BlackBerry: Game of Phones

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton in BlackBerry

The very last thing you hear in BlackBerry—I promise I’m not spoiling anything—is the high-pitched whine of a dial-up modem connecting to the internet. To younger viewers, it’ll sound like an atonal clash of beeps and hisses, but for folks of a certain age, it’ll instantly transport you (OK, me) back to the mid-’90s: that nascent online era of Napster, Geocities, and Netscape Navigator. Directed by Matt Johnson from a script he wrote with Matthew Miller, BlackBerry isn’t purely a nostalgia piece, but an undeniable part of its appeal lies in its authentic evocation of a time when the worldwide web was a vast electronic frontier, full of hope and possibility. We had no clue what the internet might become, which meant it could become absolutely anything.

It turned into a lot of things, including (from an entrepreneurship perspective) a breeding ground for false promises, egomaniacal puffery, and unrealized dreams. Anyone could conceive of anything; the question was whether they could actually make and sell it. This inherent tension between imagination and execution—the challenge of transmuting far-flung ideas into actionable results—is familiar ground for storytelling, and BlackBerry’s tech-bubble saga of success and failure occupies well-trod territory. (The book it’s based on, by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, literally includes the phrase “extraordinary rise and spectacular fall” in its subtitle.) What makes the movie entertaining, aside from its irresistible contrast in personalities, is its bountiful specificity. It opens in 1996 Ontario and occasionally feels like it was actually shot then and there—less a modern docudrama than a magic portal into a time and place of wheezing hatchbacks, wanly lit offices, and first-person shooters. Read More

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Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3: Journey to the Center of the Mirth

Jeremy BeckReviews
Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldaña in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3

James Gunn is best known for his eclectic needle drops, but he also has a visual signature: the Right Stuff-style shot of a troop of swaggering warriors striding forward in slow motion as a pop song blares on the soundtrack. He delivers that image twice in Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3, and while the second is more conventionally satisfying—the final prelude to some long-awaited interstellar ass-kicking—the first is more memorable. It’s noteworthy in part because the characters aren’t walking but floating, having just leapt from a spacecraft onto a bulbous planet (kindly shelve your astrophysical fact-checks), but what’s really striking is that each hero is outfitted in a bulky suit of a different bright color. There’s a simple beauty to the image, an eye-catching quality that’s rare for the Marvel Cinematic Universe—a cultural behemoth which, for all its commercial savvy and box-office supremacy, isn’t exactly a pioneer in terms of visual innovation. In this context, it’s oddly gratifying to be watching a superhero movie that actually cares what it looks like.

Let’s not pretend that Guardians 3 is some sort of aesthetic revelation. It’s still an MCU flick, which means it traffics heavily in green-screened locations, weightless special effects, and haphazard streams of light and fire. When an unknown gold-skinned invader (Will Poulter) zooms through the atmosphere and crashes into the chest of Rocket—the computer-generated mutant raccoon voiced by Bradley Cooper, and again embodied on set by the director’s brother, Sean Gunn—the impact is as forceful as that of a coder clacking away at their keyboard. But the value of James Gunn—the canny maneuver that helps distinguish the Guardians pictures from their costumed brethren—is his knack for minimizing the genre’s inherent drawbacks (sloppy action, dull world-building) while emphasizing his own vibrant strengths (sharp dialogue, giddy imagination). Sure, Volume 3 is yet another chaotic adventure involving a desperate rescue mission, a precious MacGuffin, and a megalomaniacal villain. But mostly, it’s a family vacation comedy. Read More

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Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret: Girlhood Is Hard, Period

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rachel McAdams and Abby Ryder Fortson in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

It is the nature of children to want things: a shiny new toy, an extra scoop of ice cream, a different body. Kids aren’t selfish because they’re rotten; they’re selfish because they’re kids. So as childish requests go, 11-year-old Margaret’s first prayer to the almighty—“Please don’t let New Jersey be too horrible”—is awfully modest. It’s also evidence that she’s a sweetheart, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret—Kelly Fremon Craig’s nimble adaptation of the beloved Judy Blume novel—honors her decency without really complicating it. It’s a nice movie about a nice girl with nice parents, which means that, depending on your perspective, it might feel like either a memoir or a fantasy.

As a boy who grew up in the ’90s—my own pleas to an unspecified deity tended to revolve around the Super Nintendo—I can’t pretend to fully relate to the challenges of a prepubescent girl in the ’70s, but I can still appreciate the skill and care with which Fremon Craig has translated Blume’s book to the screen. Yet because my own youthful immaturity never subsided as I ventured into adulthood, I can also grumble that, while the film smoothly sketches the genre’s most durable tropes—the awkward parties, the confusing crushes, the desperate attempts to fit in—it doesn’t always flesh out its characters. It’s an enjoyable time capsule of childhood helplessness that strangely lets its adult viewers off a little easy. Read More

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Beau Is Afraid: Never Shed a Single Fear

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joaquin Phoenix in Beau Is Afraid

The title of Beau Is Afraid may be a declarative statement, but its contents prompt an earnest question: Can you blame him? The story of a man beset by all manner of physical and existential terrors—angry neighbors, poisonous insects, deranged combat veterans, despondent cheerleaders, mommy issues, and (above all) his own crippling anxiety—Ari Aster’s third feature is a cavalcade of fear and anguish. Such torment is perhaps to be expected from the dude who became an indie-horror sensation with Hereditary; what’s surprising about Beau Is Afraid is that it’s such a rollicking entertainment. Sure, it subjects its hero to an unceasing ordeal of misery and humiliation, but it does so in a way that’s often (if not always) hypnotic, beautiful, and funny.

None of those adjectives would apply to Beau himself; in fact, his personality seems to revolve around a single emotion, and it’s right there in the title. We first meet Beau when he first meets the world: The film’s opening scene (“impression” might be a more accurate word) simulates the process of his birth—an unnerving disharmony of yelps and screams, set against an inky blackness that gradually gives way to blinding light. It’s one of the only times in the movie when Aster wields his formidable talent with visible stress, and it’s a bold introduction to a picture that is at once rigorous and chaotic. Read More

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Quick Hits: Renfield, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Jeremy BeckReviews
Nicolas Cage in Renfield; Ariela Barer in How to Blow Up a Pipeline

As premises go, “Nicolas Cage plays a campy Count Dracula” is a pretty good one. And Renfield, Chris McKay’s new horror-comedy, eagerly exploits the goofy appeal of its conceit; it slathers one of American cinema’s most (in)famous overactors in revolting makeup, dresses him in baroque wardrobe, and affords him ample opportunity to howl, snarl, and preen. Still, as Cage vehicles go, it’s less unhinged than some of his more maniacal late-period work, and in fact his performance works best when he pretends to modulate his hammy instincts with faux politesse, like a dormant volcano teasing you with the prospect of imminent eruption. When an associate informs Dracula that he was just on his way to see him, the vampire’s smiling response—“Oh, you were on your way”—drips with such performative understanding, you wonder if he feeds on anxiety rather than blood.

That associate, of course, is Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), and the problem with Renfield is that it’s mostly about Renfield. This isn’t the fault of Hoult, a fine actor and capable showboat in his own right. (If you haven’t seen him on Hulu’s The Great, you’re missing one of the small screen’s most marvelous imbeciles.) And it makes strategic sense to keep Cage’s wildness in reserve so that he doesn’t drain the film of its oxygen. But the product that McKay and his screenwriter, Ryan Ridley (fleshing out a Robert Kirkman pitch), have constructed around their stars is too flimsy to support the weight of their talent. It’s an idea in search of a movie. Read More

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