Drama

Straight Outta Compton: Defying the Cops, the State, and One Another

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and Eazy-E come "Straight Outta Compton" and into the multiplex

F. Gary Gray’s Straight Outta Compton tells the story of the rise and fall of N.W.A., a rap supergroup featuring Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson Jr., Cube’s real-life son), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), and Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell). For those of you not well-versed in late-20th-century hip-hop lore—not that I have anyone in mind—”N.W.A.” stands for “Niggas with Attitude”. It does not require a degree in linguistics or cultural studies to recognize that this was a provocative name for a gangster rap group, particularly one that delivered such ferocious, uncompromising anthems about racial inequality and police brutality. The problem with Straight Outta Compton—what caps it at the level of passable entertainment rather than world-conquering triumph—is that it relays N.W.A.’s history through the form of dutiful hagiography. The members of N.W.A. became legends largely because of the way they upended existing notions of how music could be made, but Straight Outta Compton hits most of the expected beats (though it skips a few others) without ever straying from the sheet music. The result is a perfectly enjoyable movie that often feels like a carefully curated Wikipedia entry.

That doesn’t make it bad. Much of Straight Outta Compton is easily entertaining, especially its zippy first half. It helps that the actors are appealing, particularly Hawkins, who’s able to convey Dre’s musical genius without letting loose on the mic. Behind-the-scenes glimpses of artists sculpting their work are always satisfying, and an early scene of Dre coaxing Eazy on his delivery (for a track that would become “Boyz-n-the-Hood”) demonstrates N.W.A.’s dedication to musical craft as well as social upheaval. And once Paul Giamatti shows up as music impresario Jerry Heller (marking the second time this year he’s played a wig-wearing manipulator of 1980s talent), the movie tracks the methodical process by which a handful of young rappers became objects of fan worship and, more importantly, persons of governmental interest. Read More

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The End of the Tour: Talking About Writing, and Other Demons

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jesse Eisenberg and Jason Segel talk (and talk) in "The End of the Tour"

Writing in the New York Times in 1996 about Infinite Jest, the magnum opus from David Foster Wallace, the critic Jay McInerney wrote, “While there are many uninteresting pages in this novel, there are not many uninteresting sentences.” I feel similarly about The End of the Tour, James Ponsoldt’s compassionate, provocative, and occasionally dull recreation of the five-day period shortly following the release of Infinite Jest, in which Rolling Stone‘s David Lipsky trailed Wallace on his promotional rounds. It is not an especially kinetic movie, and if it is in no hurry to go anywhere, its luxuriant patience occasionally creeps into stasis. But it is also a sharply scripted and profoundly affecting character study, tenderly depicting two writers who are deeply committed both to their specific jobs and to the grander notion of composing meaningful words. Wallace and Lipsky both believed that their prose, as painful as it was to conceive, might actually mean something. The End of the Tour nobly honors their commitment, even if certain stretches of its narrative feel meaningless.

The movie opens in 2008, with a dumbfounded Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg, even better than usual) learning of Wallace’s suicide, a tragic event whose dark shadow looms over The End of the Tour. It then flashes back 12 years, revealing Lipsky as a hungry and energetic young writer who keeps hearing about this rapturously received tome called Infinite Jest. Animated by both jealousy and disbelief, he scoffs at the reviews claiming that this mammoth novel heralds the arrival of the next Pynchon. Then he reads it. Not long after, he’s pleading with his editor at Rolling Stone to interview Wallace for a celebrity profile, and then he’s jetting off to snowy Illinois, hoping to reconcile this generation-defining book with the mere mortal who wrote it. Read More

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Me and Earl and the Dying Girl: The Schmaltz in Our Stars

Jeremy BeckReviews
This is a sappy movie about Greg and Earl and the Dying Girl

I often censure movies for being generic; no film is more hollow than one without a personality. The flip side, however, is the movie that pummels its audience into submission via a surfeit of quirk. This is why Me and Earl and the Dying Girl—Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s skillfully made, unrelentingly precious, ultimately insufferable weepie—is a strangely worthwhile brand of disappointment. It is by no means lacking in individuality, and it sporadically sparkles with wit and ingenuity. But it channels its eccentricity in frustratingly clichéd ways, bludgeoning viewers with an onslaught of tackiness and schmaltz. It tries very hard to win your heart, and its calculated efforts to do so make it both laudable and oddly detestable.

Here is an example of this movie’s shtick: During one of his shaggy-dog voiceovers, Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann) analogizes hot girls—in particular the oblivious manner in which they exert their sexuality and power over horny boys—to moose inadvertently trampling over helpless chipmunks. It’s a cute enough metaphor, and the first time Greg describes it, Gomez-Rejon cuts to a crude piece of claymation that playfully illustrates two such animals acting out that very scenario. That’s a wry bit of visual inventiveness and formal looseness, but Me and Earl and the Dying Girl can’t let well enough alone. For the remainder of the movie, every time the token hot girl carelessly touches Greg’s shoulder, Gomez-Rejon returns to that image of the anthropomorphic moose and its pitiful chipmunk victim. The film desperately wants you to sympathize with the chipmunk (and, by proxy, Greg), and it actually half-succeeds; by the time it ends, you, too, will feel like you’ve been stomped on repeatedly. Read More

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Love & Mercy: Picking Up Vibrations, Good and Bad Alike

Jeremy BeckReviews
John Cusack stars as one half of Brian Wilson in "Love & Mercy"

Being a musical genius must be hard. You hear harmonies no one else can hear, you struggle to communicate your vision to your band mates and studio bosses, and if you’re fortunate enough to be able to actually produce revolutionary music, your innovative advances often go unnoticed until they’re discovered by later generations. But making a movie about such a genius—conveying those enigmatic bursts of internal, auditory inspiration through the visible, visual medium of cinema—is similarly perilous. Love & Mercy, Bill Pohlad’s strange and sensitive biopic of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, does not entirely conquer this challenge. Despite its whirring sound design and persistent effort, it never quite communicates the creative synapses firing within its protagonist’s big, drug-addled brain. But Love & Mercy is nevertheless a compelling portrait of artistic triumph and toil. It is also, more surprisingly, a touching romantic drama. It’s odd that a film about such an idiosyncratic man is at its best when it is at its most conventional.

That doesn’t stop Pohlad, working from a screenplay by Oren Moverman (director of The Messenger) and Michael Alan Lerner, from laboring strenuously to circumvent the customs of the genre. His most obvious and daring maneuver is to structure Love & Mercy as two separate mini-movies. In one, set in the mid-’60s, Wilson (Paul Dano) drifts from his brothers and colleagues while obsessing over the production of the Beach Boys’ seminal album, Pet Sounds. In the other, set some 20 years later, a mentally ill, overmedicated Wilson (now played by John Cusack, delivering his best performance in more than a decade) romances a Cadillac saleswoman, Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks, radiant), and wilts under the yoke of his domineering psychotherapist, Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti, bewigged and ferocious). Love & Mercy toggles back and forth between the two eras without any particular rhythm or formula. (Think The Godfather Part II, only, er, not quite as good.) It’s an engrossing approach that nonetheless fails to reap any real dividends; it’s fair to wonder how the film would have played in linear fashion, given that neither subplot clearly informs the other. Of course, that lack of causality between the two stories is arguably the point, which is why, in the abstract, Love & Mercy‘s jagged chronology makes sense. This is a fractured movie about a broken man. Read More

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The Water Diviner: Searching for Sustenance, and the Dead

Jeremy BeckReviews
Russell Crowe cast himself as the hero in his directorial debut

The Water Diviner, the directorial debut of Russell Crowe, is a tumultuous mishmash of tones: part Indiana Jones adventure, part fish-out-of-water comedy, part Nicholas Sparks romance, all mystical goop. A throwback historical epic that’s as overwrought as it is uneven, it is almost redeemed by Crowe’s evident passion for his subject matter, which involves the Battle of Gallipoli and its woeful aftermath. Crowe clearly felt compelled to tell this story, and his ambition is admirable. His execution is another matter.

Crowe stars as Joshua Connor, a hardscrabble farmer whom we first see prowling the barren Australian landscape, searching for signs of water. It is 1919, four years after the wartime events at Gallipoli, which are presumed to have claimed the lives of Joshua’s three sons. After his wife, disconsolate from her children’s death, drowns herself in a makeshift pool of her husband’s own construction (oh, the irony!), Joshua resolves to travel to Gallipoli and locate his sons’ remains. When he arrives in Turkey, however, he learns that securing passage to the ruins is no easy task, and he takes up temporary residence in an Istanbul hotel operated by a fetching proprietor, Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko, stiff). Read More

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