Features

Convention Center: Bros, Blonde, and Smile

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Billy Eichner in Bros, Sosie Bacon in Smile, Ana de Armas in Blonde

Not every movie needs to be revolutionary. Genres are durable in part because filmmakers have gradually honed reliable formulae, the passage of time sanding down eons of cinematic experimentation into sturdy templates. Predictability can be dispiriting, but the successful execution of a familiar blueprint can also be satisfying. This past weekend saw three different movies tackle three very different genres, and though none can be mistaken for each other, they all operate with a certain degree of conventionality. Not coincidentally, they’re all watchable while also struggling to break free from the shackles of expectations.

Few movies are more visibly conscious of their place within an established genre than Bros. How conscious? It’s a romantic comedy co-written by Billy Eichner that opens with a character played by Billy Eichner recounting a pitch session in which a studio mogul urges him to write a romantic comedy. The hook, the suit explains, will be that the film will center on gay men but will otherwise follow the standard rom-com playbook, thereby perpetuating the message that “love is love.” Eichner’s character, Bobby, isn’t having it. “Love is not love,” he insists. Gay people are different; you can’t just magically flip the characters’ sexual orientation and expect everything else to cleanly lock into place. Read More

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Violent Femmes: The Woman King, Pearl, and God’s Country

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Viola Davis in The Woman King, Mia Goth in Pearl, and Thandiwe Newton in God's Country

Women are fighting back. Well, at least at the movies. Women aren’t a monolith on screen or off, but this past weekend’s new theatrical releases were striking for how they centralized female characters, and how they placed them in varying postures of defiance. At the cinema, the fairer sex is through with unfairness.

The most ambitious of these movies, The Woman King, is also the most conventional. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood from a script by Dana Stevens, it’s an old-fashioned historical epic, in the vein of Spartacus or (for a more recent vintage) Gladiator. And when it comes to women fighting, its depiction is quite literal: It tells the story of the Agojie, a troop of female soldiers for the Dahomey kingdom in nineteenth-century West Africa. Led by the fearsome Nanisca (a reliable Viola Davis), they wage war against a rival empire—not out of territorial bloodlust, but out of desire to prevent their citizens from being conscripted into slavery. Read More

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Why Didn’t You Go to the Movies Last Weekend?

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Nathalie Emmanuel in The Invitation, John Boyega in Breaking, Idris Elba in Three Thousand Years of Longing

Immediately prior to my showing of Three Thousands Years of Longing, the director George Miller delivered a pretaped message, thanking viewers for spending the time and money to see his latest epic on the big screen. It was meant to infuse a commercial transaction—I was, after all, paying a corporation for its product—with a personal touch, and it worked, though not in the way Miller intended. Watching him natter amiably about the importance of cinema, I got the sense that he was speaking directly to me—not because his words were especially powerful, but because despite sitting in a gigantic auditorium, I was one of maybe 10 people in the theater.

This does not appear to have been a unique experience. According to Box Office Mojo, Three Thousand Years of Longing—Miller’s long-awaited (or apparently not) follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road—earned a pitiful $2.9 million last weekend, despite playing in over 2,400 theaters and sporting a hefty $60 million budget. When it came to new releases doing meager business, it wasn’t alone. Breaking, a fact-based thriller about a bank robbery starring John Boyega, couldn’t even scrape up a million bucks in 900 theaters; it was outgrossed by the random re-release of Rogue One, a Star Wars spin-off playing on barely one-quarter as many screens. Even the weekend’s most nominally successful new arrival, the low-budget horror movie The Invitation, premiered in the top spot with a dubious asterisk attached: Ignoring the COVID-19 pandemic, its $6.8 million tally marked the lowest figure for a first-place debut in nearly 20 years. Read More

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Bullet Train, Prey, and Action Silly and Serious

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Brad Pitt in Bullet Train, Amber Midthunder in Prey

I take movies seriously, but how seriously should movies take themselves? One of the saws about modern blockbusters is that they’re meant to be dumb fun—that they’re designed to function as a respite from the harshness of reality, and that they grant viewers the blessed opportunity to “turn your brain off.” Setting aside the wisdom of deactivating your central nervous system, I acknowledge that films which operate primarily as pleasure dispensers carry a certain appeal, though it’s debatable whether they need to be dumb—or to neglect more pesky, brainy attributes like plot, theme, and character—in order to be enjoyable. The phrase “it doesn’t take itself too seriously” is generally considered a compliment, implying not that the picture in question is foolish, but that it’s unpretentious.

But is this a sliding scale? That is, when it comes to action—the genre most typically cited by Brain-Off enthusiasts—do movies necessarily trade seriousness for satisfaction? Or can a film’s sincerity instead indicate its level of artistic commitment, suggesting that it approaches its crowd-pleasing task with formal rigor and genuine care? These are false dichotomies, but this past weekend nevertheless presented an intriguing contrast, featuring two new action flicks that occupy opposite ends of this theoretical spectrum. One takes its blockbuster imperative deadly seriously; the other treats seriousness akin to a disease. Read More

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Lightyear, Turning Red, and the Two Pixars

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Chris Evans as Buzz in Lightyear; Rosalie Chiang as a panda in Turning Red

In 2013, six days after the release of Monsters University, then-Pixar president Ed Catmull said in an interview that the animation juggernaut was newly committed to making an original picture every year, and to correspondingly limit its sequels to biennial productions. The announcement came in the wake of a widely perceived (if relative) creative drought for the studio, whose prior two movies, the misbegotten Cars 2 and the pleasant but familiar Brave, hadn’t lived up to the legacy of greatness established during its inaugural 15-year run—a run that concluded, ironically, with a sequel (the stupendous Toy Story 3). Mathematically speaking, Pixar didn’t quite make good on its promise—of the next 10 films it released, four were sequels—but the wunderkinds of computer-drawn fantasy have for the most part threaded a delicate needle over the past decade, simultaneously making risky original movies and cranking out commercially safe follow-ups.

This “original vs. sequel” framing perpetuates a false dichotomy—the idea that original films are inherently works of boisterous ingenuity, whereas sequels are lazy and mercenary. (For this writer’s money, the existential crises conjured in Toy Story 4 are far more thought-provoking than the recognizable road-trip hijinks of Onward.) Still, in an era where Pixar’s parent company Disney continues to gobble up market share thanks to its ownership of mighty franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe—and where the apparent antidote to Mouse-House supremacy involves a competitor sequelizing a hit from 1986—it’s understandable for critics to prize the production of original screenplays as an independent good. Given that, it’s fascinating to examine Pixar’s two releases in 2022: one a science-fiction adventure that spins off from beloved intellectual property, the other a tender coming-of-age story whose only tie to the Pixar brand is its embrace of innovative storytelling. Read More

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