The Assistant: Working for the Man, and the Whole Rotten System

Jeremy BeckReviews
Julia Garner in "The Assistant")

Pronouns work overtime in The Assistant. Characters are constantly discussing the whims and whereabouts of their imperious boss, but they never refer to him by name. “He’s in a meeting.” “I don’t have him right now.” “He wants you on the flight to LA.” They may as well be talking about God. You might know him better as Harvey Weinstein.

But let’s not get too cute. The genius of this sobering movie, which was written and directed by Kitty Green, is that despite its painstaking detail, it isn’t about any particular person. It is instead a searing indictment of an entire ecosystem, a culture of domination, silence, and complicity. Rather than narrow its scope to the exploits and exploitations of a specific individual, The Assistant seeks to shine a harsh light on a prejudiced and predatory industry. The paradox of the film—the contradiction that Green deploys so thrillingly and, at times, frustratingly—is that, while its ambitions are undeniably dramatic, it unfolds with an absolute minimum of actual drama. 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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The Best Movies of 2019

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists

Cinema is dead. Long live cinema.

I don’t mean to be glib. These are turbulent times in the film trade. The ever-fluctuating artistic topography that is the movies somehow felt even more precarious than usual in 2019, with industry-wide fault lines cracking into seismic shifts. You’ve heard the cries of panic: about a sequel-saturated marketplace, about a dearth of original screenplays, about viewers watching new films—or, really, digitized reproductions—on their couch (typically via Netflix) rather than in the theater. Sure, some formulas remain sacred; after all, we can still count on Hollywood churning out safe products of hagiography, particularly where musical legends are concerned. (After Bohemian Rhapsody claimed four Oscars in 2018, this past year gave us Rocketman.) Yet there is nevertheless an uncertainty gripping global cinema, a sense of shifting currents and irregular tides. Even if 2020 is set to see Timothée Chalamet play Bob Dylan, I’m compelled to note that the movies, they are a-changin’. Read More

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Birds of Prey: Harley’s Angels

Jeremy BeckReviews
Margot Robbie and friends in "Birds of Prey"

She just wants breakfast. In an era where noble superheroes and dastardly villains are constantly preoccupied with saving the world or burning it down, all that initially matters to Harley Quinn—the brilliant but unstable psychiatrist, and the former squeeze of a certain lunatic called The Joker—is that she be able to chow down on a bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich in peace. Naturally, Birds of Prey, the hectic and uneven and largely diverting new addition to the dreary DC Extended Universe, strews plenty of obstacles in her path, continuously delaying her date with culinary bliss. But while Harley’s mania for locally sourced McMuffins (“Maybe it’s the Armenian arm hair,” she muses) is just one of countless random flourishes in the film, it’s also symbolic of the movie’s playful tone and plucky spirit. If you want tedious footage of solemn warriors grappling with the crushing existential weight of their powers, go watch Endgame. Birds of Prey is all about fun.

The DCEU has tried this before, most recently with Shazam!, a lightweight yarn whose cheerful silliness functioned as a welcome corrective to the relentless turgidity of leaden adventures like Batman v Superman. Shazam! was pleasant enough, and it featured a wonderfully limber comic performance from Zachary Levi, but it was also decidedly unmemorable, with flat humor and tiresome fight scenes. Birds of Prey, which was directed by Cathy Yan from a screenplay by Christina Hodson (Bumblebee), is a significant improvement on both fronts. It channels its flamboyant irreverence in ways that periodically resemble actual wit. It also happens to be a surprisingly good action movie. Read More

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Oscars 2019: Parasite Triumphs, and So Does History

Jeremy BeckOscars
Wait, they gave WHAT Best Picture?

Every so often, the Academy gets one right.

Look, I don’t care all that much about the Oscars. They’re a self-congratulatory ceremony designed to honor the preferences of an insular collective whose tastes rarely mirror my own. Getting worked up about them is just silly. But they still matter, as a matter of historical record if nothing else. Sure, the Academy Awards can help launch careers or highlight social issues, but their primary function these days is statistical. Actors are identified in obituaries as having been nominated X number of times, while certain victories become data points—anecdotes used to spot cinematic trends in terms of genre, style, and demographics. How many war movies have won Best Picture? How many women have been nominated for Best Director? These questions are posed not just in esoteric bar trivia, but by scholars who seek to measure changes within the film industry, who participate in our ongoing quest to determine which movies we like and which we ruefully ignore. We pay attention to the Oscars because they matter; the Oscars matter because we pay attention. Read More

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