Obsession review: Hunger and Cursed

Jeremy BeckReviews
Inde Navarrette in Obsession

You’ve met dudes like Bear before, especially at the movies. He’s a lovelorn sad sack—a sweet, sensitive guy nursing a crush on a beautiful, unattainable girl. The first time we see him, he appears to be finally confessing his true feelings, delivering the kind of anecdote-laden speech that tends to produce everlasting happiness (think the end of When Harry Met Sally). This proves to be a feint—he’s in fact rehearsing his declaration of love—but it nonetheless cements Bear as an earnest, sympathetic protagonist. We’re all rooting for him.

Given this setup, you might think that Obsession, the second feature from multi-hyphenate Curry Barker, is a romantic comedy. It isn’t. It’s a horror movie, one that traffics in supernatural phenomena, jolting suspense, and sporadic bursts of blood and gore. It’s consistently unsettling, and not just for the way it interrogates how cinema exalts nobly suffering men at the expense of idealized, objectified women. Read More

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Depression Double Feature: Omaha and Blue Heron

Jeremy BeckReviews
Eylul Guven in Blue Heron; John Magaro in Omaha

Movies aren’t better just because they’re sad. Sure, the Oscars tend to favor dramas over comedies, but making people feel bad isn’t an inherent artistic good. As with any other subgenre, the success of depressing pictures hinges on qualities beyond their deflating subject matter: the specificity of the characters, the nuance of the performances, the skill of the filmmaking.

This past weekend saw the expanded release of two small, family-centric movies whose tone can hardly be called cheerful. Both execute their assignment of shaking you up, though only one breaks new cinematic ground in the process. Read More

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The Devil Wears Prada 2 review: The Fashion of the Antichrist

Jeremy BeckReviews
Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, and Stanley Tucci in The Devil Wears Prada 2

Miranda Priestly may be the world’s worst boss, but there’s a reason for her viciousness. She’s a genius, a visionary, and she mistreats her employees not out of sadism or malice but because they are impeding her divine greatness. She is unconquerable—or so we thought. The Devil Wears Prada 2, the intriguing and maddening sequel to the 2006 adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s novel, finds Miranda locked in battle—not just for the future of her company, Runway, but for the soul of an entire industry—and she seems to be losing the war. Her chief adversary isn’t a rival editor or a meddlesome underling but a more pitiless, insidious force: private equity.

Eddies of irony swirl around Prada 2, not least that a mercenary brand extension to a 20-year-old property purports to extol the virtues of old-fashioned creativity. But the screenplay, by Aline Brosh McKenna, deserves partial credit for grappling with genuine ideas, rather than simply drafting off of its predecessor’s legacy. Consider the movie’s opening scene, which finds Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), Miranda’s former assistant who fled Runway for more fulfilling pastures, accepting an award for her hard-hitting reporting at the fictional New York Vanguard. At first, such feting of journalism feels horribly self-congratulatory and dated—what is this, Sweet Smell of Success?—but just as Andy’s name is called, she and the rest of her noble colleagues receive a text informing them of their mass firing. She might as well sell that trophy for rent money, if only anyone would buy it. Read More

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Mother Mary review: Bless This Dress

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michaela Coel and Anne Hathaway in Mother Mary

The tagline for David Lowery’s Mother Mary reads, “This is not a ghost story.” For certain cinephiles, this seems less like an ominous pronouncement than a bizarre statement of the obvious. Of course this isn’t A Ghost Story; that was Lowery’s 2017 experimental drama, which found Casey Affleck standing under a sheet and Rooney Mara stuffing pie in her face. It was challenging and slow, but it rewarded patience, with a remarkable third act that posed provocative questions about love, marriage, societal evolution, and the whole damn human condition.

Mother Mary is similarly ambitious and not nearly as good. But it has its moments, with impressive individual scenes and striking images. It wields its beauty in service of a thin and listless narrative, but taglines and titles aside, “story” has never been Lowery’s department. Read More

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Lee Cronin’s The Mummy review: Gloomy Sarcophagus

Jeremy BeckReviews
Natalie Grace in Lee Cronin's The Mummy

In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Kate Capshaw describes archaeologists as “funny little men searching for their mommies.” “Mummies,” Harrison Ford corrects her. What’s the difference? Even the scariest monsters have parents, and Lee Cronin’s The Mummy—more on that vexing title in a bit—is a horror movie about the agonies of child-rearing. We all want our kids to grow up safe and smart and responsible, but life tends to present challenges: disease, academic hardship, financial and spiritual ruin. Every family has its demons. Some are more demonic than others.

To describe The Mummy as a metaphor of tortured parenthood is to give it more credit than it deserves, and more depth than it courts. This ain’t Hereditary. It is instead a maximalist, blunt-force nightmare whose primary goal is to provoke terror through relentless, assaultive chaos. Keep your silly quips and your classical adventurism for Brendan Fraser. This supernatural being is out for blood. Read More

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