Red Rocket: A Star Is Porn

Jeremy BeckReviews
Simon Rex and Suzanna Son in Red Rocket

Cognitive dissonance is a valuable artistic tool, but there’s something especially fascinating about Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, which is one of the most enjoyably disturbing—and disturbingly enjoyable—movies I’ve seen in quite some time. On one level, it’s a blaring warning beacon—a chillingly persuasive portrait of exploitation and predation. Yet it’s also a pleasingly relaxed hangout comedy—a sun-kissed ode to the eternal pleasures of sex and drugs and NSYNC. It’s appalling and enthralling; I was aghast watching it and can’t wait to see it again.

The force of nature who provides Red Rocket with its queasy allure is Simon Rex, a journeyman actor and chiseled beefcake whom I’ve never seen before but will almost certainly be seeing again. Armed with a rippling chest and a wolfish smile, Rex plays the coyly named Mikey Saber, a washed-up porn star crawling back home to his impoverished roots in Texas City, where he attempts to shack up with his estranged wife (Bree Elrod); unable to secure legal employment thanks to the lengthy gap in his résumé (“You can call Brazzers and ask for a pay stub…”), he starts scratching out a living by selling weed to local oil riggers. He also manages to ingratiate himself with his wife and her couch-potato mother (Brenda Deiss), thanks to his rugged charm, not to mention his other talents. As his prior occupation suggests, Mikey is good with his dick and also slick with his words, which helps compensate for the black hole where his soul should be. Read More

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Don’t Look Up: May the Planet Jest in Peace

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, and Jennifer Lawrence in Don't Look Up

Are you familiar with the scientific phenomenon known as climate change? If not, then you might find Don’t Look Up, the new star-studded political satire from Adam McKay, to be profoundly eye-opening. Doubtless, McKay wishes it to provoke outrage as well as laughter; this has been his shtick ever since The Other Guys’ closing credits featured a flurry of graphics illustrating the mechanics of a Ponzi scheme. It isn’t a critic’s job to predict how an audience will react, but I suspect that most people who possess rudimentary knowledge of global warming (and I, to be clear, am no expert) will greet McKay’s latest effort not with howls of fury but with snorts of derision. I suppose Don’t Look Up is a passion project, in the same way that certain third graders can be passionate when they’re arguing for a snow day.

It feels somewhat mean to criticize a movie that carries such an urgent message, even if the delivery of that message is fairly mean. To be sure, anger is an appropriate response to society’s collective shrug toward its own existential threat, and it’s undeniably maddening that the fact of climate change is still framed as a political issue—a polarizing debate in which #BothSides present meritorious arguments. Yet agitprop tends to be more persuasive when it’s targeted; here, McKay paints with such a broad brush that he sacrifices precision. In addition to attempting to skewer the electoral establishment—embodied here by Meryl Streep as a coldly calculating, vaguely Trumpian president, flanked by an army of flunkies and an Oedipally charged chief of staff (Jonah Hill)—he also lampoons greedy tech profiteers (Mark Rylance plays an awkward genius designed to recall Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk), militaristic jingoism (Ron Perlman pops up as a demented former general), mainstream media (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry play fatuous morning-show anchors), celebrity culture (Ariana Grande and Scott Mescudi suck up some oxygen as vain pop stars), millennial slackerdom (Timothée Chalamet receives a measure of dignity as a skateboarder), and social-media vacuity (fake memes routinely spring up). It’s a lot—the film clocks in at a baggy 145 minutes—and that muchness seems to be an element of McKay’s broader point. If you aren’t part of the solution—that is, if you don’t subscribe exactly to his hazy set of principles, which I guess could be described as Pro-Science—then you’re part of the planet-killing problem. Read More

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Licorice Pizza: Age Is Just a Wonder

Jeremy BeckReviews
Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza

The heroes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza are always running, though they never seem to get anywhere. Their sprinting is heedless—the kind of panicked, exuberant racing that epitomizes the heightened quality of youth, when every crisis is life or death and every experience provokes either jubilation or disconsolation. They run and they run—across vacant golf courses and through crowded malls and down sunbaked streets—but they always end up back where they started, confused and angry and lost. They’re essentially attached to opposite ends of the same spoke, moving together in a constant circle, yet never coming any closer to their quixotic destination: each other.

This would seem to describe a doomed romance, a tragic love story that follows the trajectory of a Wong Kar-wai picture. Such a suspicion is only reinforced by the arc of Anderson’s filmography. He may be a more variable and omnivorous director than, say, his namesake Wes, but his movies tend to thrive on tension and conflict; the ruthless oil baron of There Will Be Blood, the fanatical cult leader of The Master, and the imperious fashion designer of Phantom Thread are all defined by their indomitable will, and his films derive their energy from the way their protagonists attempt to impose that will on a society that shackles and stifles them. So perhaps the happiest surprise of Licorice Pizza is how loose it is. Rather than straining to flatten us with grandiosity, Anderson has applied his considerable craft to a story that is warm, earnest, and relaxed. This is far from the weightiest effort of his career, but it may well be the sweetest. (The only real competition in that regard comes from the euphoric Punch-Drunk Love.) Read More

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The Matrix Resurrections: One Skill Makes It Larger, Other Thrills Feel Small

Jeremy BeckReviews
Keanu Reeves in The Matrix Resurrections

The white rabbit keeps hopping along in The Matrix Resurrections, the trippy, stimulating, overcaffeinated sequel from Lana Wachowski. It’s a dizzying movie, coursing with energy and teeming with ideas. It’s also kind of a mess; it struggles to wrangle its colliding philosophies into a coherent narrative, and it lacks the spirited visual imagination of its predecessors. But even if it’s a mess, it is very much somebody’s mess. Much like with her prior feature, Jupiter Ascending, which Wachowski made with her sister Lilly, the mistakes of The Matrix Resurrections are errors of commission; they are the consequences of an artist desperately trying to channel her fusillade of thoughts and emotions onto the screen. The blunders on display here are at least failures of personality rather than anonymity.

Speaking of personality: What makes us who we are? That was just one of countless questions posed and pondered by the first Matrix, the crown jewel of the cinematic treasure trove that was 1999. A bolt from the green-tinted blue, it was an electrifying fusion of brains and brawn that made a sizable swath of viewers question their own existence (not that I have anyone in mind), even as it attacked their nerve centers with eye-popping effects and kinetic fight scenes. The ensuing episodes, Reloaded and Revolutions, were less intellectually mind-scraping but were nevertheless heroic achievements in their own right; the jaw-dropping freeway chase in Reloaded remains the gold standard in contemporary action filmmaking, and it’s just one of a dozen-odd invigorating set pieces spread across the two sequels. So the standard challenge which attends any attempt at resuscitating a moribund franchise—the need to revivify a long-dormant universe in a way that both integrates the prior installments and upstages them—is especially perilous in this case. Read More

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Spider-Man: No Way Home: Once, Twice, Three Times a Spidey

Jeremy BeckReviews
Zendaya and a masked Tom Holland in Spider-Man: No Way Home

The twin cornerstones of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (not to be confused with the six infinity stones) are fan service and self-reference. Fan service, in that the primary purpose of these movies is satisfaction—not telling satisfying stories, but catering to their audience’s collective wants. And self-reference, in that the most efficient method of achieving this goal is to cram each picture with copious easter eggs, cameos, and callbacks, the better to flatter viewers’ knowledge and inspire periodic bursts of applause. The point of new installments is to remind people of older ones. The MCU is arguably the most successful global franchise in the history of popular culture, and its success derives from how it operates as a cumulative series of homework assignments.

So it’s fitting that Spider-Man: No Way Home—the third entry to center on Peter Parker, everyone’s favorite science nerd turned friendly webslinger, and the whopping 27th episode of the MCU overall (with another half-dozen films slated for theatrical release over the next two years)—finds its hero applying to college. (Never mind that Tom Holland, the talented British actor who again plays Peter with an appealing combination of gawkiness and sincerity, turned 25 this past summer; proper aging is the least of Marvel’s continuity concerns.) Sure, the movie that bears him carries the hallmarks of modern fantasy: warped spells, fractured universes, toppled buildings, freighted battles. But it is first and foremost a history lesson—a crash course in Spider-Man lore designed to reward viewers for their continued attention and scrupulous studying. If the past two decades of comic-book cinema were the substance of the curriculum, No Way Home is the refreshingly easy final exam. Read More

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