Grade: B

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs: Their Lives Are in Pieces, and So Is the Movie

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tim Blake Nelson in the Coen Brothers' "Ballad of Buster Scruggs"

In one of the six vignettes that make up The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the new Western from Joel and Ethan Coen, a solitary prospector played by Tom Waits spends a good deal of time digging a series of holes near a river. As you watch his methodical work, it doesn’t take you all that long to discern his purpose; even if you struggle to fathom the particular mechanics of his strategy, it’s plain that this silent, grizzled man is searching for gold. But because these laborious digging scenes find the film at its least busy—note that this is another way of saying “most boring”—your mind is likely to wander, and to contemplate the potential thematic connections that must surely link the film’s narratively disparate episodes.

But how? In structuring The Ballad of Buster Scruggs as an anthology, the Coens have invited their audience to engage in a robust, somewhat maddening intellectual guessing game. Maybe the movie is about the tragic inevitability of death; this seems plausible, given that four of our six main characters die, while the other two do the killing. Maybe it’s about the inherent tension between the tantalizing promise of the Old West (manifest destiny!) and the cold reality of a lawless, nascent civilization. Maybe it’s about the perpetual collision between man’s insatiable greed—most everyone we meet craves more of something, be it money, glory, or respect—and his desire for stability and peace. Or maybe, just maybe, the vignettes don’t share any deeper meaning at all. Maybe those holes are just holes. Read More

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The Hate U Give: Beaten Down, Then Speaking Up

Jeremy BeckReviews
Amandla Stenberg in "The Hate U Give"

Overstuffed yet bracing, predictable yet provocative, The Hate U Give is above all defiantly, unapologetically loud. Yet it opens with a scene of sober, ominous quiet. As the camera glides through the fictional Compton-esque neighborhood of Garden Heights, it locks on a two-story house and creeps through an open window, where a man, Maverick, is talking with his wife and three children at the kitchen table. It could be any chat where a parent imparts advice about the larger world—about sex, politics, family values—but here, Maverick (Russell Hornsby) is calmly but forcefully telling his kids how to behave if they ever when they inevitably get pulled over by the police. Keep your hands flat on the dashboard, he says. Be respectful. Don’t make any sudden movements; don’t give them any reason to hurt you. The burden, he patiently explains to his kids, isn’t on the cops; it’s on them. His children, all under the age of 10, listen intently, as though their father is teaching them about the difference between life and death. Which, of course, he is.

In making The Hate U Give, the director George Tillman Jr. faces an unusual and somewhat perverse challenge. Tasked with adapting Angie Thomas’ bestselling novel to the screen, he must dramatize a fictional story—about the fallout of a white police officer killing an unarmed black youth—in an era where such events are horribly, commonly real. In a country already familiar with the tragic deaths of actual people—many of whom the film name-checks, including Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile—do we really need an entertaining yarn about invented characters suffering the same fate? Read More

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The Old Man & the Gun: Hands Up, Please, This Is a Respectful Robbery

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sissy Spacek and Robert Redford in "The Old Man & the Gun"

Describing Robert De Niro’s vicious mobster in Goodfellas, Ray Liotta says, “What he really loved to do was steal; I mean, he actually enjoyed it.” David Lowery’s The Old Man & the Gun also follows a real-life criminal with a genuine passion for robbery, but that’s pretty much where the similarities between the two films end. Never one to tackle genre material head-on—Ain’t Them Bodies Saints was ostensibly about lovers on a shooting spree, but it was really just a collage of pretty Texas pictures overlaid by Malickian voiceover—Lowery paints this story’s true-crime elements with a warm, humanist gloss. What would typically play as a gritty thriller—there’s even a cops-and-robbers angle, with an obsessed detective who makes it his mission to capture this audacious thief—instead unfolds as a leisurely character study of aging and contentment.

Mostly, The Old Man & the Gun is a showcase for Robert Redford, appearing in what is supposedly his final role. He plays Forrest Tucker, the felon who, as relayed in the David Grann article that formed the basis for Lowery’s screenplay, robbed nearly 100 banks over a 60-year span, escaping from prison more than a dozen times in the process. That’s quite the rap sheet, but Redford doesn’t exaggerate Tucker’s legend or puff up his stature. Instead, he delivers a sly and twinkly performance, investing this sundance elder with a strange integrity that’s part-pride, part-grace. Read More

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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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