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Winnipeg Free Press
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
COVID-era tale sure to leave you unsettled
Nobody goes to an Ari Aster film to feel comfortable. The American writer-director's tortuous new anti-western — which premièred at Cannes to a divided response — is profoundly uncomfortable. Having proven himself a master of unease in Hereditary, Midsommar and Beau Is Afraid, Aster is now presenting a pitch-dark satire of our polarized era that is itself provocatively — and often pointlessly — polarizing. Along with discomfort, Aster can also be counted on for technical craft, atmospheric dread and interesting work from A-list actors. Ultimately, though, Eddington is a risky thought experiment that goes wrong, its incitements dragging out into overlong incoherence. Set in rural New Mexico in May 2020, in the uncertain early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the story starts with a showdown between town mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal from The Last of Us) and county sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix, who worked with Aster on Beau Is Afraid). Ted supports the public health measures he hopes will keep the community safe. Joe, meanwhile, refuses to enforce the state mask mandate, citing individual freedom, and pretty soon he's driving around in one of those SUVs plastered with red, white and blue 'patriot' stickers and slogans. What might feel jarring to some viewers — many fans of A24 movies skew left — is that Joe, at least initially, is presented as the most sympathetic character and the one whose point of view we follow. He's a devoted husband to his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), who's living with an anxiety disorder, and he's dealing with an extremely online mother-in-law, Dawn (The Penguin's Dierdre O'Connell), who has fallen into a rabbit-hole of internet conspiracy theories. Ted is coded as liberal (and of course played by the supercool Pascal), but seems to be in bed with big developers and wealthy tech guys who are planning a data centre that will suck up the town's water and energy. He comes off as a phony, a hypocrite, and — even worse, in 2020 — he's a toilet-paper hoarder. Anyone ready to seize on Eddington as anti-'woke' should be warned, though. Aster is actually playing with viewer expectations, engineering the audience's emotional reactions to work at cross-purposes to their ideological beliefs, deliberately messing with reflexive political responses on both sides of the spectrum. Through his characters' complicated feuds, he's demonstrating that what can seem like principled political stands are often covers for personal grievance and psychological turmoil. He also switches up audience assumptions and allegiances several times — Joe is going to do some truly terrible things — as the story devolves into an increasingly violent and hallucinatory hellscape. Things take another turn after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, as the Black Lives Matter movement spreads across the country. One of the town's few Black residents is Michael (Empire of Light's Micheal Ward), a sheriff's deputy working to quell the protests on the town's main street, while the protesters are mostly middle-class white kids, constantly announcing the burden of their privilege and making speeches about not having the right to make speeches. A24 photo Joaquin Phoenix (left) as county sheriff Joe Cross and Pedro Pascal as mayor Ted Garcia in Eddington At this point, the town of Eddington starts to feel like the toxic epicentre of America's social and political dysfunction. There's a charismatic creep of a QAnon-style cult leader (Austin Butler). There are progressive purity tests. There are the alienating effects of tech, the constant drip of social-media disinformation and incentivized online outrage. Everybody is constantly filming everybody else, which is initially touted as transparency but soon feels more like surveillance. And just in case the viewers are having any doubts about the inescapably angry and screwed-up state of America, there's a literal (!) dumpster fire. Aster is toying around with each side's worst prejudices about the other side, while simultaneously asking us to see everyone as human beings. That's a tricky stance. While it gets some support from Phoenix's emotive and oddly vulnerable work, Pascal and Stone are given less to do and end up feeling less like people and more like symbols. Eddington does function extremely well as a document of the COVID era. Aster calls up the industrial-sized bottles of hand sanitizer, the drive-up testing stations, the ordeal of grocery shopping and the awkward, socially distanced outside gatherings. He tracks the confusion and resentment and rage rushing into the pandemic's vacuum of anxiety and isolation. While the initial shootouts between Ted and Joe involved iPhones, we eventually end up outside the town's Pistol Palace, hurtling suddenly towards a deranged ending — gory, grotesque and psychologically unsettling. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. The narrative descends into surreal darkness, a vision of American history as an endless cycle of gun-fuelled retribution, with masked characters firing into the night, not even sure who their enemy is. A24 photo Micheal Ward (as Michael) has his hands full as a sheriff's deputy working to quash protests in Eddington. Aster is presenting an elaborate and ambitious conceptual setup, but in the end, the film lacks the discipline to pull it off. At one point, Joe says, 'We need to free each other's hearts.' Eddington might be hoping to free us, but its disjointed, stretched-out narrative and inflammatory images might just further entrench us. Alison GillmorWriter Studying at the University of Winnipeg and later Toronto's York University, Alison Gillmor planned to become an art historian. She ended up catching the journalism bug when she started as visual arts reviewer at the Winnipeg Free Press in 1992. Read full biography Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. If you are not a paid reader, please consider becoming a subscriber. Our newsroom depends on its audience of readers to power our journalism. Thank you for your support.
Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Is the making-of ‘Apocalypse Now' doc the greatest ever? Plus the week's best movies
Hello! I'm Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies. Writer-director Ari Aster has refashioned himself from a maker of art-house horror films like 'Hereditary' and 'Midsommar' into a more overt social satirist with 'Beau Is Afraid' and his latest film, 'Eddington,' which opens this week. Pointedly set in the spring of 2020 in a small town in New Mexico — a moment when uncertainty, paranoia and division over the response to COVID were maximally disorienting — the film's story concerns a sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) who tosses his hat in the ring to run against an incumbent mayor (Pedro Pascal). Each spouts their own complicated, spiraling rhetoric as the race between them becomes more intense, and they seem swept away by circumstances much larger than they can understand or control. In her review of the film Amy Nicholson wrote, 'Aster's feistiest move is that he refuses to reveal the truth. When you step back at the end to take in the full landscape, you can put most of the story together. (Watch 'Eddington' once, talk it out over margaritas and then watch it again.) Aster makes the viewer say their theories out loud afterwards, and when you do, you sound just as unhinged as everyone else in the movie. I dig that kind of culpability: a film that doesn't point sanctimonious fingers but insists we're all to blame. 'But there are winners and losers and winners who feel like losers and schemers who get away with their misdeeds scot-free. Five years after the events of this movie, we're still standing in the ashes of the aggrieved. But at least if we're cackling at ourselves together in the theater, we're less alone.' Carlos Aguilar spoke to acclaimed cinematographer Darius Khondji, a former collaborator of David Fincher, James Gray and the Safdies, about working with Aster for the first time on 'Eddington.' 'Ari and I have a common language,' Khondji said. 'We discovered quite early on working together that we have a very similar taste for dark films, not dark in lighting but in storytelling.' The 1991 film 'Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse' is widely thought of as among the greatest behind-the-scenes documentaries ever made. Directed by Fax Bahr with George Hickenlooper from documentary footage directed by Eleanor Coppola, the film explores the epically complicated production of Francis Ford Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now.' A new 4K restoration of 'Hearts of Darkness' will have a limited run at the American Cinematheque beginning Sunday, with Bahr in-person for multiple Q&As. When Eleanor Coppola went to the Philippines in 1976 with her husband and their three children for the production of his hallucinatory Vietnam War saga 'Apocalypse Now,' he enlisted her to shoot doc footage in part to save on additional crew and also to give her something to do. Drawing from Eleanor's remarkable footage, surreptitious audio recordings she made and her written memoir of the experience, 'Notes: On the Making of 'Apocalypse Now,'' 'Hearts of Darkness' becomes a portrait of the struggle to maintain creativity, composure and sanity amid chaos as everything that could possibly go wrong seemingly does. Military helicopters are redeployed during takes, star Martin Sheen suffers a heart attack, monsoons destroy sets, Marlon Brando is immovable on scheduling and the ending of what all this is leading toward remains elusive. 'I think it's really held up and survived,' said Bahr of the documentary in an interview this week. 'It works as a complement to this extraordinary film that Francis produced. Of course, ['Apocalypse Now'] would be what it is without this, but I do think for people who really want to go deeper into the 'Apocalypse' experience, this is really a necessary journey to take.' When 'Apocalypse Now' first premiered at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, Francis Ford Coppola infamously said, 'The way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment and little by little we went insane.' The years between the lengthy production of 'Apocalypse Now,' its turbulent release and the subsequent years before the 'Hearts of Darkness' project came to be likely eased the Coppolas into participating with such candor and full-fledged access. 'I think having almost 10 years after 'Apocalypse Now' was helpful,' said James T. Mockoski, who oversaw the restoration for Coppola's company American Zoetrope. 'It would've been a much different documentary when it was supposed to come out. It was supposed to support the publicity and the marketing of the film at that time. 'Apocalypse' was very difficult, as we have seen, obviously. I don't know how much they would've had the hunger to revisit the film and go right into a documentary. It was a rather difficult, challenging time for them. And I think 10 years gave them a perspective that was needed.' 'He gambled it all and he won,' said Bahr. 'And what I hope we really achieved with 'Hearts' was showing the despair that really all artists go through in the creative process. And even though you go there, if you keep at it and your goal is true then you achieve artistic greatness.' According to Mockoski, Francis Ford Coppola has seen his own relationship to the documentary change over the years. While at times unflattering, and certainly showing the filmmaker racked by doubt and in deep creative crisis, 'Hearts' also shows him as someone, improbably, finding his way. 'It's a very hard relationship with the documentary, but he has grown over the years to be more accepting of it,' said Mockoski. 'He doesn't like the films to ever be shown together. If anyone wants to book it, they shouldn't be on the same day. There should be some distance. And he doesn't really want people to watch the documentary and then just figure out, where's Francis and what is his state of mind at this point? They're two separate things for him. And he would rather people watch 'Apocalypse' just for the experience of that, not to be clouded by 'Hearts.'' In his original review of 'Hearts of Darkness,' Michael Wilmington wrote, 'In the first two 'Godfather' movies, Coppola seemed to achieve the impossible: combining major artistic achievement with spectacular box-office success, mastering art and business. In 'Apocalypse Now,' he wanted to score another double coup: create a huge, adrenaline-churning Irwin Allenish spectacle and something deeper, more private, filled with the times' terror. Amazingly, he almost did. And the horror behind that 'almost' — Kurtz's Horror, the horror of Vietnam, of ambition itself — is what 'Hearts of Darkness' gives us so wrenchingly well.' 'What 'Hearts' is great about is that it shows you a period of filmmaking that's just not seen today,' said Mockoski. 'You look at this and you look at ['Apocalypse'] and there's just no way we could make this film. Would we ever allow an actor to go to that extreme situation with Martin Sheen? Would we be allowed to set that much gasoline on fire in the jungle? Hollywood was sort of slow to evolve, they were making films like that up from the silent era, these epic films, going to extremes to just do art. It just captured a moment in time that I don't think we'll ever see again.' Having premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and screened only a few times since, Quentin Tarantino's 'Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair' will play twice daily at the Vista Theater from July 18-28. Clocking in at over 4 hours and screening from Tarantino's personal 35mm print (complete with French subtitles), it combines the films known as 'Kill Bill Vol. 1' and 'Kill Bill Vol. 2' into a single experience with a few small changes. The main difference is simply taking it all in as 'The Whole Bloody Affair,' an epic tale of revenge as a woman mostly known as 'The Bride' (Uma Thurman in a career-defining performance) seeks to find those who tried to kill her on her wedding day. (I'll be seeing the combined cut for the first time myself during this run at the Vista.) Manohla Dargis' Los Angeles Times reviews of the two films when they were first released in October 2003 and April 2004 still make for some of the most incisive writing on Tarantino as a filmmaker. Dargis' review of 'Vol. 2' inadvertently helps sell the idea of the totalizing 'The Whole Bloody Affair' experience by saying, 'An adrenaline shot to the movie heart, soul and mind, Quentin Tarantino's 'Kill Bill Vol. 2' is a blast of pure pop pleasure. The second half of Tarantino's long-gestating epic, 'Vol. 2' firmly lays to rest the doubts raised by 'Vol. 1' as to whether the filmmaker had retained his chops after years of silence and, as important, had anything to offer beyond pyrotechnics and bloodshed. Tarantino does have something to say, although most of what he does have to say can be boiled down to two words: Movies rock. 'In a world of commodity filmmaking in which marketing suits offer notes on scripts, this is no small thing. Personal vision is as rare in Hollywood as humility, but personal vision — old, new, borrowed and true blue to the filmmaker's inspirations — shapes 'Vol. 2,' giving it texture and density. Personal vision makes Tarantino special, but it isn't what makes him Quentin Tarantino. What does distinguish him, beyond a noggin full of film references, a candy-coated visual style and a deep-tissue understanding of how pop music has shaped contemporary life, affecting our very rhythms, is his old-time faith in the movies. Few filmmakers love movies as intensely; fewer still have the ability to remind us why we fell for movies in the first place.' '2046' in 35mm Showing at Vidiots on Friday night in 35mm will be Wong Kar-wai's '2046,' the 2004 follow-up to his cherished 'In the Mood for Love.' Loosely connected to both 'In the Mood for Love' and Wong's earlier 'Days of Being Wild,' '2046' stars Tony Leung as a writer in late 1960s Hong Kong who has encounters with a series of women, played by the likes of Maggie Cheung, Faye Wong, Gong Li, Carina Lau and Zhang Ziyi. (He may be imagining them.) Fans of Wong's stylish, smoky romanticism will not be disappointed. In her original review of the film, Carina Chocano called it 'a gorgeous, fevered dream of a movie that blends recollection, imagination and temporal dislocation to create an emotional portrait of chaos in the aftermath of heartbreak.' 'Lost in America' + 'Modern Romance' On Tuesday and Wednesday, the New Beverly will screen a 35mm double bill of Albert Brooks' 1985 'Lost in America' and 1981's 'Modern Romance.' Directed by, co-written by (with Monica Johnson) and starring Brooks, both films are fine showcases for his lacerating comedic sensibilities. A satire of the lost values of the 1960s generation in the face of the materialism of 1980s, 'Lost in America' has Brooks as an advertising executive who convinces his wife (Julie Hagerty) to join him in quitting their jobs, selling everything they own and setting out in a deluxe RV to explore the country, 'Easy Rider'-style. In a review of 'Lost in America,' Patrick Goldstein wrote, 'Appearing in his usual disguise, that of the deliriously self-absorbed maniac, Brooks turns his comic energies on his favorite target — himself — painting an agonizingly accurate portrait of a man imprisoned in his own fantasies. … You get the feeling that Brooks has fashioned an unerring parody of someone who's somehow lost his way in our lush, consumer paradise. Here's a man who can't tell where the desert ends and the oasis begins.' 'Modern Romance,' features Brooks as a lovelorn film editor in Los Angeles desperate to win back his ex-girlfriend (Kathryn Harrold). In his original review of 'Modern Romance,' Kevin Thomas wrote, 'You have to hand it to Albert Brooks. To put it mildly he's not afraid to present himself unsympathetically.' In a 1981 interview with Goldstein, Brooks said, 'As a comedian it's really my job to be the monster. People either love me or hate me. If I wanted to be a nice guy, I'd make a movie about someone who saves animals.' (Brooks would, of course, go on to appear as a voice actor in 'Finding Nemo' and 'Finding Dory.') 'The Little Mermaid' For the next installment of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.'s ongoing series at the Egyptian, there will be a screening on Thursday, July 24, of 1989's 'The Little Mermaid' with directors Ron Clements and John Musker present for a Q&A moderated by Carlos Aguilar. 'The Little Mermaid' received LAFCA's inaugural award for animation, the first of its kind among critics groups.
Forbes
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Luke Grimes Says ‘Eddington' Director Ari Aster Was On His Bucket List
Luke Grimes lays down the law in 'Eddington.' Richard Foreman/A24 "Ari Aster was on my bucket list ever since I'd seen Hereditary ," enthuses Eddington actor Luke Grimes as we discuss the neo-Western over Zoom. "Then I saw Midsommar , and I liked that even more. When I saw Beau Is Afraid , I had a panic attack. I don't know what that was. He's one of the most special filmmakers we have right now." Something he loves about the director, who also wrote and produced the satirical black comedy, is that "he's not picking a destination and getting himself there." "Ari is finding everything as organically as the movies feel, and for that reason, they stay in your head. Eddington is one of those films," he explains. "Just like with his other films, you watch it once, and then you go, 'I think I need to watch that again.'" Graves loved watching Aster work and found his process fascinating. "As far as the technical aspect of making a movie, Ari has the whole thing mapped out in his head. He has every shot, and he will storyboard everything. It's very old school," he muses. "It's like he knows what's going to be in the frame, how long each of these pieces of the film are going to be, and where he's cutting. He knows all of that beforehand. When it comes to character, allowing actors to act and even the words, sometimes it's more like, 'We're finding it as we go.' Usually, there's a script, and it serves as the blueprint that you can rely on. It was sort of the other way around, but you feel like you're in really good hands." "My actor friends were like, 'What was it like?' and all I could say was, 'Honestly, I had no clue what I was doing and I wasn't supposed to.' When you see the film, you're like, 'Wow, we got somewhere. That's a well-rounded character.'" Set during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Eddington stars Joaquin Phoenix as Joe Cross, a small-town sheriff who is locked in a standoff with the mayor, played by Pedro Pascal. That sparks a powder keg as neighbors are pitted against each other in this New Mexico pueblo. Grimes plays Guy Tooley, one of Cross' two police officers. Eddington is exclusively in theaters now. Forbes Expect More 'Final Destination' Movies After 'Bloodlines' Success By Simon Thompson Exploring the cop was a unique experience for Grimes. "I'd never had a director allow themselves to be so unsure of a character that they wrote," he recalls. "Him going, 'Look, we don't have to figure this guy out right away. We can figure this out over the process of making this movie,' made the character a lot more interesting than just pigeon-holing him and saying, 'Well, this is a bad guy.' You can feel that with every character in the movie. There are no villains, but there are also no heroes." "Everyone is trying to figure everything out at all times, and that's how it felt making the movie, and that's how it felt approaching Guy and these aspects of his personality that are a little unsavory. We were questioning it the whole time. I remember the first meeting we had, Ari said, 'Let's not reduce him too much. In every line and every scene, why don't we try to feel like we don't know what that is or where that comes from?' It was really interesting and something I'd never done before." (Left to right) Micheal Ward, Ari Aster, Joaquin Phoenix, Luke Grimes at the 'Eddington' Los Angeles ... More Premiere held at the DGA Theater on in Los Angeles, California. Variety via Getty Images 'Eddington' Examines The Pandemic But It Doesn't Judge Although Eddington is set during the pandemic, it neither takes a side nor makes a political statement. If anything, it pokes fun at both groups. "That was important to Ari when we were making the movie," Grimes explains. "He did not step into the realm of preaching or trying to give a lot of answers. The point of the movie is to raise a lot of questions. The point of this movie wasn't to go like, 'Ha! Look at them over there. We're in the right,' and that's what I liked about it. You don't see that very much. Everybody has an opinion, and I don't think this movie necessarily has one. It's just showing you the reality of what everybody was doing, what they were using, and the manipulation from every single side to try to get what they wanted, and trying to tell everyone else that they're wrong." He continues, "A lot of the characters in this film are using the situation at hand, which is this big scary thing, this virus, and this crazy time, to manipulate people and use that fear to get what they want. Guy is the only person in the movie who's not quite intelligent enough to know how to use anything to get what he wants. I don't even think he knows what he wants. I think he wants to impress Joe. I think he wants to be good at his job, and I don't think he necessarily knows how to do that." (Left to right) Micheal Ward, Joaquin Phoenix, and Luke Grimes in a scene from 'Eddington.' Richard Foreman/A24 Shot on location in New Mexico, the state where the fictional town of Eddington is located, the production created hundreds of local jobs, many appearing as extras. The places where they filmed, which included the town of Truths and Consequences, felt very familiar to Graves. "I'm very used to small-town America. I'm very comfortable there. I live in a town of 700 people in Montana. So for me, I get the mentality," the Fifty Shades actor reveals. "The only problem arose when we were doing these scenes where there's a bunch of people picketing, and they're starting to get what the movie is, and they're starting to wonder, 'Which side are these people on?' That was funny, because you could tell that they're starting to be a little bit afraid of what this movie is preaching." "Again, I think they'll realize now that it wasn't preaching. It's a satire on a very scary time for all of us. The town was amazing. They were happy that we were there and they couldn't have been kinder and more welcoming." Forbes 'Puppet Up!' Builds A New Future Away From The Jim Henson Company Lot By Simon Thompson Grimes, also known for Yellowstone and The Magnificent Seven , is more than aware that while this is a neo-western, he's no stranger to the broader genre. He's okay with that, but it was never intentional. "It's weird. I always make this joke that the cowboy hat found me," he laughs. "When I showed up in LA wanting to be in films and television, I wasn't thinking, 'I'm going to be the guy that's going to try to do all the Western stuff.' My father was a huge Western fan, so Westerns were always in our house growing up, and I watched a lot of the classic ones as a kid. Maybe just because of where I grew up and how I grew up, I had the sensibility for it." "There's a reason why you keep getting cast as a similar type of person, and maybe it's because that's closer to who I am than a lot of other things. I found that I enjoy it as well. There's something about shooting in the mountains versus shooting on a soundstage that I find much more enjoyable. I'm not complaining about it at all. I certainly love the genre and love doing it." (Left to right) Luke Grimes and Joaquin Phoenix attend the Los Angeles premiere of A24's 'Eddington' ... More at DGA Theater Complex on in Los Angeles, California. WireImage Luke Grimes Says 'No One Works Harder Than Joaquin Phoenix' Something else Grimes loves is having the opportunity to work with Eddington 's lead, the Oscar-winning actor Joaquin Phoenix. He was impressed by how he performed on set and how he remained laser-focused on the work at hand without slipping into the cliché of "going method." "The term' method acting' has become bastardized, and people don't know what that means," he says. "It has become code for actors who are difficult and acting like actors and being like, 'I'm just going to stay in this character all day,' so that you know how hard they're working. I've actually never seen someone work harder than Joaquin." The Eddington actor concludes, "He gives everything he has got, and he'll do anything he needs to do to get himself somewhere. When you're around Joaquin, the whole set knows that the only reason he's doing anything is to make a good product and to be good in the film. It never feels contrived or like he's being difficult. If he's being difficult to anyone, it's to himself. Beyond that, he's a generous, beautiful human being, and one of the kindest people I've ever met."
Atlantic
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
A Nasty, Cynical, and Eerily Accurate Look at All-Too-Recent History
After the COVID-19 outbreak began, the internet seemed to offer the thinnest of silver linings. Zoom kept kids in class, sort of. Celebrations—birthday parties, anniversaries—involved 'socializing' in multiplayer games. Tech companies built applications for contact tracing to help forecast the pandemic's spread. The industry eagerly welcomed its novel reputation as a portal to normalcy, for those who could access these opportunities. 'The world has faced pandemics before,' Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a column for The Washington Post in April 2020, 'but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good.' The film Eddington, now in theaters, gleefully rebukes Zuckerberg's assertion. Written and directed by Ari Aster—the filmmaker behind Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid —the neo-Western thriller is set during the early days of COVID's spread in the United States. But rather than explore the impact of the coronavirus, the movie studies the misinformation, paranoia, and outrage that grew amid the internet's dominance during social isolation. The small town of Eddington, New Mexico, becomes a literal battleground for its locals; they are overcome with the fear fomented by what they've seen on their screens. The movie is nasty and cynical—and also eerily accurate in its rendering of the digital reality of pandemic life. Eddington captures what happens when a community can't log off: people becoming stupefied by the illusion of connection, and muting logic in the process. Eddington isn't the first film to take advantage of virtual world-building by incorporating social-media feeds and messaging apps into its visuals. But it does so in a way that makes the online world feel like it's bleeding into the characters' daily lives. Joe (played by Joaquin Phoenix), the town's sheriff, is introduced via a video he's watching on his phone; the YouTube page fills the frame until the camera zooms out to reveal him as the viewer. His conspiracy-theorist mother-in-law prints out 'news' articles that she believes prove her points, reads them out loud, and chatters away about what she's convinced Joe and his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), refuse to see. While running for mayor against the incumbent, Ted (Pedro Pascal), Joe blares his speeches over his police vehicle's loudspeaker, creating a chaotic soundscape evoking a crisis-driven news feed. Among all this incessant noise are people whose digital personas dramatically contrast with who they are offline: Ted and his teenage son can barely stand each other, but in a campaign ad, they embrace warmly. Joe is celebrated on Facebook after defending a man who refused to wear a mask in a grocery store, but a rally attracts just a handful of supporters. Louise becomes obsessed with Vernon (Austin Butler), an influencer with a cult-like following, and disappears for long stretches of time, but Joe doesn't register her fixation until he spots a comment she left under one of Vernon's videos. Dread permeates Eddington: When Joe and his deputies watch a clip of an attack on a police precinct instigated by militant protesters, they never check the provenance of the footage; they just begin to arm themselves. Research has shown that spending time on social media isn't necessarily bad; users can generate a sense of kinship by actively participating in discussions and offering feedback and support. But that finding seemed to hold more weight prior to 2020, when the internet existed in tandem with people's fuller lives. For the characters in Eddington, as it was for many of us living in America that year, there is nowhere to turn to but the conspiratorial thinking, heated debates, and endless updates online. At one point, Joe barrels through a crowd of people chanting social-justice slogans while brandishing a ring light like it's a weapon—an absurd image that conveys the disconnect between his actual and digital lives. Joe is a meek man: He struggles to express himself to his wife, who prefers not to be touched by him; he's desperately outmatched in the mayoral race by the popular Ted; and only his two deputies seem to respect his authority as sheriff. For him, the emergency becomes an opportunity to project a more confident version of himself online. Yet in his quest to become Eddington's most admired townsperson, Joe ends up trapped in a nightmare of his own making. 'Is this what I'm supposed to do?' he cries when violence breaks out. Nobody answers, because nobody knows; his reality has become a void. Joe's despair reminded me of a conversation my colleague Charlie Warzel had with the writer and technology theorist L. M. Sacasas in 2022. They'd discussed why being on the internet can make people feel stuck in a loop of doom and confusion. Sacasas explained that the present is never the point of social-media engagement—that posting requires being reactive, thereby turning social-media users into the perfect vessels for propagating conflict. 'What we're focused on is not the particular event or movement before us, but the one right behind us,' Sacasas said then. 'As we layer on these events, it becomes difficult for anything to break through.' Information, as a result, becomes abstracted into tangents. 'We're caking layers of commentary over the event itself,' Sacasas added, 'and the event fades.' In Eddington, COVID becomes a mere footnote to the events unfolding throughout the town—Joe doesn't even check his test results when he starts exhibiting symptoms. What he continually responds to instead is the stress built up as a result of the pandemic; he's left playing catchup to scuffles happening around Eddington, unraveling emotionally as the days pass. The film never interrogates why the early pandemic led to so many ideological conflicts, but it suggests that the prognosis is bleak for those who continue to venture too far into the internet's noxious rabbit holes. Being too online, in other words, can be its own kind of sickness.
USA Today
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
In 'Eddington,' Ari Aster revisits the 'living hell' of COVID-19
Some people made sourdough starters to get through the COVID-19 lockdown. Ari Aster wrote a modern Western. Five years ago, when a pandemic and safety protocols further divided a politically tumultuous America, 'I was just living in hell and I thought I should make a movie about that,' the director says of his new drama 'Eddington' (in theaters now). 'It felt like things were poised to really explode in a new way. And to be honest, that feeling has not left since. But at that moment, it suddenly felt like, 'OK, I haven't experienced this before.' 'I just wanted to get it down on paper and describe the structure of reality at the moment, which is that nobody can agree on what is happening.' Aster's filmography is full of horror ('Hereditary,' 'Midsommar') and comedic absurdity ('Beau Is Afraid'), and with 'Eddington,' he revisits the absurd horror movie we all experienced in real life. Join our Watch Party! Sign up to receive USA TODAY's movie and TV recommendations right in your inbox Set in New Mexico during 2020, the movie centers on the fictional town of Eddington, which turns into a hotbed of bad feelings and controversy when awkward local sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) decides to run for mayor against popular progressive incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Their feud turns increasingly personal and spills onto social media and the streets, and the situation ultimately grows explosive, bloody and downright bonkers. Some scenes are a stark reminder of the time: For example, Sheriff Joe moseys into a grocery store without his mask – as an asthmatic, he's not a big fan of personal protective equipment – and gets an earful from Ted and his fellow residents. To build his narrative, Aster took a lot of notes during lockdown, 'living on Twitter and taking a lot of screenshots,' he says. The director went so far as to create multiple Twitter accounts, so he could create 'different algorithms' for varying ideologies. Aster built a cast of characters to run that gamut. Joe's malleable wife Louise (Emma Stone) falls under the sway of both her conspiracy theorist mom (Deirdre O'Connell) and the charismatic leader (Austin Butler) of a QAnon-type cult. And when George Floyd protests make it to Eddington, they involve a Black police deputy (Micheal Ward) and a teen boy (Cameron Mann) doing some performative activism to woo a girl he likes. 'It is a satire," Aster says, but the real object of criticism is social media and 'the maligned forces that have harnessed that technology to get us here and to divide us.' 'I wanted to make a film that was empathetic to all the characters. It's just that it's empathetic in multiple different directions and some of those are opposition.' Since the pandemic, there have been movies set during COVID-19, but 'Eddington' is the most high-profile project to really explore how it isolated neighbors from each other, literally and politically, and exacerbated an existing culture war. 'We haven't metabolized what happened in 2020 or how seismic COVID was. One reason for that is that we are still living through it,' Aster explains. 'That was an inflection point whose consequences are very hard to measure, but they're huge. And it's an unpleasant thing to look at. And the future is a scary thing to look at right now." Aster acknowledges he's desperate for a vision of the future that's "not totally defined by the dread that I'm feeling. I wrote this movie in a state of anxiety and dread, and that dread only continues to intensify." While many navigated the COVID-19 lockdown by binge-watching 'Tiger King,' Aster had a different ritual to find his happy place. Quarantined in New Mexico, where Aster has spent much of his life, he found a 'pretty comforting' routine of walking to a park and reading a book for two hours in the morning and returning in the afternoon for another hour or so. 'I really liked that. That, I already have nostalgia for,' he says, laughing. While Aster did end up having a couple of rounds of COVID-19 ('Not fun'), there are very few sick people in 'Eddington.' One character has the coronavirus at the beginning, at least one other character has it by the end, but that's it. Instead, 'I'll just say there are a lot of viruses in the movie. A lot of things going viral,' he says. He points out that another key subplot of 'Eddington' is the artificial intelligence-powered data center being built just outside of town. 'The movie is about a bunch of people navigating one crisis while another crisis incubates, waiting to be unleashed,' Aster says. An idea for a sequel percolates in his mind, yet Aster would like to just live in a less-weird time, please. 'It's gotten incredibly weird. And with AI rushing toward us with the possibility of AGI (advanced AI that would match human thinking) and then maybe even superintelligence, things are only going to get stranger and stranger,' Aster says. 'The human capacity for adaptation is amazing, and things become normal very quickly, especially once they become wallpaper – all of this has become ambient. 'It's just important to remind ourselves, like, 'This is strange.' How do we hold onto that and maybe challenge it?'
