Drama

Why Didn’t You Go to the Movies Last Weekend?

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Nathalie Emmanuel in The Invitation, John Boyega in Breaking, Idris Elba in Three Thousand Years of Longing

Immediately prior to my showing of Three Thousands Years of Longing, the director George Miller delivered a pretaped message, thanking viewers for spending the time and money to see his latest epic on the big screen. It was meant to infuse a commercial transaction—I was, after all, paying a corporation for its product—with a personal touch, and it worked, though not in the way Miller intended. Watching him natter amiably about the importance of cinema, I got the sense that he was speaking directly to me—not because his words were especially powerful, but because despite sitting in a gigantic auditorium, I was one of maybe 10 people in the theater.

This does not appear to have been a unique experience. According to Box Office Mojo, Three Thousand Years of Longing—Miller’s long-awaited (or apparently not) follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road—earned a pitiful $2.9 million last weekend, despite playing in over 2,400 theaters and sporting a hefty $60 million budget. When it came to new releases doing meager business, it wasn’t alone. Breaking, a fact-based thriller about a bank robbery starring John Boyega, couldn’t even scrape up a million bucks in 900 theaters; it was outgrossed by the random re-release of Rogue One, a Star Wars spin-off playing on barely one-quarter as many screens. Even the weekend’s most nominally successful new arrival, the low-budget horror movie The Invitation, premiered in the top spot with a dubious asterisk attached: Ignoring the COVID-19 pandemic, its $6.8 million tally marked the lowest figure for a first-place debut in nearly 20 years. Read More

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Emily the Criminal: The Ex-Con Is On

Jeremy BeckReviews
Aubrey Plaza in Emily the Criminal

It’s just a flimsy piece of paper, but it carries the weight of an anvil—a scarlet letter printed in cold black and white. The man behind the desk utters two dreadful words—“background check”—and her face drains of color, her once-promising prospects vaporizing into smoke. “I just want you to be honest,” he says with a thin smile that masks a contemptuous sneer. But what he really wants is to dupe her, shame her, usher her into a confessional where he can play the role of supercilious priest. The interview was over before it started; it was over as soon as that banal printout found its way into his hands. Really, it was over years ago, when a courtroom stenographer typed the word “guilty”—a word that’s been invisibly hanging around her neck ever since.

This is a good deal of information to process, yet it’s all concisely packed into the brief opening scene of Emily the Criminal, which finds the title character (a riveting Aubrey Plaza) squirming at the end of a fishing line cast by a smug, purportedly upright middle manager (John Billingsley). Arguably, the film’s title alone, with its blunt two-word suffix, illustrates the hill its anti-heroine has been climbing most of her adult life. A long time ago, Emily did a bad thing. Now, that bad thing is all she is. Read More

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Where the Crawdads Sing: Swamp Fling

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daisy Edgar-Jones in Where the Crawdads Sing

No beating around the bush (or trudging through the marsh): Where, exactly, do the crawdads sing? The answer is both literal and metaphysical, obvious and unknowable. In Olivia Newman’s strained, soulful adaptation of Delia Owens’ best-selling novel, characters speak the title aloud twice: first as a breathless suggestion of childhood sanctuary (it’s a place where kids can hide), second as a lofty notion of spiritual permanence (it’s a realm where essences can linger). Quoting your title in dialogue isn’t a crime, but it can nonetheless signal a certain awkwardness—a fumbling attempt to convey meaning through words rather than images. As a piece of dramatic storytelling, Where the Crawdads Sing is clumsy, sticking moments of raw power into the gummy machinery of the pulp thriller and the courtroom drama. But it is at least sincerely clumsy. What it lacks in clarity and persuasion, it makes up for with earnestness and gumption.

One of the many pure-hearted lessons that the film teaches (or perhaps preaches) is that people often contain more than they appear. The same might be said of movies, though the reverse can also be true; some pictures attempt to distract you with the sheer bustle of stuff—plot twists, hectic action, nonlinear structure—to conceal the fundamental emptiness at their center. Where the Crawdads Sing somehow embodies both sides of this dual principle. Despite cramming itself with incidents and swinging wildly between genres, its story is not especially interesting. Yet its tonal capriciousness—its willingness to shift and swerve while nonetheless rooting itself in its distinct milieu—lends it a certain integrity. Read More

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Elvis: All the King’s Remorses

Jeremy BeckReviews
Austin Butler in Elvis

Can a movie be exhilarating and tedious at the same time? Elvis, the biopic about an American icon (Elvis Presley) from an Australian director (Baz Luhrmann), is a vigorous and exhausting work, 159 minutes of bright lights and raucous noise and extravagant camera moves. It is also oddly boring, struggling to derail itself from the rigid train tracks that most pictures of its ilk travel upon. It has become fashionable, and a bit too cute, for critics to deride docudramas of musical genius as unwittingly earnest reproductions of Walk Hard, the 2007 parody that skewered the genre with John C. Reilly singing ditties like “You Got to Love Your Negro Man.” Elvis is too vibrant and enthusiastic and just plain expensive-looking to be dismissed as repetitive boilerplate. Yet its story—of greatness discovered, burnished, troubled, and exploited—is too typical to be memorable.

Its narrative trajectory may be tiresome, but visually speaking, Elvis is not dull. Never one for restraint, Luhrmann hurtles through his material with aggressive, often excessive verve, stitching together cacophonous sequences with music-video impatience. There are times, especially during the opening act—which finds the louche Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) narrating the film’s events in flashback as he lies in a hospital bed and imagines himself wandering through garish casinos with a drip in his arm—when this hyperactivity can feel overwhelming, like a Broadway production by way of Michael Bay. Still, the movie’s style is consonant with its subject, creating a feedback loop of restless energy. It’s fitting, if perhaps predictable, that Elvis feels most alive whenever Elvis is on stage feeling lively. Read More

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Men, Happening, and Women Under Attack

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Anamaria Vartolomei in Happening; Jessie Buckley in Men

The internet is fond of sarcastically asking if men are OK, but the same question might be more seriously asked of women. Pay equity, reproductive freedom, toxic masculinity, #MeToo—modern society is aswirl with issues surrounding female safety and autonomy. So it’s no surprise that cinema, with its quicksilver capacity to reflect on and respond to cultural shifts, is tackling these concepts with variety and alacrity. It is a bit surprising, however, for the same month to produce two theatrical releases which wrestle with men’s aggression and women’s liberation so directly, even if they do so in dramatically different ways.

Alex Garland’s third feature, the coyly titled Men, is the more ambitious work, at least in terms of scope and style. Garland favors small casts and isolated locations, but his films (Ex Machina, Annihilation) possess an aesthetic grandeur, teeming with bold colors and striking images. (His television series, the frustrating but beguiling Devs, is one of the most visually enthralling things you can find on the small screen.) This isn’t merely a matter of showing his audience pretty pictures but of somehow splicing beauty with deformity. Garland is a painterly artist with the emotional sensibility of a sick fuck. Read More

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