Quick Hits: No Hard Feelings; Elemental; Extraction 2

Jeremy BeckReviews
Chris Hemsworth in Extraction 2; Leah Lewis in Elemental; Jennifer Lawrence in No Hard Feelings

No Hard Feelings. Like most movie stars, Jennifer Lawrence tends to play the hero. She’s showcased plenty of range in her leading roles—as a resourceful vagrant (Winter’s Bone), as an intrepid messiah (the Hunger Games pictures), as a striving innovator (the underrated Joy), as a frantic parent (mother!)—but she invariably lays claim to your sympathy, wielding a winning combination of innocence and resolve. So what’s intriguing about No Hard Feelings, the new comedy from Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys), is that it finds Lawrence playing a woman who’s selfish, vengeful, and kind of mean. Her character, Maddie, isn’t exactly a villain, but the closest she gets to traditional heroism comes when she’s outracing the cops who are primed to suspend her license, all while a teenager is clinging to the hood of her car.

Maddie’s acrimony isn’t entirely without cause. She’s behind on the property taxes for her beloved Montauk home, and her primary source of income (driving for Uber) vaporizes after her ex-boyfriend, scorned from her prior ghosting, repos her car. She also resents the seasonal influx of wealthy tourists and the creep of gentrification they represent. But Maddie’s bitterness runs deeper than circumstantial irritation, and the trick of Lawrence’s performance is that she has the courage to make the character unlikable while simultaneously depicting her as a figure of nigh-mythical desirability. Read More

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From the Vault: Hulk, 20 Years Later

Jeremy BeckReviews
Eric Bana in Hulk

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2003, long before MovieManifesto.com existed, I spent my summer as a 20-year-old college kid writing as many movie reviews as I could. My goal was to compile them all into a website, possibly hosted by Tripod or Geocities, which would surely impress all of the women in my dorm. That never happened—neither the compiling nor the impressing—but the reviews still exist. So, now that I am a wildly successful critic actually have a website, I’ll be publishing those reviews on the respective date of each movie’s 20th anniversary. Against my better judgment, these pieces remain unedited from their original form. I apologize for the quality of the writing; I am less remorseful about the character of my 20-year-old opinions.]

The Hulk is perhaps the first comic-book adaptation that could ever be labeled pretentious. What we have here is not your run-of-the-mill, formulaic action flick in which exposition takes a back seat to explosion – far from it. Instead, acclaimed director Ang Lee brings us a film that generally forgoes action, alternatively attempting to present a more stylish, sophisticated picture. He endeavors mightily to create complex characters and place them in an emotionally involving story. It’s an admirable effort, and it’s encouraging that Lee refuses to be bound by the usual confines of the genre. But he fails. And when someone with the cinematic stature of Ang Lee fails, he fails hard.

The problem with The Hulk is that it lacks a center. There is no focal point, no pivot upon which we can focus our attentions and concerns. Lee is so fixated on style and uniqueness that he overlooks his characters, none of whom is nearly as well-developed as he pretends. Thus, as the machinations of the storyline unfold, we are not intrigued but isolated, hopelessly disconnected from the film’s events. This, combined with a plodding pace, render the movie a lackluster journey that struggles just to keep our interest. Read More

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In the Chamber Dramas “Reality” and “Sanctuary,” Women Fight the Power

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Sydney Sweeney in Reality; Margaret Qualley in Sanctuary

If television can have bottle episodes, can cinema have bottle movies? It probably isn’t worth the taxonomic trouble, given that TV critics routinely rant about how the term is misused. (Traditionally, “bottle episode” describes an installment that’s shot on a single set with no guest stars; it’s gained favor of late as a stylistic departure, but its primary motivation used to be financial rather than artistic.) Still, the minimalist concept—confined location, small cast—isn’t unique to television; plenty of feature films deploy a similar chamber-drama format, attempting to turn their modest mise-en-scène into showcases for narrative suspense and psychological complexity.

Last month saw the release of two such pictures—Reality, a fact-based docudrama about intelligence analyst Reality Winner, and Sanctuary, a two-hander about a sex worker and her wealthy client—both of which feature women trying to claim a measure of agency within a patriarchal structure. In one, the power dynamics are patently lopsided from the start; in the other, they’re the fulcrum of an ever-shifting battleground. Read More

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Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: What a Spangled Web We Weave

Jeremy BeckReviews
Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

It’s cinematic law that sequels need to be bigger, which presents a daunting challenge for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Its predecessor, the spry and snazzy Into the Spider-Verse, was awfully big to begin with, taking a familiar superhero origin story—this one centering on Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), an affable Brooklyn teenager who receives that famous radioactive insect bite—and then bombarding the screen with many more Spider-Men (well, actually Spider-People… OK, technically Spider-Animals) who arrived from different realms in the multiverse. It was a whole lot of movie, as noteworthy for its energetic style—busy, boisterous animation that evoked the splash panels of comic books without devolving into pastiche—as for its hectic, cluttered narrative. How could a follow-up one-up such vibrant maximalism?

Quite cleverly, as it turns out. Fueled by a powerful cocktail of joy and ambition, Across the Spider-Verse steers into the multiversal skid, embracing its own storytelling paradoxes with delirious abandon. It’s a dizzying and at times exhausting movie, and it doesn’t entirely evade the trap of saturation that foils many blockbusters; as the latter Avengers pictures proved, more superheroes doesn’t always equate to more fun. But the filmmakers here—the credited directors are Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers (from Soul), and Justin K. Thompson, while the screenwriters are Dave Callaham and the ubiquitous team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (makers of The LEGO Movie)—have located the sweet spot between playfulness and gravity. It isn’t that Across the Spider-Verse refuses to take itself seriously; it’s that it seriously commits to itself as a work of childlike invention and artistic imagination. Read More

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Quick Hits: You Hurt My Feelings; The Starling Girl

Jeremy BeckReviews
Eliza Scanlen in The Starling Girl; Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Your Hurt My Feelings

The characters in a Nicole Holofcener picture always have problems, but they tend to be cute problems—like how Catherine Keener can’t decide how to donate her wealth in Please Give, or how James Gandolfini is incapable of whispering in Enough Said. This doesn’t make their emotional confusion or existential despair any less real; it’s just that their floundering is undergirded by a bedrock of professional success and academic sophistication. So what’s interesting about You Hurt My Feelings, Holofcener’s latest look at privileged people, is that while this sense of accomplishment remains firmly in place, it’s also questionably earned. The heroes of this movie all live in nice Manhattan homes and hold impressive jobs, yet they don’t seem to actually be good at anything.

Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is a published author who teaches a creative writing course, but her memoir didn’t sell and she’s yet to land a second book deal; her students are shocked to learn that she’s a real writer. Her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), is a therapist who’s been practicing for decades, yet his patients are constantly complaining that he never actually helps them. (Whenever he’s with a client, he hangs a shabby “In Session” sign on his door.) Their son, Eliot (Owen Teague), works at a weed dispensary and is perpetually drafting a play that’s never close to being finished. Beth’s sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), is an interior decorator who seems to only have one client—a woman who never approves of her banal fixture suggestions. Sarah’s husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), is a struggling actor who’s yet to receive his big break. Read More

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