Not far away is the Haywoods’ lonely ranch, which has fallen on tough times since the mysterious death of O.J. Decades later, wearing a cowboy hat and a chillingly blank half-smile, Jupe now runs Jupiter’s Claim, a small Old West theme park in Agua Dulce. If that doesn’t ring a bell, resist the urge to Google you’re better off hearing Gordy’s story in the words of a former co-star, Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun). This connection is driven home by a few horrifying if discreetly framed flashbacks to an old ’90s family sitcom whose chimpanzee star, Gordy, would appear to have been at least partially inspired by a real-life simian celebrity named Travis.
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(“Since the moment pictures could move, we had skin in the game,” Em beams before a visibly bored camera crew.) Even as it plays fast and loose with the facts, then, “Nope” establishes itself as something of an ethically minded Hollywood history lesson, with a particular focus on the industry’s long, brutal record of animal accidents and abuses on set. and his upbeat younger sister, Em (a terrific Keke Palmer), who run a Hollywood horse-wrangling business that’s been in their family for generations. In “Nope,” that jockey - a rare Black man in a white-dominated profession - is conceived as a distant relation of O.J. Perhaps his most pointed citation here is to “The Horse in Motion” (1878), Eadweard Muybridge’s two-second black-and-white clip of a man riding a horse.
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Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials.Īnd so while evil still lurks within, as it often does in Peele’s movies, here it also swoops and soars overhead in a cheekily outlandish story that the writer-director seems to have cooked up during an epic binge of “War of the Worlds” (both versions), “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “The Thing From Another World” (and its better-known remake, “The Thing”), “Signs,” “Arrival” and especially “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Peele is nothing if not a pop-culture savant, and here he drops any number of classic Hollywood allusions - the spinning cyclone from “The Wizard of Oz,” the cropduster sequence from “North by Northwest” - as easily as he tosses out a reference to “Saturday Night Live” and, by extension, the larger sketch-comedy world where he began his career.īut Peele’s movie love, sincere and sometimes goofy as it is (watch for multiple nods to the Dwayne Johnson action vehicle “The Scorpion King”), also comes with a serrated edge.
The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic. The labyrinthine fun houses and shadowy, subterranean depths of “Get Out” - and also of Peele’s messier, more ambitiously scaled 2019 freakout, “Us” - have given way to a vast kill zone of wide open spaces and bright desert sunshine, shot in magnificently dusty vistas by Hoyte Van Hoytema (known for his frame-filling Imax work on Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” and “Dunkirk”). Their latest collaboration, though also solicitous of your shivers, has something rather different in mind. You probably remember Kaluuya’s eyes staring into the sunken-place void of 2017’s “Get Out,” a triumph of socially conscious horror that proved his and Peele’s breakthrough.
It takes a lot to shock those eyes wide open, but what he sees now gets his attention, to say nothing of ours. Until now, during much of the story’s slow, suggestive buildup, O.J.’s gaze has been downcast and hard to read, reflecting an indifference that verges on exhaustion. Haywood (Daniel Kaluuya), who peers up from the darkness of a stalled truck as something very big and very bad looms overhead. Those eyes, wide and terrified, belong to a Southern California horse rancher named O.J.
Given all the surreally unnerving sights there are to see in Jordan Peele’s “Nope” - a debris-choked windstorm, a weirdly undulating tunnel, a circular is-that-what-I-think-it-is gliding in and out of the clouds - it seems fitting that one of the movie’s most arresting images should be of a pair of eyes.
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