Features

Small-Screen Swagger: Six Shows Stretching the Boundaries of TV

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Aubrey Plaza going bonkers in FX's "Legion"

Television used to be a safe space. It was a repository for the comfortable and familiar: the family sitcom, the police procedural, the doctor show. After a long day, we settled on the couch to bask in the routine pleasures of our favorite weekly programs—chuckling along with the laugh track, racing to uncover the killer, wagering on the survival of the patient. We didn’t watch TV to be challenged or jostled. We watched it to be soothed.

Here’s a decidedly cold take: TV has changed. Over the past several decades—the point of origin is a matter of dispute, but most critics cite the launch of The Sopranos in 1999—television has transformed into a multi-headed hydra of prestige entertainment, teeming with hard-bitten dramas and historical epics and anarchic comedies. (It’s also grown more cinematic, but don’t worry: This is not one of those insufferable think-pieces declaring that TV is better than movies, or vice-versa. (For the record, the only correct answer to the question of “Which is better, movies or TV?” is “Yes”.)) As competition expands and delivery options multiply, showrunners are capitalizing on this land of digital opportunity, developing series that are bigger, costlier, and riskier than anything we’ve seen before on television. Read More

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Why You Need to Watch Netflix’s “13 Reasons Why”

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Katherine Langford is dead and hating it in "13 Reasons Why"

High school is a crucible. It can be at once wonderful and terrible, a paradise of joy and discovery and a battleground of spite and cruelty. It’s the claustrophobia—for four consecutive years, you spend an inordinately high percentage of your time stuffed into the same space, surrounded by the same people, chasing the same dream of escape. That pressure-cooker environment explains why every emotion, every experience, feels heightened: Every friendship is destined to last forever, every fight rends you in two, every romance is Shakespearean in scope. At times you wonder if you understand anything, but what you know for certain is that nobody understands you. And whenever something bad happens to you in high school, it doesn’t feel like a discrete event, a fleeting moment in the anthology of experiences that will shape you as a person. It feels like a cataclysm.

Perhaps I’m speaking only for myself. But I am also speaking for Hannah Baker, the stricken, haunted protagonist of Netflix’s sweeping, searing new drama, 13 Reasons Why. As played in a breakout performance by Katherine Langford, Hannah is the series’ focal point, its magnet for the emotional turbulence that so forcefully buffets the students of its nondescript suburban high school. Sad, sweet, hopeful, and scared, Hannah is in many ways a typical teenager—a drama queen to some, a wayward soul to others. She is the show’s lifeblood. She is also dead. Read More

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Ranking Every Movie of 2016 (all 108 of them)

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Much like these two, we watched a lot of movies last year

Following up on yesterday’s top 10, it’s time for the Manifesto’s silly annual tradition of ranking every movie we watched in the past year. This is an undeniably foolish exercise, but it’s useful as a recordkeeping function. Plus, it makes people angry, which is always fun.

Click on the hyperlinks to read my review for a particular movie. Per usual, for each film, I’m parenthetically adding the director’s name, as well as its Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores; both of those metrics are deeply problematic, but they do tend to reveal whether I conform to or diverge from the critical consensus. In addition, as a new feature this year, I’m noting if each movie listed is currently streaming on Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Go, or Hulu. So, even if you’re one of those worthless oafs who never goes to the theater anymore, this list can still provide you with some helpful viewing recommendations, free of charge.

That’s about it. Here are the Manifesto’s rankings of every movie we watched in 2016 (with the unfortunate caveat that I’ve still yet to see Toni Erdmann): Read More

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Ranking Every Movie of 2015 (yes, all of them)

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Jennifer Lawrence in "Joy"

The Manifesto has already delivered its list of the top 10 movies of 2015. Now, it’s time to look at the rest. What follows is a ranked list of every 2015 theatrical release that I’ve seen up to this point. It’s far from comprehensive—as ever, there are a number of films that I’ve failed to see, whether through lack of theatrical distribution, laziness, or bad luck. (The only movie that I truly regret being unable to include here is Son of Saul; I’ll be seeing it this weekend, but I just couldn’t hold off on publishing that long.)

As for the movies I did see, well, there were still quite a few. And while this post is just a pure list, I’ve added hyperlinks to the 56 different titles that I formally reviewed, so you can click over to those for more detailed analysis. Per my custom, I’m also including each film’s director in parentheses, as well as its respective scores on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, so you can see whether I confirm with or diverge from the critical consensus.

I’ll dispense with the usual rhetoric about the arbitrary nature of list-making (besides, I already did that yesterday for the top 10). But please, when you find yourself tempted to exclaim, “How could this idiot possibly rank [X] ahead of [Y]!” just bear in mind that the list is more of a guideline than a firm set of rules.

That should do it. Here are the Manifesto’s rankings of every movie we watched in 2015: Read More

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From Clone Wars to Death Stars: Ranking the First Six Star Wars Movies

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in "The Empire Strikes Back"

I like the Star Wars movies.

That may appear to be a banal assertion of preference—after all, every cinephile makes it his business to like or dislike individual motion pictures—but nothing involving this behemoth of a franchise is ever quite so simple. To be sure, Star Wars is deeply embedded into our divisive popular culture, and there are undoubtedly two distinct camps of moviegoers who classify as fans or non-fans. But for the former, what exactly are we fans of? At times, it feels like George Lucas’s saga of good and evil has morphed from a sextet of discrete films into an altogether different beast, a shape-shifting leviathan of toys and memes and videogames and literary spinoffs and special editions and virulent fan petitions. This is a perfectly happy consequence of the series’ success, and I don’t begrudge my brethren (OK, and myself) from using their passion to transform a half-dozen films into the cultural equivalent of an AT-AT, implacably marching toward its goal (merchandising!) and crushing everything in its path. At the same time, the franchise has grown so monolithic that it’s become increasingly difficult to evaluate the Star Wars movies as, well, movies. Read More

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