Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul: The Sour of Prayer

Jeremy BeckReviews
Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown in Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul

In one of his incisive bits about religion, George Carlin observed that God “always needs money.” The implication is that the deity’s clerics are also in permanent want of funds, but the main characters of Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul—Lee-Curtis Childs (Sterling K. Brown), a captivating Southern Baptist preacher, and Trinitie (Regina Hall), his publicly steadfast wife—aren’t hurting for cash. They live in a luxurious mansion outside of Atlanta, they drive a Cadillac Escalade, and their closets are filled with Prada. (Lee-Curtis’ gold watch gleams so brightly, you half-expect him to tell someone that it “cost more than your car.”) No, what this power couple really craves—what they desire beyond favorable clippings in the press or dollar bills in the collection plate—is an audience.

They used to have one; with Trinitie seated at his side in a gold-enameled throne, Lee-Curtis would routinely preach to upwards of 5,000 disciples at Wander to Greater Paths, their so-called “megachurch.” But then something happened—something initially alluded to only as “misconduct”—and now they bustle about in their Georgia Xanadu, breathlessly plotting their reemergence. Honk for Jesus, which is the feature debut of writer-director Adamma Ebo (based on her short film), chronicles the Childses’ painstaking attempt to reacquire their congregation (and their relevance), even as it also gradually unveils the scandal that led to their downfall. Read More

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Why Didn’t You Go to the Movies Last Weekend?

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Nathalie Emmanuel in The Invitation, John Boyega in Breaking, Idris Elba in Three Thousand Years of Longing

Immediately prior to my showing of Three Thousands Years of Longing, the director George Miller delivered a pretaped message, thanking viewers for spending the time and money to see his latest epic on the big screen. It was meant to infuse a commercial transaction—I was, after all, paying a corporation for its product—with a personal touch, and it worked, though not in the way Miller intended. Watching him natter amiably about the importance of cinema, I got the sense that he was speaking directly to me—not because his words were especially powerful, but because despite sitting in a gigantic auditorium, I was one of maybe 10 people in the theater.

This does not appear to have been a unique experience. According to Box Office Mojo, Three Thousand Years of Longing—Miller’s long-awaited (or apparently not) follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road—earned a pitiful $2.9 million last weekend, despite playing in over 2,400 theaters and sporting a hefty $60 million budget. When it came to new releases doing meager business, it wasn’t alone. Breaking, a fact-based thriller about a bank robbery starring John Boyega, couldn’t even scrape up a million bucks in 900 theaters; it was outgrossed by the random re-release of Rogue One, a Star Wars spin-off playing on barely one-quarter as many screens. Even the weekend’s most nominally successful new arrival, the low-budget horror movie The Invitation, premiered in the top spot with a dubious asterisk attached: Ignoring the COVID-19 pandemic, its $6.8 million tally marked the lowest figure for a first-place debut in nearly 20 years. Read More

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Bodies Bodies Bodies: Youngs Full of Air

Jeremy BeckReviews
The cast of Bodies Bodies Bodies: Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Chase Sui Wonders, and Rachel Sennott

The murder mystery gets a modern makeover in Bodies Bodies Bodies, the slick, enjoyable, somewhat obnoxious thriller from Halina Reijn. As the title suggests, corpses slowly stack up over the course of the movie, though the bloodshed is less a sign of inhuman evil than a natural consequence of characters lacking access to wifi. After all, when you can’t check your Instagram account, what else is there to do but kill people? Adapting a witty, smirky screenplay by Sarah DeLappe, Reijn has crafted a confident and provocative picture in which new-age brashness nestles up against cinematic classicism. It’s Agatha Christie on TikTok.

The setting, quite delectably, is a dark and stormy night. Seven attractive young people pile into a mansion in upstate New York, not that far from where Clue took place. This privileged septet has assembled, in advance of the landfall of a hurricane, for an evening of revelry—a bawdy, corrosive cocktail spiked with sex and drugs and jealousy. Before long, one of them is dead, resulting in a hectic, bloody night full of paranoia, finger-pointing, and violence. Whaddya need, a GPS-powered roadmap? Read More

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Emily the Criminal: The Ex-Con Is On

Jeremy BeckReviews
Aubrey Plaza in Emily the Criminal

It’s just a flimsy piece of paper, but it carries the weight of an anvil—a scarlet letter printed in cold black and white. The man behind the desk utters two dreadful words—“background check”—and her face drains of color, her once-promising prospects vaporizing into smoke. “I just want you to be honest,” he says with a thin smile that masks a contemptuous sneer. But what he really wants is to dupe her, shame her, usher her into a confessional where he can play the role of supercilious priest. The interview was over before it started; it was over as soon as that banal printout found its way into his hands. Really, it was over years ago, when a courtroom stenographer typed the word “guilty”—a word that’s been invisibly hanging around her neck ever since.

This is a good deal of information to process, yet it’s all concisely packed into the brief opening scene of Emily the Criminal, which finds the title character (a riveting Aubrey Plaza) squirming at the end of a fishing line cast by a smug, purportedly upright middle manager (John Billingsley). Arguably, the film’s title alone, with its blunt two-word suffix, illustrates the hill its anti-heroine has been climbing most of her adult life. A long time ago, Emily did a bad thing. Now, that bad thing is all she is. Read More

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Bullet Train, Prey, and Action Silly and Serious

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Brad Pitt in Bullet Train, Amber Midthunder in Prey

I take movies seriously, but how seriously should movies take themselves? One of the saws about modern blockbusters is that they’re meant to be dumb fun—that they’re designed to function as a respite from the harshness of reality, and that they grant viewers the blessed opportunity to “turn your brain off.” Setting aside the wisdom of deactivating your central nervous system, I acknowledge that films which operate primarily as pleasure dispensers carry a certain appeal, though it’s debatable whether they need to be dumb—or to neglect more pesky, brainy attributes like plot, theme, and character—in order to be enjoyable. The phrase “it doesn’t take itself too seriously” is generally considered a compliment, implying not that the picture in question is foolish, but that it’s unpretentious.

But is this a sliding scale? That is, when it comes to action—the genre most typically cited by Brain-Off enthusiasts—do movies necessarily trade seriousness for satisfaction? Or can a film’s sincerity instead indicate its level of artistic commitment, suggesting that it approaches its crowd-pleasing task with formal rigor and genuine care? These are false dichotomies, but this past weekend nevertheless presented an intriguing contrast, featuring two new action flicks that occupy opposite ends of this theoretical spectrum. One takes its blockbuster imperative deadly seriously; the other treats seriousness akin to a disease. Read More

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