GREATEST MOVIE CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME #3: BEETLEJUICE

"I'm the ghost with the most, babe."

Ask me any day, and I will tell you that the music, movies and pop culture that you love hooks you when you're 15-16 years old. There's no stronger reference.

When I was 15, my friend Andy bought an Amiga, the first computer ever built to sample audio and video. This was in the late 80s. The first thing he did with his machine was to load in audio of Michael Keaton's turn as beetlejuice. I'd go over to his house and he had created the first ever Beetlejuice sampler. We'd wander around high school perfecting our Beetlejuice voices reciting lines like 'ooh la la - what do we got here? The Maitlands....cute couple. Look nice and stupid! ha ha ha ha ha. '

Beetlejuice is the best movie ever made about death; it takes the comical view that the whole experience is a bureaucracy, and getting to die gracefully requires the ability to work through a DMV. The Maitlands (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) get assigned a caseworker, unsuccessfully try to haunt their own house, and puzzle over The Handbook for the Recently Deceased. This was Tim Burton in his Beatles '65 period; he had just made Pee Wee's Big Adventure, he went on to make the best Batmans. This period ends, btw, when he made the hilarious and completely misunderstood Mars Attacks!, and reinvented himself as a Johnny Depp vehicle. (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was on cable today, and it's unwatchable. It's absolutely terrible.)

Michael Keaton is the funniest guy who ever showed up in movies in the late '80s. Michael Keaton is easily the best Batman ever committed to celluloid; he steals every scene he's in in Tarantino's Jackie Brown, but he absolutely kills as Mr. Mom and Beetlejuice. This movie was reportedly not even supposed to be a comedy; it was going to be a morbid drama about death until Michael Keaton started ad libbing his scenes, and as a result, it's the only gallows humor screwball comedy I can think of.

Anyway, Keaton's only got a few scenes in this flick; about 30 minutes when the Maitlands first enlist his help, he lets spew a monologue that makes me fudge my shorts. The guy's scene the Exorcist 167 fuckin' times, and it keeps getting funner every single time he sees it. And in the big showstopping number at the end, when Winona Ryder (in the quintessential 'I can't wait until you're 18 so I can fantasize about you legally' role) agrees to marry him to save the Maitlands from her family, it gets amazing.

So what the hell happened to Michael Keaton, anyway?