A bit of rose-tinted childhood nostalgia can evoke memories of when life felt less chaotic and the future was full of unlimited possibilities. I remember seeing Beetlejuice with my friend Mark during sixth grade. I remember it distinctly because it was the first movie I saw in a theater without an adult present. My mom dropped the two of us off before and picked the two of us after the movie. It would not be such a significant milestone today as it was then, as this was long before the Internet, let alone cell phones. We had to look up the movie times in the newspaper and guess at the movie’s runtime based on the start times of when your film would start and when the movie after yours would begin. If there was an emergency or a miscommunication, it involved going to a pay phone and calling your home’s landline, praying that someone home could answer. I hadn’t thought about that day in years. With the 2024 release of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, I decided to revisit this Tim Burton (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) classic. My recent rewatch of Beetlejuice in preparation for the sequel brought back that fond memory.
Category Archives: Alec Baldwin
BlacKkKlansman (2018)
Over seven years into my movie review website and BlacKkKlansman, this is the first Spike Lee-directed movie I’m reviewing. I realized this when I checked his category and saw that he wasn’t on my list. It certainly isn’t because I don’t enjoy a good Spike Lee movie. It’s more than one of my first 370+ reviews; more than 300 have been since 2010. And while Lee has certainly directed many films since 2010, I haven’t heard of nearly any of them. I did see (and enjoy) 2013’s Oldboy and am pretty surprised I did not write a review on it. It is a movie that I will go back and watch again and review. However, Lee is better known for the movies he directed over a 15-20-year period, starting with 1989’s Do the Right Thing and ending with 2006’s Inside Man. Shockingly, he does not have a Best Director Academy Award nomination to his credit and only has one actual nomination (as a screenwriter for Do The Right Thing). While Lee isn’t a Steven Spielberg, he has directed many memorable movies that people can immediately roll out of their mouths.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)
Mission Impossible: Fallout could be a template for creating action movies. This is everything you want in a pure action movie, offering the same suspense, mystery, and comedic tones you expect from this top-of-the-line franchise. Tom Cruise (Born on the Fourth of July, A Few Good Men) reprises his most recognizable character (Top Gun came out over 30 years ago. Maverick is great, Ethan Hunt is the identifiable Cruise character, at least for anyone younger than 35). I’ve spent a good part of the last two decades knocking Tom Cruise for his choice of roles, wishing he would return to the types of roles that earned him three Academy Award nominations between 1990-2000. And honestly, at the time, I thought he was phoning it in for box office dollars. I understand an action flick here and there.
Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)
As my friend Tom would say, directing a Mission Impossible movie is like a doorknob. Everyone gets a turn. This is so true, but not really in a good way. While this franchise undoubtedly improves with each new installment, this wasn’t always the case. My biggest problem with the first four movies of the franchise was how different they were from one another. I have never watched a sequel that was so inherently different in directing, storytelling, cinematography, sound, and everything else from the original than Mission Impossible 2 was from Mission Impossible. John Woo’s Hong Kong-style martial arts action flick was so far completely different from the Brian DePalma intelligent, well-crafted, big-budget adaptation of the brilliant spy television series that ran for seven years in the late 1960s that it felt like the two movies weren’t even related. I don’t necessarily oppose changing a director (though I don’t love it), but I oppose changing styles. Plenty of franchises have had different directors that have made that work (most notably the James Bond franchise, which is similar to Mission Impossible), but many more haven’t.
Still Alice (2014)
Still Alice is a slightly above-average movie with the best lead performance you will see by an actress all year. I think there are only a couple of shoo-ins at this year’s Academy Awards. I believe that most categories are predictable, but there will be a couple of surprises. The big ones that will not be surprising are Patricia Arquette (Best Supporting Actress – Boyhood) and Julian Moore for her performance as a 50-year-old woman suffering from Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease in this Still Alice. Each year there seems to be a movie that earns a significant award but is not recognized in any other category. This year, that movie is Still Alice. I’m not a huge fan of Moore. I think she’s good, but she’s slightly overrated. Nonetheless, she is due to be recognized, and this is the lead performance that is head and shoulders above the other contenders.
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