The Devil All the Time: Once Upon a Time in the West Virginian Hellscape

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Holland in "The Devil All the Time"

Late in The Devil All the Time, the relentlessly ugly and obdurately watchable new thriller from Antonio Campos, a young man insists that he isn’t a bad person. This may ring false, given that we’ve already seen him kill several people with a pistol and beat up several others with assorted car parts. But wickedness is a spectrum rather than a point, and the competition for the most despicable character in The Devil All the Time—which transpires in various backwaters of West Virginia and Ohio, including an aptly named town called Knockemstiff—is fierce.

There’s the World War II veteran who, in an attempt to convince God to eradicate his wife’s cancer, crucifies his son’s dog. That wasn’t very nice; maybe he’s the film’s biggest baddie. But is he really worse than the charismatic preacher who systematically grooms and rapes teenage girls? What about the other captivating preacher, the one who stabs his wife in the neck in order to hone his gift for resurrection, only to discover that, whoops, death isn’t reversible after all? And let’s not forget the smiling traveler whose hobby is to pick up hitchhikers, photograph them fucking his wife, and then murder them. These guys make David Fincher’s villains look cuddly. Read More

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No, Netflix’s “Cuties” Is Not Child Porn

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Netflix's "Cuties"

To describe the recent backlash over Netflix’s Cuties as the dumbest thing to happen in 2020 isn’t quite accurate. After all, this is a year where the President of the United States mused about the possibility of Americans injecting themselves with bleach in order to kill the coronavirus, prompting the Consumer Product Safety Commission to warn citizens that, no, consuming cleaning products is not in fact a good idea. Every era has its own advancements, and to live in America in 2020 is to bear witness to astonishing breakthroughs in the field of stupidity. So, when a U.S. Senator sent a letter last week to the Attorney General urging him to mobilize the Department of Justice and investigate Netflix—specifically, to determine whether the streaming giant, in releasing a motion picture, had “violated any federal laws against the production and distribution of child pornography”—it probably wasn’t the most flagrant example of rank idiocy to infect our nation’s shores over the past year. But it was very, very dumb.

Or maybe it was more insidious than inane—a trolling maneuver designed to own the Hollywood libs. Regardless of intent, the result is that Cuties—which, in point of fact, happens to be a French coming-of-age film directed by Maïmouna Doucouré—has now been vociferously condemned as an exploitative piece of pornographic filth, both by the conservative mainstream (multiple Republican senators got in on the act) and the lunatic fringe (QAnon, 4chan). The outcry has been as loud as it is ludicrous; as of this writing, over 650,00 people have signed a Change.org petition urging Netflix customers to cancel their subscription, while hashtags like #CancelNetflix and #NetflixPedofilia (in Latin America) have trended on Twitter. Read More

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I’m Thinking of Ending Things: Meeting the Parents, Leaving Logic Behind

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jesse Plemons and Jessie Buckley in Charlie Kaufman's "I'm Thinking of Ending Things"

An extended, discursive, baffling game of Choose Your Own Metaphor, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a weighty treatise on the universal fear of loneliness. At least, I think it is. Maybe it’s a sad commentary on the inexorability of aging? I dunno. In one scene, the characters discuss the board game Trivial Pursuit, so perhaps it’s a valentine to one of that amusement’s classic categories, Arts & Literature; certainly it’s an erudite picture, given how frequently it name-checks writers like Tolstoy, Wilde, and Emerson.

Whatever his faults, Kaufman doesn’t make movies like anyone else. He also doesn’t seem to make movies that can be understood by anyone else. He’s blessed with such a fertile imagination, it’s almost like his films are acts of intellectual upheaval, as though he’s been demonically compelled to yank his ideas out of his brain and plunk them onto the screen. The human mind is a fragile and chaotic place, and so are his artistic creations, which are governed by passion and inspiration rather than order and logic. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is far from his best movie—that title belongs to either Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, both of which he wrote but didn’t direct—but it’s arguably his most purely Kaufmanesque (though Synecdoche, New York might like a word). It waltzes along to its own syncopated rhythms, its synapses firing randomly, unable to or just uninterested in packaging its multitude of thoughts into a coherent story. Read More

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The Old Guard, Palm Springs, and Immortality on Screen

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Charlize Theron in "The Old Guard"; Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg in "Palm Springs"

Who wants movie characters to live forever? Plenty of people, apparently, given how many films are made about the undead or the undying. This makes some sense: Reality has yet to discover the fountain of youth, so art has stepped in to fill the gap, allowing us to grapple with the dream (or the nightmare) of life everlasting. But it also presents a unique challenge for storytellers. No picture can fully encapsulate a person’s entire life (not even Boyhood), yet we still expect a certain degree of finality when the credits start to roll. How can movies deliver that necessary closure when their characters’ lives are open-ended?

Last month, two very different films wrestled with this quandary, in decidedly different ways. In The Old Guard, Charlize Theron plays the leader of a band of immortal mercenaries struggling to find meaning in a life of perpetual assassination. And in Palm Springs, Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti star as wedding guests locked in an infinite time loop, doomed to relive the same sunny Southern California day over and over. Both movies attempt to interrogate their characters’ predicaments, but only one does so with any real freshness. The Old Guard may be a sturdy and accomplished piece of action filmmaking, but it never truly distinguishes itself from the pictures it’s imitating. Palm Springs, on the other hand, improbably manages to evade the giant shadow cast by Groundhog Day, transforming into a romantic comedy that tickles your brain as well as your funny bone. Read More

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Hamilton, Eurovision Song Contest, and the Strangeness of the Movie Musical

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams in "Eurovision Song Contest"; Lin-Manual Miranda in "Hamilton"

No movie is literally realistic. People’s actual lives are not filmed by professional camera crews, nor are their conversations scripted. Even adherents of Dogme 95 accept a certain degree of manipulation when they watch movies; it’s the implicit contract between the artist and the viewer. Still, if any genre challenges the assumptions inherent in this contract, it’s the musical. Our preconditioned brains may not immediately perceive that most cinematic dialogue is far more polished than everyday speech, but we damn sure notice when characters suddenly break into song.

It’s this theatricality, I assume, which animates the canard that musicals are unrealistic. Of course they’re unrealistic… and so is every other movie you’ve ever seen. The best musicals—my own list would include A Star Is Born (1954), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Aladdin, and, yes, La La Land—lean into their heightened stature, using song and dance to emphasize their characters’ emotions; in the process, they turn artifice into art. Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to consider the two most recent musicals to arrive in American theaters on streaming networks, and how they relate to the genre at large. Netflix’s Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, the new vehicle for Will Ferrell’s outlandish shenanigans, and Disney’s Hamilton, the not-so-new phenomenon that you surely don’t need me to describe, are decidedly different movies—not just in terms of tone, but in how they depict music being performed on screen. Read More

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