Grade: C minus

Middlebrow Christmas: The Color Purple and The Boys in the Boat

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Fantasia Barrino in The Color Purple; Callum Turner in The Boys in the Boat

In critical circles, the term “middlebrow” is wielded as a pejorative, alongside “prestige fare” and “Oscar bait.” The idea is that these types of films—often period pieces, featuring inspirational stories that are based on either historical events or popular novels—are tasteful to the point of decorousness, flattering Academy voters for their refinement without taking real risks as works of cinema. As someone who spent his formative years greedily devouring as many Oscar winners as possible, I maintain a steadfast appreciation for the middlebrow picture; I like The Cider House Rules, I love A Beautiful Mind, and I think Kate Winslet was terrific in both Revolutionary Road and The Reader. That a movie attempts to appeal to a broad adult audience doesn’t automatically nullify its pleasures, especially when it’s well-made and well-acted (and sure, gorgeous period costumes can’t hurt).

Christmas tends to be an ideal time for the release of a middlebrow movie, given that the holiday affords extended families the opportunity to spend two-plus hours in a climate-controlled environment without offending any sensibilities. In recent years, sterling examples of this vintage include Little Women, Mary Queen of Scots, and other period pieces that didn’t star Saoirse Ronan (e.g., Fences). Quality prestige pictures, all! Still, just as I reject the notion that middlebrow flicks are inherently inferior, I also acknowledge that they aren’t intrinsically superior; they still need to work on the levels of storytelling and aesthetics. Along with the Michael Mann biopic Ferrari (which I previously reviewed here), this Christmas brought the arrival of two films that seemed like easy wins for prestige-hungry audiences. But despite their differences in tone and scope, they share a sense of failure—both to inspire and, more crucially, to entertain. Read More

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Violent Night: Mad Santa

Jeremy BeckReviews
David Harbour in Violent Night

The moment that best encapsulates the tone of Violent Night, the smirking and sadistic new action comedy directed by Tommy Wirkola, occurs when a seven-year-old named Trudy (Leah Brady) has an earnest conversation over walkie-talkie with Santa Claus—not a mall employee impersonating Santa Claus, mind you, but the real mythological deal, complete with white beard, reindeer sleigh, and craving for homemade cookies. Strategizing about how to overpower the gang of psychopaths who have taken her and her family hostage, Trudy suggests a plan: “Shove coal right up their assholes!” Santa winces. “We don’t want you ending up on the naughty list,” he cautions, and so Trudy modifies her scheme: “Shove it up their anuses!”

Santa’s approving smile in response to Trudy’s revision would seem to carry some bizarre ethical implications—vigilantism is commendable, vulgarity is deplorable—but let’s ignore that. As a matter of humor, the joke here is that cherubic children saying dirty words is inherently funny. This isn’t necessarily wrong—comedy is often found at the intersection of the holy and the profane—but it speaks to the obnoxious complacency with which Wirkola and his writers, Pat Casey and Josh Miller, have approached their material. Forget about smart dialogue or inventive choreography; the real fun, this movie insists, lies in scatology and brutality. Read More

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Gemini Man: Twice the Star Power, Quintuple the Speed

Jeremy BeckReviews
Will Smith (and Will Smith) in "Gemini Man".

There’s a reason that movies are classically referred to as motion pictures: They move. Silent or talkie, black-and-white or Technicolor, the quintessence of cinema over the past hundred-odd years is the collective experience of watching images in motion. In the Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling imagined portraits wherein the subjects ceaselessly shift and budge, a clever conceit that also underlined just how miraculous real movies are. They’re magic brought to life.

Ang Lee has contributed more to this paranormal art form than most, in variety if not in volume. Over a startlingly diverse 12-year stretch (from 1995 to 2007), he made a Jane Austen period piece, an incisive family drama, a war picture, a martial-arts fantasy, a comic-book adaptation, a romantic weepie, and a political thriller. But in his late period, Lee has taken to tinkering with the machinery of the movies itself, to exploring new ways of beaming images onto a silver screen. His Life of Pi, while narratively and thematically flimsy, is one of the few films to make productive use of 3D; scenes of a young man traversing an ocean with a computer-generated tiger were gripping in their visual splendor. Then came Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which Lee shot not just in 3D but at 120 frames per second (five times the industry standard of 24), a useless flourish which disguised the fact that the movie was the most forgettable thing he has ever made. Rather than course correcting, Lee has now (ahem) doubled down on the gambit with Gemini Man. It’s an ambitious folly that might start cementing Lee’s unfortunate cinematic legacy, that of a once-gifted storyteller who became so obsessed with changing how movies look and move, he forgot to make them good. Read More

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Climax: Trip Like Nobody’s Watching

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Gaspar Noé's "Climax".

Some movies climb the walls, but in Climax, the walls blur into the ceiling and the floor. In this ambitious and enervating whatsit from the French-Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noé, the camera floats and swirls and glides, taking delirious flight through the air as bodies writhe before it in blissed-out ecstasy and unhinged agony. At one point, it becomes unclear whether the characters are vertical or horizontal, and they’re surely tripping too hard to tell the difference. It’s a dazzling visual achievement, which makes it all the more frustrating that Climax is, well, a Gaspar Noé film, which means that its technical audacity is marshaled in the service of cardboard characters, repugnant themes, and a story that is by turns skeletal and grotesque. Few directors have labored so much, and with such evident skill, to produce art that means so little.

Following the relentless banality of Love, a 135-minute borefest whose notion of boldness was to slather a dozen explicit sex scenes on top of its monotonous chronicle of a doomed relationship, Climax finds Noé returning to the lurid violence and operatic camerawork of his prior two features, Irreversible and Enter the Void. That’s for the best; despite its surfeit of stimulated genitals and spurting fluids, Love found Noé out of his element, straining to tell a character-driven story with a minimum of visual embellishment. (Well, relative minimum; as with Enter the Void, Love featured a POV shot of a penis ejaculating inside a vagina.) He’s far more comfortable trafficking in ornate brutality, which he likes to turn arty with pounding music and sweeping long takes. Working again with his regular cinematographer, Benoît Debie, Noé takes the ostensibly flat setting of Climax—an abandoned high school in France—and, with unflinching verve, transforms it into a hellish landscape of quaking terror, the Parisian equivalent of the Overlook Hotel. Read More

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Good Time: One Bad Night on the Big Apple’s Mean Streets

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson stars in the thriller "Good Time"

I’ll say this for Good Time: It has personality. Awash in a toxic sludge of neon and grime, it is a distinctive, assaultive film, made with energy and aggression by its sibling directors, Josh and Benny Safdie. It is also a deeply unpleasant experience, and not in the way it seeks to be. Desperate to rattle you with its jittery style and glammed-up ugliness, Good Time instead just feels punishing and self-indulgent, mistaking excess for excitement and confusing shock with craft.

In their previous feature, Heaven Knows What, the Safdies explored the agony of urban drug addiction, plucking actual addict Arielle Holmes off the street and then building a movie around her sad circumstances. (Holmes went on to appear as one of Andrea Arnold’s itinerant magazine salespeople in American Honey.) Most critics praised Heaven Knows What for its grubby authenticity, but I found it cold, slack, and unrelentingly miserable. I feel much the same about Good Time, which is marginally less bleak and slightly more polished but shares with its predecessor a defiant disregard for visual coherence. Working again with cinematographer Sean Price Williams (who also shot Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth), the Safdies favor extreme, unsteady close-ups, the camera hovering near the characters’ faces like a drunken dermatologist. Some might call this approach intimate. I’d call it a mess. Read More

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