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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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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