CRYPTOQUOTE
LAS VEGAS – His Beetlejuice character is known for not fitting in, and Michael Keaton is pretty good at standing out himself.
When director Tim Burton and fellow “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” castmates showed up to a Tuesday presentation at CinemaCon to chat about their movie, Keaton rocked a brown jacket and white pants while everybody else was dressed in black – or as Burton put it, “It’s like attending our own funeral.” Like Beetlejuice, Keaton is quick with the zingers: “I didn’t get the memo. I look happy.”
Burton came to the theater owners’ convention with an extended trailer for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (in theaters Sept. 6), the long-awaited sequel to the original 1988 supernatural comedy starring Keaton as the demonic “ghost with the most.” The Deetzes, including Lydia (Winona Ryder) and her mom Delia (Catherine O’Hara), return to their home in Winter River after a death in the family, and Lydia’s rebellious teen daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), finds the model of the town in the attic that was home to a certain green-haired menace.
Cue Beetlejuice, who’s back to cause all sorts of chaos and mayhem in the real world and the Afterlife. New footage leaned into the plot of the sequel, which is about the living and the dead needing to figure out how to coexist, and also showcased the shrunken head guy from the first film, Beetlejuice reconnecting with Lydia, and first looks at Willem Dafoe’s fearsome Wolf Jackson and Monica Bellucci’s gothic villainess Delores.
Having Bellucci in the movie “fulfilled my lifelong dream of making an Italian horror film,” Burton quipped. The actress said she loved all the “beautiful sets and amazing costumes. For a moment, it really felt like I was a soul-sucking evil.”
Keaton shouted out new cast member Ortega, who couldn’t make it to Vegas because of her production schedule. “She just got it. She’s like, ‘I know what the tone is.’ She was just perfect,” Keaton said.
And his fellow original co-star O’Hara is glad people will stop asking her about a sequel as they have for the past 30 years. “To actually get the call from Tim was delightful. The characters have evolved – not Beetlejuice, but the rest of us.”
The sequel has been a long-gestating project for Keaton and Burton, who called it “a weird family reunion.” Every few years or so, “we’d kick the notion of it around,” Keaton said. “The first one was fun because Tim and were figuring it out. We just went nuts. To duplicate that, I was very nervous to see us pull it off again.”
So did they? “It’s really (expletive) good,” Keaton said in his signature Beetlejuice growl, exciting the crowd. “In fact, it’s great.”
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One letter stands for another. In the sample above, A is used for the three Ls, X for the two Os, etc. Single letters, apostrophes, the length and formation of the words are all hints. Each day the code letters are different.