1917: Hold the Line. Hold the Shot.

Jeremy BeckReviews
George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman in Sam Mendes' "1917"

Two years ago, after 13 nominations without a victory, Roger Deakins—one of the greatest cinematographers who’s ever lived—won his first Oscar, for his magnificent work on Blade Runner 2049. I mention this not because I care about the Academy Awards (I don’t… except when I do), but because 1917, Sam Mendes’ bold and brawny and periodically breathtaking new film, seems to have been engineered specifically to secure Deakins an Oscar. Its technical premise—it purports to capture its grueling events in a single take—is not wholly novel; a recent example includes Birdman (which won Emmanuel Lubezki the second of his three straight trophies), while the conceit stretches back to Hitchcock and beyond. But in marrying the single-shot concept (or gimmick, depending on your disposition) to the epic gravity of the war picture, 1917 practically screams to be recognized for its grandeur. Some movies envelop you with the invisible pull of their craft; this one pulverizes you with the sheer force of its technique.

The single-take maneuver, though undeniably impressive, is not without its hazards. The risk of wielding the camera with such fluid dynamism is that it will distract viewers. It’s a danger of distancing; the more conscious you are of the stylistic prowess on display, the farther away from the screen you tend to feel, which in turn prevents you from melting into the immaculately constructed environments. But while my brain never quite stopped registering the presence of Deakins’ camera in 1917, that subconscious awareness did little to sabotage my appreciation of his work. There’s an elegance to his lensing, a grace that somehow magnetizes you, forcing you to grapple with the lovely brutality of his images. That distinctly cinematic paradox—the tension between horror and wonder, between ghastliness and gorgeousness, between death and life—is what animates 1917, and what makes it such a fascinating sit. Like most war movies, it traffics heavily in blood, viscera, terror, and despair. And it depicts this ugliness with what can only be called beauty. Read More

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Oscars 2019: Nomination Prediction Results

Jeremy BeckOscars
"Jojo Rabbit" earned six Oscar nominations. Well, "earned" may be a stretch.

Poor Jennifer Lopez.

On the one hand, as a rule, I abhor the “Actor X was snubbed!” rhetoric. When a category limits itself to five selections, your favorites invariably find themselves left out; this rarely means that the chosen quintet is drastically inferior. That’s especially true in this bountiful era—our Golden Age of Acting—when every year seems to offer up a dozen or more performances worthy of recognition in each of the four fields. My own ballot in the acting categories hardly ever aligns with the Academy’s, but that doesn’t render their choices indefensible; it’s just a natural consequence of mathematics, the result of a large number being cruelly reduced to a small one. Great performances are inevitably excluded, not because voters didn’t appreciate them, but because they simply admired other work more.

Having said all that: Jennifer Lopez was snubbed. Her performance in Hustlers, full of fire and sadness and compassion, is the quintessential Oscar-worthy performance. It is impossible to conceive of a Best Supporting Actress field without her. The Academy blew it.

But as I discussed yesterday when making my predictions, one of the functions of the Oscars is to facilitate complaining. Their nominal purpose is to honor cinema’s best, but they’re more interesting for what they get wrong, which is what gets people angry (and talking). The only thing worse than an imperfect slate of nominees is a perfect one.

Speaking of predictions, I hit on 83% of mine this year (57 of 69), a decidedly mediocre number. Same as it ever was. On to some quick category-specific thoughts: Read More

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Oscars 2019: Nomination Predictions

Jeremy BeckOscars
Joaquin Phoenix in likely Best Picture nominee "Joker"

Are you excited for this year’s Oscars? Neither am I. But I’m not depressed about them either. For all of the annual hand-wringing among critics about the disproportionate influence of the Academy Awards—the complaint that the industry focuses so much money and attention on a gala of glorified self-congratulation—it’s worth remembering that the Oscars tend to honor movies which are, for the most part, pretty good. You will not agree with everything that’s nominated, because you are an individual with your own specific tastes rather than a voting body susceptible to marketing, bias, and groupthink. But the lack of recognition for a performance that you loved—or, conversely, the highlighting of one that you simply can’t stand—hardly invalidates your opinion, nor does it signify the Academy’s collective stupidity.

If anything, personal divergence from the bloc’s choices is a good thing, given how the Oscars function as a flattener—a smoothing of esoteric preferences into agreed-upon safe picks. It will never happen, but if my own favorites of a given cinematic year ever precisely aligned with those of the Academy, I’d be worried that I’d lost my own taste—that my private thoughts had somehow become indistinguishable from the public will. That would be far more disturbing than being disappointed about some dubious selections for supporting actress or cinematography.

So by all means, complain about the Oscars; rage about snubs, fret about race, and long for greater surprise and imagination. Some of those grievances are surely valid. Just remember that the displeasure is part of the point.

Here are the Manifesto’s predictions for this year’s Oscar nominations in 13 major categories: Read More

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Uncut Gems: Doubling Down, on Distress and Excess

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adam Sandler in the Safdie Brothers' "Uncut Gems"

Of course Uncut Gems opens with an extreme close-up of a colonoscopy. After all, this nasty, edgy, oddly exhilarating movie is the work of Josh and Benny Safdie, those sibling purveyors of stomach-churning New York City sleaze. Their prior film, Good Time, steeped itself in grimy brutality, featuring all manner of crimes, deaths, and maulings. Their new picture, as its initial footage of a man’s digestive tract suggests, in no way eases up on the throttle; it’s another portrait of a desperate man, and it’s uncompromising in its vulgarity and intensity. Yet there’s something strange about Uncut Gems, something shiny buried within its crusty shell of unfiltered savagery and heedless aggression. It is—and I can’t believe I’m writing this, given that the Safdies’ filmmaking ethos seems to involve making the viewing experience as nauseating as possible—fun to watch.

Whether it’s pleasant to look at is another matter. With each new feature—before Good Time, they made the low-budget addiction drama Heaven Knows What, starring mostly non-professional actors—the Safdies grow increasingly accomplished in refining their distinctive style. It is not an aesthetic I particularly care for. The camera is wobbly, the music (again by Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never) is invasive, and the lighting is, well, not very light; many scenes play out in dim interiors, with unflattering illumination that makes the actors look wan. Occasionally, they subvert their grungy approach in productive ways, such as when a musician activates a black light at a nightclub, suddenly brightening the screen with bolts of neon. The veteran cinematographer, Darius Khondji, has worked with David Fincher, Bong Joon-ho, and Michael Haneke, and he helps modulate the Safdies’ signature freneticism with a measure of discipline. Still, for the most part, this movie looks gritty, sickly, and ugly. Read More

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Little Women: Sisters, Suitors, and Other Nightmares

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan, and Eliza Scanlen, in Greta Gerwig's "Little Women"

I keep thinking about the ink smudges. Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation of Little Women is a film of boundless beauty, full of ravishing sights and sounds: bright hoop dresses, handsome estates and gardens, Alexandre Desplat’s piano, Timothée Chalamet’s cheekbones, Saoirse Ronan’s eyes. But amid all of this delicate loveliness is a writer who cannot seem to scrub the stubborn streaks of pencil lead from her hands. The primary hero of Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Jo March is the perfect embodiment of Gerwig’s creative spirit—not just because she’s a talented and intelligent artist, but because her work seems to bleed with feeling. Little Women, Gerwig’s second feature following the lightning bolt that was Lady Bird, is a surpassingly elegant movie. It’s also stained with life.

Jo (Ronan), an amateur playwright and aspiring novelist, is one of four mostly grown sisters; the others (in descending order of age) are Meg (Emma Watson), Beth (Eliza Scanlen), and Amy (Florence Pugh). You probably already knew this, seeing as Alcott’s book is beloved, and has previously been transferred to the silver screen four times, with Jo being played by personalities as varied as Katharine Hepburn and Winona Ryder. And so, the question that initially hovers over this incarnation of Little Women—the same skeptical inquiry that lurks beneath any new adaptation of a repeatedly staged classic—is why it needed to be made, why it stands out. Several decades having passed since I’ve read the book or watched any of its prior re-imaginings, I am perhaps not the ideal critic to answer this question. But I have seen this one, and I can say with some confidence that you should herald its arrival not with cynicism but with gratitude. The reason to see Gerwig’s movie isn’t that it rejuvenates old tropes or interrogates long-held assumptions or introduces a literary landmark to a new generation, even if it may very well do all of those things. The reason to see it is that it’s wonderful. Read More

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