Seeing Red Envelopes: An Elegy for Netflix’s DVD-by-Mail Service

Jeremy BeckFeatures
DVD Netflix

It was a new iteration of a familiar conversation. Speaking with a coworker about my prior evening, I explained that I’d watched a movie (shocker), and that I’d procured it in the form of a Blu-ray disc from Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service. He gawped in amazement: “Netflix still sends DVDs??”

Sadly, not for much longer. At the end of this month, after 21 years of glorious pony-express shipping, Netflix will finally close its brick-and-mortar (disc-and-mailer?) operation and focus exclusively on online streaming. In a way, it’s hard to believe it lasted this long. The company foresaw our digital-dominant present as early as 2007, when it introduced a novel plan to “deliver movies and TV shows directly to users’ PCs” (imagine that!). But it really ushered in the demise of its postal venture in February 2013, when it entered the original-programming space and introduced a little series called House of Cards, which was immediately available to binge in its entirety. (Who wants to watch TV this way, I scoffed.) In retrospect, it’s something of a miracle that Netflix’s DVD arm survived for a full decade from that point, even if the breadth of its selection continually shrank as the corporation poured money and sweat into the streaming wars. Read More

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Bottoms: Top Queer

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri in Bottoms

Justifying your own unpopularity is harder than it used to be. In the past, the ostracized heroes at the center of coming-of-age stories could take solace in the recognition that their tormentors were either stupid or bigoted; the bullying they faced was simply a consequence of the ruling class failing to perceive their true worth. But the nerds of Booksmart discovered that their partying brethren were also headed to the Ivy League, and now the losers of Bottoms can’t attribute the everyday cruelty they experience to insecurity or small-mindedness. “They don’t hate us because we’re gay,” Josie (Ayo Edebiri) says with gloomy honesty to her best friend, PJ (Rachel Sennott), as they watch a jock congratulate an effeminate actor on his performance in the school musical. “They hate us because we’re ugly and untalented.”

That assessment is unduly self-deprecating, though the wardrobe department has joined forces with Edebiri’s lack of vanity to make Josie look as frumpy as possible. (The first time we see her, she’s trying to stack multiple baseball caps atop her haywire afro.) But it’s crucial for Bottoms to establish its heroines’ putative undesirability in order to lay the groundwork for its story of improbable triumph and feminist upheaval. Directed by Emma Seligman from a script she wrote with Sennott, it’s an affirming movie that tells the tale of a marginalized sect rising up against its oppressors, claiming a measure of power and upending the entrenched social order. In related news, it’s about punching cheerleaders in the face. Read More

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Golda: Funny, She Doesn’t Look Shrewish

Jeremy BeckReviews
Helen Mirren in Golda

Was Golda Meir a brilliant stateswoman or a power-hungry extremist? A crusader for justice or an enabler of discrimination? You’ve likely already made up your mind on such matters, and even if you haven’t, Golda is unlikely to inform your opinion. Directed by Guy Nattiv from a script by Nicholas Martin, it is a thin and meager picture, providing little insight into its subject beyond a vague intimation of her tenacity. If it defies Truffaut’s maxim that war movies inevitably glorify battle, it does so by virtue of being boring.

Not bloated, though. To its credit, Golda doesn’t try to contemplate the entirety of its heroine’s life; its 100 minutes contain no flashbacks to her childhood or formative sequences depicting her political ascendancy. Instead, the screenplay adopts what might be called the Lincoln approach, attempting to build a sweeping character study by chronicling a single famous event. That would be the Yom Kippur War of 1973, a 20-day conflict in which Israel reeled from a two-pronged attack initiated by Syria and Egypt. The theory of the movie is that, by showing us Meir’s behavior in the face of this catastrophe—her keen intelligence, her dry wit, her steely resolve—it will turn a narrow slice of history into a rich and evocative portrait. Read More

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Landscape with Invisible Hand: Grave New World

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kylie Rogers and Asante Blackk in Landscape with Invisible Hand

Cory Finley won’t repeat himself. You couldn’t have blamed him, following his electrifying debut of Thoroughbreds, if he’d chosen to keep making razor-sharp thrillers his whole career. Instead he pivoted to docudrama with Bad Education, telling the fact-based story of a different sort of sociopath who preyed on people not with poison and knives but with smiles and scams. His new movie, Landscape with Invisible Hand, is also partially set in the classroom, but the malfeasance it chronicles is far stranger than garden-variety embezzlement. Early on, an English teacher informs his students that his “microscopic salary” has nevertheless been deemed too onerous for the new administration. He then strolls into the courtyard and, with minimal fanfare, puts a gun in his mouth and splatters his brains all over the concrete. Bad education, indeed.

It’s a jolting introduction, one which signals that the ensuing picture won’t conform to the sanitized standards of the young-adult playbook. But the oddness of Landscape with Invisible Hand is apparent even earlier. Its very first scene finds a young aspiring painter named Adam Campbell (Asante Blackk, from This Is Us) sketching a vista of the bright blue sky, only for his view to become clouded when a gigantic flying saucer rolls overhead. That might seem alarming, but Adam reacts with resigned annoyance—“Find someplace else to park!”—and we immediately realize that we’re watching a piece of dystopian fiction. But where many alien-invasion films traffic in terror and violence, this one is characterized by drudgery and disenchantment. Read More

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Passages: Weird Sex But OK

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adèle Exarchopoulos and Franz Rogowski in Passages

It takes less than a minute before we learn that Tomas, the antihero at the center of Ira Sachs’ Passages, is an asshole. He’s directing a movie (also called Passages), and he’s unhappy with how his lead actor is walking down a flight of stairs. Frustrated that the performer keeps swinging his arms, Tomas offers up a piece of criticism that is less than constructive: “Why do you keep fucking up?”

He might be better served asking that question of himself. But then, self-reflection is a foreign practice to the modern narcissist (even if narcissism’s classical etymology is rooted in literal self-reflection). An absorbing portrait of a consummate jerk, Passages is a whirlwind journey of desire and destruction. It has already received notoriety for its sex scenes, which are vigorous and persuasive if not quite pornographic. But it is even more shocking—more raw—as a study of gluttonous appetite and thoughtless cruelty. The callous behavior it displays is recognizably human and also utterly monstrous. Read More

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