Wolfs: Spurn After Reading

Jeremy BeckReviews
Brad Pitt and George Clooney in Wolfs

The first time we hear George Clooney’s voice in Wolfs, he’s on the other end of the phone, speaking in a clipped, measured tone that instantly conveys a sense of authority. A woman (Amy Ryan) has gotten herself into a spot of trouble—there’s a half-naked dead man in her hotel room, though he’s definitely “not a prostitute”—and she’s calling the mysterious number that somebody once gave her for existential emergencies. The man who answers is cool, confident, reassuring—the best in the business. When he arrives in person, hands shielded in blue latex gloves and ready to make her problem magically disappear, he insists that she’s found the right guy: “There’s nobody who can do what I do.”

The central joke of Wolfs is that exactly one other person can do what he does—and that person is played by Brad Pitt. It’s been 16 years since one of Hollywood’s most glamorous bromances shared the screen, when (spoiler alert) Clooney blasted a hole in Pitt’s head midway through Burn After Reading. Since then, they’ve both had solid careers independently—securing Oscar nominations (Up in the Air and The Descendants for Clooney, Moneyball and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for Pitt), headlining hits (Gravity and Ticket to Paradise, World War Z and Bullet Train), and appearing in a range of original pictures (Tomorrowland and Hail Caesar, Ad Astra and Babylon) that managed to exist outside the industry’s perpetual franchise machine. The promise of Wolfs is that it reunites these two A-listers—among the last vestiges of a bygone era when the audience’s level of interest in a new movie was directly correlated to the names on the marquee—and allows them to reignite the chic chemistry that once powered the Ocean’s films. Read More

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The Substance: Twice as Vice

Jeremy BeckReviews
Demi Moore in The Substance

Coralie Fargeat’s first feature, about a female plaything who gets used up and left for dead only to rise from the metaphorical ashes and transform into a retaliatory angel, was aptly called Revenge. The same title might also apply to The Substance, Fargeat’s explosive, provocative, and decidedly gonzo follow-up of feminist reduction and wrath. Revenge, one of the best movies of 2018, was memorable in part for how it kept things small; its taut, sharp setting, involving just a handful of people and locations, imbued its typical thriller construction with an elemental ferocity. In quantitative terms, The Substance is similarly intimate—there are only two characters of any depth—but its scope is far more expansive, creating an intricate mythology while taking satirical aim at the boys’-club institution that is Hollywood. The target of Fargeat’s vengeance is no longer one man but the male gaze altogether.

What persists, beyond an undercurrent (overcurrent?) of righteous anger, is her supple craftsmanship. The Substance is a big movie full of garish violence and sweeping ideas, but its images are composed with elegance and precision. Consider its first few scenes. The ominous opening shot finds an unknown hand pumping a liquid into the curdled yolk of a fried egg, which then magically belches out another foodstuff that looks nearly identical, except that it’s slightly more pristine; as your eye takes pleasure in the contrasting colors—the yellow yolk sits on a complementary sky-blue surface, while the fluid is a distinctive puke-green—your brain instantly downloads both the film’s inherent mystery and its thematic preoccupation with doubling. Then comes the time-lapsed overhead view of a Walk of Fame star, progressing from its flawless manufacture to its gradual disintegration: the life cycle of a Hollywood starlet, distilled into a few cracks of stone. Without moving her camera or opening her mouth, Fargeat has primed you for her ensuing fable about the perils of female aging in Tinseltown. Read More

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Speak No Evil, Beetlejuice 2, and Movies Nobody Asked For

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice; James McAvoy in Speak No Evil

One of the most common rhetorical questions you’ll find on the internet, posed in response to the green-lighting of a new movie, is “Who asked for this?” It’s a derisive expression meant to impugn the upcoming film’s artistic integrity and belittle its commercial viability, even if it really functions as a statement of personal taste; the literal answer to the question is invariably, “Lots of people, just not you.” It’s also correlative of asking whether a picture is “necessary,” which is equally foolish. Strictly speaking, no work of art is necessary because we’re talking about entertainment, not food or shelter; philosophically speaking, art is absolutely necessary because it provides us with pleasure, anger, knowledge, and the opportunity to get mad at people online when they disagree with us. We may not need movies to survive, but to quote the captain from Wall-E, I don’t want to survive—I want to live.

And yet: In our era of perpetual IP churn, it’s occasionally worth pondering why certain pictures are made, and whether their cinematic execution can transcend their facially dubious justification (which is, of course, that studio executives hope they might make money). The two movies currently atop the domestic box office, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Speak No Evil, inspire this sort of metaphysical musing, given that they’re typal cousins: the long-delayed sequel to a beloved classic, and the English-language remake of an acclaimed foreign work. They both have their virtues; they both also raise questions about whether they should exist at all. Read More

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Rebel Ridge: Duck the Police

Jeremy BeckReviews
Don Johnson and Aaron Pierre in Rebel Ridge

Up until now, Jeremy Saulnier has been something of an “Imagine if” filmmaker. Whether centering on a hapless schmo embroiled in a deadly noir (Blue Ruin) or a punk-rock band trapped by bloodthirsty Nazis (Green Room), his movies have thrust ordinary people into impossible situations, forcing you to contemplate how you might respond in such drastic scenarios. With Rebel Ridge, he attempts to heighten both sides of his unbalanced equation while retaining the same fundamental sense of helplessness. The hero here is the opposite of an everyman; he’s smart, determined, and physically gifted. But he’s still the underdog, because the foe he’s facing is no less than the very institution of American policing.

The chief pleasure of Rebel Ridge is how it packages its big ideas—about racism, class entrenchment, and state-sanctioned violence—into a story that’s small-scale and tidy. Well, initially; as the film progresses, its thematic ambitions grow broader, which has the paradoxical effect of diminishing its boldness. Still, even if Saulnier isn’t always in full control of his thornier ideas, he remains in complete command of his immediate environment. As a polemic, Rebel Ridge is provocative but also uneven; as an action movie, it’s terrific. Read More

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Blink Twice, Strange Darling, and the Third-Act Problem

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Channing Tatum in Blink Twice; Willa Fitzgerald in Strange Darling

Movies are built for catharsis. Regardless of genre—the romantic comedy’s race through the airport, the murder mystery’s unmasking of the killer, the sports picture’s big game—cinematic endings are designed to cash the checks that their films have spent the past two acts writing. The paradox of this construction, at least when it comes to the modern thriller, is that most directors are more skilled at building tension than unleashing bedlam. Auteurs such as Ari Aster, Osgood Perkins, and M. Night Shyamalan (to name a few) are all capable craftsmen, wielding their razor-sharp technique to amplify our unease, but while they’re skilled at manufacturing suspense, they often struggle to pay it off in ways that are genuinely unpredictable or exciting.

Last weekend saw two new releases acutely vulnerable to this common pitfall. One tumbles into it. The other does its best to evade it, partly by rewiring its chronology. At the risk of evoking that head-tapping “Roll Safe” meme, your third act can’t ruin your movie’s ending if it arrives in the first 15 minutes. Read More

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