Air: Shoe de Grâce

Jeremy BeckReviews
Matthew Maher, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck in Air

It’s 1984, and Air, the new movie by Ben Affleck, wants to make sure you know that. It opens with a blizzard of archival footage and pop-culture clips—the soundtrack quickly shifts from Dire Straits to Violent Femmes—transporting you to the halcyon era of the Ghostbusters, that Apple commercial, and Mr. T. Yet for Affleck, nostalgia is more than a fuzzy feeling; it’s a mode of filmmaking. He fancies himself a throwback—an old-school artisan in the vein of Howard Hawks—which is why his prior feature, the noir flick Live by Night, attempted to echo classic gangster melodramas to the point of embalmment. Air, about Nike’s quest to sign Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal (it was marketed with the subtitle “Courting a Legend”), is a less self-serious picture, and also a more enjoyable one. Watching it is a bit like watching a highlight package of an old sporting event you’ve heard about but never saw live: You can appreciate the talent and the craft on display, even though you already know which team wins at the buzzer.

Speaking of highlights, that introductory blitz isn’t the only time Affleck dips into montage. Though Air takes place exclusively during the year of “Sister Christian” and Beverly Hills Cop—Harold Faltermeyer’s famous synth theme for the latter appears on the soundtrack, even though it wasn’t released until months after the shoe signing (one of many factual liberties cheerfully taken by Alex Convery’s script)—at one point it suddenly travels through time, revealing grainy footage of classic Jordan moments (the hanging game-winner against Cleveland, the lefty layup versus the Lakers, etc.). It’s an understandable impulse, because despite being branded as a sports movie, Air features vanishingly little action or athleticism. In fact, its hero is a paunchy middle-aged white guy who can’t even manage one lap around the track. Read More

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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: Role-Playing Maims

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sophia Lillis, Justice Smith, Chris Pine, and Michelle Rodriguez in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

The key to a successful Dungeons & Dragons campaign, as I understand it—my knowledge derives not from personal experience, but from pop-cultural representations in shows like Stranger Things, Freaks and Geeks, and Community—is the careful blend of imagination, collaboration, and luck. Honor Among Thieves, the new wannabe D&D franchise-starter directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (who also wrote the screenplay with Michael Gilio), possesses each of these qualities in moderate measure, as though it’s distributing a maximum allotment of points across various attributes. It’s mildly creative, a little fortunate (in the current environment, a non-superhero fantasy epic feels positively refreshing), and boisterously cooperative. It is the last of these traits which rescues it from the crowded bucket of corporatized slop, turning yet another soulless IP extension into a passable diversion.

If that sounds like faint praise, remember that we’re talking about a big-screen adaptation of a fucking board game. Yet the pleasure of RPGs lies in their facility for assembling friends around a table (Daley got his acting start playing one of the nerdy gamers on Freaks and Geeks), so it’s fitting that this Dungeons & Dragons functions as an ensemble heist picture. Sure, there are presumed easter eggs in the form of fancy artifacts, mighty creatures, powerful enchantments, and exotic locations. (As the title promises, we begin in a dungeon before eventually meeting multiple dragons.) But most important, there is a motley gang of roguish outlaws, banding together to accomplish a common purpose. Read More

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John Wick: Chapter 4: Sit Back, Relax, and Destroy

Jeremy BeckReviews
Keanu Reeves in John Wick: Chapter 4

During one of the many, many fight scenes in John Wick: Chapter 4, an antagonist named Caine issues a call for expediency: “Let’s get this shit over with.” I hesitate to quibble with Caine, not least because he’s a deadly assassin played with balletic grace by Donnie Yen, but his directive here isn’t just grouchy; it violates the very spirit of the franchise. The John Wick pictures are creatures of excess and extravagance. Their hero may be a ruthlessly efficient killer, but the movies which sustain him are fueled by elaborate martial artistry and ornate mythology. They don’t get shit over with; they deliver some of the craziest shit imaginable.

Chapter 4, the latest, longest, and (potentially) last installment in the series which began in 2014, capably fulfills the franchise’s extremist imperatives, even as it subtly interrogates them. Or maybe not so subtly. It’s been nine years and four films since a group of Russian thugs killed the wrong guy’s puppy, and the plot hasn’t really changed ever since; John is still angry, still hunted, and still—as played with soulful physicality by Keanu Reeves—meting out retribution via manifold means and gruff precision. The prior episode, the bonkers and gloriously operatic Parabellum, essentially finished where it started, with a bloodied but unbroken John vowing revenge against the sinister cabal known as the High Table. Chapter 4 continues this endless battle—a rather lopsided duel in which one person wages war against what seem to be thousands of expendable henchmen (when someone asks John how many people he needed to kill to reach a certain point, he responds, with characteristic curtness, “A lot”)—but it also contemplates the existential toll that time and death have levied on the bearded man in the bulletproof suit. Read More

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Stop Citing Rotten Tomatoes

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Scenes from Zootopia, Paddington 2, and Citizen Kane

Ratings are currency. The brunt of criticism, whether you’re writing it or reading it, is words, and words are work. In our entertainment-glutted present, when countless pieces of art compete for your precious time—there is always a new show to binge, a new game to play—people crave a shorthand to cut through the noise. And so, regardless of the specific metric—four stars! C plus! 9 out of 10 fireball emojis!—ratings function as a useful communicative shorthand, crudely but efficiently reducing a critic’s detailed ruminations to a digestible letter or number. Set against this quant-obsessed backdrop, it’s understandable that Rotten Tomatoes, the review-aggregation giant which assigns a “score” to every movie that’s meant to convey its percentage of positive appraisals, has grown to dominate contemporary cinematic discourse. But while the site’s cultural ubiquity may be explicable, it’s also unfortunate, because Rotten Tomatoes is fucking awful.

Actually, it’s worse than awful; it’s meaningless. And even worse than meaningless, it’s distortive. Rotten Tomatoes purports to answer a straightforward question (“Hey, is this movie any good?”), yet in the process it misleads viewers and, more crucially, reframes discussions. The lifeblood of criticism is conversation: the dialectical exchange of opinions and the robust expression of ideas. Yet under the dominion of Rotten Tomatoes, the score doesn’t supplement criticism; it replaces it altogether. It has acquired the fearsome power of language, supplanting the very words it claims to summarize. Read More

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Quick Hits: Scream VI, Cocaine Bear, Creed III, Magic Mike 3, and Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael B. Jordan in Creed III; Keri Russell in Cocaine Bear; Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera in Scream VI; Emma Mackey in Emily; Salma Hayek Pinault and Channing Tatum in Magic Mike's Last Dance

Between the Oscars, our TV rankings, and our list of the year’s best movies, it’s been a busy past month here at MovieManifesto. As a result, while I was able to write a few proper reviews of new movies (the new Shyamalan, the new Ant-Man), I neglected to make time for a bunch of additional 2023 films. That changes now! Well, sort of. Unlike Lydia Tár, I can’t stop time, so I’m unable to carve out enough space for full reviews. Instead, we’re firing off some quick-and-dirty capsules, checking in on five recent releases. Let’s get to it.

Scream VI. The clever double-act of the Scream pictures—the platonic ideal established by the first installment and never quite equaled since—is that they’re movies about scary movies and are also, well, scary movies. In the prior episode, Scream (which should have been called Scream 5, but never mind), new directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett satisfied one and only one side of that equation, cleverly skewering the toxic fandom that attends modern discourse but failing to serve up memorable carnage. Now returning with Scream VI, the pair have essentially flipped the script. The meta ideas bandied about here are a little less trenchant, but the nuts-and-bolts execution—and executions—is first-class. Read More

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