A Big Bold Beautiful Journey: Trip or Flop

Jeremy BeckReviews
Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

He doesn’t want the GPS. Who the hell needs a GPS? He can just use his phone. Aha, the saleswoman points out, but what if his phone craps out on him? A few feeble protests later (“I don’t think it will.” “But what if it does??”), he relents and agrees to the upsell, at which point the woman exclaims in triumph, “Fuck yeah!”

There is no small degree of metaphor in this early exchange in A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, when a lonely single man named David (Colin Farrell) rents—“has foisted upon him” is probably more accurate—a 1994 Saturn from a strangely persistent agent in a pinstriped suit and pencil haircut (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, presumably improvising her thick German accent on the day of shooting). After all, a GPS is designed to guide you to a preplanned destination, allowing you to surrender your agency and simply obey the device’s rhythmic commands. So when this particular model, which speaks in the soothing voice of Jodie Turner-Smith, suddenly asks David, “Would you like to go on a big, bold, beautiful journey?” he hardly has any choice in the matter, and neither do you. Read More

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Him: Stupor Bowl Sunday

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tyriq Withers in Him

To watch sports is to subject yourself to a vocabulary riddled with hyperbole and cliché. You need to give 110%. The best players eat, sleep, and breathe the game. Athletes are soldiers, and every contest is a war. It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

Him, the new movie from Justin Tipping, attempts to literalize this sort of inflated rhetoric. It imagines a heightened surreality where a draft prospect’s training regimen takes place at a militaristic boot camp, and where professional success equates to personal survival. It takes the metaphor out of blood sport.

Conceptually speaking, this isn’t a horrible idea. By their nature, movies dramatize and embellish real-life experiences, and the obsessive character of modern sports—the players’ pursuit of excellence, the fans’ deranged zeal, the economy’s spending of billions on advertising and gambling—naturally lends itself to an outsized treatment. So the problem with Him isn’t that it’s absurd. The problem is that it’s stupid. Read More

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The Long Walk: Fear Eats the Stroll

Jeremy BeckReviews
David Jonsson, Cooper Hoffman, and other dudes in The Long Walk

As depicted in The Long Walk, the United States is a land of turmoil and suffering. Shortfalls in productivity have led to a crippling economic depression. State-sanctioned violence is broadcast in the form of bread-and-circuses entertainment. The military persecutes citizens who dare voice their dissent. To clarify, the movie is a work of fiction, not a documentary.

Specifically, The Long Walk is based on a novel by Stephen King, though its horror is allegorical rather than supernatural. Taken literally, the story’s premise—in which 50-odd young men compete in a grueling endurance test that doubles a perverse battle for life and death—isn’t especially plausible. But it’s less unrealistic than it might have seemed, say, eight months or three days ago. When the nation’s president declares war on the free press, when his toadies mount an intimidation campaign against anyone who opposes conservative orthodoxy, when TV networks suspend late-night programs out of fear of governmental retribution… well, it becomes more difficult to frame the image of tanks rolling down public streets as a flight of imaginative fancy. Read More

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Splitsville, Twinless, and the Offbeat Romantic Comedy

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Dakota Johnson in Splitsville; Dylan O'Brien and James Sweeney in Twinless

It’s been a rough two decades for the romantic comedy. Twenty years ago, the summer box office was already showing signs of intellectual-property creep, but nestled amid the Star Wars prequel and the Batman origin story and the Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton remakes were two smash-hit original rom-coms: Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. (You could also throw in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, depending on your level of genre pedantry.) In 2025, you need to scroll all the way down to #18 before finding a single romantic comedy, Materialists (and calling that one a rom-com is a bit of a stretch); at a modest $37M, it’s the only rom-com of the year to scrape its way past $3M domestic.

Were studios just waiting to unleash their laugh riots until after Labor Day? Whatever the reason, last weekend saw the release of two new comedies that, while not strictly adhering to rom-com conventions, nevertheless serve as a welcome change of pace for anyone exhausted by all of the comic-book adaptations and animated sequels. Neither exactly set the box office afire, which is a shame, given that one of the pleasures of a well-made romantic comedy is the joy of experiencing collective laughter and heartbreak with fellow patrons. That, and both of these happen to be pretty good. Read More

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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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