Review of “Dreams magazine”: Jonathan Majors on Shallow Rampage

In “Dreams magazine”, Jonathan Majors plays a volatil bodybuilder named Killian Maddox, probably because the writer and director Elijah bynum I thought that calling the character Murderguy Sulkface was too much on the nose. This drama of the slowdown is as overworked as the muscles of Killian – it is a steroidal portrait of a man in distress.

Why is Killian so upset? There are several reasons, which all have the same narrative weight (that is to say little) even if they go to the scale of surviving domestic violence to signify comments on his training videos. Above all, it's a film about someone's search without really seeing them. Bynum invites us to look at Killian's physique – Each AB is lit with the devotion of an advertisement for hot buttered dinner breads – then criticizes people who cannot see vulnerability under its sustainable surface.

I saw the film twice now, first when that Created in Sundance in 2023Here even more recently, and I still cannot see in Killian. He is angry, frustrated and opaque. Bynum's script includes it with a litany of problems faced by young solitary men: false ideas about masculinity, an inability to connect with women, pressure to leave a brand on the world, easy access to firearms.

“Dreams magazine” was put aside when Majors was guilty harassment and aggression and was abandoned by its management team and Marvel. Now he's surrounded Like his return. I cannot think of a more badly advised choice than this fragile film which is pitiful as a hammer, which puts no stock in the techniques of anger management which were part of the sentence of the majors. (“I do not raise my voice”, Killian repeats as an exercise.) The problem is not the film inadvertently echoes and the own history of the trauma of the children of the majors, his desire to push himself to perfection. It is that the ideas of the film on all this are so superficial that they make people feel false by association.

Most of the time, Killian is just clumsy and lost, especially in the hands of his creator, who wrote it to make a mistake through scenes as if it were freshly hatched in an egg. Killian does not know how Nothing works. Employee of the grocery store, he flirts without any way with a colleague, Jessie (Haley Bennett), By ringing the chicken breast and telling him to keep the change. He is on a combination of drugs – a shot and a powder – and it is a mystery how he understood how to buy them because almost all interpersonal encounters seem to be something he does for the very first time. Intionical, his life seems to be Karaoking the Eminem Song “Stan”, With Killian scribble of letters increasingly dislocated to his favorite bodybuilder (Sensation Tiktok Mike O'Hearn) Signed “your number one fan”. Maybe he doesn't know the song. He listens to the Death Metal.

Having mixed “Taxi driver” And “Rocky” in a smoothie, “Dreams magazine” does not give us many reasons to invest in this type. Killian saw a repetitive existence: he was injured, he stressed the eaters and he acts. The cycle becomes Bobe but it does not change. He is obsessed with a competition judge who, in 2016, called his small deltoids. This horoding and some rapid internet references are the only proof that it is not a period piece. Otherwise, Killian is surrounded by VHS cassettes and state-wing televisions and fixed lines with the ostensible excuse he saw with his grandfather, William (Harrison Page). Like all other unnatural choices, I suspect that it is mainly for aesthetics.

You feel the director's thumbs on each frame, removing any life, lightness or air. The tone is relentless and the score of slow and steep ropes is a song. At least visually, cinematography is magnificent with saturated reds, blues and amber oranges, as well as Nifty focus racks that do a good job to tell us where to look for. The camera is almost never on Killian of the Majors. But what are we supposed to see exactly?

I’m half a half that the film will eventually defend itself by saying that it takes place in Killian's psychosis. This is the only way to explain what his weight training exhibitions look like Shakespeare's performances, with balconies of people who are constantly applauding while a soloist bent on stage. Nothing and no one feels real, including minor characters like a streetwalker (Taylour PaigeColdly coat an ungrateful role) in a ridiculous costume of glitter and furs.

When the script decides that we have to worry more about Killian, it will suddenly become charming, because when it gently commands half of the menu in a steakhouse. And when the script decides that it needs more tension, it turns into a confident criminal. Incredibly, he destroys not only property and holds a victim under the threat of a weapon (while being unmasked and dropping obvious clues to his identity), but he also gets away without a puff of legal consequences.

These sequences are awkwardly counterbalanced by real world grievances on the way foreigners treat a large black man. The cops harass Killian when he just jogging. Later, when Killian triggers a fierce tit-tray with Ken (Bradley Stryker), the owner of a construction company, man calls him a monkey. It's a horrible and injuring moment. But I am not sure of the intentions of the film when Killian responds by launching food, frightening Ken's children and causing the room back as if it were a cage. Where does BYNUM place the public in this scene? With Killian and his justified rage – or with passers -by who simply see him acting like an animal?

There are too many competing and confronted ideas that are not examined. Bynum uses allusions like anvils, according to this sour note by identifying the ballad “the beast in me” by Nick Lowe. He also Killian Ransack his house to an aria of Camille Saint-Saëns' “Samson & Delilah”, “ A reference that only makes half-work because no woman here has ever betrayed it. (A man does it, but above all Killian is his worst enemy.) When he goes to an appointment with Jessie de Bennett, things naturally run badly. Bynum keeps the camera on her while Jessie crumps her face in her hands. We think that is only his last disappointment. It is the best scene in the film.

The majors gives this exercise all his ego. Even if you only see motionless frame, the majors effort put to look at the play is a testimony to its discipline. He holds the film, grimacing, sweating, screaming, so that each beat is more important than it is. It stings to see how much he tries to ensure that this script means something. Performance also contains ego books. When I saw “Dreams magazine” for the first time two years ago, it was my least favorite role that the majors never made – and I had made a duty to see each of them, to be there for the whole arc of his career. I felt like I had the ascent of a star that illuminates Hollywood for decades.

Anyone who has read more than a Hollywood biography knows that there are artists who enter the company so that their broken parts feel whole. Submitting yourself inside a character, exploring ugly emotions in a safe setting – these are means of merge reality into fiction and creating empathy. I am just a critic and certainly no psychologist, but on my second watch of “Dreams magazine”, I had the impression that Majors shared a piece of his own pain. I hope that the film has enabled him, and his character, a chance to expire.