Robert Hamer
As we enter the final four months of 2024, and as we desperately try to find ways to take our minds off of what is surely destined to become the single most exhausting and aggravating year we have ever had to put up with since… well, the last election year, we can take solace in the sweet arms of several high-profile releases coming out soon, including some very anticipated sequels and a few of the major competitors at the most recently-concluded Cannes Film Festival that Joey caught up with at Telluride.
So let’s get into them…
BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE – In Theaters September 6
Directed by Tim Burton
Starring Michael Keaton, with Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega
What is it about? After deciding to kill off the one character from the first movie played by someone who since became a registered sex offender a family tragedy, three generations of the Deetz family return home to Winter River. After her teenage daughter accidentally opens a portal to the Afterlife, the now middle-aged Lydia must reluctantly ally herself with the ghostly miscreant Betelgeuse to save her.
How am I feelin’ about this one? Don’t scroll down just yet! I promise this is not going to be me reiterating my exhaustion with Hollywood cynically strip-mining Baby Boomer and Generation X nostalgia for tired “legacyquels,” which I do believe this movie is another depressing example of.
But I’m going to endeavor to only speak positively about things that do, legitimately, look promising about this 36 year-old sequel to Tim Burton’s surprise hit film, via a numbered list:
1) The trailer presents what looks like a narratively propulsive story, which is a more than welcome correction to what was, unquestionably, the most debilitating flaw of the original film. Seriously, if you have not seen the first Beetlejuice in a while, you might be surprised on a rewatch just how often the story itself drags. Adam and Barbara Maitland might be two of the most boring main characters to ever be centered in one of Burton’s good movies, and so much of the runtime is just them futzing around even after it becomes clear to any halfway-attentive viewer that Lydia would be a far more engaging protagonist. They are completely absent from this sequel. Burton, thankfully, seems to be doing away with needless preamble in favor of diving right into “the good stuff” this time, with the two characters who should have been front-and-center from the jump.
2) Speaking of which, Michael Keaton! Unlike The Flash, where he came off bored and honestly even a little embarrassed returning as Bruce Wayne for empty fanservice, he seems way more eager to reprise his unhinged portrayal of the freelance bio-exorcist again in a sequel he admits to feeling initially apprehensive towards but eventually came around to enjoying. Maybe it’s because, unlike Batman, he hasn’t had to watch five other actors play Betelgeuse over the course of three decades of reboots and sequels from Hollywood (with no sign of stopping anytime soon!); this character is still 100% his, and no one else’s (in live action, at least). Or maybe, after a respectable number of post-Birdman serious roles in straight–up dramas, he’s just eager to remind everyone of his remarkable comedic chops that made him a bankable actor in the first place. Either way, for someone in this stage of his career to chow down on such a wacky character in an unabashed comedy is something worth genuine anticipation, no matter the IP he’s doing it for.
3) I have to concede to my colleague Maxance Vincent that the practical and makeup effects here look absolutely jaw-dropping. It is almost surreal, after over a decade of embarrassingly slipshod CGI–lacquered slop and morally bankrupt deepfake cesspools, seeing a fantasy setting that looks so consistently tactile. As a nice bonus, all this tactility is bringing to life a macabre fantasy-horror setting that still feels surprising and creative over thirty years after being introduced when the Berlin Wall was still up.
Those are three pretty compelling reasons for me, at least, to muscle through the gag reflex I get seeing yet another one of these nostalgia-humping gambits from a desperate Hollywood machine and perhaps give this one a shot.
THE SUBSTANCE – In Theaters September 20
Directed by Coralie Fargeat
Starring Demi Moore, with Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid
What is it about? A fading celebrity decides to use a black-market drug that creates a younger, better version of herself… with some unintended side effects.
How am I feelin’ about this one? The first of three Cannes Film Festival Main Competition entrants I’ll be covering in this piece, The Substance surprised both me and Joey when it walked away with the Prix du scénario. I suppose we shouldn’t have been, though — weird horror-thrillers and mordant dark comedies winning that award aren’t as rare as one might think at first glance, with Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore feature joining the likes of You Were Never Really Here, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Nurse Betty as Cannes Best Screenplay alumni. That kind of plaudit can only add to what was already quite a lot of anticipation for how the director of the cult hit thriller Revenge was going to follow up her uncompromisingly vicious debut.
So what to make of this purported satire of unhealthy body image in the 21st century, the beauty industry, celebrity culture, women’s propensity for misogynistic self-loathing as a product of the societal misogyny they have to navigate every day, and our eternal quest for eternal youth? Comparisons to Titane were perhaps inevitable but also inapt, according to many of the attendees at the premiere. Joey is among the movie’s fans, amazed by the writer-director and both of her leading ladies reportedly swan-diving into an over-the-top, nasty, deliriously heightened alt-reality that gleefully pushes the viewer’s tolerance for shocking sights and sounds. Detractors described… pretty much the same thing, actually.
I have no idea where I will fall on that debate, but I will say that this movie has already endeared itself to me by casting a different actress as the “younger, better version of” the film’s aging protagonist. I’m sure budgetary limitations were the primary reason for this decision, but I am immensely grateful that I am not being asked to endure the eyesore of hideous de-aging CGI effects painting a 90s-era Demi Moore facsimile onto a now-sexagenarian Demi Moore. No scene of autosurgery, grievous self-mutilation, brutal violence, or pronounced biological decay could possibly unsettle me as much as an Uncanny Valley de-aging effect on the main character. Just cast someone younger as the “Ms. Hyde”-type alter ego! All you have to do is find someone who also won a genetic lottery to a similar degree as Demi Moore did and whose nepotistic advantages grant her a wider degree of leeway in taking opportunities to act in smaller-scaled, iconoclastic movies helmed by well–regarded–but–commercially–risky auteurs without regard for the payche—oh hi, Margaret Qualley!
Anyway, I appreciate any movie that understands the value of actors over computer-aided facial manipulation, especially one that is supposed to be about how these modern inventions are ripping away our humanity in revolting ways. For filmmakers like Fargeat and Julia Ducournau to present those kinds of body horror experiences at Cannes suggest that there’s an appetite among women filmmakers to explore these disquieting sides of modern womanhood. There’s certainly a desire among Main Competition Juries to recognize them, and a curiosity from moviegoers like me to experience them in all their stomach-turning glory.
MEGALOPOLIS – In Theaters September 27
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Starring Adam Driver, with Giancarlo Esposito and Nathalie Emmanuel
What is it about? An architect wants to rebuild New York City as a utopia following a devastating disaster.
How am I feelin’ about this one? I feel very comfortable declaring this the most ambitious film of the year. In fact, I would go as far as to say this declaration is as close to objectively true as any inherently subjective value judgment I’m going to make in this piece. Point to another film coming out in the next 120 days that was originally conceived nearly fifty years ago at the tail end of one of the most infamously grueling film productions in history, whose nine-figure budget was entirely self-financed, boasting an “experimental” style where the director allowed his massive ensemble cast (who share a combined sixteen Academy Award nominations, two Academy Award wins, as well as a not-zero number of domestic abuse and sexual assault allegations among them) to improvise and rewrite scenes from the script on the fly, whose principal photography was run in such a chaotic and divisive way that it led to dozens of protest resignations, and is heavily implied to be its legendary octogenarian auteur’s final film and grand statement on the world.
Yeah, there is no film coming out this year that can possibly match the chutzpah of Megalopolis, a sprawling science fiction epic from the Francis Ford Coppola, which he was finally able to make after decades of doing grunt work to pay off debts – both financial and intangible IOUs – he accrued from the string of bombs he put out in the 1980s. I could probably write an entire 2,000-word article chronicling the myriad delays, conflicts, and debates surrounding this movie before it was seen by anyone outside of the production team that wouldn’t be able to scratch the surface of all the craziness associated with this project. Which is kind of fitting, considering the premise.
The movie did eventually make its premiere at Cannes, where it did not win any awards from Greta Gerwig’s jury but it did, predictably, become one of the most talked-about films of the entire festival. Reviews have been… exactly what I expected them to be. I would have been shocked if it received uniformly positive or uniformly negative reviews. But some critics declaring it an essential masterpiece while others slam it as a misbegotten cinematic farrago and mixed reactions feeling everything in between? Yeah, that’s the kind of divided reception that a movie like Megalopolis invites. Nay, demands! I mean, just look at this trailer they put out two weeks ago that not only quotes bad reviews of this film, but then goes on to compare that negative feedback to some of the scathing reactions Coppola received for his past works that later went on to be celebrated as classics! It is a wild trailer reflecting the sheer ballsiness of… oh, what’s that?
You can’t watch the trailer, anymore?
It’s been pulled from the internet???
Please tell us more, Bilge Ebiri from Vulture!
[The trailer cites] critics hating on Coppola’s earlier masterpieces. And not just any critics: These are quotes from people like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, two of the greatest names in film criticism. Except that it looks like they might not have said any of this. Pauline Kael, for one, totally adored both The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. She lavished praise on the adaptation, the direction, and the performances, and said of the whole epic, “This is a bicentennial picture that doesn’t insult the intelligence. It’s an epic vision of the corruption of America.” The alleged quote attributed to her in this trailer — that The Godfather is “diminished by its artsiness” — is nowhere to be found in either of her (glowing) reviews of the first two films.
Sarris, ever the delightful contrarian, was less keen on The Godfather, but that was to be somewhat expected. Still, the quote attributed to him in the trailer (“a sloppy, self-indulgent movie”) is not to be found in his review either. Vincent Canby does not appear to have called Apocalypse Now “hollow at the core.” He was, however, mixed about the film. Rex Reed did in fact pretty much hate Apocalypse Now, but his quote from this trailer doesn’t appear in his review either. And, no, Roger Ebert’s mostly positive review of Bram Stoker’s Dracula does not include the words “a triumph of style over substance.”
Oops. Pretty embarrassing. Well, look on the bright side: if the most humiliating P.R. snafu this movie experiences comes courtesy of the marketing department being willfully duped by some A.I.-generated fake review blurbs, that’s not too calamitous. Heck, it might even be reframed as an intriguing art-imitates-real-life situation that Lionsgate can turn around to their advantage (“See? Even the studio distributing Megalopolis was caught up in the disorienting world of Megalopolis where no one knows what the truth is, anymore!”) instead of having to deal with the fallout of bad behavior or scanda—
*Sigh* God dammit, Francis… and, of course, you responded to this by whining and crying about “wokeness” instead of just apologizing. Why are so many of these New Hollywood legends turning into bitter, deranged reactionaries?
JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX – In Theaters October 4
Directed by Todd Phillips
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, with Lady Gaga and Brendan Gleeson
What is it about? Incarcerated murderer Arthur Fleck meets the love of his life, Harley Quinn, while in Arkham State Hospital. Upon release, the pair embark on a doomed romantic misadventure.
How am I feelin’ about this one? I honestly can’t recall the last time I was so interested in a sequel to a film I didn’t much care for. Joker certainly could have been worse, but even with the top-notch production elements and somewhat admirable decision to eschew traditional superhero trappings in favor of a more intimate character study, the whole thing still ends up being a Poor Man’s Taxi Driver. But where Martin Scorsese’s psychological thriller was a potent chronicle of urban squalor and masculine deformation in post-Vietnam War America, Joker could not ever figure out what world or era or politics it was actually commenting on, despite loudly and incessantly announcing how much it was intended to be A Commentary On Our Society™.
Taking place during the 1980s while constantly bringing up contemporary political issues was what really sunk its claims to profundity. The film’s version of Gotham City was visually evocative of the grotty urban wastelands that cities like New York City and Chicago felt like throughout the Reagan Administration, but also kept drawing loose parallels with the kind of social unrest motivated by political events and scandals exclusive to the 21st century. Robert De Niro played a late-night talk show host recalling Johnny Carson, but in a key scene, mocked a secret recording of the protagonist bombing an open mic even though that kind of viral “cringe” content just didn’t exist back then, due to both technological limitations and cultural sensibilities of that time period. Thomas Wayne was written and performed as a muddled composite of Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, and Charles Koch, which made the obviously-studio-mandated scene of his fateful alleyway murder come off aggravatingly tacked-on. This imprecision came to a head in the climax, where our antihero delivered a hectoring, didactic speech spelling out exactly what the audience was expected to think about everything they had just seen, but because of the lack of thematic focus, the lecture just ended up sounding like a weirdly defensive rattling off of vague hipster pseudopopulism talking points disconnected from what was ostensibly set up earlier in the movie. Plus, some random asides in the monologue complaining about “cancel culture” because the director of The Hangover just couldn’t help himself, I guess.
So why have I found myself really looking forward to the sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux (a title so outrageously pretentious that I sort of love it)? After ruminating on the first and second trailers for a little bit, I think it’s because, unlike the first film, this one looks like it could be truly bold. Almost outright anti-commercial. Or at least… as aesthetically rebellious as a movie centering two of the most popular characters from one of the most lucrative intellectual properties ever owned by the multi-billion-dollar-valued Warner Bros. Discovery corporation could realistically hope to be. Doing a DC Comics-set riff on the iconic cultural phenomenon Taxi Driver is a tryhard film bro trendchaser move. Doing a DC Comics-set riff on the experimental postmodern musical New York, New York that underperformed so badly at the box office that it sent its own director into a deep depression? That comes from a filmmaker who wants to take actual risks and serve the audience something they don’t expect from a $200 million-budgeted adaptation of a lucrative IP.
I wasn’t all that impressed by Joaquin Phoenix’s Capital-A Acting! in the first movie, and no, I’m not just saying that because he’s recently placed himself on my shit list. If the Academy wanted to reward him for portraying a mentally disintegrating loner drowning in the gruesome moral depravity of the societal hellscape he lives in, he did a much better job of that in You Were Never Really Here and that was released in the United States just one year earlier. I don’t see any reason why he would “change it up” in his approach that was clearly a hit with audiences and industry figures totally outside of my understanding. So he’s mostly a wash. But Lady Gaga looks… intriguing here, which surprises me because Harley Quinn is maybe the only other villain from the entire rogues gallery of the DC pantheon who can compete with The Joker as the most done-to-death in popular media. But here, not only does she not look like she’s doing anything even remotely similar to Margot Robbie’s approach to the character, she doesn’t even look like she’s recalling Arleen Sorkin or Tara Strong, either. Which was very much the intention from the beginning, according to Phillips.
So many interesting possibilities with this one. Whether or not I’ll find the finished film any good, it can’t possibly be boring.
SATURDAY NIGHT – In Theaters October 11
Directed by Jason Reitman
Starring Gabriel LaBelle, with Rachel Sennott and Cooper Hoffman
What is it about? Studio 8H at NBC Studios. New York City. October 11th, 1975. 10 PM. The writers are inebriated. The set is on fire. The sound system is wrecked. The actors are physically assaulting each other. The crew is in open revolt. They have 90 minutes to figure it all out or the network is pulling the plug.
How am I feelin’ about this one? I saw two different potential movies when I watched the trailer for Jason Reitman’s in-real-time chronicle of the supposed ninety minutes before the very first episode of the still-running-if-not-exactly-relevant sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live aired on a fateful October evening in 1975:
First Potential Movie: I fear, and have a sinking feeling that this will be, a tedious parade of empty Boomer nostalgia bait, giving us a surface-level tour of re-enacted comedy skits that were hilarious to my parents when they were both almost half the age I am now. I am allergic to these kinds of movies that try to turn me into Leonardo DiCaprio from Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood. An occasional callback isn’t a total film-breaker, but a steady accumulation of “Hey, remember this?” and “Oh look, here is an actor you like impersonating another famous person!” becomes pure cinematic death as they build into a pandering avalanche burying anything even approaching a narratively compelling experience, even (in fact, especially) when depicting something with a great deal of that kind of potential, like the life and career of one of the most fascinatingly larger-than-life rock stars who ever lived. Or the life and career of one of the most quietly odious elected officials of the 21st century. Or how a moral panic over communist infiltration of Hollywood ruined the lives of dozens of writers, filmmakers, and performers. Sadly, according to Joey, a certain chronicle of how a venal real estate mogul fell under the tutelage of an infamously malicious pettifogger before eventually betraying and abandoning him also turned into this kind of film when he was able to see The Apprentice for himself at Telluride over the Labor Day weekend.
Jason Reitman has directed some good movies, and at least one I would consider a bonafide masterpiece, but he also directed the abominable Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which epitomizes the cynical nostalgia porn that has become an epidemic in this late-stage capitalist era of Hollywood. A dull, lifeless depiction of a bunch of impersonations and empty references to a show with waning cultural import is very possible, and is the kind of movie I would very much dread sitting through.
Second Potential Movie: I really hope, and believe there is a very real chance, that this could be a thrilling-bordering-on-stress-inducing and darkly funny procedural drama giving us a comprehensive Art From Adversity chronicle of all the myriad challenges of putting on a show like this with threadbare resources, volatile creative individuals being organized around it, and no time to get everything buttoned up by showtime. I am a real sucker for those kinds of narratives that acknowledge, through its steady accumulation of little problems and conflicts within subplots that have to be resolved immediately or there is going to be A Problem, the thousands of seemingly small logistical challenges that build up into considerable undertakings that people have to deal with every single day. I am a big fan of movies that understand how there is inherent drama to the nuts and bolts of accomplishing a task like, say, running a busy sandwich shop in a major metropolitan city. Or cajoling a bunch of craven legislators to vote for something during a lame duck session. Or putting together a complex stage production.
I have not always been a fan of Jason Reitman, but he has shown himself capable of understanding the dramatic power of seemingly mundane challenges that steadily escalate into anxiety fuel. A dedicated, exhilarating recreation of how these live broadcasts are organized and executed is very possible, and I am certainly heartened by Joey’s reassurance that this is exactly what Reitman pulled off when he witnessed the potential movie give way to the actual movie at Telluride last… Saturday night? Joey, please tell me your screening was on a Saturday night (Editor’s Note: it was).
Which movie will Saturday Night end up being? I guess there is only one way to find out…
ANORA – In Theaters October 18
Directed by Sean Baker
Starring Mikey Madison, with Mark Eydelshteyn and Yura Borisov
What is it about? A Brooklyn stripper meets and impulsively weds the son of a Russian oligarch, but her happily-ever-after is threatened when her new husband’s parents set out for New York to get the marriage annulled.
How am I feelin’ about this one? I know, I know. I am either an idiot who has no business predicting the Cannes Film Festival Main Competition awards anymore or my crystal ball has been struck with uniquely bad luck for two consecutive years. Just like my incorrect prediction that Sandra Hüller would win the Prix d’interprétation feminine for the movie that would go on to win the Palme d’Or (and she would have to settle for a meager nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role at the Academy Awards as a consolation), my prediction that former Quentin Tarantino alternate timeline Manson cultist Mikey Madison would be the Main Competition Jury’s pick for the best performance delivered by a woman of the festival ended up going bust… and it went bust for the movie that went on to win the top prize just as Anatomy of a Fall did.
On the bright side, this might mean that, like Hüller, Madison also has a Best Actress Academy Award nomination to look forward to in the near future. Joey, in fact, is considering her a major contender for the award in large part because of the near–unanimous raves she enjoyed at Cannes, which he later joined in on at Telluride when he declared her portrayal of the eponymous stripper finding herself in the center of a whirlwind romance with a Russian nepo baby “the performance of the year.”
Okay, so enough awards prognosticating, how am I feeling about the potential of Anora as a movie? Pretty positive, actually! I run hot and cold on Sean Baker, admittedly – Starlet was an excellent small-scale intergenerational relationship drama, Tangerine was weighed down by a noisy cacophony of “heybitchyoureahonoyoureahonoyoureadirtyho” shouting matches in nearly every other scene, The Florida Project was torpedoed by an inexcusable ending, and then Red Rocket roared out of the gate with a thoughtful, multifaceted depiction of a region, a culture, and an era through the point-of-view of a fascinatingly loathsome protagonist recalling infamously pathetic dirtbags of classic literature like Ignatius J. Reilly and Humbert Humbert. So he’s helmed two home runs and two movies I was iffy on, but setting aside my thoughts on his individual films, I so deeply admire how he has possessed an unwavering commitment to telling stories about sex workers through a medium that has too often abstracted them into just Victims or Femme Fatales.
Baker is an authentic ally to one of the most maligned professions in America, and seems to feel a calling to realign our perceptions of adult entertainers, prostitutes, escorts, and strippers as people. Not perfect people, but people deserving of the same consideration as everyone else. In a country where politicians think it is perfectly okay to pass laws directly endangering the lives of sex workers solely to score cheap culture war points, his filmmaking career choices seem borderline heroic.
Which Cannes Film Festival competitor are you most interested in watching soon? How do you think Todd Phillips will surprise us with a sequel he told us was never happening? Will we, as a society, ever get over ourselves and stop dehumanizing sex workers? Let us know in the comments.
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