March Madness 2015: Can Kentucky complete its pursuit of perfection? Yes, and probably not

Jeremy BeckUncategorized
Willie Cauley-Stein hopes to lead Kentucky to a 40-0 record and a national title

Before the Manifesto gets to its annual obsessive analysis over the March Madness field, let me just tell you the only two things you really need to know about this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament:

  1. You’re a fool if you pick anyone other than Kentucky to win the NCAA title.
  2. Kentucky is unlikely to win the NCAA title.

Now, if those two statements seem flatly contradictory, recall the abiding randomness of college sports. For example, last year, you may remember Shabazz Napier leading Uconn to the title (alternatively, you may choose not to remember this), but you probably don’t remember Uconn needing overtime to defeat St. Joseph’s in the first round. I’m not trying to diminish Uconn’s achievement (much as I’d like to); I’m just pointing out how incredibly hard it is to win six consecutive college basketball games in March. That’s what’s so crazy and so exciting about postseason tournaments, no matter the sport: The best team isn’t always the championship team. Read More

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Human Capital: Three Lost Souls, Searching for Meaning (and Money)

Jeremy BeckReviews
Matilde Gioli brings the humanity to "Human Capital"

How much is a human life worth? Apparently, it depends on the life. That would certainly be the embittered response of Human Capital, Paolo Virzi’s dark, disquieting drama of entitlement and despair. A jaundiced look at the intractable divisions between the careless haves and the dejected have-nots, it aspires to fuse caustic social criticism with old-fashioned melodrama. On the one hand, it is a polemic, a poisoned arrow aimed at the heart of the new world order; on the other, it is a whodunit, a crime mystery of slippery suspense. These are lofty twin goals, and it’s no surprise that Human Capital never quite realizes its potential on either front. But even if its reach exceeds its grasp, the movie is consistently engaging, with enough intriguing ideas and interesting storytelling to draw you into its crisscrossing web of human ugliness.

The movie opens with a fateful incident: After some waitstaff clean up the crumbs following a posh event, one of them glumly clambers onto his bicycle, pedals off toward home, and suddenly gets run off the road by a burly black SUV. From there, Human Capital flashes back six months and replays the events leading up to this hit-and-run from the perspectives of three different characters. The first is Dino (an excellent Fabrizio Bentivoglio), a middle-class real estate broker with a newly pregnant wife, Roberta (Valeria Golino—yes, that Valeria Golino, from Rain Man and Hot Shots!), and a teenage daughter, Serena (Matilde Gioli, very good). One sunny day, Dino drops Serena off at her boyfriend’s house—a palatial estate with its own clay tennis courts and indoor pool owned by Giovanni (Fabrizio Gifuni)—and, seduced by the opulence towering before him, decides to invest his life savings (and then some) in Giovanni’s “can’t-lose” hedge fund. The second main character is Giovanni’s wife, Carla (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), a dilettantish former actress who hopes to use her husband’s bottomless cash flow to renovate a defunct local theater. And the third is Serena herself, a restless young woman who has grown disenchanted with Giovanni’s buffoonish son, Massimiliano (Guglielmo Pinelli), and finds herself drawn instead to Luca (Giovanni Anzaldo), an outcast with a sensitive soul and unstable temperament. Read More

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Jupiter Ascending: Mila Kunis Is a Queen, Channing Tatum Has Cool Boots

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mila Kunis heads off to space in the Wachowskis' "Jupiter Ascending"

You have to hand it to Andy and Lana Wachowski: They don’t do things halfway. The Matrix was a heroic work of maniacal vision, but even their lesser movies, like the vibrantly colorful Speed Racer and the cockamamie, sporadically delightful Cloud Atlas (which they co-directed with Tom Tykwer) felt like products of artistic aspiration rather than dutiful commercialism. Now they return with Jupiter Ascending, a grandiloquent space opera that attempts to fuse the galaxy-trotting mythology of Star Wars with the familial treachery of Shakespeare. It is a labor of love, with emphasis on the labor. Like all of the Wachowskis’ films (with the exception of their first feature, the taut, terrific crime thriller Bound), this one strains for greatness; unlike their early catalog, it is ultimately weighed down by its own leaden seriousness. An enormously ambitious undertaking, Jupiter Ascending glistens with flop sweat, and you can sense the frantic desperation of its creators. It’s a valiant effort, which is another way of calling it a noble failure.

Not a typical one, though. There is far too much visual splendor and painstaking world-building on display here to dismiss Jupiter Ascending as yet another trifling, noisy, wannabe franchise-starter. After a ludicrous prologue set in Russia, we begin on a faraway planet, where Kalique and Titus Abrasax (Tuppence Middleton and Douglas Booth), two royal siblings dressed in finery, talk idly about the colonization of distant worlds. They are interrupted by their elder brother, Balem (a campy, scenery-munching Eddie Redmayne), who appears suddenly by stepping through a shimmering void in the air. The three speak in the thin politeness that masks bitter jealousy, and their social hierarchy is made clear when Titus casually asks Balem if he might consider parting with one of his more valuable properties. “What’s it called? Earth?” Read More

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Maps to the Stars: Where Satire Meets Schlock

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mia Wasikowska and Julianne Moore in David Cronenberg's "Maps to the Stars"

David Cronenberg is a profoundly talented filmmaker, and he’s never made a normal film. But originality isn’t itself a good, and as gifted as Cronenberg may be, his ability to heighten the natural language of cinema—to create movies saturated with intrigue and weirdness—can work both ways. When he starts with a strong premise and an intelligent screenplay, he can make operatic marvels like The Fly, A History of Violence, and Eastern Promises. But give him a leaky script and false characters, and his instinctive intensity will only magnify the material’s flaws, resulting in stultifying dreck like Crash, Spider, or Cosmopolis. It’s this innate capacity for augmentation—for blowing up a picture to gargantuan size—that makes Cronenberg perhaps the worst possible choice to make Maps to the Stars, a half-baked Hollywood satire that gradually morphs into a tacky horror movie. With a less capable director, Maps to the Stars would have been little more than a harmless bore. Under Cronenberg’s lurid stewardship, it’s a fascinating atrocity.

The movie begins as a disorienting blur, introducing us to its major players and forcing us to discern their connections ourselves. We meet Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a burn victim clad in a black dress and matching elbow-length gloves, who arrives in Los Angeles and immediately hires a chauffeur, Jerome (Robert Pattinson, who headlined Cosmopolis), to whisk her to the homes of various celebrities. Then, we’re suddenly inside one of those homes, where 13-year-old Benjie (The Killing‘s Evan Bird), a Justin Bieber-like child star, speaks lewdly with his mother, Christina (Olivia Williams). His father, Stafford (John Cusack), appears briefly and babbles about Tibet, then disappears to engage in a bizarre training session—an apparent combination of massage and hypnotherapy—with Havana (Julianne Moore), a hysterical actress with severe mommy issues. Read More

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Focus: Will Smith and Margot Robbie Are Light as Air, But the Plot Is All Fumes

Jeremy BeckReviews
Will Smith and Margot Robbie in "Focus"

A breezy, sexy, ultimately empty crime caper, Focus is a victim of its own sleight of hand. It is so intent on hoodwinking its audience and disguising its characters’ motivations that it doesn’t entertain so much as tease, constantly taunting us with one version of events before yanking out the rug again and again. It’s the kind of movie where nothing is what it seems. That does make things unpredictable, since no viewer could possibly anticipate Focus‘ sudden twists and hairpin curves. But following this movie’s labyrinthine structure becomes less a tantalizing task of puzzling things out than a tedious exercise of wait-and-see. When you’re constantly on guard for the next big surprise, nothing is truly surprising.

Here’s the good news: For its first 40 minutes or so, Focus is a blast. The ageless Will Smith stars as Nicky, an inveterate con man who decides to tutor Jess, a fledgling pickpocket played by the fast-emerging Margot Robbie (last seen heating up the screen in The Wolf of Wall Street and set to appear next summer as Jane in Warner’s Tarzan reboot). They make a pretty pair, he with his relaxed handsomeness, she with the pale blue eyes and curves that need no introduction. Their difference in years may consternate some viewers—at 46, Smith is nearly twice the age of the 24-year-old Robbie, and his goatee now betrays the slightest whispers of grey—but his charisma hasn’t waned, and it’s easy to buy the mutual attraction that quickly leads them tumbling into bed. It’s a romance that operates on surface appeal rather than real heat, which proves problematic once Focus tethers its twist-and-turn plot to the notion that Nicky, typically such a cool customer, has fallen desperately in love. Read More

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