Comedy

Lisa Frankenstein: Wit’s Alive!

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kathryn Newton in Lisa Frankenstein

Diablo Cody and the ’80s: match made in cinematic heaven, or ungainly fit? Despite a varied and underrated screenwriting career (Tully, Ricki and the Flash), Cody remains best known for her opening one-two punch of Juno and Jennifer’s Body, which instantly established her polarizing style: pithy wordplay, obvious themes, and referential characters who seem to know they’re living in a movie. The heightened quality of her writing would appear to make her a natural match for the era that brought us John Hughes and synth pop. What’s strange about Lisa Frankenstein is that it neither sends up classic ’80s teen flicks nor pays loving tribute to them. It seems to be set in 1989 for no other reason than to justify its kickass soundtrack.

Which is fine, as far as it goes. I’m skeptical that Lisa Frankenstein will earn the same cult following that Jennifer’s Body did—certainly it won’t send adolescent boys scurrying to the internet in search of “megan fox amanda seyfried kiss scene”—but it is at least a vibrant and playful production. The feature directorial debut of Zelda Williams (working from a script by Cody), it sports bright colors, cool music, and an array of outfits so dazzling, they’d make Cher from Clueless jealous. The movie is not without significant flaws—uneven dialogue, awkward staging, a general aimlessness—yet it offers the robust built-in defense of, “Sure, but did you see her hair?” Read More

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American Fiction: By Book or by Crook

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction

Writing is a task infected with misery and failure: an endless cycle of staring at a blank screen, deleting reams of gibberish, and questioning your life choices. (Am I speaking hypothetically? Reader, I am not.) So it was with a mixture of envy and disbelief that I watched Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), better known for obvious reasons as Monk, sit at his desk and confidently compose an entire novel in what appeared to be a single night. What’s his next trick, building Rome?

Not that Monk is an especially successful artist. The flailing hero of American Fiction, Monk is a mythological scholar whose fearsome intellect has failed to translate into financial security or critical renown. (When he appears at a book panel, he scratches a missing vowel onto the placard that misspelled his name.) His latest text, a meticulous analysis of Aeschylus’ The Persians, hasn’t attracted the slightest nibble from publishers, given that it’s miles removed from the zeitgeist. “They want a Black book,” explains his agent, Arthur (John Ortiz). Monk’s frustrated response—“I’m Black, and it’s my book”—betrays not only his stubbornness, but his woeful ignorance of consumer demand. Read More

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Anyone But You: A Plague on Both Your Spouses

Jeremy BeckReviews
Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney in Anyone But You

They say mature movies are supposed to challenge audiences, so here’s a test for you: Can you accept the contrivances of Anyone But You as frivolous eccentricities rather than shopworn clichés? If so, then you’re likely to enjoy it. Stripped of its tortured machinery, it functions as a sweet and playful romantic comedy starring two indecently attractive people who—in another universe where box-office success hinges more on actorly charisma than intellectual property—might have the potential to age into movie stars. I did my best to meet it on its terms. But some terms are harder to accept than others.

It takes all of five minutes, before the opening credits even roll, for Anyone But You to announce that it will operate according to the cruel whims of rom-com illogic. The alphabetically adjacent pair of Bea and Ben (played by Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, respectively) meet cute at a coffee shop, and following some bathroom shenanigans in which Bea struggles with a hand dryer, they spend a magical day and night together before falling asleep in each other’s arms. It’s true love! Yet for reasons known only to the screenwriters (Ilana Wolpert and Will Gluck, the latter of whom also directs), Bea sneaks out the following morning; she instantly realizes her mistake, but upon her return she overhears a wounded Ben assassinating her character to a friend. As a result of this symmetrical misunderstanding, these would-be lovers become less star-crossed than simply and irrevocably cross. Read More

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Poor Things: Pride of Frankenstein

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things

Poor Things opens at a stately manor in Victorian London, where chickens bark, pigs quack, and legless horses draw steam-powered carriages. These hybridized bastardizations are the work of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a brilliant surgeon with scars on his face and curiosity in his heart. When he isn’t tutoring pompous medical students or belching out his farts through a contraption that turns gas into floating spheres, God (as he prefers to be called) toils in his vast private laboratory, concocting unholy experiments in his ongoing quest to investigate and bend the laws of nature. God wields his scalpel with such rigorous dispassion—a blend of mighty intelligence and clinical precision—that you might be tempted to perceive him as a proxy for Yorgos Lanthimos, the movie’s director and cinema’s preeminent scholar of human oddity. But that reading disserves Poor Things, which finds Lanthimos applying his craft with generosity as well as exactitude. God’s creations are perverse; Lanthimos has manufactured a miracle.

In doing so, he has sacrificed none of his talent for arresting imagery (not to mention caustic comedy). From its very first shot—that of a pregnant woman in a blue dress on a bridge, flinging herself to the icy waters below—Poor Things routinely marries the ghastly and the gorgeous. The production design, by Shona Heath and James Price, concocts environments of terrible wonder, like the airborne trams that slice through a smoggy metropolis or the yellow Escheresque staircase that crumbles in midair. (Even the black-and-white title cards that divide the picture into discrete chapters ripple with dazzling eccentricity.) The costumes, by Holly Waddington, are a resplendent array of gowns and bodices, despite every male character wanting to tear them to shreds. And the cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who also shot Lanthimos’ The Favourite, features bursts of bold color yet repeatedly contorts the frame into his singular fisheye style; at times he even shrinks the canvas to a small circle, as though we’re squinting through a peephole at all of the movie’s beautiful grotesqueries. Read More

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Dumb Money: The Smarts of the Deal

Jeremy BeckReviews
Paul Dano in Dumb Money

Pitching her coworker on the viability of a specific stock she heard about on YouTube, a middle-class nurse named Jenny (America Ferrera) argues that the bandana-clad weirdo she saw promoting the investment is unusually trustworthy: “You can see his whole balance sheet!” Jenny may not have scrutinized the data displayed in that Excel file, but in her view, its mere disclosure is a signal of expertise and a gesture of transparency. The actual numbers are irrelevant; what matters is what the nerd says about them.

Writ large, this didactic illustration functions as an apt metaphor for the entire stock market, in which tangible value is inextricably tangled with theoretical perception. Shares of stock aren’t worth anything in the literal sense; their value derives from a manufactured number—a figure whose calculation appears at the end of a byzantine maze of trades, estimations, and symbols—which we have all accepted to carry meaning. No movie has better illuminated this capitalist fiction than J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call, in which Jeremy Irons says of our financial system, “It’s just money, it’s made up.” Dumb Money, the new docudrama from Craig Gillespie, is not so insightful or incisive, but it does persuasively recognize the absurd whims and fateful caprices that catapult some investors into fortune and plunge others into poverty. Read More

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