Where the Crawdads Sing: Swamp Fling

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daisy Edgar-Jones in Where the Crawdads Sing

No beating around the bush (or trudging through the marsh): Where, exactly, do the crawdads sing? The answer is both literal and metaphysical, obvious and unknowable. In Olivia Newman’s strained, soulful adaptation of Delia Owens’ best-selling novel, characters speak the title aloud twice: first as a breathless suggestion of childhood sanctuary (it’s a place where kids can hide), second as a lofty notion of spiritual permanence (it’s a realm where essences can linger). Quoting your title in dialogue isn’t a crime, but it can nonetheless signal a certain awkwardness—a fumbling attempt to convey meaning through words rather than images. As a piece of dramatic storytelling, Where the Crawdads Sing is clumsy, sticking moments of raw power into the gummy machinery of the pulp thriller and the courtroom drama. But it is at least sincerely clumsy. What it lacks in clarity and persuasion, it makes up for with earnestness and gumption.

One of the many pure-hearted lessons that the film teaches (or perhaps preaches) is that people often contain more than they appear. The same might be said of movies, though the reverse can also be true; some pictures attempt to distract you with the sheer bustle of stuff—plot twists, hectic action, nonlinear structure—to conceal the fundamental emptiness at their center. Where the Crawdads Sing somehow embodies both sides of this dual principle. Despite cramming itself with incidents and swinging wildly between genres, its story is not especially interesting. Yet its tonal capriciousness—its willingness to shift and swerve while nonetheless rooting itself in its distinct milieu—lends it a certain integrity. Read More

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Thor: Love and Thunder: Another Fray in Paradise

Jeremy BeckReviews
Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth in Thor: Love and Thunder

In opening narration that’s akin to the “Previously on” recap of a TV show, the blue rock-being Korg reminds viewers of Thor: Love and Thunder that Loki, the titular god’s brother, is dead; in fact, Thor has witnessed him die repeatedly. Death tends to be temporary in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—Loki’s own demise became the springboard for an ongoing streaming series—and as you watch this latest comic-book extravaganza from Taika Waititi, you may find yourself hoping for a miraculous resurrection, if only so the sly actor Tom Hiddleston might enliven the mechanized hullabaloo. You don’t get one, but the impish wit that was the god of mischief’s trademark still sometimes manages to shine through, penetrating the fog of stale plotting and monotonous fighting. Even if we’re collectively suffering from superhero fatigue (this represents the MCU’s 29th theatrical release), not everything here is old hat; for example, this is the first Marvel picture to feature a love triangle between a viking, a hammer, and an axe.

The axe, called Stormbreaker (“These weirdos all gotta have a name now”), is the jealous type; when it spies Thor (Chris Hemsworth, obviously) looking longingly at Mjölnir (the hammer, less obviously), it glides disapprovingly into frame, like a suspicious housewife who caught her husband peeking at his ex’s Instagram. Love and Thunder’s persistent insouciance can feel phony at times—a runner about the heroine workshopping a catchphrase is practically yanked from last year’s Free Guy (where Waititi had a small role)—but its smirking charm at least bears the stamp of genuine authorship. It is neither as funny nor as dynamic as its predecessor, the broadly appealing Ragnarok, but it nonetheless harnesses the same spirit of cheerful frivolity. Read More

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The Black Phone: No Answer, Try His Hell

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ethan Hawke in The Black Phone

Listen up, kids, here are some dos and don’ts courtesy of The Black Phone, the grimy new horror movie from Scott Derrickson: Do stand up to bullies by hitting them in the head with rocks. Don’t beat your children with a belt, even if you’re really just a sad dad on the inside. Do pay careful attention to your dreams, which may or may not be premonitions. Don’t invite the cops inside your home while lines of cocaine are visible on your coffee table. And if a dude in clown makeup driving a black van branded “Abracadabra” approaches you on a vacant sidewalk, do immediately walk the other way; don’t—seriously, do not—ask if you can see a magic trick.

That last nugget comes courtesy of The Grabber, a serial killer terrorizing a morose Denver neighborhood in 1978. With lank hair and dark eyes that peek out from behind a two-piece mask—the upper part topped with devilish horns, the lower forming a demented smile—he’s played by Ethan Hawke, continuing the actor’s not-unwelcome veer into villainy following his small-screen turn on Marvel’s Moon Knight. There are moments of real menace in Hawke’s performance here; when he smothers a child’s cries and threatens to gut him like a pig before strangling him with his own intestines, you know he means it. For the most part, though, he keeps things in second gear, gesturing toward evil rather than embodying it. Read More

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Elvis: All the King’s Remorses

Jeremy BeckReviews
Austin Butler in Elvis

Can a movie be exhilarating and tedious at the same time? Elvis, the biopic about an American icon (Elvis Presley) from an Australian director (Baz Luhrmann), is a vigorous and exhausting work, 159 minutes of bright lights and raucous noise and extravagant camera moves. It is also oddly boring, struggling to derail itself from the rigid train tracks that most pictures of its ilk travel upon. It has become fashionable, and a bit too cute, for critics to deride docudramas of musical genius as unwittingly earnest reproductions of Walk Hard, the 2007 parody that skewered the genre with John C. Reilly singing ditties like “You Got to Love Your Negro Man.” Elvis is too vibrant and enthusiastic and just plain expensive-looking to be dismissed as repetitive boilerplate. Yet its story—of greatness discovered, burnished, troubled, and exploited—is too typical to be memorable.

Its narrative trajectory may be tiresome, but visually speaking, Elvis is not dull. Never one for restraint, Luhrmann hurtles through his material with aggressive, often excessive verve, stitching together cacophonous sequences with music-video impatience. There are times, especially during the opening act—which finds the louche Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) narrating the film’s events in flashback as he lies in a hospital bed and imagines himself wandering through garish casinos with a drip in his arm—when this hyperactivity can feel overwhelming, like a Broadway production by way of Michael Bay. Still, the movie’s style is consonant with its subject, creating a feedback loop of restless energy. It’s fitting, if perhaps predictable, that Elvis feels most alive whenever Elvis is on stage feeling lively. Read More

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Lightyear, Turning Red, and the Two Pixars

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Chris Evans as Buzz in Lightyear; Rosalie Chiang as a panda in Turning Red

In 2013, six days after the release of Monsters University, then-Pixar president Ed Catmull said in an interview that the animation juggernaut was newly committed to making an original picture every year, and to correspondingly limit its sequels to biennial productions. The announcement came in the wake of a widely perceived (if relative) creative drought for the studio, whose prior two movies, the misbegotten Cars 2 and the pleasant but familiar Brave, hadn’t lived up to the legacy of greatness established during its inaugural 15-year run—a run that concluded, ironically, with a sequel (the stupendous Toy Story 3). Mathematically speaking, Pixar didn’t quite make good on its promise—of the next 10 films it released, four were sequels—but the wunderkinds of computer-drawn fantasy have for the most part threaded a delicate needle over the past decade, simultaneously making risky original movies and cranking out commercially safe follow-ups.

This “original vs. sequel” framing perpetuates a false dichotomy—the idea that original films are inherently works of boisterous ingenuity, whereas sequels are lazy and mercenary. (For this writer’s money, the existential crises conjured in Toy Story 4 are far more thought-provoking than the recognizable road-trip hijinks of Onward.) Still, in an era where Pixar’s parent company Disney continues to gobble up market share thanks to its ownership of mighty franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe—and where the apparent antidote to Mouse-House supremacy involves a competitor sequelizing a hit from 1986—it’s understandable for critics to prize the production of original screenplays as an independent good. Given that, it’s fascinating to examine Pixar’s two releases in 2022: one a science-fiction adventure that spins off from beloved intellectual property, the other a tender coming-of-age story whose only tie to the Pixar brand is its embrace of innovative storytelling. Read More

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