The Beekeeper

The Beekeeper fails to land in large part due to a patriotism that feels strangely mismanaged. It is dissimilar to a movie like Top Gun: Maverick because those themes become a distraction rather than an incidental framing (or fun metaphor for being the last movie star) because of how poorly they’re woven into plotting and dialog. The performances feel unbalanced in a way that feels like a writer-director problem rather than an acting problem, especially when you know the actors in question. For people that enjoy every action movie (or every Statham action movie), there is much here; for people that love action movies in a more discriminating manner, there are better places to spend your money and time.

I will credit that the film is not totally bereft small joys. The horror-adjacent kills are fun to see set up and executed and it is not remarkably ugly if also not especially beautiful. Jason Statham’s ability as an infiltrator is entertaining, as is the idea that an Englishman was the top U.S. spy assassin. The film is in some parts a copy-paste of John Wick plot points and scenes and, for the audience members skeptical of the film’s FBI propagandizing (there’s a standard-issue complaining about suspected criminals having too many civil rights when you know they’re guilty scene), it at least picks an easy-to-hate villain and social issue premise: the film follows, in addition to Statham’s titular ex-government murderer Adam Clay, the FBI agent daughter (Emmy Raver-Lampman as Verona Parker) of an elderly woman (Phylicia Rashad as Eloise Parker) who clicks on a phishing scam and has her life savings and the funds of a charity she administers wiped out.

Therefore, The Beekeeper gets us all onside very quickly because phishing, data mining, scamming, and identity theft are among a rash of problems across the internet and cellular technology that the government is unable (read: unwilling) to do anything about. Regardless of the accuracy of the movie’s idea of who is behind those scams, it is interesting that they chose to link these crimes to the super-wealthy who explicitly in the film decide elections. Most impressive about all that, though, is that Josh Hutcherson gives arguably the most committed and convincing performance of any actor as douchebag tech billionaire heir antagonist Derek Danforth. I mean, Jeremy Irons (his head of security, ex-CIA director Wallace Westwyld) is always bringing gravitas to low- and middle-brow projects, but I was disappointed in the writing for both Rashad and Raver-Lampman (who has a lot of very bad on-the-nose observations), both of whom I hold in generally high esteem. Bobby Naderi (Verona’s partner Agent Matt Wiley) was a capable scene partner and affable work husband.

Now, this *is* a rampage revenge movie. We don’t necessarily *need* the premise to be tied into social ills. And you can in fact get away with just shallowly dipping your toe into them. However, when you escalate the issue to the point of how tightly capital controls the government and the tight intertwined nature of the relationships between, for instance, the CIA and the tech world, you can’t pull your punches and make the great beneficiary of this corruption an innocent billionaire politician who didn’t know any better when several scenes right before set the character up as also villainous; it doesn’t feel like an exciting surprise but a gutless letdown. The Beekeeper posits that data mining is good as long as it is in service of tracking suspected terrorists rather than defrauding people; there are no questions as to methods, just ends. I mean, I don’t expect it to come out and say that the intelligence community at large exists to help maintain a status quo of international resource extraction to keep America rich and working Americans sufficiently content with our treats that we never notice or think to act on the deprivation and exploitation all around us. After all, it isn’t the closing scene of Three Days of the Condor.

I just think that when a film has within it certain assumptions about America’s place in the world that do not contribute to plot or characters or vibe and instead distract from those things to create a background image of American heroism that is in fact at odds with the general plot and its more interesting points, and this background image is furthermore built up by careless and artificial dialog, that is worth examining. We’ve gotten to a place where enough of our political identities are wrapped up in critiquing the things we consume, and many of us are so estranged from actual political action that we only know to judge people or objects by their vibes, that post-Trump there’s a real problem of dismissing these examinations or critiques rather than sitting with them. There have without a doubt been some reaches among the critiques and there have been, more to the point of the problem as far as aesthetic quality is concerned, a great mass of works that don’t rhetorically aim to disrupt neoliberal capitalism or neo-imperialism so much as critique its facets at surface level in the realm of professional class grievances while petitioning for a more racially- and gender-diverse ruling class. I suppose the fact that the President in The Beekeeper (Jemma Redgrave with the least believable line I’ve heard on screen yet this year) and most of the FBI brass we meet (as well as the agents we follow most closely) are people of color, women, or both, contributes to the cultural placebo panacea of diverse oppressors. Sinister work in service to an agency that surveilled and infiltrated the civil rights and Black Power movements and is implicated in the murder of multiple movement leaders, or accurate representation of the ability to recruit from the oppressed?

The film isn’t a polemic against monopoly capitalism, but what critiques it does have it undermines because David Ayer just loves America so much and believes in its institutions so strongly. The film is sort of pathetic, really, though I like to imagine it’s where Jason Statham drove off to after he left his single scene in Fast X. Go watch one of Statham’s Guy Ritchie movies instead (or, like, Crank or The Transporter or The Italian Job or the actual John Wick movies).

Poor Things

Poor Things is an adult satire-fantasy, a grown-up fairy tale which evokes steampunk, the surreal and the absurd in delivering the tale of a woman’s sexual awakening and exploration of world and self. It pulls off a flamboyant production design (led by Shona Heath and James Price) which reminds me of Henry Selick, Tim Burton, Wes Anderson, and George Miller’s films – distinct from all, but perhaps existing on a continuum among them. Emma Stone stars as Bella, an adult woman who begins with the mind of a child, learning at first slowly and then rapidly to be a person through the pursuit of pleasure and then of self-improvement.

Stone is firstly supported by Willem Dafoe, who plays her father figure Godwin Baxter, a nearly-mad scientist that speaks very clinically while operating in a world where organic chemistry, if not basic physics, works quite a bit differently than in our own. It’s a way that feels inherited from fables, mysticism, and the speculative fiction of the 19^th century. In fact, early on I find myself thinking of Frankenstein, Edward Scissorhands, and A Nightmare Before Christmas, where a mad scientist brings life to the inanimate and, specifically in the last case, to a woman that he cloisters. This is compounded by Godwin’s tattered visage (his face and body are covered in a latticework of surgical scars) and at one point early on, in one of the film’s first transitions from grayscale to color, feels to invoke the pulp horror of the 60s and 70s in its color composition and use of light as much if not more than horror stories and films before the Hays Code.

Dafoe’s Godwin is obsessed with his work as a man of science, is disfigured by his father’s experiments on him, and is only begrudgingly affectionate. Ramy Youssef is his student in medical school (Max McCandles, a last name if not first name drawn from the novel by Alasdair Gray from which this film is adapted), who Godwin contracts to observe Bella, with whom he grows intrigued and of whom protective. Mark Ruffalo plays Duncan Wedderburn, a scheming lawyer and worldly cad who tries and fails stupendously to control Bella. Much of the film’s comedy comes from their conflicts as they travel.

Poor Things is a very sexual movie, more than I expected from the trailers. The film’s use of nudity evolves from feeling mildly intentionally discomforting based on the mental aptitude of the protagonist to appropriately provocative without ever feeling cheap.

Emma Stone’s performance really is remarkable. Early on, she is so effective portraying the mind of a child that I am uncertain whether it came off – such full commitment to performing incompetency that it borders concern she might perpetuate caricature and bring us an unwatchable picture. However, the nuance reveals itself soon enough, and then the character’s development through personhood and psychological adulthood provides the audience reflections of how weird our world is, boiled down to the observations of someone thrust into understanding it very rapidly by a man who offers her adventure and freedom in an effort to control her, taken her out of a castle-laboratory, with empiricism as her guiding principle.

In less able hands, Poor Things could very easily be incredibly tedious. It is instead some of Lanthimos’s most visually daring and generally aesthetically experimental work. It does retrospectively have the feeling of a novel adaptation, but I didn’t know it was one until the credits. The film’s greatest sin may be that it falls short of garnering the high-minded but bloviating and flaccid praise of alleged social importance. Its critiques are accurate but not mind-blowing. Still, the recurrence of Bella repeating people’s ideas to them reworded as observations or curious queries is a joyous experience.

The place this most daringly demonstrates itself is when sex work enters the world of the film. Poor Things does not depict Bella here as a victim but as an agent in her life, perhaps even an innovator, and certainly someone wise and fortunate enough to make the most out of any situation. It is even, in fact, due in part to her own desire and empirical curiosity which brings her to this occupation.

Poor Things is one of the better films released in 2023, among my personal favorites. It intends to make its audience think about the absurdity of our world. It succeeds in this, observing and commenting on misogyny, violence, and contortion in capitalism, patriarchy, and even colonialism. It’s bright and witty and safely away from being dry and redundant. It probably isn’t going to win Best Picture at the Oscars, but it feels like real art without being dour, and everything I thought wouldn’t work does. It’s clever and enjoyable, superior in my estimation to The Lobster, if not The Favourite.

Drafting in the CMS

I’m drafting in the CMS in the hope that not having a backup built-in via handwriting or on my PC will encourage concision. That’s not always my strong suit. The purpose of this place on the internet is for me to talk about movies, games, TV, books (fiction and non, including graphic novels and comics) at length at my discretion. This blog exists for me to discuss my ongoing cultivation of a critical attitude and identity, to discuss knowledge production and the commodification of the soul. Sometimes I will heavily edit pieces to be more in line with what a paying publication might like. Sometimes I will just allow a smattering of random thoughts to adhere or congeal into something hopefully legible. I am writing this in January 2024, as the month transitions from its middle to its late part. I am also amid transitions in my life, some of which just have to do with getting to know myself better. Fear of vulnerability has compromised my writing before, and I will struggle through that.

I’m both aware that no good writing comes without releasing something of yourself for judgment, and that the internet is no less a punitive and surveilling place than it was when I was younger. Arguably it’s even more that than it was before. This fills me with anxieties both perfectly logical and seemingly irrational. I’m not going to dig that out for you right now, but we will no doubt return to it. To courage and cowardice and expectations of one’s self and one’s community and one’s society. About the constant process of selling ourselves, about the further grinding of humanity into marketable, consumable bites.

This space, P.C. Vulpes, will undergo changes as I try to get my footing and figure out what I’m doing here besides jumping ship from Substack because of the whole Nazi thing (a bunch of writers asked “hey what’s up with all these Nazis you’re making money from and promoting?” and substack brass said “don’t worry, it’s cool, we don’t like Nazis but we’re not gonna make them go anywhere”) and because I feel like WordPress as a content management system doesn’t have the same expectations of using its users that Substack as a platform does (for instance, they aren’t trying to pivot to being a social media platform while refusing to do moderation), though I may be proven wrong about that yet. There are still many publications I respect there, and I’m not sure yet whether I’ll get rid of my Substack yet, but I’m leaning toward moving out and away.

I suppose one thing you should know about me, more than anything else, is that I think art and entertainment are important and the central purpose of this blog is for me to sketch out my thoughts on why that is and how it works. I don’t always want to care about these things, because our preconceptions about their triviality (or as I’ve so internalized it) makes me feel guilt as if I’m consumed by distraction while the world burns and collapses. But I’ve seen some journalists from Gaza that call themselves “storytellers” and I do think stories are important even if the concept of the importance of stories has been used to prop up bad art. For whatever it’s worth, I recognize that a genocide is ongoing in Gaza (alongside crimes against humanity in Sudan, unrest in Congo, and a war in Ukraine) among other serious issues that are worth your full attention. Anytime you spend here is a gift to me. I hope I make it worth your while. Sometimes I doubt the importance of art because the constraints and contrivances of what is valued widely (for instance, the box office, the metacritic score, a vaguely defined sense of “representation”) are not necessarily in line with what I find edifying, but besides that these data points can provide context, things don’t always stop mattering to you just because you realize other things have more dire or urgent consequences. I guess I say all that to say that from time to time I may just be talking about politics, but it will likely largely be in the context of writing about how art-media-entertainment-products reflect a sociopolitical environment.

Can you see it? Can you see me struggling with concision as my mind goes in a bunch of different directions? Maybe this will mostly be a place for rambling. But, in any case, it fills me with joy to write. I have a full-time job that pays me to live and I do work that I enjoy and value, and I am here writing because nothing else makes me feel the way writing does. It’s funny, with as much of it is done by typing on computers these days, that we call it writing. Be that as it may, here I am sharing it with you.

Welcome to what I am, for now, calling P.C. Vulpes.