Satire

Ingrid Goes West: California, Here She Comes, with Hand Bags and Hashtags

Jeremy BeckReviews
Aubrey Plaza is a compelling nutcase in "Ingrid Goes West"

Obsession goes dark in Ingrid Goes West, Matt Spicer’s funny and sad debut feature about a profoundly lonely person and the phony friendship she foists upon a vapid quasi-celebrity. The misery and the menace of the stalker is nothing new in cinema—Spicer’s screenplay (co-written with David Branson Smith) even name-checks Single White Female—but here the trope of classical fixation is, ahem, filtered through the distinctly modern lens of social media. The movie’s protagonist is decidedly deranged, but she’s also strangely sympathetic, perhaps because she represents the logical extreme of a culture that tallies friends and competes for followers. When you’re constantly uploading exquisite images of your sun-kissed California lifestyle to thousands of adoring fans, isn’t it only rational to expect a rando from Pennsylvania to become unhealthily attached to you? #justsaying

Not that Ingrid Goes West is a crotchety, Luddite take on How We Live Now. While the script exhibits fluency in the linguistic and behavioral quirks of social media—the hashtags and emojis, the constant scrolling and double-tapping—it is too smart and savvy to insult an entire generation of potential customers. Ingrid Goes West is persistently scathing, almost as a matter of principle, but it directs its scorn toward its characters, not its viewers. And while it uses contemporary technology as its entry point, the feelings that it traffics in and stirs up—loneliness, jealousy, fervor, fear—are emphatically age-old. #instawisdom Read More

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The Lobster: Looking for Love as the Clock Ticks Down

Jeremy BeckReviews
Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz in "The Lobster"

Early in The Lobster, the deadpan, depraved, deeply romantic black comedy from Yorgos Lanthimos, a woman discusses the unsuitable hypothetical couplings of various animals. She notes, for example, that a wolf and a penguin could never live in harmony. “That would be absurd,” she scoffs. Fair enough. But when it comes to Lanthimos, absurdity is relative. The Greek director’s prior film, Alps, followed a four-person troupe of bizarre ambulance-chasers who waited for people to die, then impersonated the deceased for the bereaved’s benefit (in return for a fee). Before that he made Dogtooth, a nightmarish study of three home-schooled teenagers who had no names, learned a false language, and regarded house cats as ferocious beasts to be decapitated on sight. Dogtooth was consistently fascinating, Alps intermittently so, but both depicted their human grotesqueries so persuasively that they were easier to admire than adore. The Lobster is different, even as it’s more of the same. It retains the hypnotic surrealism of Lanthimos’ earlier work, but it also possesses something even more startling: a heart.

All of Lanthimos’ films operate on multiple levels, working as tidy, intimately scaled pieces of off-kilter esoterica while also asking big, loaded questions about social customs and human relationships. Here, he’s exploring the freighted topic of love. That’s hardly a novel hook for a movie, but The Lobster is less interested in defining love than in examining how we view it as a symbol of status. And so it inquires: Are married people truly happy? Are single people really alone? When we claim that we are in love, what do we mean? Is coupledom a shield against the sadness of isolation, or is it a prison that suppresses freedom and individuality? And if you get caught masturbating, shouldn’t you be forced to stick your hand in a burning-hot toaster? Read More

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Hail, Caesar! Give Me That Old-Time Hollywood, with Smirking Sincerity

Jeremy BeckReviews
George Clooney as Baird Whitlock in the Coen Brothers "Hail, Caesar!"

There is quite a bit going on in the latest eccentric movie by Joel and Ethan Coen, beginning with its title. It is called Hail, Caesar!, and it is about the making of a sword-and-sandal epic called Hail, Caesar!, which comes complete with a subtitle, “A Tale of the Christ.” Students of Hollywood history will recognize that caption as the same one affixed to Ben-Hur, the Charlton Heston-starring colossus that seized 11 Oscars in 1959, but the Coen Brothers are interested in more than just nostalgic homage. Early in Hail, Caesar!—the real one, not the fake one, though it is occasionally difficult to distinguish the two—producer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin, fighting trim) assembles a quartet of religious cognoscenti and beseeches them to tell him if the script for his big-budget behemoth could possibly offend members of their respective faiths. This leads to a predictably funny whirligig of insults and confusion—the rabbi in attendance is constantly denigrating the views of his Christian brethren, while the minister insists that the film’s chariot-jumping scenes are narratively dubious—but the on-screen collision between religion and cinema is hardly incidental. For the Coens, filmmaking isn’t just a vocation. It’s God’s work.

But what about for Eddie? As Hail, Caesar! opens, he is experiencing a crisis of faith, one that has him rushing to the confessional at regular 24-hour intervals. Eddie is the fixer for Capitol Pictures, one of those titanic Old Hollywood studios that churns out star-powered, machine-authorized hits in the vein of Cecil B. DeMille blockbusters, Busby Berkeley musicals, and John Ford westerns (plus plenty of junk, too). He’s wrung out, exhausted from the endless hours and disturbed by the seedier aspects of his job. That doesn’t stop him from working. After we first see him unburdening himself to an apathetic priest, he hightails it to the Hollywood Hills and slaps around one of his stars, berating her for posing for naughty photos (the studio owns her glamorous likeness, you see) and sending her to rehab to dry out. Then it’s off to the back lot to wrangle obstinate directors, soothe haughty starlets, and divert nosy gossip columnists, the latter of whom are always sniffing out the latest scandal. This is to say nothing of the pictures themselves, many of which are behind schedule; when Eddie finally finds a moment to review the most recent dailies of Hail, Caesar!, he discovers that one of its major set pieces is interrupted by a title card reading, “Divine Presence to be shot.” Read More

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Maps to the Stars: Where Satire Meets Schlock

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mia Wasikowska and Julianne Moore in David Cronenberg's "Maps to the Stars"

David Cronenberg is a profoundly talented filmmaker, and he’s never made a normal film. But originality isn’t itself a good, and as gifted as Cronenberg may be, his ability to heighten the natural language of cinema—to create movies saturated with intrigue and weirdness—can work both ways. When he starts with a strong premise and an intelligent screenplay, he can make operatic marvels like The Fly, A History of Violence, and Eastern Promises. But give him a leaky script and false characters, and his instinctive intensity will only magnify the material’s flaws, resulting in stultifying dreck like Crash, Spider, or Cosmopolis. It’s this innate capacity for augmentation—for blowing up a picture to gargantuan size—that makes Cronenberg perhaps the worst possible choice to make Maps to the Stars, a half-baked Hollywood satire that gradually morphs into a tacky horror movie. With a less capable director, Maps to the Stars would have been little more than a harmless bore. Under Cronenberg’s lurid stewardship, it’s a fascinating atrocity.

The movie begins as a disorienting blur, introducing us to its major players and forcing us to discern their connections ourselves. We meet Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a burn victim clad in a black dress and matching elbow-length gloves, who arrives in Los Angeles and immediately hires a chauffeur, Jerome (Robert Pattinson, who headlined Cosmopolis), to whisk her to the homes of various celebrities. Then, we’re suddenly inside one of those homes, where 13-year-old Benjie (The Killing‘s Evan Bird), a Justin Bieber-like child star, speaks lewdly with his mother, Christina (Olivia Williams). His father, Stafford (John Cusack), appears briefly and babbles about Tibet, then disappears to engage in a bizarre training session—an apparent combination of massage and hypnotherapy—with Havana (Julianne Moore), a hysterical actress with severe mommy issues. Read More

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