Glass: The Supervillains Are Running the Asylum

Jeremy BeckReviews
Samuel L. Jackson, James McAvoy, and Bruce Willis in M. Night Shyamalan's "Glass".

One of the main characters of M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass suffers from dissociative identity disorder. That illness is not shared by its director. Shyamalan may have his flaws, but he wields his camera with a confidence, a sense of self, that’s unusual in the Hollywood studio system. Good thing, too, because when reduced to its building blocks, Glass is a ridiculous movie, a bizarrely plotted thriller that makes astonishingly little sense. Yet it also flaunts a genuine personality, along with an exhilarating degree of style, that elevate it comfortably above its stupidity. There’s a school of critics who insist that Shyamalan should stop penning his own screenplays, arguing that his shaky writing hampers his gifts as a director. Maybe that’s true, but consider the flip side: How many other filmmakers could have taken this script and turned it into something so effortlessly, indecently entertaining?

An ungainly, tantalizing hybrid of two superior genre movies, Glass positions itself as the climax of a suddenly uncovered cinematic universe. Way back in 2000, Unbreakable—still Shyamalan’s best film—followed the uneasy partnership between David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), with the latter insistently tugging at the former to accept his destiny as a real-life superhero. Separately, Split followed the murderous exploits of Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a Sybil-like serial killer who occasionally transformed into a savage, animal-like entity called The Beast. Shyamalan is often accused of repeating himself, but these two movies weren’t remotely alike in terms of either plot or tone; Unbreakable was a powerful study of obsession, confusion, and self-discovery, whereas Split was a hammy, razor-sharp, predator-versus-prey thriller. Yet the (admittedly delightful) stinger of Split revealed that it in fact occupied the same world as Unbreakable, and from those still-glowing ashes, Glass was born. Read More

Read more

Oscars 2018: Nomination Prediction Results

Jeremy BeckOscars
Rami Malek in "Bohemian Rhapsody"

This was the first year that I’ve ever attempted to watch the Academy’s livestream of the nominations. I do not recommend it. I know that the Oscars are still a bit behind the times with respect to technology, but you’d think they could figure out how to stream a video of two people reading cue cards without it crashing every 20 seconds.

In any event, my predictions this year were pretty dismal; I hit on just 51 of 69 (74%), a steep drop from the 81% mark that I posted last year. Ordinarily I’d say that’s a good thing, because I’m always in favor of an unpredictable Oscars, but some of the nominees this year were real head-scratchers. But so be it. Let’s take a quick run through the field:

BEST PICTURE
Black Panther
BlacKkKlansman
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Favourite
Green Book
Roma
A Star Is Born
Vice
If Beale Street Could Talk Read More

Read more

Oscars 2018: Nomination Predictions

Jeremy BeckOscars
Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in "A Star Is Born"

Who’s going to host this year’s Oscars? Who cares? True, for some viewers, the Academy Awards are more about the pageantry—the glamour, the outfits, the sheer mass of hundreds of celebrities piling into a single auditorium—than the movies. But for me, to the extent the Oscars matter at all—and they do matter, probably more than we’d like to admit—it’s the way they function as a snapshot of film history. Sure, they’re a ceremony of self-congratulation, but they’re also a statement about the particular cinematic values that the Academy holds at this moment in time.

Does that mean that the Oscars function as some sort of objective arbiter of filmmaking quality? Of course not. But even if it’s silly to get too worked up about which movies win Oscars and which don’t—the upsets! the snubs!—the awards themselves are still worth analyzing and remembering. That’s why, each year, the Manifesto devotes some brief time to covering the Oscars. We’re beginning today with our predictions for the nominations, which will be announced tomorrow. We’ll follow that up with some quick reactions to those nominations on Tuesday, followed by some category-specific analysis in the coming weeks.

Let’s get to it:

BEST PICTURE
Black Panther
BlacKkKlansman
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Favourite
Green Book
If Beale Street Could Talk
Roma
A Star Is Born
Vice Read More

Read more

If Beale Street Could Talk: Surges of Passion, Even from Behind Bars

Jeremy BeckReviews
Stephan James and KiKi Layne in "If Beale Street Could Talk"

A movie awash in potent contradictions—intimate vs. operatic, reserved vs. vivacious, hopeful vs. disillusioned, wrongfully accused vs. savagely victimized—If Beale Street Could Talk opens with a quotation from James Baldwin, who wrote the novel upon which the film is based. The selected passage, which discusses “the impossibility and the possibility” (more contradictions!), directs “the reader” to draw certain inferences from what follows. This is a curious instruction, given that what follows is not a book but a movie; we aren’t readers, we’re viewers. It also illuminates the challenge that Barry Jenkins has accepted in choosing to adapt Baldwin’s novel, the tricky task of translating spiky words on a page to the visual language of the screen. In making If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins is attempting both to pay homage to one of the 20th century’s most important authors and to imbue that author’s prose with his own distinctly cinematic voice.

Not having read the novel, I can’t speak to the veracity of the on-screen result. What I can say is that, for the most part, this moving-picture version of If Beale Street Could Talk walks the line nicely, capturing Baldwin’s frustration and rage while also functioning as an honest-to-God movie. There are times when Jenkins’ ambitions get the better of him, and when the sheer scope of his undertaking threatens to overwhelm the particular plight of his characters. Yet even when he struggles to corral his myriad ideas into a tidy package (and to be sure, the film’s lack of tidiness is part of its point), Jenkins flaunts a vigorous command of his medium, breathing bold and colorful life into a story that is, in some ways, fairly black-and-white. Read More

Read more

Holiday Gift Bag: Mary Poppins Returns

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emily Blunt in "Mary Poppins Returns"

The book on Mary Poppins is that she’s practically perfect in every way. Like most movies, Mary Poppins Returns, which returns to the home of the Banks family on Cherry Tree Lane after a 54-year absence, is not perfect; it isn’t even very good. But it is hard to quibble with the rightness of Emily Blunt’s performance as the titular nanny, all withering glares and superior disdain. As a singer, Blunt is no Julie Andrews (who is?), but her perfectly calibrated acidity helps anchor a film that is otherwise so flimsy, it’s prone to drift off into nothingness, sliding up a banister until it disappears into the ether.

Not that Mary Poppins Returns is quiet. Directed by Rob Marshall, who seems to have become the emissary of the new-age Hollywood musical almost by default, it boasts a number of suitably impressive and boisterous numbers, which have been staged with evident care and skill. Yet there is a dispiriting adequacy to Marshall’s choreography, a lack of genuine wonder and flair. The music here is perfectly fine, but it seems unlikely that any of the songs will grow to acquire the classic status of “A Spoonful of Sugar”, or even join the ranks of more recent Disney hits such as “Let It Go” and “You’re Welcome”. Read More

Read more