Period Piece

BlackBerry: Game of Phones

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton in BlackBerry

The very last thing you hear in BlackBerry—I promise I’m not spoiling anything—is the high-pitched whine of a dial-up modem connecting to the internet. To younger viewers, it’ll sound like an atonal clash of beeps and hisses, but for folks of a certain age, it’ll instantly transport you (OK, me) back to the mid-’90s: that nascent online era of Napster, Geocities, and Netscape Navigator. Directed by Matt Johnson from a script he wrote with Matthew Miller, BlackBerry isn’t purely a nostalgia piece, but an undeniable part of its appeal lies in its authentic evocation of a time when the worldwide web was a vast electronic frontier, full of hope and possibility. We had no clue what the internet might become, which meant it could become absolutely anything.

It turned into a lot of things, including (from an entrepreneurship perspective) a breeding ground for false promises, egomaniacal puffery, and unrealized dreams. Anyone could conceive of anything; the question was whether they could actually make and sell it. This inherent tension between imagination and execution—the challenge of transmuting far-flung ideas into actionable results—is familiar ground for storytelling, and BlackBerry’s tech-bubble saga of success and failure occupies well-trod territory. (The book it’s based on, by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, literally includes the phrase “extraordinary rise and spectacular fall” in its subtitle.) What makes the movie entertaining, aside from its irresistible contrast in personalities, is its bountiful specificity. It opens in 1996 Ontario and occasionally feels like it was actually shot then and there—less a modern docudrama than a magic portal into a time and place of wheezing hatchbacks, wanly lit offices, and first-person shooters. Read More

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Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret: Girlhood Is Hard, Period

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rachel McAdams and Abby Ryder Fortson in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret

It is the nature of children to want things: a shiny new toy, an extra scoop of ice cream, a different body. Kids aren’t selfish because they’re rotten; they’re selfish because they’re kids. So as childish requests go, 11-year-old Margaret’s first prayer to the almighty—“Please don’t let New Jersey be too horrible”—is awfully modest. It’s also evidence that she’s a sweetheart, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret—Kelly Fremon Craig’s nimble adaptation of the beloved Judy Blume novel—honors her decency without really complicating it. It’s a nice movie about a nice girl with nice parents, which means that, depending on your perspective, it might feel like either a memoir or a fantasy.

As a boy who grew up in the ’90s—my own pleas to an unspecified deity tended to revolve around the Super Nintendo—I can’t pretend to fully relate to the challenges of a prepubescent girl in the ’70s, but I can still appreciate the skill and care with which Fremon Craig has translated Blume’s book to the screen. Yet because my own youthful immaturity never subsided as I ventured into adulthood, I can also grumble that, while the film smoothly sketches the genre’s most durable tropes—the awkward parties, the confusing crushes, the desperate attempts to fit in—it doesn’t always flesh out its characters. It’s an enjoyable time capsule of childhood helplessness that strangely lets its adult viewers off a little easy. Read More

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Air: Shoe de Grâce

Jeremy BeckReviews
Matthew Maher, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck in Air

It’s 1984, and Air, the new movie by Ben Affleck, wants to make sure you know that. It opens with a blizzard of archival footage and pop-culture clips—the soundtrack quickly shifts from Dire Straits to Violent Femmes—transporting you to the halcyon era of the Ghostbusters, that Apple commercial, and Mr. T. Yet for Affleck, nostalgia is more than a fuzzy feeling; it’s a mode of filmmaking. He fancies himself a throwback—an old-school artisan in the vein of Howard Hawks—which is why his prior feature, the noir flick Live by Night, attempted to echo classic gangster melodramas to the point of embalmment. Air, about Nike’s quest to sign Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal (it was marketed with the subtitle “Courting a Legend”), is a less self-serious picture, and also a more enjoyable one. Watching it is a bit like watching a highlight package of an old sporting event you’ve heard about but never saw live: You can appreciate the talent and the craft on display, even though you already know which team wins at the buzzer.

Speaking of highlights, that introductory blitz isn’t the only time Affleck dips into montage. Though Air takes place exclusively during the year of “Sister Christian” and Beverly Hills Cop—Harold Faltermeyer’s famous synth theme for the latter appears on the soundtrack, even though it wasn’t released until months after the shoe signing (one of many factual liberties cheerfully taken by Alex Convery’s script)—at one point it suddenly travels through time, revealing grainy footage of classic Jordan moments (the hanging game-winner against Cleveland, the lefty layup versus the Lakers, etc.). It’s an understandable impulse, because despite being branded as a sports movie, Air features vanishingly little action or athleticism. In fact, its hero is a paunchy middle-aged white guy who can’t even manage one lap around the track. Read More

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Quick Hits: Scream VI, Cocaine Bear, Creed III, Magic Mike 3, and Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael B. Jordan in Creed III; Keri Russell in Cocaine Bear; Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera in Scream VI; Emma Mackey in Emily; Salma Hayek Pinault and Channing Tatum in Magic Mike's Last Dance

Between the Oscars, our TV rankings, and our list of the year’s best movies, it’s been a busy past month here at MovieManifesto. As a result, while I was able to write a few proper reviews of new movies (the new Shyamalan, the new Ant-Man), I neglected to make time for a bunch of additional 2023 films. That changes now! Well, sort of. Unlike Lydia Tár, I can’t stop time, so I’m unable to carve out enough space for full reviews. Instead, we’re firing off some quick-and-dirty capsules, checking in on five recent releases. Let’s get to it.

Scream VI. The clever double-act of the Scream pictures—the platonic ideal established by the first installment and never quite equaled since—is that they’re movies about scary movies and are also, well, scary movies. In the prior episode, Scream (which should have been called Scream 5, but never mind), new directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett satisfied one and only one side of that equation, cleverly skewering the toxic fandom that attends modern discourse but failing to serve up memorable carnage. Now returning with Scream VI, the pair have essentially flipped the script. The meta ideas bandied about here are a little less trenchant, but the nuts-and-bolts execution—and executions—is first-class. Read More

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Babylon: Putting the Sin in Cinema

Jeremy BeckReviews
Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in Babylon

In the Bible, the city of Babylon is referred to as a dwelling place of demons—a haunted, sinful metropolis that is ultimately befallen by evil, disaster, and ruin. That Damien Chazelle has selected it as the title of his new movie, a rampaging epic set in the dawn of Hollywood, is one of the filmmaker’s subtler touches.

I mean this less as criticism than observation—maybe even admiration. The maximalism with which Chazelle has constructed Babylon, a simultaneously nostalgic and seditious homage to cinema’s golden age, is unmistakably a product of courage, even if it is also a signifier of poor taste and bad sense. His heedlessness—the way he has envisioned 1920s Tinseltown as a gluttonous underworld of sex, drugs, and generalized depravity—carries with it a monumental ambition, one that demands the skill of a truly great director. That Chazelle mostly pulls it off is a testament to his talent; that he fails in stretches makes his vanity no less interesting. Read More

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