Grade: B

A Star Is Born: The Song Remains the Same, But with New Music

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in "A Star Is Born"

As meta monologues go, it’s hard to imagine one more openly symbolic than the speech that Bobby (Sam Elliott) gives in A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper’s sweet and soulful love story. Music, Bobby drawls, is just 12 notes between any octave. “It’s the same story, told over and over, forever; all the artist can offer the world is how they see those 12 notes.” Bobby is speaking about the constraining nature of music—a medium whose potential for variety is virtually limitless, but never mind—but it’s impossible not to read his remarks in the context of this movie, which is a remake of a remake of a remake. The cinematic notes underlying A Star Is Born have already been played. What matters now isn’t their sequence, but their presentation.

And measured against that yardstick, the film is a success. Its story is obviously familiar, but Cooper’s execution of it is spirited and stirring. It rather seamlessly transports the hoary themes of the 1937 original—a classic tale of fame, persistence, and possession—into the complexities of the present day, managing to feel timeless and contemporary at once. And perhaps most importantly, it features high-quality music, including a handful of truly triumphant scenes that help transform its leading lady from a pop phenomenon into a movie star. Read More

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A Simple Favor: Sipping Martinis with a Twist. Lots of Twists.

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively in "A Simple Favor"

Anna Kendrick looks nice. I don’t mean that she’s attractive (though of course she is); I mean that, with her soft-blue eyes and small build and delicate features, she presents as a decent, wholesome person. That innate tenderness has served her well in films like 50/50, End of Watch, and The Accountant, where she’s quietly elevated the material around her with unassuming grace. A Simple Favor, the gleefully absurd, indecently entertaining new comedy-mystery from Paul Feig, efficiently exploits Kendrick’s inherent geniality while also cannily subverting it. Her character, a single mom and moderately popular suburban vlogger named Stephanie, is sugary-sweet and aggressively eager—she’s always volunteering for multiple PTA assignments (her surname is literally Smothers)—but her helping hand has an iron grip. Her dainty exterior camouflages a mettle of steel, arousing your suspicion that she has something to hide.

But really, who doesn’t? One of the many pleasures of A Simple Favor, which is as much an amateur detective yarn as a pointed comedy of manners, lies in teasing us with misdirection and insinuation, encouraging us to anticipate its inevitable twists and turns. It’s being marketed as coming from Feig’s “darker side”, which is misleading on a few counts. To begin with, the former Freaks and Geeks showrunner is no stranger to troubling themes; even his more straightforward comedies, like Bridesmaids and Spy, carry undercurrents of sadness and pain. But more centrally, labeling this movie dark is false advertising. A Simple Favor may traffic in deception, seduction, and murder, but none of that changes the fact that, at its core, it’s a total fucking hoot. Read More

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Puzzle: Falling to Pieces, and Putting Them Together

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kelly Macdonald searches for meaning in "Puzzle"

In one of the few lyrical stretches of Puzzle, Marc Turtletaub’s sensitive and sad new drama, Agnes (the perpetually unappreciated Kelly Macdonald) rides a New York subway car while a blind man stands in the center and sings “Ave Maria” in a plaintive falsetto. Not long after, Agnes is served tea by a woman named Maria, and she points out the oddity that the namesake of Schubert’s piece is now providing her with a beverage. Her tea-drinking companion is unmoved, dismissing the parallel as an act of mere randomness that carries no cosmic significance. Agnes remains unconvinced: “It has to mean something.”

Does it, though? Given the sheer size of the universe, I’m inclined to agree with her partner and hesitate to ascribe any meaning to such an apparent coincidence. But it’s hard to blame Agnes, seeing as her own, private search for meaning is the animating force behind Puzzle, a movie about a seemingly stock figure who suddenly resolves to discover more of herself, and of the world. It’s also hard not to turn the question around and aim it at Puzzle itself. This is an unusually gentle and well-observed film, with a peculiar attention to its central characters and their rhythmic dynamics, but what does it really mean? Read More

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BlacKkKlansman: For the Boys in Blue, Black Man Dons White Robe

Jeremy BeckReviews
John David Washington goes undercover in Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman"

During an interlude of rare tranquility in BlacKkKlansman, undercover detective Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) and his sorta-girlfriend, Patrice (Laura Harrier, from Spider-Man: Homecoming), stroll through a serene wooded area, highlighted by a bubbling stream and colorful foliage. They’re talking, as fledgling lovers tend to do, about their favorite films, and Ron asks Patrice whether she prefers Super Fly or Shaft. Patrice, the president of the Black Student Union at Colorado College, is adamant. “Shaft,” she answers decisively, explaining that she has no use for something like Super Fly, which perpetuates the stereotype of black men as pimps and thugs. Taken aback by the severity of her criticism, Ron urges Patrice to relax. After all, he says in protest, “it’s just a movie!”

That sort of dismissive, laissez-faire hand-waving—the fallacious notion that art should simply be absorbed rather than analyzed, contextualized, and debated—has never and will never apply to the motion pictures of Spike Lee. For more than three decades now, the director has made all manner of “joints”—war epics and crime thrillers, sweeping period biopics and intimate family dramas, good movies and bad ones—but all of them share a purpose that goes beyond entertainment (though they are often entertaining). Lee is one of America’s most proudly political filmmakers, using his work not just to provide audiences with a few hours of diverting pleasure but to educate, instigate, preach, and rattle. BlacKkKlansman, which tells the story of Ron’s infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in 1972 Colorado, fits squarely within this lineage. It is by turns a suspenseful police procedural, a powerful piece of agitprop, and a ferocious indictment of a reeling nation that, in its maker’s view, continues to neglect and suppress its black citizenry. It is not just a movie. Read More

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Sorry to Bother You: Climbing the Corporate Ladder, Leave Your Blackness on the Ground Floor

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson in "Sorry to Bother You"

A sizzling satire that’s overflowing with invention and ideas, Sorry to Bother You takes place in an America that is both entirely apart from our present reality and a disturbing reflection of it. Set in Oakland, it conceives of a land where prisons have become lifelong labor camps, where riot police attack striking workers with clubs, and where the biggest hit on TV is a moronic show called “I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me!” Here I should clarify that this movie is a work of fiction, not a documentary.

Oh who am I kidding? Sorry to Bother You, the debut of writer-director Boots Riley, is such an extreme and provocative piece of work that nobody will confuse it with the intimately pitched, naturalistic dramas of Ken Loach or the Dardennes. But like those socially conscious filmmakers, Riley has something to say, and he’s saying it loud; excessiveness is his chosen cinematic language as well one of his foibles. Whether you hail Sorry to Bother You as a masterpiece or dismiss it as a mishmash—I’m inclined to think it’s a bit of both—you will likely agree that it’s a lot. Read More

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