Pandepic: “Eddington,” “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” and “Smurfs”

EDDINGTON

Given that it's the latest feature by Ari Aster, you can bet that the writer/director's Eddington, as it nears its conclusion, will boast startling violence and at least one memorable death. Yet none of the imagery in the film's climactic scenes quite compares to the gasp-inducing shock presented some 10 minutes in, when a disheveled, babbling, obviously unhealthy vagrant tumbles onto Joaquin Phoenix and coughs – hacks – directly on his face.

This action would be upsetting under any circumstances. Because it lands not long after a title card has revealed Eddington's time period as May 2020, it produces an instinctive, almost visceral reaction: Get Joaquin a COVID test stat!!! Yes, folks, Aster's fourth big-screen provocation (following 2018's Hereditary, 2019's Midsommar, and 2023's Beau Is Afraid) is a pandemic movie. It's actually a lot of things: a Western; a thriller; a really dark satire; a slice-of-life drama of the sort that Paul Thomas Anderson dabbled in and Robert Altman built a career on. As a product of Ari Aster's imagination, it's naturally also a bit of a horror film, though the evil here don't stem from demonic entities or tradition-obsessed Swedes or an attic housing a 16-foot penis monster. It stems from us – or rather, the fractured, volatile “us” that had been gestating in America for decades and seemed to reach its apex, for the time, in the spring of mask mandates, self-quarantining, and the murder of George Floyd. Nearly everyone in Eddington appears about five seconds away from completely losing their minds. You could argue that the film eventually goes crazy, too. That's part of what I loved about it.

With the movie's title also the name of the (fictional) rural New Mexico town in which it's set, Phoenix plays the conservative, downtrodden sheriff Joe Cross, who, from the start, has had it up to here with COVID. He doesn't deny its existence. He simply believes it's a problem for other people in other parts of the world – Eddington has had no reported cases – and there's consequently no reason, especially as an asthmatic, that he and his fellow citizens should be forced to wear uncomfortable face masks and stand six feet apart. Beyond the disease and its mandates, Joe's chief adversary these days is Eddington mayor and tavern owner Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), a charming, somewhat pompous liberal running for re-election. Everything about Ted rubs Joe the wrong way, though it's unclear whether the sheriff is more heated by the mayor's enforcement of Fauci-sanctioned safety measures or the fact that, 20 years prior, Ted very briefly dated Joe's wife Louise (Emma Stone). Either way, and with his live-in mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell) coaxing Louise further and further down paranoia-fueled Internet rabbit holes, Joe is about ready to pop. He finally does with a spontaneous Facebook post, one in which he announces that he'll directly challenge the incumbent Ted in the forthcoming mayoral race.

When I first caught wind of this storyline several months ago, I practically salivated thinking about what Aster might do with such a juicy hook. What better, richer set-up for a modern Western – particularly a satiric one – could there be than a showdown between two warring representatives of the pandemic-safety issue? What I hadn't anticipated was how little anyone in Eddington would care about this showdown. Beyond his deputies Guy (Luke Grimes) and Michael (Micheal Ward), the only person who apparently sides with Joe is an old man who, like the sheriff, finds masks an impediment to his breathing. Yet while most residents appear to be following the mandates dutifully and a few dozen attend the mayor's fundraising party, no one appears to be visibly or vocally siding with Ted, either. It turns out that – surprise! – everyone is too wrapped up in their own views of the world, by which I mean their social media, to actively engage in something as theoretically mundane and unimportant as a local election.

Louise and Dawn become engulfed in the doomsday prophecies of cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (a hyper-charismatic Austin Butler). Eddington's youth population, most significantly embodied by Cameron Mann's Brian, Matt Gomez Hidaka's Eric, and Amélie Hoeferle's Sarah, stages increasingly vitriolic Black Lives Matter protests. (Brian and Eric, the latter of whom is Ted's son, get involved in the movement primarily to score with Sarah. Not one of them, it should go without saying, is Black.) Even Joe loses track of why, precisely, he's running for mayor – his phone, like the screens of everyone else in town, distracting him with an incessant feed of panic-inducing images and buzzwords: Fauci; Floyd; Wuhan Flu; Antifa; hydroxychloroquine; super-spreaders; lockdown. No one in Eddington, or in Eddington, listens to one another, and they're so constantly assaulted by the barrage of real and fake news that they don't have the bandwidth to hear themselves. In one of his more agitated states, during a poorly attended press conference, Joe goes on a lengthy tirade against his opponent that ends with him stating, without evidence, that Ted is a pedophile. Afterward, Guy asks the sheriff if he might want to watch the footage before posting, and is politely rebuffed. “Nah,” says Joe, “do it before I change my mind.”

This moment was pretty emblematic of the movie's overall sickening/hilarious vibe. (At my Thursday screening, it was also the moment in which our previous nervous giggles led to a collective belly laugh.) I'll readily concede, however, that there are loads of potential viewers who won't get Aster's jokes, some for the simple fact that they'll feel like the butt of them. Here's a very short list of those who likely won't feel like chuckling. Anyone who, back in '20, echoed Dawn's non-researched, conspiracy-minded propaganda, such as her claim that COVID was obviously a planned attack because someone used the term “coronavirus” in 2019. Anyone who feels a sense of indignation, rather than mere recognition, when a mask-less grocery buyer is escorted from the store and the other customers applaud. Anyone who thinks Aster is mocking Black Lives Matter, rather than the young woman herself, when Sarah doesn't notice or care that she's screaming indignation with her mask below her nose. Anyone who thinks the film is inherently on Team Ted because the happily ubiquitous Pescal is handsome and genial and Phoenix (in his most thrilling performance since the first Joker) is shlubby and cranky. Anyone mortified by Eddington's deliciously perverse conceit that, toward the finale, Antifa might actually be to blame for this community's specific woes.

Aster is on everyone's side and no one's side here, and there isn't a soul in Eddington whom he views with pure disdain. He understands that May of 2020 (one month after the month in which, as our president assured us, this whole nightmare would magically go away) was a crazy-making period. So even when characters behave abominably – and our “hero” Joe is easily the worst offender – their actions are coated with a weird yet relatable kind of empathy. If anything, thus far, connects Aster's four features beyond the exquisite craftsmanship and ballsiness of their creator, it's that his paranoid-seeming leads are always right. Toni Collette's mom really was hexing her family from beyond the grave. Florence Pugh really was being groomed against her (initial) will. Phoenix, in Beau Is Afraid, really was being forced to pay for day-to-day sins he barely recognized. And in Eddington, the big lie that Joe stages and eventually convinces himself of turns out to be truthful. No one's seemingly nutty convictions are to be outright dismissed in an Ari Aster joint, and this one also finds him playing deviously ticklish games with those in our lead's periphery, with the righteously clueless again punished and the determinedly clueless again benefiting.

I adored nearly every nanosecond of this movie, from the morbid emptiness of the town's city streets – Clifton Collins Jr. is amazing as that hacking vagrant – to the accurately detailed six-foot distancing in the grocery-store line to the climactic homage to No Country for Old Men, and the performances are phenomenal across the board. (I can't be the only one who, following her roles here and as Colin Farrell's soul-sick mom in HBO Max's The Penguin, wishes we were granted many previous decades of astounding character work by Tony-winning stage actor Deirdre O'Connell.) To be sure, this won't be everyone's particular blast of nitrous oxide. But if you're already in the tank for Ari Aster, and can find five years enough time to now laugh at what was almost unquestionably unfunny back in the day, his unsettling experiment is a deeply rewarding, oddly cathartic experience. Forget black hats and white hats. In this neo-Western, everyone is teasingly, nastily outfitted in similar shades of gray.

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER

There's a huge problem built into director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson's horror trifle I Know What You Did Last Summer. In truth, there are quite a few, among them the film not being at all scary, the 20-something cast members being universally unengaging, and the movie being a reboot of a crummy 28-year-old property that previously spawned two instantly forgotten followups and a 2021 Prime Video series that lasted all of eight episodes. But the hugest huge problem with the new one lies in its very conceit.

In the original that starred Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., and Sarah Michelle Gellar (all of whom reappear in this “legacy sequel” … even the one who died in the '97 version), a car full of youths accidentally hit a pedestrian, discover the guy isn't yet dead, kill him for real, and vow never to discuss the incident again. Hence the madman with the fishing hook, a year later, exacting revenge. In this one, though, our collectively banal group of bimbos and himbos merely cause a drunken distraction that results in their victim's car teetering off the edge of a cliff, and their chief sin lies in not saving him fast enough. Sure, the kids are responsible for the guy's death. But at least they tried to do right! Maybe they didn't scale down from perilous heights and jump into choppy seas to rescue the man from his car. They did, however, call the police to inform them of the accident before splitting, and rescue workers did indeed show up. Isn't the following summer's escalating, gruesome body count at the hands of a malevolent Gorton's Fisherman, you know, a lot for a crime that would've resulted in a three-year jail term at best?

I truly didn't want, or even expect, a bad time from Robinson's IKWYDLS, partly because the original, despite a script by Scream's Kevin Williamson, was so unremittingly bland that I figured this material had nowhere to go but up. Between the obnoxiously vocalized exposition and the performers' maddening diction issues, though, this thing was annoying from the word go, and the two or three minuscule bits of wisecracking amusement in Robinson's and Sam Lansky's script weren't enough to salvage the film's dreary plotting or inability to fashion a character you didn't want to see killed. For the Gen X-ers who might care, Hewitt and Prinze look more haggard yet still undeniably terrific as they approach their 50s, and the eerily well-preserved Gellar looks ready to jump into her Buffy wardrobe at a moment's notice. I'm not catty or cruel enough to suggest that the secret behind their own “I know what you did last summer” insinuations was “have work done.” But it would certainly make more sense than anything that ultimately happens in this lazy reboot – one whose killer may possess a hook, but whose movie is decidedly without one.

SMURFS

All told, director Chris Miller's mostly animated Smurfs isn't a bad time – a miracle, really, considering that human MVPs Hank Azaria, Neil Patrick Harris, and Jayma Mays, from the 2011 and '13 outings, were nowhere to be found. While I probably would've had more fun seeing it with a child chaperone. my favorite 11-year-old movie-going companion is now way too cool for such nonsense. So I trekked off alone for this one, and didn't feel the least bit weird about being a potential Person of Interest at a manic kiddie comedy given that, even at 1:30 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, I was one of only a dozen people there. Have we all, collectively, stopped caring about the Smurfs? If so, beyond the film's general not-bad-ness, isn't that reason enough to rejoice?

The plot concerns Papa Smurf's kidnapping and, as is necessary in our comic-book-fixated movie culture, the ultimate destruction of the universe, and it couldn't matter less. I was just happy that, while sincerely questioning my professional and life choices, I managed to smile on more than a few occasions, and even find a bit of pleasure in elements I expected to loathe. Like most of you, probably, I'm so over James Corden. Yet I'll admit that, voicing the magical No-Name Smurf, his early solo “Always on the Outside” was legitimately lovely, and rekindled fond memories of Corden's performance as the Baker in Into the Woods back when we didn't universally hate him. I'm tired of hearing famous actors scoring easy paychecks in animated flicks that don't deserve their talents, and still grinned at specific readings by John Goodman, Nick Offerman, Dan Levy, Amy Sedaris, Hannah Waddingham, and the pricelessly throaty and acerbic Natasha Lyonne. (Among the talents whose vocals I didn't immediately register were Jimmy Kimmel, Sandra Oh, Octavia Spencer, Nick Kroll, Alex Winter, Maya Erskine, and Kurt Russell – easy paychecks for all!)

Rihanna doesn't add much fun as chief protagonist Smurfette, and it's somewhat embarrassing that the chipper blue weirdos are now forced to be hip-hop and house-music fanatics because the only gal in their mix is being voiced by a musical icon who wasn't even born at the peak of their popularity. It's also bizarre that, like in the '11 and '13 versions, some Smurfs make their way to the “real world,” yet not a single real-world inhabitant here takes notice of their presence, even when they're sliding on a nightclub bar in clear view of servers and patrons. Yet expecting realism from Smurfs is no doubt a bridge too far, and I was content enough to let this formulaic, friskily voiced family throwaway do its job – including the occasionally disreputable one of having every perceived curse word replaced with “Smurf,” as in “I'm gonna Smurf you up you Smurfing motherSmurfer.” Blessedly, things never get that raunchy, and screenwriter Pam Brady even comes up with funny lines that don't abuse Smurf lingo at all. Sneers JP Karliak's Gargamel regarding all the good vibes surrounding him, “Love and a dime will get you a cup of coffee … in 1986!”