REVIEW: Nope

The people living through the horror films deserve our sympathies. In most cases, they didn't ask to be put through this nightmare. It's us, the viewers, who are the fools. We knew fully well what we were getting into when we bought that ticket.

I had this thought watching Jordan Peele's Nope on the big screen today. I don't necessarily know if it's true, especially since sometimes the characters in these kinds of films can knowingly get themselves into some hairy situations, but it was a sobering thought nonetheless.

In the case of this film, the protagonists definitely seemed to know what they were getting themselves into. When a mysterious entity starts stealing their family's horses in the middle of the night, brother and sister, OJ and Emerald Haywood, are quick to realize their valley is playing host to an extraterrestrial visitor. Their first reaction? Let's get this thing on camera and sell the footage to Oprah.

The elements at play in this film are all somewhat disparate. I don't know what made Peele want to use horror and western ingredients to tell a first encounter story that also exposes society's addiction to spectacle, but the end result only feels more original for it. The film holds up a mirror, for sure, but it would be misleading to call this a "social commentary" in the vein of Peele's previous two films. The focus is less on the evils of social systems and more on our own need to capture the spectacular and mysterious things of the world.

The film is mostly carried by Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya. They play brother and sister who are at complete opposite ends of the energy spectrum. OJ is downbeat and impersonable. With Emerald, I got the impression that Palmer had to swallow a firework before every take. This broad duality gives the story a huge range of emotions to play off of, even as the tension dials up to ten.

I wouldn't call the movie bloodless, but it might relieve some potential viewers to know that this isn't an especially gory film. Peele left the zombie deer and brain surgery in Get Out where they belong. Of course, that means that the tension comes almost exclusively from the atmosphere, which is masterfully orchestrated. Yes, you have your standard "walking down a dark corridor and hear an unearthly noise" segments, but the two sequences that actually had me wonder if I needed to exit the auditorium were both brightly lit. A lot of credit for this goes to the unnerving sound design at work here. The nightmare that worms its way into your ears is more unsettling than anything they could have shown onscreen, and I'd be truly puzzled if the sound team for the film didn't catch some attention come this Oscar's season.

Nope joins the long train of movies that employ dazzling spectacle with the intent of shaming the audience for coming to partake of the spectacle. There are, of course, natural contradictions to this ethos baked into the medium. Even the best of these films have some holes in the equation. I don't know if Nope is going to be the film to close the gap, but it certainly reminds us why we ask the question.

--The Professor

Comments

"What Are Happy Endings For Anyway?" (II) - The Docks of New York

Yes, fellas. Your calendar is correct. We are, in fact, 10 years out from La La Land . My main point of interest in Damien Chazelle’s groundbreaking 2016 musical has historically been its role in helping set off the sort of stealth renaissance of musicals we’ve been experiencing the last ten years where we all try to see how big we can make the genre before anyone notices. Chazelle explained at the time , “Now more than ever we need hope and romance on the screen, and I think there’s something about musicals that just get at something that only movies can do. That idea of movies as a dreamland, movies as the language of our dreams and movies as a way of expressing a world in which you break into song, that emotions can violate the rules of reality.” The hook for this film, though, is very much the film’s ultimate rejection of the traditional happy ending for which musicals are so well known. That is the reason why...

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: Ranking Decades of Film

This piece's lead image very much puts the modern landscape of blockbusters in competition with classic Hollywood. And the state of things can often feel that way, that film literacy is somehow a zero-sum game between popular film and "real film." But lo, this is just a fun way to visually represent eras of film competing for top placement on one person's ranking. I'm not here to add to any divide. Rather than argue that one period of film is better than the other, I want to explore how the mutating DNA of cinema carries a base code of magnificence across its lifetime. The way that manifests will vary across each decade, and I'm organizing them in such a way that privileges how I personally favor any given variant, but the lifeblood of the movies is vibrant across the ages. There is fantastic work in every time era, just as every era has its stumbles. But there are certainly periods where I feel more attuned to the work that Hollywood is puttin...

We're Back! a Dinosaur's Story - Getting Lost in the "Last Frontier of Imagination"

Last month, Variety ran a piece observing, “Hollywood Can’t Survive Without Animation. So Why Won’t the Industry Respect It?” by Clayton Davis, who reported , “In the nearly five decades that domestic grosses have been tracked, an animated film has finished the year as the No. 1 release just seven times, beginning with Disney’s 'Aladdin' in 1992. Now the medium is having an unprecedented run, with 'Inside Out 2' and 'Zootopia 2' topping the last two calendar years (a first for animated movies to lead the box office for two consecutive years) and the latter becoming the highest-grossing animated film ever domestically. 'The Super Mario Galaxy Movie' is leading 2026 so far and is the only film to cross $1 billion. Setting aside the 2020 and 2021 pandemic seasons, which emptied theaters of family films, animated features have made up about 20% of the year’s 10 top-grossing releases over the past decade. And yet, the artists who make these movies have rarely...

REVIEW: COYOTE VS. ACME

The secret weapon of The Looney Tunes has always been their natural eloquence with meta-textuality. Seriously. Go rewatch "Duck Amuck." It's high art. That trick isn't really new here in a landscape where "self-awareness" is just generally baked into the fabric of most millennial media. But Coyote vs Acme nonetheless feels cut from a very different cloth. I don't even know if that's from anything extra this film does so much as what it doesn't do. This movie never feels like it's trying to prove how much smarter it is than the audience. It doesn't feel smug or self-promoting. Like, it takes a different kind of self-awareness to look at how many times a certain Wile E. Coyote has tried to get his hands around a certain speeding bird and ask if maybe the poor guy, who has literally tried everything under the sun, has just had the odds stacked against him. It takes a certain kind of movie to decide that this dude just needs so...

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: 10 Movie Theater Experiences That Changed Me

So, January 2012: Disney is rereleasing their 1991 animated masterpiece, Beauty and the Beast into theaters, and in 3D format, and I'm able to coerce a friend into seeing it with me. This was a big deal because, as with most of the Disney movies we'd call "classic," Beauty and the Beast had its day in theaters before my time, and this was an opportunity to experience the movie in its proper element, and maybe imagine what it would have been when the legendary tunes by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken graced the public for the first time. My larger circle was none-too-impressed with my choice. Didn't I know that the movie was already on DVD? That I could just watch it anytime in the comfort of my own home without having to pay for another ticket? How could I be so careless with my finances? (Incidentally, many of these same friends would pay top-dollar to see the Beauty and the Beast remake five years later on opening weekend ...) ...

REVIEW: Jungle Cruise

Disney has relied on branding for their box-office since Walt himself started using fairy-tales as a launching pad. Flash forward 80 years, and the branding wars have escalated not just within the Disney company, but the industry all around. Disney's Jungle Cruise walks the line between original and remix, and not just because it's adapted from a theme-park ride. This film, a pastiche of adventure flicks over the last 60 years, absorbs the best from its sources of inspiration but falls just short of congealing them into something truly groundbreaking. Tales a mythical tree of life have beckoned explorers since it bloomed into legend hundreds of years ago. This catches the interest of explorer Lily Houghton who makes it her mission to find the tree, first to distribute its gifts to the world and second to keep it from the hands of less benevolent seekers. Her success hinges on joining forces with the gruff Frank Wolff. He'll ferry Lily and her brother, McGregor, across th...

REVIEW: Disenchanted

Once Upon a Time, Disney's Enchanted reminded us that deep down inside, even the most cynical of us was pining for a fairy-tale. In those days, a musical rom-com featuring hand-drawn animation and overtly referencing films of the Disney animated catalog actually felt novel, even daring. But today is a different climate. Disney fairy-tales are unambiguously a popular presence in modern pop culture. They are regularly referenced, discussed, and abused both by their parent company and the public at large. Any sequel to such a film wouldn't have the same opportunity to feel revelatory or groundbreaking. But this proves to be an inadequate defense for this movie's shortcomings. Turns out, you can sing about fairy-tales for two hours without earnestly exploring what makes them so special to begin with. I say shortcomings deliberately because there's not a lot that's actively wrong with this movie. Almost everything about this movie could have worked if it had been pr...

Making Room for Classic Movies

Way back in my film school days, I had an interaction with a favorite cousin whom I had not seen in some time. This opportunity to reconnect saw our first interaction since I had been accepted as a film student, and so he asked me what basically everyone asks me right after I tell them I’m studying film, “So, like what’s your favorite movie, then?” When approached with this question, at least by associates who are not necessarily film buffs, my default response is usually something I know has been on Netflix in the last year. (Though if I had to pick an answer ... maybe Silver Linings Playbook .) I think this time I said James Cameron’s Titanic . He then had a sort of illuminated reaction and followed up with, “I see, so you like … old movies.” My response to this was something in the vein of, “Well, yes , but NOOOO …” Steven Spielberg being a 29-year-old on the set of Jaws In academic circles, t he demarcation between “c...

REVIEW: Soul

Pixar's latest film, Soul , dropped on Disney+ Christmas day, another regrettable casualty of the virus. This time around, we follow a hopeful musician bursting with enthusiasm. Music is an oddly appropriate metaphor for the film: both certainly touch the outer rim of mankind's emotional faculty, but good luck summarizing the experience to your friends. Joe Gardner is a music teacher at a public school whose enthusiasm for music is spilling out of the walls of his classroom. Opportunity strikes Joe the same day that misfortune does, and a fatal accident lands him in a celestial plane of existence known as "The Great Before," where souls are developed and finessed before being sent to earth to experience human existence. Joe is saddled with mentoring 22, a soul sapling who has settled in The Great Before for several hundred years and has no intention of ever giving mortality a chance. But in 22, Joe sees a chance to return back to earth and fulfill his purpose if he ca...

REVIEW: The Rivals of Amziah King

The first note I made for this film is that I knew a bunch of cowboys growing up. But I regretfully did not know any who were just so willing to burst into song. I thought then that I knew what I was getting into with this movie. But I could not anticipate what this story would try to feed me. The movie sees Amziah King, a good-natured beekeeper, smalltown musician, and all-around good dude, sorting through some business deals as he happens to reunite with his former foster-daughter, Kateri. Crossing paths again allows them to mutually rediscover what they gave to each other as two people who lifted each other up. But when King's entire stock is stolen at the worst possible moment, Kateri gets to step-up and defend what is theirs. Amziah King is McConaughey at his most endearing. His ability to put the viewer at ease is the film's greatest trick. I've heard some buzz about this being his best performance ever. I'd...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog