MovieManifesto

Saturday Night: Kvetch Comedy

October 18, 2024October 17, 2024 Jeremy BeckReviews

Jason Reitman likes two things: chaos, and smart people overcoming it. Aaron Eckhart’s amoral lobbyist in Thank You For Smoking, Elliot Page’s arch teenager in Juno, George Clooney’s slick consultant in Up in the Air—they were all sharper than everyone else, and their superior intellect helped them navigate sticky situations. So it makes sense that Saturday Night, Reitman’s brisk and entertaining and somewhat dubious recreation of the inaugural production of Saturday Night Live, centers on a brilliant young man ensnared in a thicket of logistical complications. Can our clever and resourceful hero somehow beat the odds and get the show ready for air?

You surely know the answer to that question, even if the abbreviation “SNL” is somehow foreign to you. Reitman, who co-wrote the screenplay with Gil Kenan, has structured the movie as a ticking-clock thriller, but it really unfolds in the language of the underdog sports drama. The cast and crew of the show’s production resemble a ragtag batch of hotheaded athletes and quirky assistants, a fragmented bunch whose clashing egos and disparate abilities must be marshaled by the beleaguered head coach into a unified team. The putative suspense derives from whether this unruly squad can put aside their differences and assemble a functional variety hour—can score a goal, as it were—before the final buzzer that’s destined to go off half an hour before midnight. Read More

The Outrun: Don’t Drink-Shame

October 11, 2024October 29, 2024 Jeremy BeckReviews

The first time we see Saoirse Ronan’s face in The Outrun, she’s dancing in a nightclub, neck tilted upward and lips slightly parted, like she’s trying to kiss a black sky. It’s an image of divine rapture, which makes it a jarring contrast to her next few appearances—first getting unceremoniously dragged out of a bar after hours, then checking herself into a rehabilitation clinic while sporting a horrific purple bruise over her right eye. For this woman, agony can follow ecstasy in the span of a night or the blink of a single camera cut.

The notion that substance abuse can inspire both pleasure and pain is by no means novel; cinema is littered with depictions of actors articulating the euphoria and despair caused by various intoxicants. And The Outrun, which was directed by Nora Fingscheidt from a screenplay she wrote with Amy Liptrot (based on the latter’s book), doesn’t entirely evade the durable conventions of the genre. But it does inject those old customs with considerable new life, thanks both to the boldness of its structure and the vivacity of its lead performance. You’ve seen this movie before, but also, you very much haven’t. Read More

Joker, Folie à Deux: The Smile of the Century

October 10, 2024October 9, 2024 Jeremy BeckReviews

For all its flaws, and it has plenty, Joker: Folie à Deux doesn’t commit the sin of lazily recycling the beats of its predecessor. The first Joker, which Todd Phillips directed to multiple Oscars and a massive box-office haul (not to mention an attendant and insufferable discourse), was a piece of faux provocation; it pretended to have interesting ideas, but it really just wallowed in its self-made sea of anger and unpleasantness. It would have been easy—and, if the opening-weekend receipts are anything to go by, commercially advisable—for Phillips to just run that material back, treating/subjecting viewers to another crude fantasy of toxic resentment and violent retribution. Instead, he and co-writer Scott Silver have radically reversed course, delivering a strange and off-kilter movie that’s part courtroom drama, part jukebox musical, and part twisted romance. (The subtitle refers to a shared delusion.) The incel goons who loved the first one must be livid.

For my part, I am less furious than frustrated. Conceptually speaking, Joker 2 is something of a coup, melding genres and skimming comic-book lore in the service of a fairly original and gratifyingly odd vision. So why is the whole thing such a wan and boring affair? Here is a movie where the hero fantasizes about hosting a late-night variety show with his beloved who threatens to shoot him on stage, then later dresses up as a clown before making his closing argument to a jury. That’s weird! Yet while the production should crackle with offbeat energy, Phillips’ execution is so lackluster that the whole enterprise comes off as limp and half-hearted. Read More

Megalopolis: An Offer He Can’t Excuse

October 3, 2024October 2, 2024 Jeremy BeckReviews

The story of Megalopolis is that of a power-drunk visionary struggling to wield his formidable artistic gifts within the constraints imposed on him by an entrenched and inflexible society. Oh, and stuff happens in the movie too.

The saga of the production of Megalopolis, the first new Francis Ford Coppola film I’ve seen in nearly 30 years, is a juicy and tawdry tale, full of hubris, chaos, and despair. It is also vastly more intriguing than the movie itself, which—for all its stately ambition and grandiloquent style—is most notable for its tedium and incoherence. It is the unhappy outcome of what appears to have been an unruly process. Read More

Wolfs: Spurn After Reading

September 27, 2024September 26, 2024 Jeremy BeckReviews

The first time we hear George Clooney’s voice in Wolfs, he’s on the other end of the phone, speaking in a clipped, measured tone that instantly conveys a sense of authority. A woman (Amy Ryan) has gotten herself into a spot of trouble—there’s a half-naked dead man in her hotel room, though he’s definitely “not a prostitute”—and she’s calling the mysterious number that somebody once gave her for existential emergencies. The man who answers is cool, confident, reassuring—the best in the business. When he arrives in person, hands shielded in blue latex gloves and ready to make her problem magically disappear, he insists that she’s found the right guy: “There’s nobody who can do what I do.”

The central joke of Wolfs is that exactly one other person can do what he does—and that person is played by Brad Pitt. It’s been 16 years since one of Hollywood’s most glamorous bromances shared the screen, when (spoiler alert) Clooney blasted a hole in Pitt’s head midway through Burn After Reading. Since then, they’ve both had solid careers independently—securing Oscar nominations (Up in the Air and The Descendants for Clooney, Moneyball and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for Pitt), headlining hits (Gravity and Ticket to Paradise, World War Z and Bullet Train), and appearing in a range of original pictures (Tomorrowland and Hail Caesar, Ad Astra and Babylon) that managed to exist outside the industry’s perpetual franchise machine. The promise of Wolfs is that it reunites these two A-listers—among the last vestiges of a bygone era when the audience’s level of interest in a new movie was directly correlated to the names on the marquee—and allows them to reignite the chic chemistry that once powered the Ocean’s films. Read More