Drama

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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Red Rocket: A Star Is Porn

Jeremy BeckReviews
Simon Rex and Suzanna Son in Red Rocket

Cognitive dissonance is a valuable artistic tool, but there’s something especially fascinating about Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, which is one of the most enjoyably disturbing—and disturbingly enjoyable—movies I’ve seen in quite some time. On one level, it’s a blaring warning beacon—a chillingly persuasive portrait of exploitation and predation. Yet it’s also a pleasingly relaxed hangout comedy—a sun-kissed ode to the eternal pleasures of sex and drugs and NSYNC. It’s appalling and enthralling; I was aghast watching it and can’t wait to see it again.

The force of nature who provides Red Rocket with its queasy allure is Simon Rex, a journeyman actor and chiseled beefcake whom I’ve never seen before but will almost certainly be seeing again. Armed with a rippling chest and a wolfish smile, Rex plays the coyly named Mikey Saber, a washed-up porn star crawling back home to his impoverished roots in Texas City, where he attempts to shack up with his estranged wife (Bree Elrod); unable to secure legal employment thanks to the lengthy gap in his résumé (“You can call Brazzers and ask for a pay stub…”), he starts scratching out a living by selling weed to local oil riggers. He also manages to ingratiate himself with his wife and her couch-potato mother (Brenda Deiss), thanks to his rugged charm, not to mention his other talents. As his prior occupation suggests, Mikey is good with his dick and also slick with his words, which helps compensate for the black hole where his soul should be. Read More

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