Comedy

Don’t Look Up: May the Planet Jest in Peace

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, and Jennifer Lawrence in Don't Look Up

Are you familiar with the scientific phenomenon known as climate change? If not, then you might find Don’t Look Up, the new star-studded political satire from Adam McKay, to be profoundly eye-opening. Doubtless, McKay wishes it to provoke outrage as well as laughter; this has been his shtick ever since The Other Guys’ closing credits featured a flurry of graphics illustrating the mechanics of a Ponzi scheme. It isn’t a critic’s job to predict how an audience will react, but I suspect that most people who possess rudimentary knowledge of global warming (and I, to be clear, am no expert) will greet McKay’s latest effort not with howls of fury but with snorts of derision. I suppose Don’t Look Up is a passion project, in the same way that certain third graders can be passionate when they’re arguing for a snow day.

It feels somewhat mean to criticize a movie that carries such an urgent message, even if the delivery of that message is fairly mean. To be sure, anger is an appropriate response to society’s collective shrug toward its own existential threat, and it’s undeniably maddening that the fact of climate change is still framed as a political issue—a polarizing debate in which #BothSides present meritorious arguments. Yet agitprop tends to be more persuasive when it’s targeted; here, McKay paints with such a broad brush that he sacrifices precision. In addition to attempting to skewer the electoral establishment—embodied here by Meryl Streep as a coldly calculating, vaguely Trumpian president, flanked by an army of flunkies and an Oedipally charged chief of staff (Jonah Hill)—he also lampoons greedy tech profiteers (Mark Rylance plays an awkward genius designed to recall Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk), militaristic jingoism (Ron Perlman pops up as a demented former general), mainstream media (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry play fatuous morning-show anchors), celebrity culture (Ariana Grande and Scott Mescudi suck up some oxygen as vain pop stars), millennial slackerdom (Timothée Chalamet receives a measure of dignity as a skateboarder), and social-media vacuity (fake memes routinely spring up). It’s a lot—the film clocks in at a baggy 145 minutes—and that muchness seems to be an element of McKay’s broader point. If you aren’t part of the solution—that is, if you don’t subscribe exactly to his hazy set of principles, which I guess could be described as Pro-Science—then you’re part of the planet-killing problem. Read More

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Licorice Pizza: Age Is Just a Wonder

Jeremy BeckReviews
Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza

The heroes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza are always running, though they never seem to get anywhere. Their sprinting is heedless—the kind of panicked, exuberant racing that epitomizes the heightened quality of youth, when every crisis is life or death and every experience provokes either jubilation or disconsolation. They run and they run—across vacant golf courses and through crowded malls and down sunbaked streets—but they always end up back where they started, confused and angry and lost. They’re essentially attached to opposite ends of the same spoke, moving together in a constant circle, yet never coming any closer to their quixotic destination: each other.

This would seem to describe a doomed romance, a tragic love story that follows the trajectory of a Wong Kar-wai picture. Such a suspicion is only reinforced by the arc of Anderson’s filmography. He may be a more variable and omnivorous director than, say, his namesake Wes, but his movies tend to thrive on tension and conflict; the ruthless oil baron of There Will Be Blood, the fanatical cult leader of The Master, and the imperious fashion designer of Phantom Thread are all defined by their indomitable will, and his films derive their energy from the way their protagonists attempt to impose that will on a society that shackles and stifles them. So perhaps the happiest surprise of Licorice Pizza is how loose it is. Rather than straining to flatten us with grandiosity, Anderson has applied his considerable craft to a story that is warm, earnest, and relaxed. This is far from the weightiest effort of his career, but it may well be the sweetest. (The only real competition in that regard comes from the euphoric Punch-Drunk Love.) Read More

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Belfast: The Troubles of Growing Up, Like and Unlike Everyone Else

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds, Jude Hill, and Judi Dench in Belfast

The opening scene of Belfast, the new film from Kenneth Branagh, announces the movie as both a narrow slice-of-life comedy and a more ambitious historical drama. Following some trivial narration from Judi Dench, the wan colors shift into crisp black-and-white, and the camera glides along a street in Northern Ireland, revealing a homey, intimate neighborhood. (A title card informs us that the date is August 1969.) The mood is relaxed and cheerful; children are kicking a ball around, adults are yammering idly, and everyone seems to know everybody’s name. Yet as nine-year-old Buddy (newcomer Jude Hill) traverses the road and spars good-naturedly with some shopkeepers, this peaceful idyll is shattered by the sudden arrival of armed hooligans. As they snarl threats and smash windows, the camera pivots around Buddy, spinning faster and faster, underlining his vulnerability and panic. What was once bliss has been replaced by terror.

Roughly based on Branagh’s own childhood, Belfast is a noble, enjoyable, not entirely successful attempt to document both sides of this formative coin. It seeks to frame the traditional hallmarks of the coming-of-age picture—the fledgling romances, the quixotically striving parents, the classroom grievances, the petty illegalities—against the backdrop of social unrest and religious conflict. That it struggles to fuse these disparate halves into a cohesive whole is due less to tonal inconsistency than cinematic execution, or maybe priorities. Over the course of a long and uneven career, Branagh has proved himself capable of working on a large scale—I remain a fan of his straitlaced Hamlet, while the operatic thriller Dead Again is arguably his best work—but here, whether because of lack of interest or inadequate filmmaking chops, he fails to invest the movie’s ostensibly sweeping commentary with much energy or clarity. He’s more committed to evoking the particular pleasures and predicaments of his youth with loving detail and misty-eyed nostalgia. Read More

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Dune, The French Dispatch, and World-Building Great and Small

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Timothée Chalamet in Dune and The French Dispatch

Denis Villeneuve and Wes Anderson are strangely similar filmmakers, even though they make exceedingly dissimilar films. Villeneuve’s movies are grand, sprawling adventures that envision alien life forms and contemplate dystopian futures. Anderson, by contrast, makes tidy, compact comedies whose foremost exotica are their characters’ eccentricities, and which tend to unfold in an unspecified but highly particular recent past. Yet both directors are true artisans skilled in the craft of cinematic world-building; for them, the screen is a coloring book for their fertile imaginations, one that should be sketched in as boldly and minutely as possible. Put differently, Villeneuve and Anderson treat movie-making like a work of galactic creation. One looks to the skies, the other to the soul, but both construct their own universes, packed with detail, whimsy, and awe.

This past weekend was something of a feast for cinephiles, as it brought new films from the two auteurs, both of which the COVID-19 pandemic had delayed for roughly a year. Villeneuve’s Dune, the long-awaited adaptation of the beloved science-fiction novel by Frank Herbert, finds the Canadian literally building a brand new world, one teeming with wonder and innovation. Anderson’s The French Dispatch, meanwhile, is more earthbound but no less profligate in its assembly. Both are natural progressions that reflect their makers’ career-long preoccupations, yet while both are undeniably impressive aesthetic achievements, only one fully succeeds as a piece of dramatic entertainment. Read More

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Free Guy: Leveling Up, One Cross-Promotion at a Time

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Reynolds in "Free Guy"

Once you acknowledge that it’s creatively bankrupt, Free Guy becomes a reasonably diverting time at the movies. It’s a work of benevolent fraud, like an identity thief who steals your credit card and then buys you some cool shit before jetting off to Cancun. It’s also a fascinating document for where it sits in today’s precarious blockbuster landscape: a big-budget original screenplay that nonetheless feels awkwardly bootstrapped to the superior pictures it’s imitating. It’s an original copy—an organic movie with a synthetic soul.

Free Guy was technically directed by the journeyman Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum, Real Steel), but its true authorship is corporate. It’s being distributed under the banner of “20th Century Studios”, which means it was initially developed at Fox before that company was acquired by Disney, the insatiable commercial behemoth that currently owns roughly 98% of the market share. The film’s first trailer, which premiered back during the Before Times of December 2019, winkingly ridiculed the Mouse House’s penchant for recycling old hits (“from the studio that brought you Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King… twice”), but Free Guy occupies a curious double-zone; even as it’s trumpeting its original bona fides at every turn, it’s continually leveraging its preexisting brand in the hope of launching yet another merchandise-friendly franchise. Read More

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