Titane: Extra-Vehicular Activities

Jeremy BeckReviews
Agathe Rousselle in Titane

Car trouble gets a remodel in Titane, the blistering new thriller from the French provocateur Julia Ducournau. If you think the dudes from the Fast & Furious flicks are into vehicles, wait until you meet Alexia, a woman with a metal plate wedged into her head and a screw loose in her brain. The plate was installed during her childhood (the screw has presumably been loose since birth), after she inspired a crash by distracting her father while cooing “vroom-vroom” from the backseat; far from holding a grudge, as soon as she’s released from the hospital, she plants an adoring smooch on the sedan’s window. Flash forward 20-odd years, and her affections for automotives have, shall we say, matured, even if her moral compass continues pointing straight toward a black hole.

Ducournau’s first feature was Raw, and if you saw it, you haven’t forgotten it, especially the scene where a hungry teenage girl nibbled on her sister’s severed finger. Her follow-up bears a number of similarities, many of them appellative; Garance Marillier, who previously starred in Raw as that ravenous limb-muncher, returns here in a smaller role again playing someone named Justine, while other key characters are once more called Alexia and Adrien. More substantively, both films interrogate femininity in a masculine world, and the chaos that results when women start pushing past the guardrails that polite society has erected for them. Read More

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The Two Faces, and Methods, of Jessica Chastain

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Jessica Chastain in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" and "Scenes from a Marriage"

The Eyes of Tammy Faye, the new biopic from Michael Showalter, is the kind of movie that features a lot of stuff. There are a lot of wigs and mustaches. There are a lot of exaggerated accents, both midwestern and southern. There are a lot of title cards, informing us of the year and location as we race through five decades and across quite a few states. There are a lot of period-specific songs and chintzy costumes. And, thanks to an Oscar-hungry Jessica Chastain, there is a lot of acting.

Which isn’t the same thing as overacting. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Chastain disappears into the role of Tammy Faye Bakker, the popular televangelist who fell from grace in the late ’80s; over the course of the movie, even as the redheaded actor becomes increasingly difficult to recognize under heaps of artificial black-and-blonde hair and facial prosthetics, it’s always clear that you’re watching a performance. But that’s the point. As described in Showalter’s film, Tammy Faye built her following through a combination of sincere sweetness, uncommon pluck, and sheer force of will. In attempting to convey that degree of boisterous charisma, Chastain’s technique is similarly bold and visible. Rather than modulating the part with her usual steely presence, she leans into the eccentricity—chewing over every Minnesota-inflected syllable, cackling with every laugh, turning on the waterworks as tears stream through her heavy makeup. It’s an outsized performance designed to fit a larger-than-life figure. Read More

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Malignant, The Card Counter, and Movies Going All-In

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Oscar Isaac in The Card Counter; Annabelle Wallis in Malignant

Last Sunday, the critic Walter Chaw tweeted that, because more than 90% of the new movies he watches are “pretty much the same”, he’s more likely to appreciate a film that “just cocks an arm and swings for all it’s worth”. I might quibble with the mathematical accuracy of his first statement, but despite the mixed metaphor, I’m inclined to agree with his second; even when they fail, ambitious movies tend to be more memorable than their cautious counterparts. Chaw presumably had a specific picture in mind, but this past weekend provided multiple titles that refused to play by multiplex rules. One is far better than the other, but both succeed in upending expectations and carving out their own atypical territory.

At the outset—and, in fact, for the majority of its running time—James Wan’s Malignant isn’t especially novel. Despite stemming from a nominally original screenplay by Akela Cooper, it’s another haunted-house chiller that would fit snugly inside the Conjuring cinematic universe that Wan created back in 2013. Its heroine, Madison (Annabelle Wallis, best known to me as Grace on Peaky Blinders), is plagued by visions of a malevolent spirit called Gabriel, one of those shadowy creatures who’s never quite in focus but who looks a bit like the skeleton-masked bank robbers from The Town, only blacker and nastier. In addition to somehow speaking through electronic devices like a demonic Siri, Gabriel seems to be a burgeoning serial killer, and Madison—in an arresting manipulation of the image—periodically finds her mind transported to the sites of his murders, forced to watch his grisly wet work like a helpless, paralyzed bystander. Read More

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Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: How to Contain Your Dragon

Jeremy BeckReviews
Simu Liu in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings could have been a damn good comic-book movie, if only it hadn’t been about the Ten Rings. Neatly ornamented circlets that flash blue-and-purple lightning, these conjoined jewels vest their bearer with cosmic power, which is cool for him but unfortunate for us. I’m sure that blasting bolts of deadly energy from your wrists is an efficient method of laying waste to your enemies; visually speaking, it’s a drag, and so is this film’s prologue, which appears poised to squander the great Tony Leung—saddling him with lank hair and medieval armor, then watching as he magically vaults over and slices through an entire opposing army. He’s lord of the blings, and his growling invulnerability initially marks him as yet another tedious Marvel villain.

Happily, the Ten Rings factor little into Shang-Chi, at least until its predictably torpid climax. Even the tired prologue is something of a feint, seeing as how it’s followed by a second preamble, this one far more elegant. Flashing forward a thousand-odd years to 1996, it finds Leung’s heavy, Xu Wenwu, newly shorn and stumbling into a pastoral grove, where he trades balletic blows with his future wife, Ying Li (Fala Chen); their graceful combat, as much a dance as a fight, recalls the stylish wirework of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And for most of its runtime, Shang-Chi aspires to that level of intimacy and fluidity, eschewing CGI pyrotechnics and globe-altering stakes in favor of taut action and clenched family drama. Read More

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Candyman: Mirror, Mirror, Time to Maul

Jeremy BeckReviews
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II in Candyman

The premise of Candyman has always struck me as a peculiar illustration of risk versus reward. Most supernatural summonings involve some sort of Faustian bargain; sure, the heroes of Bedazzled, The Picture of Dorian Grey, and Rosemary’s Baby all sold their souls (or their son), but they at least got something out of it. Here, the lore is far less complicated, and commensurately less appetizing: Say the name “Candyman” five times while looking into the mirror, and his reflection will appear… and will promptly kill you. To me, such a proposition is in no way enticing. At least the dude in Mephisto can claim to have been duped; if you want to blame someone for getting your throat sliced open by Candyman, all you need to do is look in the mirror.

To its credit, this new Candyman, which was directed by Nia DaCosta from a script she wrote with Win Rosenfeld and modern horror impresario Jordan Peele, is at least partly aware of this absurdity; when one character learns of the legend, she understandably asks, “Who would do that?” followed by a very funny smash cut to a gaggle of vapid high school girls commencing the ritual. In any event, narrative plausibility is not DaCosta’s concern. She’s more interested in fusing the visceral with the political—in making a spine-chilling horror movie that doubles as a trenchant commentary on Black life in contemporary America. She isn’t entirely successful. As a metaphorical text, Candyman is admirable but awkward, struggling to vibrate with its desired resonance. But as a fright fest, it’s pretty good—not exactly scary, but engrossing and polished. There’s plenty of poise to go along with the blood. Read More

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