Reviews

The king of the world shows us a magnificent new one in Avatar

Jeremy BeckReviews

Perhaps the most breathtaking moment in James Cameron’s Avatar – a movie that takes the breath from its awestruck audience with startling regularity – occurs roughly 45 minutes into the film. It introduces us to Neytiri, a blue-skinned warrior with amber-gold eyes and a supple 12-foot frame. Perched gracefully on a tree branch, Neytiri has spotted an intruder (who happens to be Jake Sully, our story’s hero), and she moves silently to eliminate the threat. Pulling her bowstring taut, she is poised to strike when, suddenly, something catches her eye: a wispy, jellyfish-like organism, floating delicately in midair. The ethereal life form drifts toward Neytiri, eventually settling on the tip of her arrowhead. Neytiri, for reasons unknown to us at the time, takes this as an admonition of her combative instinct; she lowers her bow, and Jake Sully is allowed to live a little longer.

This is a beautiful scene. It takes place in complete silence (with the exception of James Horner’s soft, reverent score), yet it constitutes a moment of both exquisite suspense (what will happen?) and slack-jawed wonder (just what are these creatures?), plus it effectively advances the movie’s story. But the scene is particularly noteworthy because it is possible – indeed probable – that none of what we see was ever actually filmed, instead constructed within the confines of a computer. (I use the word “confines” loosely, as Avatar suggests that any alleged boundaries of computer-assisted filmmaking may in fact be illusory.) Yet watching the scene unfold, I never for a moment questioned the authenticity of Neytiri, the tree branch, or the wispy creature. I was simply transfixed on what was happening, wondering who this Amazonian was and why she suddenly refused to kill.
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A moping moon, but some light still shines through

Jeremy BeckReviews

“It was pretty terrible. I really enjoyed it.”

 
That was me, one year ago, on the phone with my father, giving him my brief and not entirely rational assessment of a little movie called Twilight, which has now become America’s latest mega-franchise – the second installment, New Moon, raked in a cool $142.8 million this past weekend, good for third all-time behind The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3. And while I’m impressed (and more than a tad awed) at the remarkable commercial success of the Twilight films, I have to admit that I’m a little confused as well.
 
Mainstream movie nut that I am, I’m generally a sucker for the studio-manufactured charms of a big-budget, multi-volume, special-effects-laden blockbuster franchise, but I can’t confess to being a devotee of the Twilight saga. Maybe that’s because it isn’t marketed to my demographic (I am not, in fact, a lovesick teenage girl, despite my occasional indulgence in emotionally devastating female-empowerment pop music). More likely it’s that I haven’t read Stephenie Meyer’s books (partly because I hardly read anything these days, partly because even Meyer’s ardent fans seem to concede that the novels are poorly written). But most of all it’s that, in all honesty, I don’t think the Twilight movies are very good.
 
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A child imagines wild things, shrouded in mystery

Jeremy BeckReviews

“I’m expecting your review of Where the Wild Things Are in my inbox by noon tomorrow.”

That was my buddy Brian two days ago, and while he wasn’t offering me a salaried position at a major newspaper in exchange for my commentary, I was nevertheless pleased to learn – as I always am – that someone wanted to know my particular opinion of a film. But he wasn’t the only one. A number of people I know have expressed enthusiasm about Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s beloved book, including those who are rarely enthused about movies.

Of course, this sense of intrigue isn’t unique to my personal sphere of contact; box office estimates pegged Where the Wild Things Are to earn $32.5 million this weekend, which places it eighth all-time among movies opening in October (ignoring inflation). This is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a rare beast. Oftentimes, when intrepid directors resolve to transform a classic childhood text into a movie, audiences tend to grumble. (There’s a reason Encyclopedia Brown has thus far failed to decipher the map to the multiplex.) Yet for whatever reason – perhaps a savvy marketing campaign (the trailer made excellent use of Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up”), perhaps a viewing public starved for an imaginative work – the standard outcry that often accompanies the transfer of a landmark literary work to the screen has in this case been replaced by exuberant anticipation.
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Why Watchmen is a movie for our time, for better or worse

Jeremy BeckReviews

I like big movies. I always have. Not being a professional film critic, I don’t feel obligated to prioritize small-scale, independent projects over studio-helmed blockbusters. I certainly have no intrinsic problem with low-key indie films – one of my favorite movies of 2008 was Rachel Getting Married, which is about as lo-fi and low-budget as you can get – but in general, my boyish, exuberant sensibilities tend to be partial to grand and even grandiose filmmaking. Cinema as a medium can show us truly remarkable things, and I love movies that tell sweeping stories on an epic scale, movies with an unapologetic sense of adventure and a bold imagination.

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is, if nothing else, a big movie. With a $130 million budget, an IMAX release, an immensely popular novel that has inspired a rabid fan base, and a storyline of apocalyptic proportions (not to mention a runtime of two and a half hours), Watchmen demands to be recognized as an epic. In this, I suppose it succeeds – after all, making an epic is really all about effort, and no one is going to accuse Snyder of not trying hard enough. Read More

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If that’s a Duchess, I want to be a Duke

Jeremy BeckReviews

There’s a great moment in “The West Wing” when Josh is preparing to meet some brainy NASA scientist who wants to take him stargazing and show him how majestic the night sky is so she can secure White House funding for a mission to Mars, or something like that. Normally it’s not something Josh would be caught dead doing, but the scientist is a chick (played by Christina Chang), and she isn’t ugly. Josh’s shrewd secretary, Donna, calls him on it. “Would you be going if she weren’t attractive?” she asks. He thinks about it, then replies, with spectacular honesty: “We’ll never know.”

That’s basically how I feel about The Duchess. Would I have enjoyed this straightforward British period piece as much as I did if it didn’t star Keira Knightley, whom I firmly believe to be not only the most beautiful woman in the world but also the finest actress of her generation? We’ll never know. But as it is, golly I sure did like it. Read More

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