LarsVonDreary

Throughout the movie, I was surprised that I wasn't more engaged with the story. This is the exact kind of thing that usually excites my imagination. In the end, the movie dismissed itself as a mere delusion. That must have been coloring the production the whole time. You can't spend the entire movie in the realm of the psyche and then rise above it in the denouement. You can't snub your own vision, declare yourself superior/smarter - and then expect me to appreciate the dream that you yourself disdain. OTOH this is exactly what the Wizard of Oz movie adaptation does, and nobody seems to mind. Hey, it was all a dream! I used to read Word Up Magazine...

I just watched this for the first time last night (2024-09-06). I would have been a junior in high school when this came out, and I only vaguely remember people talking about it. Yet watching it I felt like I had seen every single sight gag. IDK how that's possible. Does this movie have any characters? Who are they? What were they doing before the movie started? What psychological change did they undergo in the course of the... I want to say story, but does that even apply here? Also, if everyone is only yelling all the time, is anyone yelling? Is anything emotionally heightened in a 90-minute emotional monotone? Those poor actors. There is so much comedic talent in the cast. But none of them is funny in this movie. Didn't crack a smile, and I was so open/receptive to all things spooky, whimsical, silly, gross, scary... whatever. Prior to dinner, we had just come from the grocery store where we spent too long looking at this year's Halloween cards. My wife and I each bought a couple, and we also got a few Halloween decorations. So we were feeling corny and Halloweeny - down for whatever. This reminds me of all the other inexplicably overhyped movies from the 1980s where it seems like everyone from screenwriter to editor was on a cocaine bender. There is lots of cursing and **** humor. The content is trashy but the tone is peurile. It's as if the target audience is nine-year-old felons who just got out of prison and are READY TO FUUUUUCK. Maybe that's what they told Jeffrey Jones to get him to come onboard. (His home computer desk is just two sawhorses and a board). See, THAT'S a joke. Two if you count the pun. You don't just make up stuff from your precious, I'm-the-creative-one, mommy-says-I'm-the-smartest-boy, overgrown head. You hook into a STORY. If want to show teeth, you bite INTO SOMETHING. Apart from farts and slapstick, humor needs an object, and it's hard to find one in a world with no rules, a gathering with no relationships, and course of surprising events with no **** this comedy is grimly unfunny. It really only has style to stand on, and it feels so tin-eared regarding tone. I suspect that Tim Burton is very good with (1) a sketchpad, and (2) Hollywood power meetings. Maybe he didn't start to learn about story until after this movie? This movie is so dreary and awful. 90 minutes felt like an 8-hour car ride with the loudest, most insensitive, most intolerable person I can imagine. We would have bailed out but my wife and I each tolerated it for the sake of the other - so at least there was one funny joke in the course of the movie. Our cat watched it with us, and he seemed genuinely interested at a few points. I give Beetlejuice one point for him, since he so far hasn't learned to post his own review. Hard to believe this is the same director - and some of the same cast - who made the funny, touching, charming Ed **** picked this as our Friday-night-home movie because it's impossible to get away from the advertising around the new Beetlejuice movie. We thought, why don't we watch the original now, and the new one closer to Halloween. In a way I think the time for this kind of movie has finally come - people have infantile attention spans and current media is better suited to contextless sight gags. If it's anything like the original, they should release the sequel as a series of TikToks.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Melodrama. Plot without a story. No ticking clock. Every character arc is boilerplate that feels like it was made hastily for television. Like maybe they pitched and sold the movie on the strength of the monster-novelty and then had to deliver a movie before they came up with characters or a story. BTW a novel monster does not make a premise. A premise is something like *Elizabeth Bennet must correct her own character faults AND demand the same of her reluctant suitor in order to find love and make a life for herself - before her family loses their home and she finds herself in a bad situation.* OR *Sarah Connor is being hunted by a mysterious killer and aided by an equally mysterious man whose preposterous story is nearly as scary. She must learn to trust others and accept responsibility/community role before the hunter-killer ends her [newly-important] life.* Actually, The Terminator (1984) seems like an informative comparison. First of all, you have a hero/main character/protagonist. A Quiet Place has none; it follows the post-narrative/television model of simply throwing a bunch of characters in a situation and leaving it to the audience to determine what is the moral vision of the artwork. Next there is a ticking clock of sorts. The Terminator is on a clearly accelerating timeline with ultimate stakes. When the monster finally kills Sarah Connor, humanity is doomed. In A Quiet Place, once the whole family is killed, then what? IDK - I assume there are millions of other such holdouts all over the world; and because these paper-doll characters are not proper movie characters with psychic dynamics, I really don't care at all about any of them. I could go on and on... Basically take any model from Aristotle's *Poetics* to the present and go down the list. Line by line, this movie fails to deliver almost everything that matters. A screenplay doesn't have to follow rules to be acceptable, but IMHO it has to at least acknowledge the existence of story. This movie follows the post-narrative model usually seen on television: simply sequence one surprising event after another. The fact that this movie is universally acclaimed makes me feel that I might be in my own fantastic dystopia. I feel a little crazy watching this, knowing how many smart, worldly people recommended it to me. So the movie is left with *just* plot. And the plot is no good IMHO. As others have noted, this is the kind of movie that invites incredulous questions. There are so many obvious solutions to their predicament that go unaddressed... I will tolerate a lot of slop in a horror movie - much more than any other genre. E.g. one of my recent favorites is The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster (2023), which has DEEP problems but I understand why they are there and I love it all the more for following its own rules to their conclusions. A Quiet Place is just a shiny piece of junk for people raised on distraction-amusement-entertainment devoid of story. My hope in spending all this energy to degrade something is that others like me will be warned off from spending 90m on this "movie." LOL now I'm imagining that last sentence as Sarah Connor's last soliloquy in The Terminator. "What's most difficult for me is trying to decide what to tell you and what not to..." My one point is for editing; at least the movie is taut, kinetic. Like a variation on the old joke: the food is terrible, but at least they got the portion right. The only other review I gave on this platform was similarly negative. Maybe I will just reserve this site as my outlet for negativity - keep it contained here so I don't become one of those people who delights in pointing out what's wrong with everything.

Plot alone does not make a story. An idea alone does not make a premise. A goal alone does not make a character. Remember Sammy Jankis.

It will be good as clips and memes. I loved the look of the movie. The clothing really looks like gorgeous fashion for dolls. I finally did start laughing once Ken started to stumble through his own unfortunate awakening. I liked the cameos, especially Dua Lipa. I looked for Lizzo but if she's in it I missed it. I don't like to **** on people's hard work, so let me counter the fact of this movie with a proposition for a similar future project: make a Barbie movie that is like _Drunk History_, but narrated by sober children. You get normal kids who play with Barbies and have them tell you what their Barbies are doing. Usually it will be a string of surprises, reenactments of stories they saw elsewhere.. but some of these will be novel, coherent stories. Take those and illustrate them with the same lavish detail as in the *Barbie* movie I just watched. I think that would save everything I love about this movie and trim out everything else.