Grade: B minus

Streaming Roundup: Borat 2, His House, On the Rocks, Rebecca, and The Witches

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Sope Dirisu in "His House"; Maria Bakalova in "Borat 2"; Anne Hathaway in "The Witches"; Lily James in "Rebecca"; and Bill Murray in "On the Rocks"

Not long ago, the United States was rocked by a seismic event—one that historians will be grappling with for generations, and one that threatens to further divide an already polarized nation. I’m talking, of course, about the new Sofia Coppola movie.

OK, OK, settle down. The 2020 presidential election may be unprecedented in a variety of ways—voter turnout, disinformation campaigns, whispered implications of an outright coup—but even it couldn’t derail the movies, which keep getting made and released. We here at the Manifesto have been a bit busy of late obsessively tracking every electoral development doing important confidential work, so let’s catch up with some capsule looks at five recent streaming titles. Read More

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I’m Thinking of Ending Things: Meeting the Parents, Leaving Logic Behind

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jesse Plemons and Jessie Buckley in Charlie Kaufman's "I'm Thinking of Ending Things"

An extended, discursive, baffling game of Choose Your Own Metaphor, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a weighty treatise on the universal fear of loneliness. At least, I think it is. Maybe it’s a sad commentary on the inexorability of aging? I dunno. In one scene, the characters discuss the board game Trivial Pursuit, so perhaps it’s a valentine to one of that amusement’s classic categories, Arts & Literature; certainly it’s an erudite picture, given how frequently it name-checks writers like Tolstoy, Wilde, and Emerson.

Whatever his faults, Kaufman doesn’t make movies like anyone else. He also doesn’t seem to make movies that can be understood by anyone else. He’s blessed with such a fertile imagination, it’s almost like his films are acts of intellectual upheaval, as though he’s been demonically compelled to yank his ideas out of his brain and plunk them onto the screen. The human mind is a fragile and chaotic place, and so are his artistic creations, which are governed by passion and inspiration rather than order and logic. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is far from his best movie—that title belongs to either Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, both of which he wrote but didn’t direct—but it’s arguably his most purely Kaufmanesque (though Synecdoche, New York might like a word). It waltzes along to its own syncopated rhythms, its synapses firing randomly, unable to or just uninterested in packaging its multitude of thoughts into a coherent story. Read More

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The Old Guard, Palm Springs, and Immortality on Screen

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Charlize Theron in "The Old Guard"; Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg in "Palm Springs"

Who wants movie characters to live forever? Plenty of people, apparently, given how many films are made about the undead or the undying. This makes some sense: Reality has yet to discover the fountain of youth, so art has stepped in to fill the gap, allowing us to grapple with the dream (or the nightmare) of life everlasting. But it also presents a unique challenge for storytellers. No picture can fully encapsulate a person’s entire life (not even Boyhood), yet we still expect a certain degree of finality when the credits start to roll. How can movies deliver that necessary closure when their characters’ lives are open-ended?

Last month, two very different films wrestled with this quandary, in decidedly different ways. In The Old Guard, Charlize Theron plays the leader of a band of immortal mercenaries struggling to find meaning in a life of perpetual assassination. And in Palm Springs, Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti star as wedding guests locked in an infinite time loop, doomed to relive the same sunny Southern California day over and over. Both movies attempt to interrogate their characters’ predicaments, but only one does so with any real freshness. The Old Guard may be a sturdy and accomplished piece of action filmmaking, but it never truly distinguishes itself from the pictures it’s imitating. Palm Springs, on the other hand, improbably manages to evade the giant shadow cast by Groundhog Day, transforming into a romantic comedy that tickles your brain as well as your funny bone. Read More

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Onward: Dwindling Magic, But What of Imagination?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Holland and Chris Pratt voice brothers in Pixar's "Onward"

The world is gripped by existential despair, so what’s better to capture our collective terror than a Pixar movie? The wizardly corporation owns a patent on brightly colored, child-friendly entertainments that nevertheless speak to adults’ bone-deep fears. Of course, Onward, the newest adventure from the preeminent purveyor of computer-generated animation, isn’t about the coronavirus, no matter how tempted we might be to perceive everything through the lens of that horrifying pandemic. But it is about people—and a world—crippled with fear and self-doubt, struggling to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. That it’s also a playful children’s movie with a happy ending comes as something of a relief, even if it also currently feels like wishful thinking.

But enough about impending global catastrophe. Besides, there’s a more obvious metaphor to be found in Onward. At one point, its two brothers, Ian (voiced by Tom Holland) and Barley (Chris Pratt), squabble over navigation, disputing how best to reach their destination. Ian, the more pragmatic of the pair, insists on taking the freeway, a straight shot to their goal. Barley, a fantasist with either grand ideas or delusions of grandeur, instead suggests that they follow the Path of Peril, a twisting road fraught with danger and uncertainty. The freeway is of course the logical choice, but in Barley’s view, it is the eccentricity of the Path of Peril—its literal and figurative curves—that makes traveling it worthwhile. Read More

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Richard Jewell: A Bomb Detonates, and a Life Explodes

Jeremy BeckReviews
Paul Walter Hauser in Clint Eastwood's "Richard Jewell"

Even when they aren’t appearing in Westerns or war films, Clint Eastwood’s heroes routinely find themselves under siege. Earlier in his everlasting late period, in movies like Invictus and J. Edgar, Eastwood’s principals operated from inside the government, attempting to impose order and decency on a cruel and lawless world. Lately, however, The System itself has become Eastwood’s chief antagonist, a daunting power intent on smearing the names and ruining the lives of good men. In Sully, a skilled and noble pilot found himself the target of a biased and insidious bureaucratic inquiry. Now comes Richard Jewell, which dramatizes the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing and its aftermath, when the country collectively decided—based on hunches rather than evidence—that the doughy security guard who thwarted the attack was in fact the man who perpetrated it.

This material—an innocent man, railroaded!—is catnip for Eastwood, which means it plays to his worst instincts. Yet while Richard Jewell is clumsy and dubious, it is also fleet and colorful, featuring some of the director’s most relaxed and immersive filmmaking in years. It would be terrible if it weren’t so enjoyable. Read More

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