Streaming Release

King Richard, Tick Tick Boom, and the Tortured Genius

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Andrew Garfield in Tick Tick Boom; Will Smith in King Richard

Success stories can’t be simple. Presumably, many gifted artists and athletes achieve their goals through little more than the straightforward combination of labor and talent, without facing any daunting challenges or making any personal sacrifices. But who wants to watch a movie about them? Drama requires conflict, which is why rousing tales of ultimate success must contain moments of intervening failure. (Pictures about sustained failure are far more rare, give or take an Inside Llewyn Davis.) Last week featured the premiere of two fact-based films about obsessive geniuses: Warner Brothers’ King Richard, about the father of Venus and Serena Williams, and Netflix’s Tick, Tick… Boom, about the early struggles of the creator of Rent. One teeters perilously on the border of hagiography, while the other is largely enjoyable on its own artistic terms, but both are steeped in the cinematic wellspring of toil, triumph, anguish, and redemption.

Technically, King Richard isn’t so much the story of a genius as that of the man behind the genius(es), though I’m sure if you posed that framing to Richard Williams, he’d dismiss the distinction as one without a difference. Whether this on-screen version of Richard, incarnated by Will Smith with twinkly charm and bottomless gumption, represents a drastic departure from the actual man is a debate best left to historians and biographers. What matters here is whether this Richard is the suitable protagonist of a predictable, rags-to-riches sports picture—whether he is sufficiently separable from the countless coaches and motivators who have preceded him in the illustrious screen tradition of drilling, aggravating, and speechifying. Read More

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Pig, Gunpowder Milkshake, and the Instant Legacy of John Wick

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Karen Gillan in Gunpowder Milkshake; Nicolas Cage in Pig

John Wick is technically an original character, but the films featuring him aren’t really anything new. They’re just slickly repackaged creations that combine the archetypes of the classic Western—the retired warrior begrudgingly forced back into battle—with the balletic flair of John Woo’s gun-fu pictures. Still, their mythology is so wonderfully detailed, and Keanu Reeves’ central performance is so intensely charismatic, that the franchise has quickly morphed from pastiche into primary source. Now, when a genre exercise like Nobody hits theaters, it’s instantly billed as “Bob Odenkirk doing John Wick”.

Last week alone saw the release of two new movies that wear their Wick influences loudly: Gunpowder Milkshake, featuring Karen Gillan as an assassin on the run, and Pig, starring Nicolas Cage as a hermit who’s drawn back into a dangerous underworld. Neither is nearly as good as the best Wick flick (that remains Chapter Two, though Parabellum certainly has its moments), but they’re nonetheless interesting for how they both pay tribute to and differentiate themselves from the film that has suddenly become the standard-bearer for revenge cinema. Read More

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Luca: Summer Loving, Glazed by the Past

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Pixar's Luca

Luca is a shape-shifting sea monster, and Luca itself is something of a transformer. It is by turns (and sometimes all at once) a coming-of-age story, an underdog sports movie, an ode to canonical Italian cinema, and a heartfelt fable of tolerance. That it ably fulfills all of these roles without succumbing to chaos or incongruity is a testament to the dexterity of its storytelling and the fluidity of its construction. It doesn’t so much offer something for everyone as it provides everything for someones—namely, for those audiences who hunger for art that is simultaneously funny, kinetic, sweet, and affirming.

It is not—and with every new Pixar release, the conversation tends to focus on what it isn’t rather than what it is—terribly imaginative. Small in scale and gentle in heart, Luca lacks the bold ingenuity that has (ahem) animated some of the studio’s more impressive recent works: the metaphysical philosophizing of Soul, the existential angst of Toy Story 4, the triumphant razzle-dazzle of Incredibles 2, the anthropomorphized emotions of Inside Out. But not every Pixar picture can be expected to stretch or redefine an entire genre, and besides, lamenting Luca’s familiarity risks diminishing some of its considerable charm. Here is a playful, gorgeous, heart-warming adventure that tells its tender story with craft and conviction. That it occasionally resembles other movies seems a small price to pay. Read More

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Things Heard & Seen: The Ghostest with the Mostest

Jeremy BeckReviews
Amanda Seyfried in Things Heard & Seen

Every horror movie is a metaphor. Things don’t just go bump in the night for no reason; they carry messages and meaning, whether about racial injustice or domestic abuse or romantic incompatibility. The genre is an amplifier, designed to imbue figurative predicaments with literal and physical force. Things Heard & Seen, the new horror-lite picture from Netflix, proffers any number of tribulations for allegorical fodder: the peril of being trapped in a loveless marriage; the trauma of suffering from an eating disorder; the fear of being dislocated from the city to the country; the questionable wisdom of hiring a hunky, piano-playing townie to do your yardwork.

As that scattered litany of problems indicates, Things Heard & Seen is not an especially trenchant or provocative work. But it’s hardly terrible, seeing as it probes its central relationship with honesty and sobriety. Still, it’s easy to wish that this vague, slippery movie were a bit scarier, and that it cared more about its leading lady. Read More

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Stowaway: Unauthorized Admission to Mars

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anna Kendrick in Stowaway

The minimalist space movie seems like a contradiction, but it’s actually an elegant solution to a familiar problem. The cosmos is so incomprehensibly vast, it’s impossible for cinema to convey its full breadth on screen; that’s doubly true for films released by Netflix, where said screen is attached to a television rather than a multiplex auditorium. And so Stowaway, the streaming giant’s new sci-fi feature, conceives of interstellar travel not as the launching pad for an epic adventure, but as the vehicle for a taut and constrained thriller. It’s a horror movie without a boogeyman; the inky enormity of outer space is plenty scary enough.

This particular vintage of stargazing picture has experienced a relative boom of late; recent examples include Geore Clooney’s The Midnight Sky, Claire Denis’ High Life, and Morten Tyldum’s unduly maligned Passengers. In terms of scale, Stowaway is smaller than all of those; it only features four characters, and its unnamed vessel is unremarkable, except maybe for being so cramped (the better to underline the setting’s claustrophobia). And while its final act includes its share of perilous derring-do in zero gravity, its main preoccupations are moral and philosophical rather than dynamic or kinetic. Read More

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