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I Saw the TV Glow: Long Live the Screen

Jeremy BeckReviews
Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine in I Saw the TV Glow

The line that best encapsulates the knotty themes of I Saw the TV Glow isn’t spoken aloud; instead, it’s scrawled across the screen in pink font: “Isabel and Tara are like family to me.” The author of that statement is Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), and the young women she’s referring to aren’t real people (or are they??) but the central characters in The Pink Opaque, her favorite episodic thriller. The notion that Maddy can cherish fictional figures akin to her actual relatives might strike you as ridiculous. For my part, I’ll cop to identifying with her sentiment in a peculiar way, given that 13 years ago on this very website, I celebrated Buffy the Vampire Slayer for its capacity to “make you feel as if you belong” and described watching an episode as the equivalent of “going home.” In other words, I get where she’s coming from.

Buffy, as it happens, is an obvious point of inspiration for The Pink Opaque, with its paranormal investigators, its monster-of-the-week structure, and its claim to a teenage audience in the ’90s (it airs on the “Young Adult Network”). But Jane Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow’s writer and director, is after something more complicated than paying tribute to a childhood staple, even if they toss in a few tasty easter eggs. (One member of Buffy’s beloved Scooby Gang was named Tara; Amber Benson, the actress who played her, cameos here.) They’re more concerned with our relationship with the art that we consume—how it can shape us, bind us, even warp us. In High Fidelity, John Cusack surmised that shared interests are essential when connecting with friends and lovers: “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like.” But what if what you like alters who you are? Read More

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Civil War: The Revolution Will Not Be Rationalized

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kirsten Dunst and Wagner Moura in Civil War

Something is wrong. We know this immediately, as soon as the A24 vanity card appears and bursts of noise explode from all sides, as though miscreants in the theater have set off fireworks in both aisles. We see a middle-aged white man (Nick Offerman) fumbling his lines as he rehearses a televised speech, and the ceremonial nature of his surroundings gradually reveals that he’s the President of the United States. As he yammers about secessionists—a faction he labels “the Western Forces”—the screen periodically cuts away to scattered shots of chaos and destruction. The President blusters that these rebels are on the brink of defeat, but the panicked nature of his rhetoric, along with the pointed images of mayhem, suggest otherwise. This uprising won’t be put down anytime soon.

This is the arresting first scene of Civil War, Alex Garland’s engaging, muddled, knotty new thriller. Simultaneously sprawling and intimate, it chronicles the challenges facing four people as the country around them is engulfed by anarchy and despair. Garland is no stranger to grappling with weighty philosophical ideas in the context of spiky, character-driven adventures. Ex Machina, his first and still best movie as a director, meditated on the very nature of humanity via a twisted, triangular war of wills; his theatrical follow-up, Annihilation, and his TV miniseries, Devs, both conjured dazzling worlds while interrogating their heroes’ motives and pondering their destinies. Civil War is his boldest effort yet, and also his emptiest. Read More

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Love Lies Bleeding: Her Body Is a Rage

Jeremy BeckReviews
Katy O'Brian and Kristen Stewart in Love Lies Bleeding

The MPA advisement for Love Lies Bleeding informs viewers that the film is rated R “for violence and grisly images, sexual content, nudity, language throughout, and drug use.” Setting aside that certain sickos (who me?) might perceive this notice as an inducement rather than a warning, one vice that the agency declines to mention is smoking—perhaps because the movie itself condemns such behavior. Early on, a woman named Lou pushes play on a portable cassette recorder (the year is 1989); as she half-listens to a health official drone on about the dangers of nicotine addiction, she aimlessly puffs on a cigarette. The obvious conflict between her brain and her body is amusing, even if her inability to quit quickly becomes the least of her problems.

Lou is played by Kristen Stewart, who supplies the kind of earthy, hard-bitten performance that has become the actor’s specialty post-superstardom. Stewart’s naturalism makes her an intriguing match with Rose Glass, the promising writer-director whose first feature, Saint Maud, was a raw nerve of a horror movie, observing a pious caretaker’s descent into madness with unsettling chops. In Love Lies Bleeding, Stewart’s effortless plausibility draws you inside Lou’s orbit and makes you root for her, even as Glass sets about upending her meager circumstances with exuberant chaos. Read More

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The Zone of Interest: Heart of Gas

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sandra Hüller in The Zone of Interest

The music speaks the truth. Strip away The Zone of Interest’s first few minutes—a grim overture in which Mica Levi’s doomy, dissonant score aches and seethes against a black screen—and you might suspect that you’ve stumbled into a gentle movie of bucolic bliss. The first image we see is that of a happy-looking family lounging lazily in a meadow. As a stream gurgles nearby, the children traipse along a dirt path, the sun glinting down on their golden hair. Their parents seem entirely relaxed, suggesting a life of comfort and security. Perhaps they’re on vacation, or maybe just enjoying a weekend picnic. Even after they return to their home, a cozy cottage with a carefully tended garden and a small in-ground pool, it takes some time before you pick up on the curious nature of their surroundings: the razor wire atop the large wall in the background, the smoke billowing from distant chimneys, the muffled echoes of gunfire and screams.

Adapted by Jonathan Glazer from a novel by Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest is decidedly a movie about the Holocaust. But it is also not a Holocaust picture—at least, not in the way the subgenre has traditionally been understood. There are no ghastly scenes of extermination, no heroic feats of endurance and survival, no condemnatory speeches, no comeuppance or catharsis. There is simply the pervasive aroma of death, and the people willfully oblivious to its stench. Read More

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Priscilla: Can’t Help Bawling in Love

Jeremy BeckReviews
Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla

It takes roughly 15 minutes before Priscilla announces itself as a Sofia Coppola movie. Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny), a meek 14-year-old American girl living on an army base in Germany, has just shared her first kiss with Elvis Presley (Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi), possibly the most popular musical artist on the planet. As she glides down her school hallway—oblivious to her surroundings, deep in the swoon of adolescent love—“Crimson and Clover” flares to life on the soundtrack. The year is 1959, nearly a decade before Tommy James yearned for a girl he hardly knew to come walking over, but Coppola has never let anachronisms get in the way of emotions. Priscilla is hopelessly smitten, and Priscilla represents Coppola’s attempt to capture both the purity of her rapture and the agony of its inevitable deflation.

Strangely, this blissful sequence is something of an outlier—a fleeting moment of canny cinematic imagination in a picture that is broadly functional and orthodox. It’s weird, because conceptually speaking, Priscilla’s pairing of artist and subject seems ideal. Even setting aside her filial connections to Hollywood royalty, Coppola has long been fascinated by celebrity, having considered it through the various lenses of middle-aged ennui (Lost in Translation), historical opulence (Marie Antoinette), and vicarious obsession (The Bling Ring). Yet where those movies all hummed with vivacious technique and energetic style, Priscilla is oddly conventional. Apart from some sharp music cues and a few arresting images (such as a woman walking down a corridor bathed in red light), it feels like anyone could have made it. Read More

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