Features

The Old Guard, Palm Springs, and Immortality on Screen

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Charlize Theron in "The Old Guard"; Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg in "Palm Springs"

Who wants movie characters to live forever? Plenty of people, apparently, given how many films are made about the undead or the undying. This makes some sense: Reality has yet to discover the fountain of youth, so art has stepped in to fill the gap, allowing us to grapple with the dream (or the nightmare) of life everlasting. But it also presents a unique challenge for storytellers. No picture can fully encapsulate a person’s entire life (not even Boyhood), yet we still expect a certain degree of finality when the credits start to roll. How can movies deliver that necessary closure when their characters’ lives are open-ended?

Last month, two very different films wrestled with this quandary, in decidedly different ways. In The Old Guard, Charlize Theron plays the leader of a band of immortal mercenaries struggling to find meaning in a life of perpetual assassination. And in Palm Springs, Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti star as wedding guests locked in an infinite time loop, doomed to relive the same sunny Southern California day over and over. Both movies attempt to interrogate their characters’ predicaments, but only one does so with any real freshness. The Old Guard may be a sturdy and accomplished piece of action filmmaking, but it never truly distinguishes itself from the pictures it’s imitating. Palm Springs, on the other hand, improbably manages to evade the giant shadow cast by Groundhog Day, transforming into a romantic comedy that tickles your brain as well as your funny bone. Read More

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Hamilton, Eurovision Song Contest, and the Strangeness of the Movie Musical

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams in "Eurovision Song Contest"; Lin-Manual Miranda in "Hamilton"

No movie is literally realistic. People’s actual lives are not filmed by professional camera crews, nor are their conversations scripted. Even adherents of Dogme 95 accept a certain degree of manipulation when they watch movies; it’s the implicit contract between the artist and the viewer. Still, if any genre challenges the assumptions inherent in this contract, it’s the musical. Our preconditioned brains may not immediately perceive that most cinematic dialogue is far more polished than everyday speech, but we damn sure notice when characters suddenly break into song.

It’s this theatricality, I assume, which animates the canard that musicals are unrealistic. Of course they’re unrealistic… and so is every other movie you’ve ever seen. The best musicals—my own list would include A Star Is Born (1954), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Aladdin, and, yes, La La Land—lean into their heightened stature, using song and dance to emphasize their characters’ emotions; in the process, they turn artifice into art. Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to consider the two most recent musicals to arrive in American theaters on streaming networks, and how they relate to the genre at large. Netflix’s Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, the new vehicle for Will Ferrell’s outlandish shenanigans, and Disney’s Hamilton, the not-so-new phenomenon that you surely don’t need me to describe, are decidedly different movies—not just in terms of tone, but in how they depict music being performed on screen. Read More

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Why I Hate Movie Trailers

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Movie trailers

Last month, the online community informally known as Film Twitter grew abuzz after discovering that the latest trailer for Tenet, the upcoming movie from Christopher Nolan, would be premiering that evening on Fortnite. This seemingly trivial piece of information sent everyone’s hearts aflutter, though the apparent cognitive dissonance was in some ways understandable; with the COVID-19 pandemic depriving cinephiles of new films, it was only natural for them to gorge on unseen movie-related #content like zombies converging on human flesh. The ensuing discourse followed a familiar pattern of instant-reaction, a cacophonous medley of enthusiasm, disparagement, playfulness, and obsession. Responses arrived in many forms; there were breathless analyses and video reviews and screenshots and gifs and memes. If you were logged on to Film Twitter on the evening of May 21, 2020, you were assuredly talking about—or watching other people talk about—the trailer for Tenet.

Except, that is, for me. I didn’t watch the trailer for Tenet, and I instinctively scrolled past any and all online discussion of it. This wasn’t because I’m uninterested in seeing the movie; on the contrary, it’s my most highly anticipated motion picture of 2020, if in fact “2020” is still a calendar year where new movies are released. No, I didn’t watch the trailer for Tenet because it was, well, a trailer. And trailers are bad. Read More

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Underrated Movies to Stream, from A to Z

Jeremy BeckFeatures

As it paralyzes the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has generated all manner of terrifying questions. Am I going to get sick? Will I lose my job? Are my parents safe? When can my kids go back to school? And most importantly: If I’m going to be stuck at home, which movies should I watch?

The last of these questions may not be the most pertinent or existentially troubling, but it happens to be the one that I’m most qualified to answer. One practical consequence of our collective quarantine is that everyone is firing up their favorite streaming services, seeking to either escape from the world or relate to it by means of entertainment. The darkening of movie theaters may have deprived us of the communal experience—that intangible, alchemical joy derived from absorbing a work of art while surrounded by strangers—but it’s hardly prevented us from watching movies. Read More

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Ranking Every Movie of 2019 (well, sort of)

Jeremy BeckFeatures
That's a lot of movies.

Each of the past four years, the Manifesto has engaged in a fun and ludicrous exercise wherein we ranked every movie we saw that year. It’s always been a profoundly silly column, one that’s more designed to inspire debate than to operate as any sort of official statement of my opinions; for example, it’s provoked heated reactions like “How dare you disrespect Paddington 2!” and “Dude, you ranked Avengers: Infinity War 40 spots below Aquaman, what the fuck?” While I always enjoy getting yelled at on the internet, I acknowledge that these rankings are flawed, because they give the appearance of an ironclad hierarchy that doesn’t really exist. Last year, I ranked First Man 17th and Hereditary 25th; did I really think that the former was significantly better than the latter?

Still, I maintain that a comprehensive year-end wrap-up has its virtues. For one, it serves as a handy recordkeeping function, allowing me to track what I watched and (perhaps more importantly) what I didn’t. It also features a #servicey component: I always include in parentheses, along with the name of each movie’s director and its respective ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, any service where it’s streaming (Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc.). In theory, this is helpful for readers who have the ubiquitous questions of “What should I watch?” and “How can I watch it?” Read More

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