The Creator: Cries of the Machines

Jeremy BeckReviews
John David Washington in The Creator

Noisy, clunky, and conventional, Gareth Edwards’ The Creator is a disappointing folly. Yet it is also a worthy endeavor, attempting to wield boisterous blockbuster filmmaking in the service of an original, idea-driven story. It could have been great, if only it were good.

Originality is relative in mainstream cinema. It’s commendable that The Creator isn’t formally rooted in existing intellectual property; the screenplay, by Edwards and Chris Weitz, actually invents new characters and conceives its own quasi-apocalyptic future. It also exhibits minimal interest in jumpstarting a franchise, instead telling a complete and self-contained story. (Of course, Disney might have demanded otherwise had the film been commercially successful; in that regard, early box-office receipts indicate the studio has nothing to worry about.) At the same time, it borrows liberally (one might say shamelessly) from numerous science-fiction touchstones—most obviously Blade Runner and its sequel, 2049, but also the Terminator pictures, Star Wars, and plenty more. It’s a putatively original movie that nevertheless feels recycled, as though an algorithm spat out a vague approximation in response to the prompt, “new-age sci-fi entertainment.” Read More

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Dumb Money: The Smarts of the Deal

Jeremy BeckReviews
Paul Dano in Dumb Money

Pitching her coworker on the viability of a specific stock she heard about on YouTube, a middle-class nurse named Jenny (America Ferrera) argues that the bandana-clad weirdo she saw promoting the investment is unusually trustworthy: “You can see his whole balance sheet!” Jenny may not have scrutinized the data displayed in that Excel file, but in her view, its mere disclosure is a signal of expertise and a gesture of transparency. The actual numbers are irrelevant; what matters is what the nerd says about them.

Writ large, this didactic illustration functions as an apt metaphor for the entire stock market, in which tangible value is inextricably tangled with theoretical perception. Shares of stock aren’t worth anything in the literal sense; their value derives from a manufactured number—a figure whose calculation appears at the end of a byzantine maze of trades, estimations, and symbols—which we have all accepted to carry meaning. No movie has better illuminated this capitalist fiction than J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call, in which Jeremy Irons says of our financial system, “It’s just money, it’s made up.” Dumb Money, the new docudrama from Craig Gillespie, is not so insightful or incisive, but it does persuasively recognize the absurd whims and fateful caprices that catapult some investors into fortune and plunge others into poverty. Read More

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A Haunting in Venice: The Ghost of the Town

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kenneth Branagh in A Haunting in Venice

Just what kind of genius is Hercule Poirot? Six years ago, in his remake of Murder on the Orient Express, Kenneth Branagh reimagined Agatha Christie’s famous detective as a man obsessed with balance; his gift for crime-solving derived from his preternatural ability to recognize when clues and alibis didn’t line up. In his two ensuing movies—first the forgettable Death on the Nile, now the somewhat-improved Haunting in Venice—Branagh seems to have abandoned this conceit, instead depicting his super-sleuth as a quasi-scientist who unravels mysteries through the rigorous application of “order and method.” He isn’t some sort of deductive wizard; he just pays attention.

This doesn’t make Poirot an especially interesting character, but it does function as a handy metaphor for Branagh’s own filmmaking. The traps inherent in the murder-mystery picture—the isolated location, the assemblage of suspects, the cheap twists and red herrings, the destination overshadowing the journey—are difficult to evade. This time out, Branagh doesn’t so much avoid them as skillfully blunt their impact. His version of “order and method” is to deploy familiar cinematic tools in order to bring energy and flair to a production whose narrative bones are dusty and creaky. A Haunting in Venice doesn’t exactly revive this moldy skeleton, but it does clothe it in alluring imagery and spooky atmosphere. Read More

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Seeing Red Envelopes: An Elegy for Netflix’s DVD-by-Mail Service

Jeremy BeckFeatures
DVD Netflix

It was a new iteration of a familiar conversation. Speaking with a coworker about my prior evening, I explained that I’d watched a movie (shocker), and that I’d procured it in the form of a Blu-ray disc from Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service. He gawped in amazement: “Netflix still sends DVDs??”

Sadly, not for much longer. At the end of this month, after 21 years of glorious pony-express shipping, Netflix will finally close its brick-and-mortar (disc-and-mailer?) operation and focus exclusively on online streaming. In a way, it’s hard to believe it lasted this long. The company foresaw our digital-dominant present as early as 2007, when it introduced a novel plan to “deliver movies and TV shows directly to users’ PCs” (imagine that!). But it really ushered in the demise of its postal venture in February 2013, when it entered the original-programming space and introduced a little series called House of Cards, which was immediately available to binge in its entirety. (Who wants to watch TV this way, I scoffed.) In retrospect, it’s something of a miracle that Netflix’s DVD arm survived for a full decade from that point, even if the breadth of its selection continually shrank as the corporation poured money and sweat into the streaming wars. Read More

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Bottoms: Top Queer

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri in Bottoms

Justifying your own unpopularity is harder than it used to be. In the past, the ostracized heroes at the center of coming-of-age stories could take solace in the recognition that their tormentors were either stupid or bigoted; the bullying they faced was simply a consequence of the ruling class failing to perceive their true worth. But the nerds of Booksmart discovered that their partying brethren were also headed to the Ivy League, and now the losers of Bottoms can’t attribute the everyday cruelty they experience to insecurity or small-mindedness. “They don’t hate us because we’re gay,” Josie (Ayo Edebiri) says with gloomy honesty to her best friend, PJ (Rachel Sennott), as they watch a jock congratulate an effeminate actor on his performance in the school musical. “They hate us because we’re ugly and untalented.”

That assessment is unduly self-deprecating, though the wardrobe department has joined forces with Edebiri’s lack of vanity to make Josie look as frumpy as possible. (The first time we see her, she’s trying to stack multiple baseball caps atop her haywire afro.) But it’s crucial for Bottoms to establish its heroines’ putative undesirability in order to lay the groundwork for its story of improbable triumph and feminist upheaval. Directed by Emma Seligman from a script she wrote with Sennott, it’s an affirming movie that tells the tale of a marginalized sect rising up against its oppressors, claiming a measure of power and upending the entrenched social order. In related news, it’s about punching cheerleaders in the face. Read More

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