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
Late in The Devil All the Time, the relentlessly ugly and obdurately watchable new thriller from Antonio Campos, a young man insists that he isn’t a bad person. This may ring false, given that we’ve already seen him kill several people with a pistol and beat up several others with assorted car parts. But wickedness is a spectrum rather than a point, and the competition for the most despicable character in The Devil All the Time—which transpires in various backwaters of West Virginia and Ohio, including an aptly named town called Knockemstiff—is fierce.
There’s the World War II veteran who, in an attempt to convince God to eradicate his wife’s cancer, crucifies his son’s dog. That wasn’t very nice; maybe he’s the film’s biggest baddie. But is he really worse than the charismatic preacher who systematically grooms and rapes teenage girls? What about the other captivating preacher, the one who stabs his wife in the neck in order to hone his gift for resurrection, only to discover that, whoops, death isn’t reversible after all? And let’s not forget the smiling traveler whose hobby is to pick up hitchhikers, photograph them fucking his wife, and then murder them. These guys make David Fincher’s villains look cuddly. Read More
Asked to describe Claude Rains’ self-regarding police captain
in Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart
replies, “He’s just like any other man, only more so.” Aside from accurately
summing up one half of cinema’s most beautiful friendship, that quip
encapsulates what might be called The Law of the Hollywood Sequel. The motion
picture industry is big business, so it’s only logical that when a movie makes
money, you make another one. And because follow-ups are typically driven more by
fan enthusiasm than by creative compulsion, you make the sequel just like the
original, only more so: more action, more jokes, more special effects, more
stars, more blood.
Last weekend saw the release of two decidedly different
sequels which, if not exactly long-awaited, are certainly far-removed from
their respective progenitors. Maleficent:
Mistress of Evil arrives five years after Robert Stromberg’s surprise
smash, which found Angelina Jolie donning pointy black horns and vivid green
contact lenses for a reimagining of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. Five years is an eon by Hollywood standards, but it’s
half the interval between Zombieland:
Double Tap and its predecessor, whose comic take on the apocalypse won moviegoers’
hearts and wallets a full decade ago. These unusually long gaps might suggest
that both sequels are motivated by art rather than commerce—that their creators
returned to their universes after significant time away because they’d actually
developed exciting new stories rather than because greedy studios recognized an
opportunity to cash years-old checks. Read More
Size matters in It
Chapter Two, and that’s bad news for everyone, unless you’re a
special-effects technician or Paul Bunyan. Big, loud, and long—but not
powerful, memorable, or scary—Andy Muschietti’s follow-up to his 2017 smash hit
completes the saga of six misfits and their supernatural battle against one
angry clown. But while this sequel flashes forward 27 years, alighting on the
members of the self-proclaimed Losers Club as disenchanted adults, its
sensibility is distinctly childlike. Dismissive of subtlety and ignorant of
tension, Chapter Two stomps around
wildly, craving your attention and desperate for your dread. Its creepy clown—named
Pennywise, of course, and again played by Bill Skarsgård with streaks of red
gashing his pasty-white makeup—may remain a force of malevolent evil, but at
times he seems less like the movie’s villain than its spirit animal.
Not that he’s around all that much. In fact, aside from the prologue—in
which a pleasant evening at a carnival turns icky and gory, with a paranormal
murder preceded by a vulgar, distinctly human hate crime—Pennywise is a nonentity
for most of Chapter Two, lurking in
the periphery or cloaking himself in other forms of varying ghastliness. It’s
an approach that makes some theoretical sense; the clown is such a nightmarish
symbol, Muschietti doesn’t want to dilute his gruesome power through overuse. And
his solution—to terrorize his characters, and his audience, by subjecting them
to a twisted menagerie of misshapen monsters—might have worked, had the
director exhibited some grasp of how to transfigure computer-generated phantasms
into genuine fright. Read More
In the new Lion King,
the circle of life soothes us all, but especially the Walt Disney Company’s
shareholders. Made a quarter-century after the original enchanted audiences
with its blend of Shakespeare, music, and fart jokes, this remake takes pains
to follow the unwinding path that Carmen Twillie sang about all those years
ago. Yet rather than traversing a harmonious circle, this Lion King progresses in a straight line, one pointed squarely back
toward the past. In our present era of Disney dominance, everything new is old
again.
Directed by Jon Favreau, and taking place in the
increasingly populous cinematic netherworld that lies between animation and
live action, this new Lion King
aspires to remind nostalgic viewers of its predecessor as bluntly and
repeatedly as possible. But it is notably different in one respect: It’s
longer. Favreau’s version clocks in at 118 minutes, a full half hour greater
than the hand-drawn classic. You might think that Favreau and his screenwriter,
Jeff Nathanson (whose odd career includes three Spielberg movies, plus a bunch
of inferior sequels), would use this additional time to meaningfully expand the
film’s universe, perhaps by dynamizing its action or supplementing its story.
But while there are a couple of new songs—and while the shot-for-shot concerns
that sprang up last year prove unfounded—none of the added material carries any
spark of originality. Favreau hasn’t made a movie so much as a museum
artifact—a weird, faded echo of a time gone by. Read More
