Comedy

M3gan: Hell Comes to the Dollhouse

Jeremy BeckReviews
Amie Donald as M3gan

They say the eyes are windows to the soul, which is why the most expressive anthropomorphic characters in cinema—E.T., Gollum, Wall-E—all sport wide, soulful peepers. But windows work both ways. In M3gan, the sly and spry new horror-comedy directed by Gerard Johnstone, the titular android gazes out into the world through a pair of delicate grey-blue irises, less concerned with comprehending her internal essence than with mapping her external environment. Her vision is rendered like that of an eerily empathetic cyborg—when she sees a person, she instantly analyzes their “Emotional State” and assigns quantitative ratings to various feelings (trust, joy, fear), like a talent scout grading an athlete—but she’s doing more than just gauging behavioral patterns. She is constantly downloading new data and feeding it into her processor, which means she’s learning, judging, evolving.

How, you might wonder, will such a creature ultimately regard our society? Then again, you might not wonder that, because if you’ve seen any previous entry in the child-doll subgenre of horror, you already know. Yet while M3gan’s predictable plotting rarely deviates from its predecessors’ silly and shrieky playbook, it is nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable diversion—smart, funny, and even a mite provocative. Read More

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Babylon: Putting the Sin in Cinema

Jeremy BeckReviews
Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in Babylon

In the Bible, the city of Babylon is referred to as a dwelling place of demons—a haunted, sinful metropolis that is ultimately befallen by evil, disaster, and ruin. That Damien Chazelle has selected it as the title of his new movie, a rampaging epic set in the dawn of Hollywood, is one of the filmmaker’s subtler touches.

I mean this less as criticism than observation—maybe even admiration. The maximalism with which Chazelle has constructed Babylon, a simultaneously nostalgic and seditious homage to cinema’s golden age, is unmistakably a product of courage, even if it is also a signifier of poor taste and bad sense. His heedlessness—the way he has envisioned 1920s Tinseltown as a gluttonous underworld of sex, drugs, and generalized depravity—carries with it a monumental ambition, one that demands the skill of a truly great director. That Chazelle mostly pulls it off is a testament to his talent; that he fails in stretches makes his vanity no less interesting. Read More

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Violent Night: Mad Santa

Jeremy BeckReviews
David Harbour in Violent Night

The moment that best encapsulates the tone of Violent Night, the smirking and sadistic new action comedy directed by Tommy Wirkola, occurs when a seven-year-old named Trudy (Leah Brady) has an earnest conversation over walkie-talkie with Santa Claus—not a mall employee impersonating Santa Claus, mind you, but the real mythological deal, complete with white beard, reindeer sleigh, and craving for homemade cookies. Strategizing about how to overpower the gang of psychopaths who have taken her and her family hostage, Trudy suggests a plan: “Shove coal right up their assholes!” Santa winces. “We don’t want you ending up on the naughty list,” he cautions, and so Trudy modifies her scheme: “Shove it up their anuses!”

Santa’s approving smile in response to Trudy’s revision would seem to carry some bizarre ethical implications—vigilantism is commendable, vulgarity is deplorable—but let’s ignore that. As a matter of humor, the joke here is that cherubic children saying dirty words is inherently funny. This isn’t necessarily wrong—comedy is often found at the intersection of the holy and the profane—but it speaks to the obnoxious complacency with which Wirkola and his writers, Pat Casey and Josh Miller, have approached their material. Forget about smart dialogue or inventive choreography; the real fun, this movie insists, lies in scatology and brutality. Read More

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Glass Onion: The Sleuth Shall Set You Free

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daniel Craig in Glass Onion

The real mystery of Glass Onion, Rian Johnson’s breezy and punchy sequel to Knives Out, is how Netflix so badly bungled its distribution. After bidding the GDP of a small country to secure its production rights, the streaming giant broke with its own foolish tradition and granted the movie a semi-wide theatrical release… for seven measly days. It made a healthy chunk of change during that span (over $13 million despite a general lack of marketing), but if you missed it, you’ll need to wait for its small-screen premiere later this month. This is frustrating, not least because Glass Onion is exactly the type of picture whose experience is vastly improved in a crowded theater—not because of its crisp visuals or its gleaming sets, but because of the murmurs of pleasure it inspires from its audience. That ineffable kinship—the ripples of laughter, the squirms of tension, the collective hum of anticipation and enjoyment—is unique to theaters. Netflix’s half-measure—offering a modest release but severely restricting its scope (not to mention its opportunities to make money)—is a puzzle so bizarre, even Benoit Blanc couldn’t solve it.

Blanc is back in Glass Onion, again played by Daniel Craig with a winning combination of Southern-fried decency and innate perspicacity. His return is the lone nominal carryover from Knives Out, though Johnson also retains the broader architectural blueprint of the whodunit. As a result, there is a bit less suspense this time around, and a bit more familiarity. You know the formula: A dead body will turn up, a cluster of suspicious malcontents will be implicated and suspected, and in the end Blanc will pierce the elaborately constructed veil and elucidate the plot’s relentless machinations. The build-up will be artificially loaded with crucial clues and red herrings, while the climax will be breathlessly satisfying and also beside the point. Read More

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The Menu: Till Chef Do Us Part

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy in The Menu

Nobody technically eats the rich in The Menu, even if a few splinters of bone marrow make their way onto some dinner plates. But the movie, which was directed by Mark Mylod from a script by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, plainly has an appetite for first-world destruction. This makes it a familiar dish—a sizzling satire of upper-crust vulgarity whose recent forebears include the hide-and-seek thriller Ready or Not and the yachting misadventure Triangle of Sadness. Yet while The Menu may be rooted in a recognizable recipe, it nevertheless mixes its customary ingredients with shrewdness and flair. It doesn’t introduce new flavors to your palette, but it’s plenty tasty all the same.

If these metaphors seem indecent, just wait until you meet the movie’s characters. The opening act introduces a coterie of pompous oafs, all of whom have paid an outrageous fee to travel by boat and dine at an exclusive island restaurant called Hawthorn. They include a pretentious food critic (Janet McTeer) and her sycophantic editor (Paul Adelstein), a has-been actor (John Leguizamo) and his exasperated assistant (Aimee Carrero), three insufferable finance bros (Rob Yang, Mark St. Cyr, and Arturo Castro) who surely would’ve founded FTX if only they’d had the chance, an elderly couple (Reed Birney and Judith Light) who are among the establishment’s most loyal regulars, and a foodie named Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) who slurps oysters with the zeal of a child opening Christmas gifts. Fatted lambs who just may be buying a ticket for their own proverbial slaughter, these snobs carry themselves with an air of entitlement that instantly make them unsympathetic—creatures of obscene privilege and even greater self-regard. Read More

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