Grade: C plus

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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The Marvels: O Captain, Why Captain

Jeremy BeckReviews
Iman Vellani, Brie Larson, and Teyonah Parris in The Marvels

The title of The Marvels doesn’t appear on screen until the end, but it’s announced verbally midway through, during a cutesy scene where the three main characters debate potential nicknames for their improbable team-up. It’s easy to condemn such dialogue as unduly meta, but the problem with The Marvels isn’t the Marvels; it’s Marvel, singular. On its own terms, this movie exhibits its fair share of appealing qualities: charming actors, playful humor, a generally buoyant tone. But it can’t really exist on its own terms—not when it’s constantly being pulled into the yawning black hole that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

This is partly a matter of laborious franchise integration. Multiplex attendees have long since accepted the term “threequel,” but logistically speaking, The Marvels is essentially a triple-sequel, providing a conjoined follow-up for its three disparate members. Most obviously, it operates as a successor to Captain Marvel, the 2019 smash hit that introduced Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) as the final piece of the superhero puzzle before the studio delivered the ultimate crossover event with Avengers: Endgame. That behemoth may have concluded with a sense of nominal finality, but while it said goodbye to several of the series’ biggest stars (most notably Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man and Chris Evans’ Captain America), it hardly turned off the corporation’s lights; there have since been eleven additional feature installments, along with quite a few TV series—two of which factor in here. WandaVision introduced Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), the daughter of Carol’s old friend Maria (who also appeared in Captain Marvel, which actually took place in the ’90s and, look, just go with it); Monica acquired her own superpowers when she waltzed through the force field that was trapping Wanda Maximoff in the fabricated town of Westview, and she now serves as a galactic sentry for Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). And then there is Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), the New Jersey teenager who morphed into Ms. Marvel on the show of the same name, and who has long nurtured a celebrity crush on one Captain Marvel. Read More

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Fair Play: Investment Wank

Jeremy BeckReviews
Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor in Fair Play

The power couple at the center of Fair Play both work at a pressure-cooker investment bank, so it’s fitting that the movie opens with its own form of aggressive sales pitch. Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) are cavorting at a wedding, where they sneak into the bathroom for a quickie. Luke performs some moan-inducing cunnilingus, but Emily’s gasps turn from pleasure to shock when she realizes that her menstruation has bloodied both his face and her dress. Yet they recover their poise (“You look like you slaughtered a chicken,” he giggles), then sneak out a back door and race home to their swanky Manhattan apartment, where they enthusiastically finish what they’d started.

The purpose of this introduction is twofold. On a character level, it’s designed to establish Luke and Emily’s mutual passion—an ardor whose strength and durability will be tested as the film unspools. And in terms of style and imagery, it announces its provocative intent—not as a product of pornography (the simulated thrusting and the glimpses of nudity are more coy than explicit), but as a piece of proudly sexed-up entertainment. Here at last, writer-director Chloe Domont proclaims, is an adult movie for adult audiences. Read More

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The Creator: Cries of the Machines

Jeremy BeckReviews
John David Washington in The Creator

Noisy, clunky, and conventional, Gareth Edwards’ The Creator is a disappointing folly. Yet it is also a worthy endeavor, attempting to wield boisterous blockbuster filmmaking in the service of an original, idea-driven story. It could have been great, if only it were good.

Originality is relative in mainstream cinema. It’s commendable that The Creator isn’t formally rooted in existing intellectual property; the screenplay, by Edwards and Chris Weitz, actually invents new characters and conceives its own quasi-apocalyptic future. It also exhibits minimal interest in jumpstarting a franchise, instead telling a complete and self-contained story. (Of course, Disney might have demanded otherwise had the film been commercially successful; in that regard, early box-office receipts indicate the studio has nothing to worry about.) At the same time, it borrows liberally (one might say shamelessly) from numerous science-fiction touchstones—most obviously Blade Runner and its sequel, 2049, but also the Terminator pictures, Star Wars, and plenty more. It’s a putatively original movie that nevertheless feels recycled, as though an algorithm spat out a vague approximation in response to the prompt, “new-age sci-fi entertainment.” Read More

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Blue Beetle: Say No to Bugs

Jeremy BeckReviews
Xolo Maridueña in Blue Beetle

It feels reductive to label Blue Beetle “the Latinx superhero movie.” But reduction is now the superhero industrial complex’s specialty. Marvel and DC are technically competitors, but their shared universes have operated in tandem, systematically shrinking the field of blockbuster cinema into a carefully cultivated, self-sustaining formula. The studios haven’t wholly eradicated visual imagination or provocative storytelling—search for a well-made comic-book production, and you need only flip the calendar back three months—but those qualities are now secondary, subservient to the commercial imperatives of franchise continuity and fan service. Artistic personality is no longer a goal, just a potential bonus.

So yes, Blue Beetle is the Latinx superhero movie. And it’s not awful! Contrary to DC’s corporate blueprint, its main attraction isn’t its athletic showmanship, its flashy special effects, or its obligatory world-building. (Superman and the Flash, along with their fictional cities of residence, are notably name-checked, as though the script is contractually preserving the right to let its characters play with the big boys in a future sequel.) It is instead the Reyes family, a tight-knit clan of Mexican-Americans who live in a boisterous Texas enclave within the (similarly fictional) Palmera City. Bustling with activity and affection, the Reyeses are rich in love and poor in everything else. When prodigal son Jaime (Xolo Maridueña), a recent college graduate (“How do I look?” “Like you’re six figures in debt”), returns home in ostensible triumph, he encounters a parade of terrible happenings: He’s at risk of losing his ancestral house (“The landlord tripled the rent”), his father’s long-running body shop is defunct, and his now-unemployed dad (Damián Alcázar) recently suffered a small heart attack. Read More

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