Drama

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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The Survivor, Hatching, and Movies Resisting Genre

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Ben Foster in The Survivor; Siiri Solalinna in Hatching

Genre is a limiting concept. Movies are too complicated, too messy, to be reduced to single-word classifications. It’s a comedy. What if it’s scary? It’s a drama. What if it’s funny? It’s a Western. What if it doesn’t have any guns? These reductive descriptors attempt to package complex pieces of art into tidy little boxes, deceiving viewers into believing that movies can only be one thing, rather than many things at once.

Still, the conceptual construction of genre makes sense, and not just as a matter of commercial advertising. It also functions as a conversational shorthand, a convenient way of identifying a film’s scale and tone. (This website, I should note, routinely affixes genre tags to its reviews, the better to group like-minded pictures together.) Describing a movie as a comedy or a thriller conveys an established set of expectations—suggesting that you’re likely to laugh, shudder, or squirm—which it’s then naturally judged against. But what happens when movies actively resist the genre territory that they appear to be occupying? I’m not talking about gearshift features, like Something Wild or Parasite, which intentionally fake out viewers by swerving from one mode of storytelling to another. I’m talking about movies that seem uncomfortable within their own skin, and that struggle to satisfy those preconceived expectations because their interests appear to lie elsewhere. Read More

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The Northman: It Takes a Pillage to Faze a Child

Jeremy BeckReviews
Alexander Skarsgård in The Northman

Awesome in multiple senses of the word, Robert Eggers’ The Northman is a swaggering, delirious monument to cinematic excess. It’s difficult to select a single scene that best encapsulates its bravura decadence—the moonlit swordfight against a skeleton? the hallucinogen-aided bonding session where father and son bark and howl like feral dogs? the fiery duel at the literal gates of Hell?—but I’m partial to the early sequence where a Viking warrior fells a helpless adversary with his axe and then, having already vanquished his hapless foe, bends down and sinks his teeth into the dying man’s neck.

This unchecked, animalistic ferocity is part of what animates The Northman, which is noteworthy for its sheer frenzy alone; on the surface, it seems to have been constructed purely to inspire giddy instant reactions along the lines of, “omg u guyz this movie FUCKS.” (A quick Twitter search confirms its success in this regard.) Yet look past the blood-soaked savagery on display, and you will discover that there is something more sophisticated at play here. I don’t mean to minimize the berserk (and berserker?) quality of the film’s content, or to imply that its straightforward themes of vengeance and obsession stretch beyond the obvious. What I mean is that, for all its gonzo energy, as a piece of aesthetic craftsmanship, The Northman is absolutely beautiful. Read More

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Everything Everywhere All at Once: In the Multiverse of Radness

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Among the innumerable genres represented in Everything Everywhere All at Once—the universe-hopping, tone-mutating, brain-scrambling whatsit from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as Daniels)—is the martial-arts instruction picture. Like Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid and Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, its protagonist receives tutelage from a wiser, more experienced combat veteran. But here, rather than preaching about the virtues of discipline or the importance of practice, the seasoned mentor encourages our hero to weaponize absurdity. “The less sense it makes,” he insists, “the better.”

This is a matter of opinion, at least when it comes to movies. At the cinema, the twin values of logic and imagination are often in tension with one another, resulting in an artistic seesaw in which adding weight to one sacrifices the other. The brilliance of Everything Everywhere All at Once isn’t that it strikes the perfect balance between these qualities but that it loads up so heavily on one as to render the other irrelevant. Here is a work of bold, boisterous originality, teeming with rich ideas and vivid images and the quixotic thrill of genuine inspiration. It isn’t better because it doesn’t make sense. It’s better because it redefines the concept of making sense entirely. Read More

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