Fin: 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,' and the Jeffrey Jones Thing

Plus: The two Michael Douglases, the surprise return of 'Aloha,' 'Untold' still sucks, the Vince McMahon doc finally surfaces, and more in this week’s notes column.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the 38-year-later sequel to the 1988 Tim Burton horror comedy, comes out today. I reviewed it earlier this week and liked it more than I expected to. I laughed quite a bit and admired quite a bit of the wit. 

In my review, I also alluded to something else in the film: The Jeffrey Jones factor. 

Jones is the actor who is probably best known for playing Principal Rooney in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, although he was also a regular for a long time in Burton’s films, and he was on Deadwood. Jones was arrested in 2002 and charged with both possession of child pornography and soliciting an underage boy to take nude photos; in the years since, he’s been arrested multiple times and convicted at least once for failing to update his sex offender registry. 

This has deservedly ended Jones’ acting career, although he did appear briefly five years ago in the Deadwood movie. 

Jones was in the original Beetlejuice as the father of Winona Ryder’s character, but he doesn’t return in the sequel. And, if you mind a spoiler, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice found a creative way to dispense with his character. 

Early in the new film, it’s established that Jones’ character, Charles Deetz, has died. Then, we see an animated version of Charles, resembling Jeffrey Jones, having his head bit off by a shark. There’s a funeral scene where we see a headshot of Jones, the way he looked in the 1980s. For the rest of the film, we periodically see “Charles” in the afterlife, missing his head.

I found this a particularly inspired way to work around the unavailability of a canceled actor. Those especially angry with Jeffrey Jones get to watch him die violently. At the same time, the character of Charles — who, unlike the actor who played him, is not canonically a pedophile — gets some closure. 

But some feel differently, among both well-intentioned #MeToo types and the not-so-well-intentioned Hollywood-is-full-of-Satanic-pedophiles crowd. 

Multiple early reviews called the presence of Jones “problematic” or “uncomfortable.” 

Then there’s this, which just imagined some things from the film that weren’t there: 

The character – who, once again, is NOT the abuser — is celebrated, but the actor is not. And I feel like if the goal of the filmmakers was to “celebrate child abusers and rub it in your face,” they would have just gone ahead and let Jeffrey Jones be in the film. 

And speaking of Beetlejuice: 

Michael Keaton and Michael Douglas