Features

In “Long Story Short,” Jews Will Not Be Replaced

Jeremy BeckFeatures
A scene with the full family in Long Story Short

Long Story Short is a surrealistic animated comedy whose plot points include wolves invading schools, mattresses bursting from tubes, and donors misplacing sperm. It’s the most relatable TV show I’ve seen in years.

This dissonance isn’t exactly unthinkable. Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the creator of Long Story Short, is best known for BoJack Horseman, the wonderfully ridiculous Netflix series that anthropomorphized animals and afflicted them with decidedly human problems. Compared to the absurdity of BoJack, Bob-Waksberg’s newest effort can feel downright grounded; there are no talking cats, no underwater festivals, no three kids standing on top of each other in a trench coat presenting as “Vincent Adultman.” But aside from confining its speaking parts to two-legged creatures—there is a cute dog named The Undeniable Isadora Duncan, but it merely barks—Long Story Short resonates with me for a more specific reason: It’s a rich and complex portrait of American Jewishness. Read More

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Sydney Sweeney Is Not Your Sexpot

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Sydney Sweeney in Americana, Euphoria, and Anyone But You

On last week’s episode of Platonic, Seth Rogen and Beck Bennett rhapsodize about the attractiveness of Sydney Sweeney. Their appreciation manages to be simultaneously crude (“She’s stacked”), onomatopoetic (“She’s ridonk-adonk”), and even architectural (“She’s cantilevered, she’s like a Frank Lloyd Wright building”), though Bennett later insists that his admiration is intellectual as well as physical (“She was the head of her high school robotics team!”). It’s a playful sequence that also proves to be vaguely prophetic, because right now Sydney Sweeney is, in pop-culture terms, Having A Moment.

To be clear, I am not referring to her American Eagle jeans ad, which dropped last month and whose purported backlash (read: a handful of people kvetched about it online) ignited a counter-assault of manufactured right-wing outrage (about “wokeness,” or whatever). I’m instead talking about the arc of Sweeney’s career: an ongoing refinement that blends sex appeal, actorly talent, and interesting choices. Put those qualities together, and you have the makings of a true-blue movie star. Read More

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Materialists, The Life of Chuck, and the Pleasure of Brute Force

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal in Materialists; Annalise Basso and Tom Hiddleston in The Life of Chuck

Movie critics are supposed to crave subtlety. We like to complain about obviousness, whether it appears in the form of voiceover, backstory, or exposition. Bluntness is axiomatically amateurish; true artistry lies in the oblique, the implied, the invisible.

I’m mostly joking, even if I acknowledge that I’m not immune to this sort of rhetoric. But directness in cinema can be satisfying, provided the story is told well. Last weekend saw the release of two new movies, Materialists and The Life of Chuck, which exhibit a plainspoken quality that’s more appealing than insulting. They wear their hearts on their sleeves and get yours pumping in the process. Read More

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I Watched All 6 Final Destination Movies in 7 Days. I’m Still Alive.

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Ali Larter, Tony Todd, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kaitlyn Santa Juana and Shantel Vansanten in the Final Destination movies

Every cinephile has their blind spots. One of the unfortunate consequences of a mortal lifespan is that we lack sufficient time to watch all of the movies we want to before we die. Some people have never seen a film by Godard or Ozu. Others have never known the glory of Citizen Kane or Casablanca. My own confession: Until last week, I’d never seen a single Final Destination movie.

As ignorance goes, this may seem less shameful than other gaps in motion-picture consumption. But the horror franchise—which originated in 2000 and methodically churned out four more entries over the next 11 years, then went on hiatus before being resurrected last week—has amassed a certain level of, if not artistic prestige, at least cultural penetration. Its recurrent and enduring premise—expendable characters are dispatched not by some masked or malevolent slasher, but by the unseen, inexorable force of Death itself—is now idiomatic. When Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey arrived in theaters earlier this year, most critics (including this one) couldn’t resist commenting that its cavalcade of tragicomic kill sequences resembled a Final Destination flick. In constantly cutting short its residents’ lives, the series has proved weirdly eternal. Read More

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Drop, Warfare, and Putting Viewers in the Shit

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Meghann Fahy in Drop

Roger Ebert famously said that the movies are a machine that generates empathy, but that same machine can also manufacture terror. Cinema is an art of forced perspective—we adopt the point of view of a film’s main characters, figuratively if rarely literally—and directors often use the medium to churn our stomachs, to make us experience anxiety and fear. Two of last weekend’s new releases, while occupying different genres and deploying different styles, share the goal of distressing their audience by thrusting you inside their heroes’ nerve-racking headspace. They may ask you to empathize, but they really want you to sweat and shudder.

Of the two, Drop is both the more conventional and the more outrageous. Directed by Christopher Landon from a script by Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Roach, it belongs to an emerging breed of subgenre: the technophobic thriller. Cells phones were supposed to ruin horror movies—why would the final girl cower in fright when she could just call 911?—but filmmakers have adapted, turning tools of salvation into instruments of torment. We spend an increasing percentage of our time interacting with screens; turns out, in addition to distracting us with cute memes, those displays can besiege us with images of our worst nightmares. Read More

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