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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Jurassic World Dominion: Hash of the Titans

Jeremy BeckReviews
The cast of Jurassic World Dominion

You remember Ellie Sattler, right? She was one of the visitors to the original Jurassic Park, the one whose open-mouthed awe gave way to gasps of horror when she discovered that Samuel L. Jackson’s reassuring hand was attached to nothing more than a bloody stump. Everyone’s favorite paleobotanist, Sattler is back in Jurassic World Dominion, at one point hunching down to peek at a cuddly-looking computer-generated baby critter and murmuring, in a reverent tone, “You never get used to it.”

Don’t you, though? The failed bet of this heaving, sporadically entertaining movie, which was directed by Colin Trevorrow from a script he wrote with Emily Carmichael, is that our collective fascination with prehistoric beasts hasn’t dimmed in the 29 years since Steven Spielberg terrified audiences with a few well-placed shots of CGI and a rippling puddle of water. Technology has progressed dramatically in the intervening three decades, and Dominion renders its terrible lizards with impressive and expensive-looking detail, if not much tangible weight. What is missing, beyond the inimitable gifts of Spielberg himself, is the sense of wonder. This is now the sixth Jurassic feature, not to mention the umpteenth strain in the commercially hegemonic species that is the box-office-conquering blockbuster, the kind whose cinematic DNA is spliced with elaborate effects and cardboard characters. We have, indeed, gotten used to it. Read More

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Crimes of the Future, Watcher, and Horror of Body and Mind

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Viggo Mortensen in Crimes of the Future; Maika Monroe in Watcher

What scares you? More to the point, what kind of movie scares you? It’s been 100 years since Max Schreck climbed out of his coffin in Nosferatu, and directors have been harnessing and refining cinematic tricks to terrify their audiences ever since. One of the pleasures of the horror genre is its versatility—its infinite methods for exploring madness. This past weekend featured the release of two creepy pictures that take decidedly different approaches in their similar effort to raise the goose bumps on your arms and the hackles on your neck. One tries to dig under your skin; the other carves your skin clean off.

David Cronenberg is the father of modern body horror—or maybe the grandfather, given that the Canadian envelope-pusher is now 79 years old. But the director’s latest grotesquery, the arresting and impressive and ultimately empty Crimes of the Future, proves that age hasn’t sapped him of his enthusiasm for staging imaginative corporeal brutality. In the film’s opening scene, an eight-year-old boy living off the coast of a Grecian island munches on a plastic wastebasket, swallowing its synthetic fibers with no apparent difficulty; shortly thereafter, his mother smothers him to death with a pillow. This shocking, vulgar sequence is arguably the least inexplicable thing that happens in the entire movie. Read More

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Top Gun: Maverick: Bruising Altitude

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick

Ah, the ’80s: that glorious decade of unvarnished patriotism, jubilant synth music, and pop-culture cheese. As artifacts of this ancient era go, Tony Scott’s Top Gun has aged more poorly than most; it now plays as a silly, occasionally diverting genre exercise that doubles as a military recruitment ad, and while it entertains as a tribute to the glistening machismo of Tom Cruise, it also suffers from thin characters and a profoundly stupid story. So when I tell you that Top Gun: Maverick, the 36-years-in-the-making follow-up directed by Joseph Kosinski (from a script credited to Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie), improves on its predecessor in every conceivable way, what I really mean is, it’s not bad.

Honestly, that assessment is perhaps unfair to Kosinski and Cruise, who have approached this legacy assignment with a canny combination of reverence, intelligence, and playfulness. Not content with merely avoiding stupidity, Maverick is often genuinely smart. Its character dynamics are sharp, its plot makes structural (if not geopolitical) sense, and its action is mostly engaging and occasionally electrifying. It’s a pretty good movie that also wrestles with the obligation of being a Top Gun sequel. Read More

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