Fantasy

From the Vault: Pirates of the Caribbean, 20 Years Later

Jeremy BeckReviews
Keira Knightley and Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2003, long before MovieManifesto.com existed, I spent my summer as a 20-year-old college kid writing as many movie reviews as I could. My goal was to compile them all into a website, possibly hosted by Tripod or Geocities, which would surely impress all of the women in my dorm. That never happened—neither the compiling nor the impressing—but the reviews still exist. So, now that I am a wildly successful critic actually have a website, I’ll be publishing those reviews on the respective date of each movie’s 20th anniversary. Against my better judgment, these pieces remain unedited from their original form. I apologize for the quality of the writing; I am less remorseful about the character of my 20-year-old opinions.]

God damn this movie is fun. There exists in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl an unadulterated joy of filmmaking so rarely found in the sullen cynicism of modern cinema. The film is crafted with skill and dexterity, fusing classically grand storytelling with a light-footed comedic grace. It is superbly acted, but even more, it is unapologetically cheerful, so that a genuine delight permeates each frame. This is a bold, effervescent picture, and it is an absolute pleasure to behold. Read More

Read more

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: Role-Playing Maims

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sophia Lillis, Justice Smith, Chris Pine, and Michelle Rodriguez in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

The key to a successful Dungeons & Dragons campaign, as I understand it—my knowledge derives not from personal experience, but from pop-cultural representations in shows like Stranger Things, Freaks and Geeks, and Community—is the careful blend of imagination, collaboration, and luck. Honor Among Thieves, the new wannabe D&D franchise-starter directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (who also wrote the screenplay with Michael Gilio), possesses each of these qualities in moderate measure, as though it’s distributing a maximum allotment of points across various attributes. It’s mildly creative, a little fortunate (in the current environment, a non-superhero fantasy epic feels positively refreshing), and boisterously cooperative. It is the last of these traits which rescues it from the crowded bucket of corporatized slop, turning yet another soulless IP extension into a passable diversion.

If that sounds like faint praise, remember that we’re talking about a big-screen adaptation of a fucking board game. Yet the pleasure of RPGs lies in their facility for assembling friends around a table (Daley got his acting start playing one of the nerdy gamers on Freaks and Geeks), so it’s fitting that this Dungeons & Dragons functions as an ensemble heist picture. Sure, there are presumed easter eggs in the form of fancy artifacts, mighty creatures, powerful enchantments, and exotic locations. (As the title promises, we begin in a dungeon before eventually meeting multiple dragons.) But most important, there is a motley gang of roguish outlaws, banding together to accomplish a common purpose. Read More

Read more

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

Read more

Lightyear, Turning Red, and the Two Pixars

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Chris Evans as Buzz in Lightyear; Rosalie Chiang as a panda in Turning Red

In 2013, six days after the release of Monsters University, then-Pixar president Ed Catmull said in an interview that the animation juggernaut was newly committed to making an original picture every year, and to correspondingly limit its sequels to biennial productions. The announcement came in the wake of a widely perceived (if relative) creative drought for the studio, whose prior two movies, the misbegotten Cars 2 and the pleasant but familiar Brave, hadn’t lived up to the legacy of greatness established during its inaugural 15-year run—a run that concluded, ironically, with a sequel (the stupendous Toy Story 3). Mathematically speaking, Pixar didn’t quite make good on its promise—of the next 10 films it released, four were sequels—but the wunderkinds of computer-drawn fantasy have for the most part threaded a delicate needle over the past decade, simultaneously making risky original movies and cranking out commercially safe follow-ups.

This “original vs. sequel” framing perpetuates a false dichotomy—the idea that original films are inherently works of boisterous ingenuity, whereas sequels are lazy and mercenary. (For this writer’s money, the existential crises conjured in Toy Story 4 are far more thought-provoking than the recognizable road-trip hijinks of Onward.) Still, in an era where Pixar’s parent company Disney continues to gobble up market share thanks to its ownership of mighty franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe—and where the apparent antidote to Mouse-House supremacy involves a competitor sequelizing a hit from 1986—it’s understandable for critics to prize the production of original screenplays as an independent good. Given that, it’s fascinating to examine Pixar’s two releases in 2022: one a science-fiction adventure that spins off from beloved intellectual property, the other a tender coming-of-age story whose only tie to the Pixar brand is its embrace of innovative storytelling. Read More

Read more

Jurassic World Dominion: Hash of the Titans

Jeremy BeckReviews
The cast of Jurassic World Dominion

You remember Ellie Sattler, right? She was one of the visitors to the original Jurassic Park, the one whose open-mouthed awe gave way to gasps of horror when she discovered that Samuel L. Jackson’s reassuring hand was attached to nothing more than a bloody stump. Everyone’s favorite paleobotanist, Sattler is back in Jurassic World Dominion, at one point hunching down to peek at a cuddly-looking computer-generated baby critter and murmuring, in a reverent tone, “You never get used to it.”

Don’t you, though? The failed bet of this heaving, sporadically entertaining movie, which was directed by Colin Trevorrow from a script he wrote with Emily Carmichael, is that our collective fascination with prehistoric beasts hasn’t dimmed in the 29 years since Steven Spielberg terrified audiences with a few well-placed shots of CGI and a rippling puddle of water. Technology has progressed dramatically in the intervening three decades, and Dominion renders its terrible lizards with impressive and expensive-looking detail, if not much tangible weight. What is missing, beyond the inimitable gifts of Spielberg himself, is the sense of wonder. This is now the sixth Jurassic feature, not to mention the umpteenth strain in the commercially hegemonic species that is the box-office-conquering blockbuster, the kind whose cinematic DNA is spliced with elaborate effects and cardboard characters. We have, indeed, gotten used to it. Read More

Read more