I might be so inclined myself next year. Anyway, she tries to stop Jack from leaving on Christmas Eve by deploying a fog bomb on the town, but she’s foiled by Zero the Red-Nosed Ghost Dog. So she goes to save Santa Claus from the Boogie Man Oogie Boogie (Ken Page) instead. (Naturally, the Boogie Man likes to boogie, which is exactly how my toddler interpreted the term “boogie man” and started shaking her little booty along with him.)

Jack is a bit discouraged when it turns out everyone hates his Christmas, but he quickly pulls himself back up, reinvigorated at the thought of Halloween and all it has to offer, and he runs off to save Santa and Sally. Yay! (But Santa still yells at him for having such a stupid idiotic plan. Double yay!)

Also, apparently Sally’s been in love with him all this time? And now he loves her too? I’m not sure where that all came from, but okay. I’ll go with it. I do like the new duck-billed lady monster the duck-billed evil scientist made for himself, at least.

Now, though, I need to go finish writing the alternate “Rudolph” lyrics to my song about Zero. That’s really where it’s at.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Dolores Claiborne

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 286  Days to go: 276

Movie #91: Dolores Claiborne

Most people, in my estimation, read a book first and then see the movie based on it afterward. That’s generally how these things work anyway; books come out years before their film adaptations, so obviously the books are read first. Except in my case. Not that I’ve never read a book before I’ve seen the movie, but most times I see a movie and discover it’s based on a book, and that’s when I seek the book out. I’m backwards that way. Always have been.

When the book Dolores Claiborne was released in the early ’90s sometime, I bought it as a gift for my friend — a big Stephen King fan — for her birthday, probably. (I suppose it could’ve been Christmas, but birthday seems more likely.) I didn’t give it much thought after that. Several years later, I saw the movie when it came out, and it struck me — the sadness, the harshness, the years of misunderstanding and resentment that can tear a relationship apart, or the years of mutual pain and shared hardships that can bring people closer. So I sought out the book. I really liked it as well, and because it contained a reference to another book, Gerald’s Game, I read that one as well. It scared the ever-loving bejeezus out of me and I pretty much gave up reading King after that. Still, this movie hangs on to me somehow.

Kathy Bates is brilliant in just about everything, but she doesn’t get nearly enough credit for her portrayal of Dolores. A bitter, hardened, frosty woman who’s lived every inch of a difficult life, most of it as a domestic servant to the wealthy Vera Donovan (Judy Parfitt), who Dolores is being accused of murdering — most vigorously by investigator Detective John Mackey (Christopher Plummer), who says she’s killed before.

Dolores Claiborne is a slowly building fire of secrets, lies, accusations and atrocities. Peppered with flashbacks, some of them unwelcome intrusions, it reveals, piece by piece, the truth about Dolores’s relationship with Vera, and the one she had with her husband (David Strathairn) almost twenty years earlier, when he died under questionable circumstances. It also deals with the crumbling, broken relationship Dolores has with her daughter Selena (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and how its rift came about.

The movie creates a pervasive mood of distance and depression, with cold, blue-tinted lighting that is unforgiving to say the least and a score by Danny Elfman that is subtly haunting and ominous and sorrowful (in case you thought he could only do playful quirkiness). In contrast, the flashbacks are all shot in bright, rich color — soft, warm beauty to be juxtaposed with the pain hiding just beneath the surface.

Jennifer Jason Leigh has never been an actress I’ve been particularly drawn to, but here she perfectly embodies a tortured and emotionally wrecked Selena, self-medicating with liquor and pills to help her get through her days (Ellen Muth as Selena’s younger self is also quite good). Christopher Plummer is relentless and angry and out for blood, pursuing Dolores with unwavering focus that has more to do with her husband’s death than Vera’s. Dolores, meanwhile, is single-minded and she couldn’t care less about the accusations against her, past or present, nor her standing or reputation in the town. She only cares about one person, and everything she’s ever done has served that purpose.

The film is also about the difficulty of being a woman — the difficulties of being a mother, of being a daughter, and of being a friend. Many times women feel alone in the world, with no supporters, and that was true of all these women — Dolores, Vera and Selena. And yet, sometimes unbeknownst to each woman individually, the others had their backs. Dolores and Vera looked out for Selena. Dolores looked out for Vera — and Selena supported her in death. Vera, and eventually Selena, looked out for Dolores. Sometimes a woman may feel like being a bitch is all she has to hold onto, but that’s not necessarily the case. The ones who love us and look out for us are there too.

MY MOVIE SHELF: The Corpse Bride

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 299  Days to go: 289

Movie #74: The Corpse Bride

Tim Burton has sort of cornered the market on this particular kind of digital claymation horror flick, and kind of as a general rule you expect to see (or hear) his life partner Helena Bonham Carter and long-time friend and collaborator Johnny Depp in every one of them. The thing is, though, I’d totally forgotten they were in this one and I somehow missed the opening credits until it got to Emily Watson so I watched the whole thing without noticing Depp and Bonham Carter were the voices of Victor and Emily (with the other Emily, Watson, actually voicing Victoria).

Danny Elfman, in addition to providing his usual trippy score, writes a bunch of catchy songs as well. You really have to hand it to Tim Burton — he know what works for him and he continues to crank that sort of thing out, working with the same people, year after year. And yet he still manages to create new and interesting stories.

The Corpse Bride is definitely my favorite of the animated Burton films. It plays with ideas of obligation versus desire, and love versus longing. Lines are crossed between the land of the living and the world of the dead when Victor accidentally slips his wedding band on the petrified zombie finger of Emily, the corpse bride, reaching up from under the ground beneath a tree. The use of color to differentiate these planes of existence is excellent and plays against expectations, as Victor and Victoria’s lives are composed of pale and pasty shades of gray and sepia, whereas the underworld is all bright colors and unnatural complexions. It’s beautiful and interesting to look at.

The most fascinating part of The Corpse Bride, however, is how it empowers its young women. Victor is a nervous man, and while he definitely finds strength through the course of the film and proves to be a stand-up guy, Victoria and Emily are actually the heroes. Victoria, though she is foiled and forced to marry Lord Barkis (Richard E. Grant), is the only one to fight for Victor and try to save him from the underworld. And Emily, who has been wallowing in the heartbreak of her lost love (and murder most foul), learns to be strong on her own. She doesn’t need a man to be happy, and she releases Victor to be with his true love Victoria. However, she neither goes back to her wallowing, nor does she allow herself to be run over by the villain. She stands up to him, takes back her life (or death, as it were) and returns to the underworld in a flutter of magical butterflies. It’s a vision of a woman being set free from the things that can hold them back, and I’m all for that.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Beetlejuice

This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.

Movie #26: Beetlejuice

It occurred to me today, watching this for perhaps the thirtieth time, that I didn’t really understand this movie when it came out. I was thirteen, so I got the gist, but a lot of the darker references — and a lot of a jokes, to be honest — were lost on me. I thought it was great and hilarious, of course, but I suspect that came from the off-beat nature, the frenetic score and the unrestrained performance by Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse that all combined to make it a movie that seemed great and hilarious, even if you didn’t get all of it. (And I suspect I wasn’t the only one who didn’t quite get it, considering the Beetlejuice cartoon that ran from 1989-1991, featuring characters Beetlejuice and Lydia as friends.)

Over the years, though, my appreciation for the film has deepened significantly. It’s a tight, raucous comedy — a sort of controlled chaos. Even the opening is intentionally discordant. With the camera panning across the peaceful countryside of a small northern town, it could be mistaken for a much different film if not for the score — a frantic, jarring, jumping series of notes that practically made composer Danny Elfman a household name (at least among cinephiles). The score lets you know there is something unsettling about this sleepy scenery, and that feeling is confirmed when the camera stops on a large Victorian farmhouse and a giant, hairy spider — bigger than the windows — crawls over the roof. The perspective and tone shifts again to reveal the house and the town are all part of a scale model built by homeowner Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin, almost disquietingly thin as compared to his current self). He and his wife Barbara (Geena Davis) are taking the world’s first staycation, reveling in the chance to hang wallpaper and avoid friends. They make a quick run into town for supplies from their hardware store (an innocuous dog trotting through the edges of each scenic location change), then crash their car through a covered bridge and into the river below when trying to avoid the (same) dog that crosses their path. Within a few short minutes of the opening shot, the quiet, homebody Maitlands arrive home from their crash into the river to discover they’re dead — at least the third twist against the expected and the movie’s been on for maybe ten minutes.

The movie wastes very little time on exposition or unnecessary scenes, and saves itself from having to by making the nature of death and the dead a mystery the Maitlands don’t understand any better than the audience does. They sort of fumble through their new existence and when the urbanite Deetz family (Jeffrey Jones as the jittery Charles, the never not-perfect Catherine O’Hara as the style-conscious Delia, and teenaged Winona Ryder in her breakout role as proto-goth Lydia) moves into their home, they seek to haunt the interlopers out, with no success. The nefarious Betelgeuse is actually sort of tangential to all this. He tries to insert himself into the Maitlands’ dealings with the Deetzes, and Keaton’s performance just takes over from there. It’s so dynamic, in fact, I think most people forget the movie isn’t really about him at all. Still, his draw is undeniable, and he makes something dark and ultimately quite frightening in concept a comedic tour de force. It’s easily the most iconic role of Keaton’s life, even surpassing Batman.

The two calypso numbers are also iconic and fun, and the netherworld is full of visual gags. The bulk of the movie, in fact, is joke upon joke with barely a breath in between, on top of a rather simply constructed framework. I think that’s what makes it work so well, actually. Dealing with life and death, even comically, a film can get bogged down in its own mythology. Beetlejuice doesn’t, yet it still brings heft to Lydia’s loneliness and depression, to the Maitlands’ affection for her, and to the terror of the séance and final showdown (again, masterfully scored by Elfman at a terrifying, escalating pace). I didn’t get that at thirteen.

Awesomely, this movie has sort of grown up with me, in my own mind, experience and perspective. At sixteen, I could definitely relate to and understand Lydia better than I had at thirteen. I felt her disconnect from her parents and her longing for someone to nurture her. In my early twenties, it was Delia who caught my attention because I wanted to be stylish and expressive and understood artistically, while still believing I had all the answers. A few years ago, I could’ve been like Charles, actively looking for a way to relax and get away from all the stress in my life. And now I’m more like Barbara and Adam, happy to be at home spending time with my family. In that way the movie is universal and timeless. I look forward to experiencing it many more times.