The murder mystery gets a modern makeover in Bodies Bodies Bodies, the slick, enjoyable, somewhat obnoxious thriller from Halina Reijn. As the title suggests, corpses slowly stack up over the course of the movie, though the bloodshed is less a sign of inhuman evil than a natural consequence of characters lacking access to wifi. After all, when you can’t check your Instagram account, what else is there to do but kill people? Adapting a witty, smirky screenplay by Sarah DeLappe, Reijn has crafted a confident and provocative picture in which new-age brashness nestles up against cinematic classicism. It’s Agatha Christie on TikTok.
The setting, quite delectably, is a dark and stormy night. Seven attractive young people pile into a mansion in upstate New York, not that far from where Clue took place. This privileged septet has assembled, in advance of the landfall of a hurricane, for an evening of revelry—a bawdy, corrosive cocktail spiked with sex and drugs and jealousy. Before long, one of them is dead, resulting in a hectic, bloody night full of paranoia, finger-pointing, and violence. Whaddya need, a GPS-powered roadmap? Read More
Scream is the fifth movie in the Scream franchise, which launched a quarter-century ago with a movie that was also called Scream. If you find this title repetition annoying, you aren’t alone; the film’s characters agree with you. “It should’ve been called Stab 8, not just Stab,” someone grouses at one point, referring to the series within the series that has apparently suffered from creative drought. This kind of meta commentary can be exhausting, but here it carries an element of sincerity. Despite being a bunch of cheap slasher flicks with no big stars, the Scream pictures have always aspired to a fairly lofty level of ambition, striving to combine playful semiotic analysis with genuine cinematic terror. These movies don’t just want to mock the clichés of classic horror; they also want to be horror classics.
Which this new Scream is not. Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the duo behind the similarly sly Ready or Not, it’s more functional than suspenseful, serving up the usual medley of shrieks, spurts, and shocks with formulaic toil. But it’s nevertheless appealing, with solid performances and a witty script (from James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick) whose insights extend beyond the usual canned callbacks and self-referential humor. The movie is predictably stocked with insignificant twists—who’s the real killer? who cares?—but its biggest surprise is that it actually has something to say. Read More
Are you familiar with the scientific phenomenon known as climate change? If not, then you might find Don’t Look Up, the new star-studded political satire from Adam McKay, to be profoundly eye-opening. Doubtless, McKay wishes it to provoke outrage as well as laughter; this has been his shtick ever since The Other Guys’ closing credits featured a flurry of graphics illustrating the mechanics of a Ponzi scheme. It isn’t a critic’s job to predict how an audience will react, but I suspect that most people who possess rudimentary knowledge of global warming (and I, to be clear, am no expert) will greet McKay’s latest effort not with howls of fury but with snorts of derision. I suppose Don’t Look Up is a passion project, in the same way that certain third graders can be passionate when they’re arguing for a snow day.
It feels somewhat mean to criticize a movie that carries such an urgent message, even if the delivery of that message is fairly mean. To be sure, anger is an appropriate response to society’s collective shrug toward its own existential threat, and it’s undeniably maddening that the fact of climate change is still framed as a political issue—a polarizing debate in which #BothSides present meritorious arguments. Yet agitprop tends to be more persuasive when it’s targeted; here, McKay paints with such a broad brush that he sacrifices precision. In addition to attempting to skewer the electoral establishment—embodied here by Meryl Streep as a coldly calculating, vaguely Trumpian president, flanked by an army of flunkies and an Oedipally charged chief of staff (Jonah Hill)—he also lampoons greedy tech profiteers (Mark Rylance plays an awkward genius designed to recall Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk), militaristic jingoism (Ron Perlman pops up as a demented former general), mainstream media (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry play fatuous morning-show anchors), celebrity culture (Ariana Grande and Scott Mescudi suck up some oxygen as vain pop stars), millennial slackerdom (Timothée Chalamet receives a measure of dignity as a skateboarder), and social-media vacuity (fake memes routinely spring up). It’s a lot—the film clocks in at a baggy 145 minutes—and that muchness seems to be an element of McKay’s broader point. If you aren’t part of the solution—that is, if you don’t subscribe exactly to his hazy set of principles, which I guess could be described as Pro-Science—then you’re part of the planet-killing problem. Read More
The rise of the Third Reich is such a blight on the world’s
history, it’s no wonder we keep making fun of it. Sure, there are plenty of
sober cinematic reconstructions of the era, so many that the Holocaust drama
has practically become a genre unto itself. But the genocidal horror of Nazism
is so obscene, so incomprehensible, that unless you’re Steven Spielberg, it can
seem impossible to confront head-on, like staring into a black sun. Maybe it’s
better to approach this unspeakable atrocity askance, to attack its ugliness
and brutality not with outrage and solemnity, but with cleverness and mockery.
Or maybe it isn’t. Certainly some viewers will take umbrage at
Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi’s
comedy-drama-satire-coming-of-age-whatever, which is set in Germany in 1945 and
which unfolds with an impish tone that, while hardly seditious, is decidedly less
than utterly respectful. I’m not here to tell you what you can and can’t get
mad about, but I will suggest that this awkward, weirdly sincere movie is too eager
and silly to be truly offensive. Its parodic vision of Nazis as bumbling
stooges feels like an appropriate portraiture, not so much trivializing evil as
acknowledging its senselessness and banality. And so, my problem with Jojo Rabbit isn’t that it tries to be
funny. My problem is that it isn’t
funny. Read More
The underground is both a geographic location and a lowly caste
in Parasite, the electrifying new
movie from Bong Joon-ho. In this tonally shifting and artistically unwavering
film—it’s part comedy, part thriller, all silky craft—the social order is
upended with mayhem and precision, as the dwellers of the subterrane invade the
castles of the aristocracy. Yet Parasite’s
ravishing, blood-soaked imagery is complemented by its patience, its humor, and
its observational savvy. Consider that it largely transpires in two different
homes, whose contrasting layouts illuminate a crucial truth: that some
basements are more equal than others.
The film’s title suggests an infestation, though Bong, who
also wrote the screenplay with Han Jin-won, plays it coy, leaving open to
interpretation just who’s the scourge and who’s the plagued. What’s obvious from
the jump, however, is that Parasite
is a movie about class. This is nothing new for Bong; in Snowpiercer, he imagined a giant
train that separated its inhabitants according to their inherent station, a rigid
hierarchy enforced by Tilda Swinton, who brutally reminded the steerage
occupants of their lesser status with a chillingly didactic fable featuring the
edict, “Be the shoe.” The stratification in Parasite
may not be as linear, but it’s still firmly in place, visible to the eye and—as
becomes at first amusingly and then grotesquely clear—detectable to the nose. Read More
