A24

Swiss Army Man: A Story of Adventure, Friendship, and Farts

Jeremy BeckReviews
Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe in "Swiss Army Man"

“The big bucks are in dick and fart jokes,” Ben Affleck’s character memorably quipped in Chasing Amy. Something tells me that he wasn’t thinking of Swiss Army Man, an aggressively absurd, surprisingly saccharine comedy from the writer-director team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (aka Daniels). This bizarre movie, with its gigantic premise and diminutive budget, does not possess a commercial bone in its proudly misshapen body. But for all its surface weirdness and gross-out humor, Swiss Army Man proves to be a fairly conventional story of isolation and redemption, with broad themes that would fit snugly inside a Disney film. It’s standard self-help shtick, only with more farts and boners.

The source of both is Manny (Daniel Radcliffe, continuing to do his utmost to distance himself from his signature screen persona), a waterlogged corpse whom we first see washing up on a remote beach. His arrival interrupts the attempted suicide of Hank (Paul Dano), a bearded loner who, believing himself to be marooned on this tiny spit of land, has given in to despair. Manny is hardly a good candidate to improve his circumstances, given that he is dead. But in death, he has acquired a peculiar superpower: He can pass gas on command, and his flatulence is so powerful that he can serve as a sort of catatonic motorboat. And so, Hank straddles Manny’s lifeless body, pulls down his pants, and rides him off toward the mainland “like a jet ski”. (If only Manny had appeared off the coast of Mexico instead of California, he would have made poor Blake Lively’s life a whole lot easier.) Read More

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The Lobster: Looking for Love as the Clock Ticks Down

Jeremy BeckReviews
Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz in "The Lobster"

Early in The Lobster, the deadpan, depraved, deeply romantic black comedy from Yorgos Lanthimos, a woman discusses the unsuitable hypothetical couplings of various animals. She notes, for example, that a wolf and a penguin could never live in harmony. “That would be absurd,” she scoffs. Fair enough. But when it comes to Lanthimos, absurdity is relative. The Greek director’s prior film, Alps, followed a four-person troupe of bizarre ambulance-chasers who waited for people to die, then impersonated the deceased for the bereaved’s benefit (in return for a fee). Before that he made Dogtooth, a nightmarish study of three home-schooled teenagers who had no names, learned a false language, and regarded house cats as ferocious beasts to be decapitated on sight. Dogtooth was consistently fascinating, Alps intermittently so, but both depicted their human grotesqueries so persuasively that they were easier to admire than adore. The Lobster is different, even as it’s more of the same. It retains the hypnotic surrealism of Lanthimos’ earlier work, but it also possesses something even more startling: a heart.

All of Lanthimos’ films operate on multiple levels, working as tidy, intimately scaled pieces of off-kilter esoterica while also asking big, loaded questions about social customs and human relationships. Here, he’s exploring the freighted topic of love. That’s hardly a novel hook for a movie, but The Lobster is less interested in defining love than in examining how we view it as a symbol of status. And so it inquires: Are married people truly happy? Are single people really alone? When we claim that we are in love, what do we mean? Is coupledom a shield against the sadness of isolation, or is it a prison that suppresses freedom and individuality? And if you get caught masturbating, shouldn’t you be forced to stick your hand in a burning-hot toaster? Read More

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Green Room: Beware of Dog and Neo-Nazis

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anton Yelchin, Joe Cole, and Alia Shawkat, trapped in "Green Room"

“When you take it all virtual, you lose the texture,” Pat says early in Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier’s lean, nasty, uncompromising new thriller. Pat, played by the squirrelly actor Anton Yelchin, is speaking about his band’s grass-roots approach to music, but he’s also serving as a mouthpiece for his writer-director. A roughneck at heart, Saulnier doesn’t so much defy cinema’s technological advances—like most low-budget filmmakers, he shoots in digital, a relatively newfangled technique—but exploits them to make movies that are primal and proudly unpolished. His previous feature, Blue Ruin, embraced a popular genre (the revenge picture) while simultaneously upending that genre’s conventions, but it was most noticeable for its atmosphere, a queasy aura of sweat, grime, and helpless panic. Now he brings us Green Room, a terror film about a handful of people locked in a tiny space, desperate to escape. Its setup is familiar, but its execution is marvelously visceral. The result is both exhilarating and oddly strangulating—you cannot help but enjoy this movie’s assaultive body blows, even as its hands begin to tighten around your neck.

Pat is the bassist for the Ain’t Rights, a punk-rock four-piece also featuring lead singer Tiger (Callum Turner), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat, miles from her iconic role on Arrested Development), and drummer Reece (Joe Cole, from the BBC’s Peaky Blinders). They’re touring the Pacific Northwest, though “touring” is a generous term for their ritual, which consists of scrounging for gigs at sparsely populated clubs and siphoning gas from parked cars to keep their rundown van moving. After plowing through a particularly humiliating performance that nets them six bucks apiece, they get wind of another opportunity outside nearby Portland, which they accept eagerly. When they arrive at the venue—a backwoods bar just east of nowhere—they discover that they’ve been mislabeled “The Aren’t Rights” and, more disconcertingly, that the place is populated by skinheads and is adorned with Nazi paraphernalia. Being iconoclasts, they settle on a special number for the opening song of their set: a cover of Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off!”. Read More

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The Witch: A Puritanical Walk in the Wicked Woods

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy in "The Witch"

Early in The Witch, Robert Eggers’s sly and skillful horror film, a man goes hunting with his 12-year-old son. They’re searching for game in the midst of a dark, ominous wood, but they also find time for some standard-issue father-son bonding. Only it isn’t quite standard-issue; when the man, William (Ralph Ineson), cautions the boy, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), against the dangers of sleeping too late, he solemnly intones, “The devil holds fast your eyelids.” That delectable piece of diction encapsulates The Witch‘s dual preoccupations. It’s a movie about the danger of religious fervor, but it’s also about communication—what people say (and don’t say), and, more importantly, how they say it. As the adage goes, the devil is in the dialogue.

The Witch, which takes place in the 17th century, purports to base its tale of literal and allegorical horror on actual period sources. To that end, the characters speak largely in early-modern English, which means there are a great many thous, haths, and dosts. (Even the film’s marketing materials get in on the act, treating the title’s W as consecutive V’s.) This requires a small act of translation on the part of the audience—not unlike when listening to Shakespeare, you have to actively puzzle out the characters’ speech, rather than simply absorbing it. This assumes that you can hear it; the film’s sound design picks up the rustling of branches and the bleating of animals, often compelling you to strain your ears to comprehend every flavorful morsel of colonial argot. Read More

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The 10 Best Movies of 2015

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists
Maika Monroe in David Robert Mitchell's "It Follows"

We all know top 10 lists are meaningless—arbitrary attempts to objectively quantify highly subjective works of art. But top 10 lists can also be meaningful, not just as encapsulations of the year that was, but as snapshots in time. Were I to pick the 10 best films from 2015 a month from now, or a month ago, this list would assuredly look different. Those who prefer their year-end collectives to be cemented in stone may deem that sentiment overly tentative, but I’ve always accepted that my opinions of movies are like my memories: fluid, changing with time, and susceptible to multiple feelings and interpretations.

But here we are today, and here I must enumerate my thoroughly impeachable rankings of the year that was. In reviewing 2015 at the movies, I am struck by how many big-budget pictures I enjoyed. From the thrilling action scenes of Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation to the equally thrilling dance sequences of Magic Mike XXL, from the interplanetary collaboration of The Martian to the intergalactic warfare of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, studios routinely served up rousing entertainment at the multiplex, and they should be commended for it. (Yes, they also served up the usual dreck.)

None of those high-profile movies, however, is on my year-end list. Instead, my top 10 is populated largely by more intimate stories focusing on relationships—mothers and sons, bosses and employees, men and women (and women and women). This should not, of course, reflect a value judgment on my part in favor of “smaller” films. I like all good movies, regardless of the scale of their production or the size of their target demographic. This year, I happened to gravitate toward more independent fare, but that is a coincidence rather than a signifier of taste.

But while the following 10 movies may not have been commercially successful—only two made more than $50 million at the box office, and just one topped $100 million—there is nothing small about their artistic achievements. They told beautiful stories, and they did so with clarity, vigor, and passion, lingering in my mind’s eye for some time after I watched them. They may span countries and eras and genres, but they are all powerful, provocative pictures, with their own singular style and vision. Here are the Manifesto’s 10 best movies of 2015. Read More

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