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Mint
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Mint
Ari Asters father advised him to stop screenwriting after Beau is Afraid underperformed at box office
Washington DC [US], July 30 (ANI): The 'Hereditary' director Ari Aster's father advised him to stop screenwriting and focus on direction after his film 'Beau Is Afraid' underperformed at the box office in 2023, reported Variety. During a recent appearance on the 'WTF with Marc Maron' podcast, as quoted by Variety, Aster said his father suggested he stick to directing only after his 2023 film 'Beau Is Afraid' underperformed at the box office. "When 'Beau Is Afraid' flopped, my dad did tell me, 'Uh, maybe you shouldn't write the next one. He might've been right," said Aster as quoted by Variety. Despite the advice, Aster wrote his follow-up feature, 'Eddington,' which is currently in theatres. A24 and Aster are hoping for a win from the small-town dramedy starring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal after "Beau" grossed 12 million USD worldwide against a 35 million USD budget. Aster said he was "pretty sad" about the poor critical and commercial reception of "Beau," but added that a few stray messages of support helped him deal with the disappointment. "I was pretty sad that it was, like, so maligned. There are a lot of people who reached out to tell me that they loved helped, but yeah, no, it was a bummer because it was a huge, you know, it lost money, and critically, I wouldn't say it was, like, reviled, but it was definitely, like, there was no consensus whatsoever," said Aster as quoted by Variety. He continued, "All these things you take away after you release a film, and you're like, 'OK, it's out of my hands now, I can't really avoid people's reactions, responses.' It's like, you know, you kind of learn matter what the response, you're proud of for sticking with [your choice], and then certain things where you're like, 'Eh, I'm not sure if it was worth losing that much of the audience for that decision.' I think I ejected a number of people from the theatre. I could've used them." Aster's latest feature is Eddington. It stars Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimer, Austin Butler, Emma Stone and others. The film was screened in Cannes, followed by a recent theatrical release. (ANI)
Atlantic
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
When It Feels Good to Root for a Bad Guy
This article features spoilers for the ending of Eddington. The director Ari Aster specializes in bringing stress dreams to life: becoming plagued by a demonic curse, as seen in his debut film, Hereditary; joining an evil Scandinavian cult, in his follow-up, Midsommar; realizing a person's every fear, as occurs in the strange, picaresque Beau Is Afraid. But for his latest movie, Eddington, he turns to a more prosaic topic to get our blood running: the events of 2020. The film initially presents itself as a neo-Western, set in the small, fictional New Mexico town of Eddington at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. In true Aster form, the familiar portrait of that period—and the gnarly headspace it trapped many of us in—disintegrates into something disturbingly surreal. The film dramatizes this downward spiral through the experience of a man consumed by anxiety about how his community is shifting around him. Lockdown may have driven some people to question one another's reality; Eddington 's protagonist, however, seeks control of his—with violent and gory results. In interviews about his inspirations, Aster has invoked John Ford's masterpiece My Darling Clementine, a bittersweet retelling of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. But what I thought of more than anything while watching Eddington was Taxi Driver, a dark fable that's grounded in the point of view of a delusional maniac similarly defined by his paranoid, even conspiratorial, thinking. In the Martin Scorsese classic, Travis Bickle (played by Robert De Niro) lives out his fantasy of 'cleaning up' New York City by murdering a man who prostituted young girls in a brothel; the subsequent press coverage cements him as a folk hero, ending the film on a strange, bloodily triumphal note. The local sheriff in Eddington, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), is the film's Bickle, though his final showdown is a far more absurd spectacle than the one in Taxi Driver. Aster's film is frightening, yes—but it's a dark and lacerating comedy first and foremost, playing out the power fantasies that fueled many an online conspiracy theory in the pandemic's early days (and still do now). And although Cross may not be as crushingly lonely as Bickle, he does share the character's escalating sense of paranoia. By plunging the viewer into this chaotic inner world, Aster illustrates the dissonant appeal of being enmeshed in the perspective of, and maybe even rooting for, an individual committed to their belief in justice—even if that commitment can border on sordid. Each of Aster's movies descends into chaos by its third act, but the bloodbath at the end of Eddington is particularly challenging because of what precedes it: a recognizable, if satirical, investigation of life under lockdown. As such, the film is much more concerned with modern society than the director's past work, contorting the anxiety and extreme politicization that arose during the early pandemic to fit into Aster's strange world. Embodying those feelings is Cross, a lonely sheriff who eventually stands up to shadowy, destructive forces. Eddington introduces its protagonist in much more mundane fashion, however. Cross serves the town of Eddington as a useless figure of authority—a shiftless, asthmatic grump who mumbles complaints at lawbreakers and halfheartedly manages a staff of cops at his office. When the film starts, he is struggling to uphold the state-mandated quarantine regulations, which he rarely follows himself. Eventually, the viewer learns that Cross has a personal connection to the position; his father-in-law once held it, and his tenure is still revered by both his family and his community. But Cross can hardly keep up with his job's basic tasks, let alone the kind of slick change represented by the person often challenging his control over Eddington: its mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Garcia, unlike Cross, is a friendly, tech-focused modernizer; he's backing the construction of a local data center that has proved divisive. Garcia and Cross's mutual disdain initially drives the film's tension: Garcia has some personal animosity with Cross that revolves around a rumored, long-ago dalliance withthe sheriff's wife, Louise (Emma Stone). Just as Garcia and Cross become fixated on each other, Louise develops an obsession with a seeming cult leader named Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). Peak posts his elliptical wisdom in popular short-form videos that Louise affirms in the comments. Louise's mother, Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), who lives with the Crosses, is similarly buying into questionable lines of thinking; she's constantly spouting misinformation about the origins of the pandemic, and parroting whatever else comes across her Facebook feed. Eddington makes plenty of satirical sport of all the characters, including a swath of overly sensitive teenage protesters. But the rageful engine driving Cross's actions is more disquieting than simple family or small-town drama. In the simplest read of what happens next, Cross becomes a local celebrity of sorts. After an altercation with Garcia at a supermarket, instigated when the sheriff supports a customer refusing to wear a mask—and similarly goes without one, pointing to how it affects his asthma—Cross announces his own mayoral run. He campaigns on a vague populist platform of throwing unhoused people out of town and resisting COVID restrictions, posting his progressively more inflammatory screeds to Facebook. The ramblings go viral, pushing Cross into further confrontations with Garcia. The sheriff's simmering anger, which reaches boiling point as a result of Eddington's growing air of claustrophobia and his own loosening grip on his life, leads to Cross assassinating Garcia. He kills Garcia's son too, and tries to cover up both murders by pinning the blame on a fellow cop. But as the sheriff's tangled web of lies begins to unravel—and his focus is diverted further away from the town—Eddington is besieged by frightening special-ops forces of unknown origin. The attack culminates in a bloody gun battle in the streets, and Cross barely survives; he emerges as a vigilante who has defended his community from, well, somebody. The film ends with Cross, now paralyzed and heavily medicated, functioning as the town's mayor. Unlike that of Taxi Driver 's Bickle, however, the sheriff's victory is a hollow one; his mother-in-law appears to have seized the real power behind the throne, rendering him more a puppet than an icon. This turn of events offers a perfectly grim button to Cross's ridiculous hallucinations of grandeur. But it's also a reminder from Aster that for all the thrilling gunplay of Eddington 's final act, there is no real happy ending awaiting Cross. Eddington does not aim to be a simple tale of heroism, and its events are so outlandish that they are hard to take at face value. The movie, in its fullest expression, is a feverish swirl of the charged opinions that drove so many conversations during the pandemic's height—be they from the right, the left, or all the way on the fringe. The shadowy characters invading Eddington could be interpreted as a fascist hit squad or an antifa battalion; on-screen, they simply represent the nonsensical extremes that our internet-addled brains are capable of reaching. The uncomfortable result is that Aster at times seems to be challenging the audience to root for Cross, despite laying out all his buffoonery very plainly—because even the most composed person may have found the limits of their patience tested at some point during those strange, dark days.
Time Magazine
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
Ari Aster Breaks Down the Ambiguous Ending of Eddington
Warning: This piece contains major spoilers for the ending of Eddington. Ari Aster is no stranger to making movies that get people's attention. His debut feature, Hereditary, and his sophomore effort, Midsommar, were huge successes for distributor A24 and helped spark conversation about 'elevated horror.' Aster kept audiences guessing with his wildly ambitious Beau is Afraid, a three-hour comedy-horror starring Joaquin Phoenix that wasn't successful at the box office, but certainly generated plenty of conversation among those who saw it. Eddington, his fourth feature, is his most divisive yet. It takes place in May 2020 in the fictional small town of Eddington, New Mexico, as the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic meets the urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement. It follows Joe Cross (Phoenix), Eddington's sheriff, who lives with his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), and mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), the latter of whom regularly espouses conspiracy theories. Joe, who has asthma, strongly opposes the implementation of mask mandates that Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) is keen to enforce. Furious over the perceived infringement on his and his neighbors' freedom, Joe decides on a whim to challenge Ted in the upcoming election. Things escalate completely out of control from there. 'The film is about a bunch of people who care about the world and know that something is wrong,' says Aster, who wrote and directed Eddington, of its take on that recent era's brewing distrust. 'They feel very clearly that something is wrong, but they're all living in different realities, and they disagree about what that thing is that's wrong.' While the townspeople debate the building of a giant new data center which will bring jobs and industry but drain natural resources, its citizens confront the conflict between police and Black Lives Matter protestors, anger and frustration over masks, and the rampant conspiracy theories increasingly finding a foothold among citizens living much of their lives on the internet. We sat down with Aster to discuss the film's explosive ending and what he's trying to say through all the violence, twists, and 11th-hour gags. Everything falls apart for Joe While Joe's campaign for mayor gains steam, things at home are crumbling. Louise is furious that he entered the race without discussing it with her, but when he makes a video claiming that Ted is a sexual predator who took advantage of Louise when she was underage, things take a turn for the worse. Louise makes a video in response stating that Joe's claims are utterly false, leading Joe's credibility to falter. She leaves Joe for Vernon (Austin Butler), a cult leader whose belief in a powerful ring of pedophiles Louise hops on board with. After a heated public interaction with Ted, who brutally slaps Joe (in an altercation set ironically to Katy Perry's 'Firework'), Joe is left completely defeated. He does the unthinkable, killing both Ted and their son in their home at long range from the desert, sniper style. Joe then sprays 'No Justice, No Peace' on Ted's wall, attempting to pin the murders on Antifa, which has been gaining attention via viral videos. When a police officer from the nearby Pueblo tribe (William Belleau) gets involved with the investigation, citing sovereignty over the land from which the bullets were fired, and quickly becomes suspicious of Joe, the sheriff begins to spiral. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, a group of masked extremists descends, luring Joe to the outskirts of town where they plan to wreak havoc. They detonate explosives that kill one of Joe's fellow police officers and severely wounds the other, Michael (Micheal Ward), who has been hoping he might fill Joe's shoes if Joe wins the election, while also being pressured to join the BLM protests as one of the town's small number of Black residents. Joe finds himself in a firefight for his life on the streets of Eddington, arming himself at a gun shop and dodging bullets through the empty town in a lengthy Western-style shootout. Multiple interpretations of who the shooters might be Eddington is a movie of screens. They dictate the way the people of Eddington live, as real to them as the world outside. Characters are constantly on their phones or computers, scrolling social media, watching YouTube, and going down various rabbit holes about government conspiracies, mask-wearing, and whatever else reinforces their worldviews. 'Every character is paranoid, and they're all very certain of what they feel is happening,' says Aster. That sense of paranoia infects every frame of Eddington. And just as characters are consumed by their screens, 'the film becomes possessed by the worldview of these characters,' Aster says. But once the pivotal shootout happens, screens are almost nowhere to be found. The sudden disappearance is almost enough to make you think Joe is undergoing some horrifying COVID-induced fever dream. Aster confirmed that shifting from omnipresent electronic devices to none at all was purposeful. 'In the climactic sequence, there's no longer any need for screens. They've done their job,' he says, suggesting that paranoia has well and truly taken over in Eddington. Joe finds himself roaming Eddington, shooting at anyone and everyone attacking him, including not-so-accidentally killing the Pueblo officer who found evidence to connect Joe to Ted's murder. Shots cut through the air, and bullets hail from every direction as Joe tries to stay alive. 'You have those anonymous shooters emerging from the dark,' says Aster. 'That feels like an interesting metaphor for how the internet tends to work. It grants us anonymity in a way that I think does not bring out our better selves.' It's telling that Aster uses the word 'anonymous,' despite an earlier scene clearly establishing men geared up and donning Antifa insignia coming into Eddington via plane. 'The film is meant to function as something of a Rorschach test. That is the moment at which the film either announces itself as satire, or announces itself as a way that's really getting at what's happening—more conspiracy-minded people,' says Aster. Just because Eddington presents the shooters as Antifa doesn't mean that's necessarily who they are. 'Everything that's there would tell us that those people are Antifa, whether that means that they're being sent in by the GOP to make it look like Antifa is dangerous, or whether you're on the other side and you believe that George Soros is sending them in.' But Aster won't say which he believes it to be: 'It felt important and maybe a little impish to leave that to the viewer,' he says. A third alternative beyond an assault secretly organized by the left or right? Perhaps the killers have been hired by the powers that want to build the data center in Eddington. The data center is on the periphery of the film, but it's clear that very wealthy and powerful people are invested in the development of the center, and a town already engulfed in a national media circus is hardly a suitable place for its installation. Is all the violence and division just a distraction from the real problem? Perhaps they posed as Antifa and brought violence to the town to destabilize it so they could come into that power vacuum, offering jobs and stability, just what a torn-up Eddington would desperately need. The unlikely rise of Brian and Dawn The brutal shootout ends thanks to Brian (Cameron Mann), a teenager who has been an active member of the Black Lives Matter protests, though only to impress a girl he likes. Brian guns down an assailant, but not before the latter stabs Joe in the head. The moment is captured on film (bringing screens back to Eddington), and we flash forward one year. The video has gone viral on TikTok, leading the opportunistic Brian to become a sudden icon of the right wing. That includes a hilarious moment where Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene herself demands that Brian receive a Congressional Medal of Honor. Aster says that Kyle Rittenhouse served as the model for Brian's sudden rise. 'Brian is a very interesting and important character in the film, because he is somebody who's not ideologically driven. He's a normal kid looking for community and wants a girlfriend. He joins the left-wing movement for pretty disingenuous reasons. In the end, he'll go where he's wanted. It's a consequence of this hyper-individualistic society that we live in,' says Aster. After the shootout, Joe is left braindead and in a wheelchair. He's technically serving as mayor, but his conspiracy-pilled mother-in-law, Dawn, has taken over, marking her new role with some fancier pantsuits. The town celebrates the opening of the data center. Joe has accomplished his mission to bring the town together, and got everything he wanted—except the love of his life, who left him for Vernon and is now pregnant with his child. But he's left virtually functionless, forced to live out the rest of his days without any agency. His nurse is sleeping with his mother-in-law, and they all share a bed. 'There's an element of karmic punishment there,' Aster says. 'But it's more of a success story for Dawn. She's somebody who is loaded with convictions, and was looking for a platform, and she ultimately is the mayor at the end.' The data center at the center of it all The final shot is not of Joe, Dawn, or any other person. Instead, book-ending the film's opening on the proposed site of the new development, it's of solidgoldmagikarp, the now-completed giant data center, looming in the middle of the New Mexico desert on the outskirts of Eddington. (The name of the data center doesn't reference the Pokémon Magikarp, but rather an AI token that causes disruption or erratic behaviour in AI)..'There are many winners and losers at the end of the film, but there's only one unequivocal winner, and that's the data center,' says Aster. 'It's a peripheral detail in the film, but it's absolutely central to the film's point. It's a hyper-scale data center, which is tied to AI. We begin with the promise of it coming, and we end with it being achieved. There's a way of looking at the film and saying all of those stories and all of these characters are now just training data. The movie itself is training data,' Aster says. The ending of Eddington remains wide open to interpretation, but that's how Aster sees it. 'It's a movie that's about a bunch of people navigating a crisis while another crisis incubates,' Aster says. That other crisis is the surging of AI. 'AI, at this point, seems too big to fail. It feels like we're in an arms race. The people who are warning us about this are the ones who are ushering it in, and they think that that is relieving them of responsibility. I think the dominant feeling of this moment is one of powerlessness and dread.' Aster knows that's bleak, but he doesn't see Eddington as nihilistic. "I think there's hope in the fact that the film is a period piece,' Aster says. 'I hope it can give people the opportunity to look back at how we were and maybe in that experience, see a little bit more clearly how we are on the path that we're on and maybe ask the question: Do we want to stay on this path?'
Winnipeg Free Press
19-07-2025
- 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.
Screen Geek
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Screen Geek
Ari Aster Turned Down Offer To Direct 'Morbius'
Director Ari Aster is known for making his very own unique movies including Hereditary , Midsommar , and the upcoming film Eddington . However, it looks like he once had the opportunity to add a very different kind of movie to his resume. Specifically, Ari Aster reveals that he was offered the chance to direct Sony's Marvel adaptation Morbius . The final version of Morbius that hit theaters, as we all know, became a box office flop. It was one of several failures in Sony's efforts to adapt Spider-Man characters with their own major Marvel franchises, and Jared Leto's portrayal of the titular character became the subject of many memes. This obviously makes one wonder what would've happened if someone like Aster was involved with the project instead of director Daniel Espinosa. Here's what Aster shared via Semafor: 'I was asked to do 'Mobius.' Or is it 'Morbius'? Oh, God,' he said. 'We could have added it to my list of [flops].' It's definitely an interesting layer to unearth regarding the development of Morbius . As mentioned, Daniel Espinosa ultimately directed the film, which failed to resonate with fans of the character and the rest of the Spider-Man franchise. Other Sony films shared similar fates, and their attempt at a universe of Spider-Man villains was finally axed. While having Ari Aster as the director would have certainly provided a much different kind of Morbius movie, it's likely that it still would have underperformed based on what Sony was doing. One must also consider that Aster's movies don't really fit the formula for comic book adaptations, so it could have alienated audiences for that reason as well. Stay tuned to ScreenGeek for any additional updates regarding the future endeavors of Ari Aster as we have them. It's unlikely that we'll see him taking any other offers to direct a superhero movie in the future, but stranger things have certainly happened. In the meantime, fans can look forward to his new movie Eddington that looks like another film with Aster's signature style.
