Horror

In the Testament of Ann Lee and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Religion Gets Musical

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Amanda Seyfried in The Testament of Ann Lee; Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

All movies compel suspension of disbelief, but the musical demands an extra dose of willful credulity. In real life, people don’t break into choreographed song-and-dance routines, so appreciating the genre requires accepting the form’s heightened surreality. It’s an act of faith—a gesture of surrender to a higher power whom you trust to guide you through the inexplicable.

This means that musicals about religion create a kind of feedback loop, reinforcing their characters’ spirituality—the belief in the unseen, the quest to convert others through vigorous performance—via their staging and technique. As (ahem) fate would have it, two recent releases toy with this idea, even if neither of them conforms to classical conventions of how movie musicals are meant to operate. Read More

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Primate review: When It Comes to Blows, Chimping Ain’t Easy

Jeremy BeckReviews
A shot of the ape in Primate

So much for species equality on screen. Over the past decade-plus, in movies like the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise or the Robbie Williams vehicle Better Man, the computer-generated chimpanzee has been a symbol of evolution and humanity—sad, intelligent, soulful. (Though featuring a different genus, the new blockbusters involving King Kong similarly depict the gorilla as a nice guy.) Yet here comes Primate to lay waste to these fantasies of human-animal harmony. The monkey here may be smart, but he sure isn’t friendly; he’s a fearsome killing machine who uses his mighty strength to facilitate his appetite for brutal, bloody violence. I’m surprised PETA hasn’t called for a boycott.

Not that Ben, the titular beast who is played (sort of) by Miguel Torres Umba, initially seems like a bad boy. He instead presents as the happy and docile pet of Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), a university student returning to her gorgeous home in Hawaii, where life seems pretty good. Lucy’s late mother was an expert linguist who taught Ben to communicate by punching buttons on a vocalizing tablet, allowing him and others to mash together noun-adjective combinations like “Ben happy” and “Lucy sorry.” Her half-absent father (Troy Kotsur) is the author of a lucrative mystery series with unfortunate titles like “A Silent Scream,” and its popularity has afforded him a swanky beachfront estate that would make the tech bros from Mountainhead jealous. Her younger sister (Gia Hunter) is resentful toward her—apparently for the sin of, I dunno, going to college?—but they quickly patch things up, and Lucy anticipates luxuriating with family, friends, and her favorite furball. Read More

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Indie New Year: No Other Choice, We Bury the Dead, The Plague

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lee Byung-hun in No Other Choice; Daisy Ridley in We Bury the Dead; Everett Blunck in The Plague

Christmas tends to be a big holiday for new movies, but New Year’s Day, not so much. Major studios rarely drop new films in the chill of early January, so the flip of the calendar instead becomes an opportunity for limited releases to expand slowly (sometimes glacially—looking at you, The Testament of Ann Lee). Today, we’re catching up with three independent pictures gradually making their way around the country, though viewers in some markets may be forced to wait until they hit streaming. This is why I support a national law requiring all movies to play in all theaters at all times.

No Other Choice. Capitalism is murder. You work and you work, pouring your blood and sweat into a numbing career that drains the life from you, in service of unfeeling bosses who can sack you whenever they want. (Note to any of my superiors who happen to be reading this piece: I love you and I love my job, please don’t fire me.) If you’re a CEO, they send you packing with a golden parachute. If you’re a line worker, they give you an eel. Read More

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Him: Stupor Bowl Sunday

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tyriq Withers in Him

To watch sports is to subject yourself to a vocabulary riddled with hyperbole and cliché. You need to give 110%. The best players eat, sleep, and breathe the game. Athletes are soldiers, and every contest is a war. It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

Him, the new movie from Justin Tipping, attempts to literalize this sort of inflated rhetoric. It imagines a heightened surreality where a draft prospect’s training regimen takes place at a militaristic boot camp, and where professional success equates to personal survival. It takes the metaphor out of blood sport.

Conceptually speaking, this isn’t a horrible idea. By their nature, movies dramatize and embellish real-life experiences, and the obsessive character of modern sports—the players’ pursuit of excellence, the fans’ deranged zeal, the economy’s spending of billions on advertising and gambling—naturally lends itself to an outsized treatment. So the problem with Him isn’t that it’s absurd. The problem is that it’s stupid. Read More

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Weapons: From Soup to Guts

Jeremy BeckReviews
Julia Garner in Weapons

The title is plural for a reason. The characters in Weapons brandish any number of destructive instruments—not just guns and knives, but also needles, scissors, forks, teeth, locks of hair, and more. You’ll never look at your vegetable peeler the same way again.

Yet the most potent tool on display here—maybe second-most, given how the use of that peeler has seared itself in my brain—is writer-director Zach Cregger’s craftsmanship. Weapons is a bold and bloody movie, full of ghoulish turns and ghastly violence. It is also a work of consummate skill—a deftly constructed tapestry that weaves imagination, precision, and patience. It’s a beautiful nightmare. Read More

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