Coco: The Music Is Lively, and So Are the Dead

Jeremy BeckReviews
A young boy finds stardom and death in Pixar's "Coco"

Part ticking-clock thriller, part throwback musical, part family weepie, Pixar’s Coco strikes a smart balance between new-age innovation and old-fashioned storytelling. It lacks the creative virtuosity of the studio’s greatest works: the shimmering grandeur of Finding Nemo, the emotional sophistication of Inside Out, the bravura silence of Wall-E. But while Pixar may have previously set the bar for family-friendly entertainment to be unfathomably high, it’s unfair to measure each studio’s new release against its past triumphs. Judged on its own terms, Coco is an agile and rollicking children’s film, mingling spirited action and characteristically stunning technique with wholesome sentimentality. It’s tier-two Pixar, which is another way of saying it’s pretty damn good.

It’s also beautiful, which should go without saying. Visual magnificence is a quality that we take for granted in Pixar productions—it’s simply a matter of appreciating the newest details and the whimsical flourishes within the richly textured environments and limber animation. Coco conjures a world of dazzling luminosity and ceaseless invention: arcing bridges made of bright-orange flower petals; an electric-blue swimming pool in the shape of a guitar; a skylit district of pulsating buildings, threaded together by spiraling staircases and curved viaducts. The characters, meanwhile, move with exquisite dexterity, their wonderfully expressive faces matching the well-pitched vocal performances. The people in this movie look and sound decidedly alive, which is curious, given that most of them are also dead. Read More

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Lady Bird: Desperate to Leave the Nest, But Still Learning to Fly

Jeremy BeckReviews
Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf in "Lady Bird"

There is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment late in Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s funny and piercing and achingly humane directorial debut, that perfectly encapsulates the movie’s warmth and lucidity. Christine, the tempestuous teenager at the center of Lady Bird who insists that everyone refer to her by the film’s title, is repainting her bedroom. As a ribbon of white varnish rolls over the formerly pink wallpaper, it obliterates the printed names of two boys that Lady Bird had previously scrawled into the wall. Those names, which once filled Lady Bird with ardent longing, have been erased, the desires they inspired living on only as relics of her own memory. The implications are plain: Time passes. People change. And life—forgive me if you’ve heard this before—goes on.

Movies, however, must end. Yet when the final frame of Lady Bird cut to black, I was not ready to be done with it. I preferred to linger a few moments longer in the finely textured world that Gerwig had conjured with such candor, intelligence, and care. Perhaps I was simply overpowered—by the film’s sincerity, by its humor, by its grace—but I like to think that I was expressing fidelity to one of the clichéd-but-undeniable truths that this movie articulates with such heartbreaking clarity: When you love someone, it is hard to let them go. Read More

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Murder on the Orient Express: To Catch a Killer, with Instincts and Interviews

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot in "Murder on the Orient Express"

The concept of a whodunit set on a train carries with it a tantalizing geometric contradiction. Trains are rigid vehicles, traveling robotically along a designated pathway with no room for deviation or improvisation. Mysteries, by contrast, zig and zag, circling around and doubling back along pronged avenues of key clues, red herrings, and dramatic twists. Murder on the Orient Express, Kenneth Branagh’s sleek but staid transliteration of Agatha Christie’s much-adapted novel, seeks to mine the tension inherent in this incongruity, lumping a dozen-odd suspects and one dead body inside the claustrophobic confines of an immobilized caravan. It’s a suspenseful setting, but it serves as scaffolding for a disappointingly bloodless and familiar story. You know the drill: Everyone is a suspect, nobody can be trusted, and freighted expository flashbacks are just around the bend.

Our conductor on this less-than-thrilling ride is Kenneth Branagh, the stately Irish actor who often moonlights as a mercurial director. (In addition to a number of Shakespeare productions, he has helmed a Marvel movie, a Tom Clancy adventure, and updates of both Frankenstein and Cinderella.) He pulls double duty here, showcasing his knack for filming panoramic vistas while also hamming it up as Hercule Poirot, Christie’s famous and ingenious detective. (Previously essayed on the big screen by both Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov, Poirot is probably most recognizable in the form of David Suchet, who played the sleuth for 24 years on British TV.) Donning a flamboyant Belgian accent and a mesmerizing handlebar mustache that a taxidermist must have pruned from Kurt Russell’s exhumed Hateful Eight corpse, Branagh’s Poirot is a savant who, much like Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, is not especially modest about his own intellect. “I am probably the greatest detective in the world,” he declares to a roomful of gobsmacked observers; one suspects he added the adverb as a mere courtesy. Read More

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Thor: Ragnarok: God of Thunder, Bringer of Rain, Cracker of Jokes

Jeremy BeckReviews
Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston smirk and squabble in "Thor: Ragnarok"

Midway through Thor: Ragnarok, a creature called Korg—a soft-spoken gladiator whose body is composed entirely of lumpy blue rocks—informs the God of Thunder that the planet they’re currently inhabiting doesn’t really make sense. It may not be coincidental that Korg is voiced by Taika Waititi, the film’s director and impish guiding spirit. A New Zealand native best known for his fanciful comedies (What We Do in the Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople), Waititi may not seem an intuitive choice to helm Ragnarok, the third Thor-centric feature and the seventeenth(!) installment in the corporatized mushroom cloud that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yet Waititi’s gift of whimsy proves perfectly suited for the MCU, thanks to a deceptively similar set of priorities. The Marvel movies, for all their lumbering technological clamor, have typically been better at dialogue and character than at action and story, and Waititi embraces that hierarchy with energy and savvy. He realizes that, if you’re going to make a senseless comic-book movie, you might as well make it fun.

And make no mistake: This movie is senseless. Perhaps comic-book aficionados can assemble its random artifacts and fantastical esoterica—fire demons and bi-frosts, eternal flames and infinity stones, cryptic prophecies and resurrected skeletons—into an intelligible map, but even an intimate understanding of Marvel mythology cannot provide Ragnarok with any narrative logic. Nor can it instill any legitimate stakes or tension into a product that is, in broad strokes, entirely predictable. (Given Marvel’s commitment to the perpetual expansion of its sequel-happy universe, it is hardly a spoiler to declare that no Avengers were harmed in the making of this film.) But unlike the first two Thor pictures—which felt leaden and lifeless, weighed down by their ostensible otherworldliness—Ragnarok seizes on its own silliness. When it comes to enjoying this frolicsome, jokey adventure, the plot’s lack of relevance proves irrelevant. Read More

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Thank You for Your Service: Back from War, Now Fighting Demons

Jeremy BeckReviews
Miles Teller and Beulah Koale struggle with PTSD in "Thank You for Your Service"

In the best scene in American Sniper, a one-legged veteran (Mindhunter’s Jonathan Groff) cautiously approaches Bradley Cooper’s titular Navy SEAL in an auto shop and warmly thanks him for saving his life during battle. It’s a moment that ordinarily would play as sweet and triumphant, but instead it’s awkward and tentative, as Cooper’s laconic soldier is utterly incapable of handling such direct gratitude. Now, Sniper screenwriter Jason Hall homes in on that discomfort with Thank You for Your Service, a humane and sober movie that tackles the war after the war.

Based on a book by David Finkel, Thank You for Your Service is a film of such unimpeachable decency—well-intentioned, understanding, respectful—that it’s virtually impossible to disapprove of. But those same qualities make it difficult to enjoy, or even really admire, as a piece of cinema. It’s more message than movie, and while the message—that post-traumatic stress disorder is a serious illness, and that many of our veterans need psychiatric help far more than they need banal platitudes—is undoubtedly worth conveying, the delivery system lacks oomph. It’s a movingly penned essay that just happens to unfold on screen. Read More

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