Review: ‘Eddington’ is the Wacko COVID Western We’ve Waited for; ‘Eddington’: The COVID Nightmare Movie Designed to Tick Everyone Off, and other C-Virus related stories

A24 Films

Review: ‘Eddington’ is the wacko COVID Western we’ve waited for:

Ari Aster delivers an engaging, thought-provoking Western starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone.

The COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown turned many Americans into social media gunslingers, tell-all posters and disruptors who shot from the online hip and rode roughshod over reason and facts. They favored conspiracies and adhered to their own belief systems and individual freedoms, damn the consequences.

“Eddington,” Ari Aster’s “High Noon-ish” ticking time-bomb of a film set in a dusty New Mexico cowpoke town taps the collective insanity that resulted from the 2020 lockdown where few of us saw straight and viewed the act of donning of a mask either as virtuous or foolish. (It lands in theaters July 18, here’s what to watch until then.)

Aster’s fourth and most ambitious feature satirically and boldly looks at the Great Divide that nudged America into becoming a hair-trigger nation, as the pandemic moved nascent fears and resentments off the back-burners of our psyches and onto the sizzling grill ready to charbroil our indivisible nation to a crisp.

“Eddington” is an intricately plotted escalation into the absurd — a common theme in Aster’s works — “Hereditary,” “Midsommar” (still his finest hour) and “Beau Is Afraid.” It’s not perfect by any means, but does it ever have a mind of its own and a sense of sublime craftsmanship. It’s seamlessly edited by Lucian Johnston — a key figure on any Aster feature — offers an uncanny soundtrack from Daniel Pemberton and boasts some of the best cinematography of the year from Darius Khondji. --->READ MORE HERE

Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/A24

‘Eddington’: The COVID Nightmare Movie Designed to Tick Everyone Off:

No one ever accused Ari Aster of playing it safe, and following the bats--t Oedipal acid trip of Beau is Afraid, the writer/director returns with a furious and frenzied Western snapshot of our COVID nightmare with Eddington.

In theaters July 18 (following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival), the Hereditary and Midsommar auteur’s latest takes a trip back in time to the unpleasant days of late May 2020 to paint a microcosmic portrait of the pervasive hate, derangement, delusion, and daffiness that ran rampant in America during the early stages of the pandemic.

Taking aim at the left, the right, and every mad thing in-between, it’s a fierce and funny provocation designed to p--- off everyone along the political spectrum, and a caustic satire of a country poisoned by a plague that supercharged the diseases lying dormant in its veins.

In the tiny middle-of-nowhere New Mexico town of Eddington, Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) stubbornly refuses to don a mask because of his asthma, his objection to its illogical enforcement—a fellow scolding cop, for example, wears his below the nose, rendering it ineffective—and his pro-freedom convictions. --->READ MORE HERE

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