Hulu-ciné-shins

I welcomed a return to Hulu for the opportunity to finish the third season of Welcome to Wrexham (MC-77), and also the most recent few episodes of Abbott Elementary (MC-83).  Abbott continues to provide enjoyment in the outmoded tradition of 22-minute sitcoms like Parks & Recreation.  Wrexham, however, continues to find new directions to explore in the relationship between sports and community.  The show might have begun as a seeming attempt to cash in on the appeal of Ted Lasso by two Hollywood stars who buy an ailing Welsh soccer team.  But while Rob McElhenny and Ryan Reynolds provide an amusing throughline to the story, they happily recede into the background of the overall proceedings, which range far and wide.  The third season has fewer but longer episodes, with no diminishment of interest and enjoyment.  I eagerly anticipate the fourth.
 
But the big lure back to Hulu was of course the third season of The Bear (MC-87), which did not disappoint but did not satiate either, something of a comedown from the highs of season two.   It’s clearly a transitional season that stretches out and accommodates other characters’ stories, while remaining fixated on the inner struggles of main character Carmy (Jeremy Allen White).  Show creator Christopher Storer allows himself to go on whatever tangents he chooses, usually to good effect but with more angst than joy.  Carmy’s maniacal pursuit of culinary excellence begins to seem deranged, and Claire Bear’s absence unbearable.  Syd’s (Ayo Adebiri) future with the restaurant hangs in doubt.  The rest of the staff have their moments (Tina’s especially welcome), but this season mostly serves as a tease for the next.
 
The eight-part series Under the Bridge (MC-70) proved substantially better than its overall MC rating, even though true crime dramatizations are not generally my thing.  For me the draw was Lily Gladstone, but I’ve liked Riley Keough in other things as well.  I was reminded of the Toni Collette-Merrit Wever pairing in Unbelievable.  Based on a nonfiction book by Rebecca Godfrey (played by Keough), the series is set on Vancouver Island, where a group of mean girls are responsible for the death of one of their number, a rebellious 14-year-old whose strict parents are from India.  Gladstone is a First Nations policewoman who was adopted in infancy by the white police chief, and formerly a close friend of the Keough character.  Backgrounding the whodunit aspect, the series flashes back and forth in time and between characters, painting a broad picture of an insular community coming to terms with familial trauma of various kinds, grounded in teen bullying and infected by racism.  Consider this series a sleeper for listing among the best TV of the year.
 
With Origin (MC-75), Ava DuVernay tries to split the difference between Selma and 13th, and winds up with an ungainly hybrid that falls short of either, and would have worked better as a four-part docudrama like her When They See Us.  Presumably she wanted to bring Isabel Wilkerson’s bestselling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents to a wider audience than any documentary could draw.  She thus makes Isabel herself (well-played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) the center of a somewhat melodramatic story, and proves yet again that a writer working on a book is not a gripping cinematic enterprise.  The acting is generally good, and the research travelogue and historical re-creations are mostly effective, but they go together awkwardly, and at 2:20 the film is either too long or not nearly long enough.  Still, the argument that caste is more significant than race in the marginalization and persecution of different peoples – such as American Blacks, German Jews, and Indian untouchables – is worth pondering
 
Though hardly an auteur, Roger Michell made a lot of enjoyable films, from the 1995 Persuasion through Notting Hill and beyond – his final feature, The Duke (MC-74), adds to that list.  Based on the true story of the 1961 theft from the National Gallery of Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington – by a retired bus driver from Newcastle – this comedy-mystery stars Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, and revels in contrasts of class, caste, and region, with Michell’s light hand rather than the agitprop of a Mike Leigh or Ken Loach.  The two stars, and a good supporting cast, deliver a delightful tale of gumption and comeuppance.
 
Though you wouldn’t know it from Hulu’s home page, they surprisingly continue to have some new and impressive foreign films, despite takeover by Disney.  The latest example is La Chimera (MC-91), Alice Rohrwacher’s acclaimed film centered on a British archaeologist in Tuscany.  Now, my son is a British archaeologist whose career started on an Etruscan dig (he’s currently digging in the Republic of Georgia), but he’s nothing like the one played by Josh O’Connor, who is a grave-robbing scoundrel and a lost soul, though not without redeeming qualities.  Like an archaeologist, Rohrwacher excavates buried artifacts and seeks to explain ancient enigmas from surviving fragments.  If you’re not willing to dig with her, don’t bother to join her expedition.  Her cast offers committed support, led by Isabella Rossellini.  From the get-go, you don’t know where this film is going or how it’s going to get there, but you feel in the sure hands of a filmmaker who knows what she wants to say and can find some means to say it, even when the meaning is not immediately clear.  Oddities abound, but sense is made, as we put the disparate shards back together, with a deep grounding in film history.  The quest may be chimerical, but it’s rooted in a magical reality.
 
I read that Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (MC-80) was reverse-engineered from a desire to highlight the remarkable architecture of some of Tokyo’s public lavatories.  If so, mission accomplished.  But so much more is accomplished in this mostly-silent portrayal of a toilet cleaner (a remarkable Koji Yakusho, awarded Best Actor at Cannes) going about his daily rounds.  His mysterious backstory is filled in with a few clues and encounters, but the collections of books and cassettes in his spartan apartment suggest that he was once something quite different, having chosen (or resigned himself to) a limited and regimented existence.  Nonetheless his face registers quiet delight with that existence, and a genial response to other isolated people.  Hard to make this sound like something you might want to watch, but believe me, it's profoundly humanistic and heartening, and deserving of its Oscar nomination for Best International Feature.  I enjoyed the largely-English music soundtrack as much as the Ozu-inspired filmmaking.
 
Adam Driver held my attention as Ferrari (MC-73), as did Penelope Cruz as his wife, but Shailene Woodley is largely wasted as the other woman.  Michael Mann’s busy film does not come close to the recent Ford v. Ferrari in making motor sports the least bit interesting, but a 1000-mile cross-country race does allow for an engaging travelogue through Italy (minus the fatal car crashes).
 
I was misled by the title of The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat (MC-55) to think it was the origin story of the great Motown singing group.  And somewhat misled by a NYT recommendation, though in the event I did not regret watching, in appreciation of the stories of three middle-aged Black women, arriving in the same week that one of their number was nominated for President.  Fine actresses tell a rather formulaic and box-checking tale, spanning three decades of Sisterhood.  I was also misled by the mismatch between the younger and older actresses, though each was pretty good in her own right, led by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Uzo Aduba, and Sanaa Lathen.
 
Older movies tend to move from one streaming channel to another, but several I was interested in seeing again recently showed up on Hulu.  The Big Lebowski (MC-71), despite the charm of Jeff Bridges as The Dude, does not rank with the better Coen brothers’ films, but Say Anything (MC-86) certainly holds up as John Cusack’s breakthrough film and as Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut.  Slums of Beverly Hills (MC-68) was mixed up in my memory with the slapstick of Bette Midler’s Down & Out in Beverly Hills, but I watched to see a teenaged Natasha Lyonne, and was impressed with Tamara Jenkins’ debut feature based on her own teenage years, which she would follow up at decade intervals with the excellent films The Savages and Private Life.
 
Abbott Elementary meets Sex Education in English Teacher (MC-83), moving from elementary school in Philly to high school in Austin, and from ABC to FX so the “fucks” are flying.  Brian Jordan Alvarez is the creator and star, in the mold of Quinta Brunson of Abbott (though gay as all get-out) – he also has a crush on a hunky Black fellow teacher.  The ensemble of E.T. is not as engaging as that of A.E. so I’m not sure how long I will persist in watching, but it’s not without its sitcom laughs.
 
Hulu is proving stickier than I expected.  Emmy awards are a devalued currency, but it caught my attention that Shogun won 18 (!).  I’d gotten 20 minutes into the first episode when I decided the show was yet another GoT clone, which I didn’t need to see.  On second approach, I wonder whether it might turn out to be more on the order of Wolf Hall.  We shall see – and I shall report.
 
For a while I’ve been intending to pause my Hulu subscription and wrap up this survey.  But now I intend to re-up for another month, with the Disney+ add-on, so I’ll break off here and come back with a sequel.

Britbox and the scrapbox

[Sorry for rogue underlining that I couldn't fix in first two paragraphs.]

A Britbox special offer paved the way for me to complete my survey of Jane Austen adaptations, starting with the ne plus ultra of Pride and Prejudice (Wiki), starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, and a host of players just perfect in their roles.  In six episodes, this series has plenty of room to breathe; it’s quite true to the text and its innovations are well judged, exemplified by putting the oh-so-famous opening line into Lizzy’s mouth, thrown off as a sarcastic riposte to her mother (a horrifyingly comic portrayal by Alison Steadman).  Susannah Harker is a perfect Jane Bennet, and the relationship of the sisters is touchingly similar to that between the writer Jane and her sister Cassandra, though they both remained maiden aunts.  After thirty years, the series has been restored digitally to a pristine quality that makes settings and costumes look like new, quite a contrast to my initial viewing, from a VHS tape made by my mother off the original broadcast.  Whatever your own pride or prejudice, I defy you not to enjoy this rendition.

 
I followed up by revisiting two versions of Persuasion.  Roger Michell’s from 1995 (Wiki), starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds, remains my favorite by far, second only to the much more expansive P&P, and tied with the contemporaneous S&S.  The 2007 version (Wiki) seems barely adequate now that my original moment of being smitten by Sally Hawkins (as Poppy in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky) has passed, since the rest of the production does not come up to her level.
 
Whilst on Britbox, I took another look at Romola Garai as Emma (Wiki) in a 2009 BBC series that definitely takes liberties in opening out the book, but is not as misleading as some latter-day Austen adaptations and imitations.  Romola plays Emma believably but somewhat broadly; Jonny Lee Miller is good, if a little too hunky, as Knightley; but Michael Gambon is perhaps the best Mr. Woodhouse.  The period design is pretty reliable, with well-placed emphasis on domestic architecture, and the supporting actors are adequate if not memorable.  Going more for the comic than the ironic, the only thing this has over other versions of Emma is the amplitude of four episodes, but it does not come close to the pitch-perfect richness of the 1995 P&P.
 
To complete my survey, I returned to the 1940 Pride and Prejudice (Wiki) starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson, who both perform okay in a ludicrous MGM production that puts the “costume” in “costume drama.”  With no taste for verisimilitude, appropriate Regency design, or fidelity to Austen’s text or tone, the film plays for broad domestic comedy and goes for a mid-Victorian look, with absurd leftovers from the Gone with the Wind shoot.  The “Golden Age of Hollywood” attempts literature but reduces it to abject formula.
 
Finally, as I was about to close the book on Austen, I noticed that Hulu was also now offering the canonical 1995 P&P, plus a follow-up that I had never seen, a 2008 BBC/Andrew Davies adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (MC-79).  We’re halfway to Bridgerton here, as this two-part series opens with a “tasteful” sex scene with little reference to the book.  If Davies’ stated aim was to make viewers forget the Emma Thompson version, this was a woeful failure, with not one of the performers being more memorable than the film’s, though Dan Stevens does a good job imitating Hugh Grant.  But – E.T.>Hattie Morahan, Kate Winslet>Charity Wakefield, Alan Rickman>David Morrissey, Greg Wise>Dominic Cooper.  Nonetheless, I enjoyed watching this Bronte-like take on our dear proper Jane, and was eventually won over by Morahan’s performance in contrast to dear Emma’s. 
 
This deep immersion in Janeite lore certainly revealed the limited circumference of her world, and the repeated reliance on certain types and tropes, but also the consummate artistry of her self-described “fine brush on two inches of ivory,” and penetrating wit about the personalities within her purview.
 
So in sum, the Austen adaptations to watch are the Jennifer Ehle P&P, the Amanda Root Persuasion, the Kate Beckinsale Emma, the Emma Thompson-Kate Winslet Sense & Sensibility, the Frances O’Connor Mansfield Park, and the Felicity Jones-Carey Mulligan Northanger Abbey, with Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship as a bonus.
 
Also on Britbox, Stonehouse (MC-77) follows in the tradition of the successful Hugh Grant series A Very English Scandal, dealing in three hour-long episodes with the feckless peccadillos of a real British politician.  The title character is played enjoyably by Matthew Macfadyen, in a manner much like his performance in Succession, with his real-life spouse Keeley Hawes as the long-suffering wife.
 
Flying to and from the U.K., I sort-of-watched some so-so films on which I will report briefly.  Wicked Little Letters (MC-58) boasts Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, two must-see actresses as far as I’m concerned, and a host of familiar British faces, including Anjana Vasan, the star of We Are Lady Parts.  Billed as a “black comedy mystery,” it’s mainly a cozy BBC-worthy visit to an actual seaside hamlet a hundred years ago, where two neighbors start out as friends but wind up as courtroom adversaries.  But, oh those two.
 
Coming back, comfortably provided with better screen and headphones, I overlooked poor reviews to watch Bob Marley: One Love (MC-43), which I liked well enough, but nowhere near as much as the 2012 documentary Marley. Kingsley Ben-Adir makes a credible reggae star (more so than as either Malcolm X or a Ken), and Lashana Lynch is good as Rita Marley.  Director Reinaldo Marcus Green does what he can with a script by committee and under Marley family supervision, which does not venture far beyond the usual rock musician biopic tropes.  But the film does revive a lot of kick-ass music.
 
High over the Atlantic, I also got halfway into popular recent films Anybody But You and Challengers – do not need to see more of the former, but may look to see the rest of the latter when I can.
 
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (MC-63, AMZ) is better than its Metacritic average would suggest, as you might expect of a film that stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, Toby Jones, and Andrea Riseborough, with narration by Olivia Colman.  Will Sharpe’s off-kilter tale relates the life of eccentric late-Victorian artist Louis Wain, whose hugely-popular pictures of cats are credited with changing their cultural image from feral ratcatchers to household pets.  The film is all over the place, narratively and stylistically, but well-designed, and grounded in the touching if tragic romance between Cumberbatch and Foy.  Not nearly as twee as it might have been, absent the admirable acting.
 
Ethan Hawke has carved out a commendable career for himself, so I ignored poor reviews to watch his directorial effort Wildcat (MC-55, Kanopy), starring his daughter Maya Hawke as Flannery O’Connor.  She also plays characters in fragments from some of O’Connor’s stories, in a literal interpretation of their autobiographical impulse.  Laura Linney plays her mother, in real life and in the stories.  A lot of actors prove willing to pitch in on another actor’s film, so there are several well-known cameos.  And the overall look of the film, with its period recreations, does not bespeak a strained indie budget.  So I respond to this film as I’ve responded to the work of its subject – interesting, but not really hitting me where I live.  Still, a pretty good attempt at making a biopic out of the solitary life of a writer.
 
After this potpourri, next up will be a lengthy survey of recent offerings on Hulu.

Second-tier streaming channels

My own impressions of the evolving business of streaming, and the cut throat competition for market share and profitability among channels and services, were given a top-down perspective in a recent NYT analysis.  Personally, I’ve become quite methodical in managing subscriptions to minimize cost and maximize worthwhile viewing options.
 
To find HBO under this heading is surprising, but as MAX it has certainly devolved into a channel that is only worthwhile for free, or for the occasional month.  The slogan used to be “It’s not TV, it’s HBO,” but now it should be “It’s not HBO, it’s just TV.”  Which is not to say it’s worthless, but lacking an identity, and not worth a continuing subscription (though I continue to piggyback on a friend’s cable subscription). 
 
I confess to availing myself of Max’s incongruous live sporting events on occasion, and I’m a dedicated fan of John Oliver (who alternatively is easy to watch on YouTube).  And credit where it’s due – the third season of Hacks (MC-86) lived up to, and even exceeded, expectations.  MAX also offers a Hannah Einbinder comedy special, Everything Must Go, which confirms her ability as an actress, but is not quite as funny or appealing as the character she plays on Hacks.  The channel’s current flagship program, House of the Dragon, stands absolutely no chance with me.  I did give Lance Oppenheimer’s Ren Faire a chance to grab me . . . and it didn’t.  Established fondness for two performers led me to a couple of films in a line-up that has been MAX-imized
 
I responded to Am I Okay? (MC-72) with “Yes, you are – not great, but just fine.”  This is Tig Notaro’s directorial debut, in tandem with her wife Stephanie Allynne, and she also delivers an amusing cameo.  Dakota Johnson plays a 32-year-old near-virgin, a diffident would-be painter but current receptionist at a swank LA spa, who belatedly realizes her erotic tendencies lean toward women.  Her long-time best friend (Sonoya Mizuno), a much more confident professional woman, tries to coach her love life but with little success, and then is promoted to a distant job, which leads to friction that proves liberating to the Dakota character.  Sweet and funny, with more than a hint of Tig’s dry humor, as well as Stephanie’s lived experience, though the script by Lauren Pomerantz is reputedly quite autobiographical.   
 
I responded to Men (MC-65) with “Aren’t they awful?”  Yes, but the woman they are being awful to is Jessie Buckley, so I decided to give Alex Garland’s film a chance.  And before the film goes off the rails in the third act, it gives her the opportunity to be her magnetic self, as well as painting a bucolic picture of the English countryside.  Her well-off character has rented a large old cottage for a healing getaway, after the ambiguous death of her husband, glimpsed in brief flashbacks.  This Covid-era nightmare turns from pastoral to horrific, as Jessie is threatened by a variety of men, all played by Rory Kinnear, with not-so-special effects.  The symbolism is laid on so thick it eventually becomes ridiculous, as the monstrous turns into a monstrosity.  Rarely have I been so engaged with a film, only to turn against it so vehemently in the last third.
 
Where HBO shows were once original and inspired, now they’re more like extruded product.  Likewise, the true-crime documentaries that have become a staple.  But HBO still produces some docs worth seeing, such as Stax: Soulsville U.S.A. (MC-81).  It’s an exploration as much as a promotion, since director Jamila Wignot does considerably more than recycle delightful footage from concert films like Monterey Pop and Wattstax.  Using an ample archival record of performance and studio scenes, mixed with newsreels and retrospective interviews, she tells the story of the Memphis counterpart to Motown, featuring Booker T. Jones, Otis Redding, and Isaac Hayes among many others.  In four hour-long episodes, the music business is situated in the context of race relations in the Sixties and Seventies and of an economy where the big fish devour the little fish, so the nostalgia is balanced by social critique, where the meeting of black and white is co-opted by green.
 
In the streaming channel shakeout now underway, Paramount+ is in the process of being sold and/or broken up, and consequently is offering a month’s free trial, perfectly timed for the new fourth season of my favorite Showtime series ever, Couples Therapy (Wiki).  Rather than beating the drum for this outstanding series yet again, I refer you to my previous comments.  I just love this show, it’s reality TV made real and comes with my highest recommendation.
 
So with a month to peruse P+, I came up with some other worthy viewing.  In a round-up of documentaries, I’ll write up Oscar-nominated Chilean film The Eternal Memory.  And I was happy to reacquaint myself with The One and Only Dick Gregory (MC-79), a notable figure of my younger days, in a documentary that gives equal weight to his comedy and his activism.  You’ll laugh and you’ll be inspired.
 
Reminded by Hit Man of how much I like Richard Linklater, I was happy to give a second chance to one that initially struck me as a minor disappointment, Everyone Wants Some!! (MC-85).  Lo and behold, I discovered it on P+, the house of disappointment.  But on this viewing, I found more to like, and missed less of what I like most about Rick.  This film pairs nicely with Dazed and Confused, taking his autobiography from the last days of high school to the first days of college.  It also marks the emergence of Glenn Powell, who flowered in Hit Man.
 
Next up I’ll return to the first-tier streaming channel Hulu, and also post my round-up of recent award-worthy documentaries.
  

Net-flix-ations

I was a devoted Netflix subscriber for more than twenty years (starting with DVDs by mail), but I’ve become rather disenchanted, finding their programming not worth more than a few months viewing out of a year, and their streaming quite glitchy.  Nonetheless, it’s worth returning occasionally to salvage a few winners out of their nonstop flood of mediocrity.

Baby Reindeer (MC-88) is the most buzzworthy of new Netflix shows (and thankfully, it’s no Squid Game or Bridgerton, or any of that ilk).  Many’s the comedian who turns “their” worst traumas or embarrassments into a routine, and there are quite a number who have spun out impressive solo performance pieces.  But I credit Richard Gadd for digging deep and developing a 7-episode series about his interactions with a woman who stalked him, an older man who abused him, and a trans woman whom he loved, but not as much as he hated himself.  Very dark, but quite funny, with a message about empathy that transcends the seamy material.  He also enlists actors who make the most of their roles, notably Jessica Gunning and Nava Mau.  Though he narrates and stars himself, it’s telling that he enlisted two women directors to split the episodes, for something other than a guy perspective on his experiences.
 
One Day (MC-76) has some of the appeal of Normal People, in charting over time the relationship between a young, mismatched sort-of-couple.  And has the appeal of Amika Modi, who made such an impression in This Is Going to Hurt and here makes a refreshingly diverse rom-com heroine.  Her foil is Leo Woodall, who is certainly cute, and charming when he wants to be, but lacks soulfulness of a Paul Mescal.   They meet at graduation in Edinburgh in 1988, and each of the 14 more-or-less half-hour episodes shows them coming together (or apart) on that date in succeeding years, in differing places and situations.  They go through various humorous and dramatic changes, beyond the question of will they or won’t they, until a swerve into Love Story territory (“Love means always having to say you’re sorry”).  It’s a satisfying binge, if not an indelible experience.
 
Just before I paused Netflix back in January, I had read a glowing New Yorker profile of Jacqueline Novak and her one-woman performance piece Get on Your Knees (MC-tbd), so when I resumed NFX that was one of the first shows I watched.  As you might expect, a 97-minute aria on blowjobs is raunchy of course – but in an intellectual, highly-literary way, you understand – delivered with manic energy and stinging wit.  As lascivious as the topic may be, she stalks the stage in torn jeans and a gray t-shirt, and goes for something much deeper than titillation.  Feminist to be sure (though who am I to say?), and oh yes, it’s funny as hell, for anyone not turned off by the subject matter. 
 
Another female comic that kept me laughing was Rachel Feinstein with her Big Guy comedy special.  The title is what her outer-borough firefighter husband calls her, and with telling impersonations she delineates the cultural clash between a daughter of lefty Jewish intellectuals and the family of her working-class Catholic husband.
 
I stuck around on NFX long enough to see the latest from Richard Linklater, probably my favorite filmmaker over the past thirty years.  Hit Man (MC-82) returns him to Bernie mode, in a true-ish crime comedy based on a Texas Monthly article, with some hot romance added.  Hot indeed in the pairing of Glenn Powell and Adria Arjona.  He’s a mild-mannered psych/philosophy teacher, whose electronics hobby leads to part-time police work with a surveillance team, which in turn leads him to take on the role of a hit man in sting operations.  She is one of his targets, clearly seeking murder for hire, but also lovely and sympathetic.  He lets her go with a bit of kind advice, they meet again by chance, sparks fly, shit hits the fan.  Linklater and Powell, who collaborated on the screenplay, are both Austin TX boys, but shifted the setting to New Orleans, to good and witty effect.  The script gives Powell ample opportunity to show off his acting chops as well as his abs, as he takes on a different hit man persona for each potential client.  Ms. Arjona also has ample opportunity to shape-shift, and give off what I thought of as some Barbara Stanwyck energy.  With so much to delight, I’m not inclined to put forward my quibbles with the ending, but I am inclined to update my woefully out-of-date Linklater career summary [now done].  Score one for Netflix.  And check out this recent NYT interview, through which my temperamental and intellectual affinity with Linklater is highlighted, and in which he neatly ties the ending to his recent documentary Hometown Prison.
 
Nyad (MC-63) boasts a fully-committed performance by Annette Bening as the title character, and a highly-engaging one by Jodie Foster as her coach and right-hand woman, both Oscar-nominated and enough to make the film worth seeing.  Bening does not soften the rough edges of a questionable character on a chimerical quest (to swim from Cuba to Key West), but the film is based on Diana Nyad’s celebrity memoir and feels compelled to conform to all the conventions of the sports film.  Foster humanizes the proceedings and justifies the final realization that an individual’s accomplishment is really a team achievement.  Made by the directing pair of the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo, the film is not superlong, but sometimes seemed as arduous and prolonged as the swim itself.
 
In a similar vein, The Novice (MC-85) follows a hardworking freshman as she tries to crack the varsity rowing team at an elite American university.  It’s obvious that first-time writer-director Lauren Hadaway knows whereof she speaks, and brings long experience as a sound designer to her maiden effort.  Visuals and music conspire to turn competitive sport into something like a psychological horror movie.  Isabelle Fuhrman is excellent as a presidential scholar who works obsessively to overcome her own feelings of not being good enough, which take her down dark paths of self-harm, relieved only by occasional moments of relief and beauty on the water.
 
I take note of two excellent documentaries now appearing on Netflix, though I’ll save comment for a forthcoming round-up of stand-out nonfiction films: Four Daughters (MC-80) and To Kill a Tiger (MC-88).  Netflix is not the invaluable resource it once was, but it still has some high-quality offerings. 
 
Since I stuck around on Netflix for an extra month to see Hit Man, I was finally able to follow up on a friend’s recommendation to watch Top Boy (MC-85), the UK’s answer to The Wire.  So far I’ve only seen the four-episode first season, will definitely watch more and report back.

Criterion of judgment

[First, a procedural note:  For films of the past quarter-century, I generally link to their Metacritic pages as the best portal for more information, including trailers, cast lists, and reviews.  For older films, I link to their Wikipedia pages, with two advisories: the Plot section is always rife with spoilers (if that matters to you); and for trailers and such, there’s always a direct link at the bottom to the film’s IMDb page, among other useful links.  So you never have to take my word alone on whether a film is worth seeing.]
 
Before I get started on another long celebration of the Criterion Channel, I want to highlight the next best streaming source for wide-ranging classics old and new, foreign and documentary, film and tv, namely Kanopy, which is available free through participating libraries, academic or public.  You’ll see the channel cited frequently as the place I found a film, sometimes when available on another channel that I don’t have a subscription to, and sometimes when I haven’t been able to find it any other place at all.
 
Such as four Eric Rohmer films that follow up nicely on one of my previous Criterion roundups, which led with the revival of Rohmer’s “Tales of Four Seasons” from the 1990s, and now Kanopy popped up with two of his “Comedies & Proverbs” from the 1980s, and two other anthology films from the same period.
 
First off, The Aviator’s Wife (Wiki), not remembered as one of my favorites, but this time around I appreciated the Rohmeresque irony of the title character never appearing in the film, and I took to Marie Riviere as l’autre femme more in the context of her other roles for Rohmer over the years.  It can all seem quite inconsequential unless you are attuned to his wavelength, with its everyday blend of eros, humor, and philosophic insight.  As much as Truffaut, Rohmer was a “man who loved women,” though perhaps less of a libertine and more a fond aesthetic admirer of youth and beauty.
 
It wasn’t till the final scene that I definitely remembered seeing Boyfriends and Girlfriends (Wiki), yet another amorous roundelay among young people looking for a proper mating.  Whether in Paris or various vacation venues, Rohmer is always attentive to architecture and environment, and this time it’s a newly-built satellite city around Paris, and a shifting group of young professionals.  This film is delightful, even if not memorable, in the long frieze of Rohmer’s portraits of desiring and desirable young people.
 
Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (Wiki) was definitely new to me, a country-mouse/city-mouse story of two young women who meet in the countryside and then room together in Paris, in four discrete episodes of understated humor.  This print seemed to be substandard, but the film itself is very much of a piece with Rohmer’s other work, and I was happy to see it.
 
Rendezvous in Paris (Wiki) details three separate anecdotes, in which different young characters meet up in a café, various parks, or the Picasso museum.  Each episode seemed fresh to me, even though I showed the third in my own anthology program at the Clark.  I’d almost recommend this as an introduction to Rohmer if you aren’t particularly familiar with his work, even before his acknowledged masterpieces.  If you like this, there’s plenty more where that came from.
 
While I was focused on other channels, Criterion accumulated several highly-rated streaming premieres.  First off, there was Our Body (MC-93), a Frederick Wiseman-like documentary about a French gynecological hospital, with one of 2023’s highest Metacritic ratings.  To tell the truth, for me it went from must-see to can’t-watch, given my squeamishness.  An admirable piece of work, but too much for my delicate sensibilities.
 
Then came two films high on my must-watch list.  Tótem (MC-91) is a dense and intimate family portrait as seen through the watchful, empathetic eyes of a 7-year-old girl.  It’s the birthday of her father, an artist who is dying of cancer.  With her, we are thrown into the maelstrom of an extended Mexican family, breaking down and re-forming around the tragedy of a beloved younger son.  The patriarch is a grumpy psychologist with his own medical problems.  Two elder sisters are putting on the party for their sick brother, but from clashing perspectives.  The central girl, Sol, has younger and older cousins, and a fascination for small living things around her, as she is told not to bother her father, who is resting up for the party.  In a tight frame, with long up-close takes, we follow as Sol begins to put together a picture of a family coping with the unstated presence of death in their midst.  Her mother drops her off in the morning, leaving her (and us) to spend the day trying to make sense of what is going on around her, and then the mother returns for the party and a stunning celebratory performance they have worked out together.  Lila Avilés has crafted a small film of major import, full of life under the shadow of mortality,
 
A new film from acclaimed Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is always an event, though sometimes a prospect of endurance more than enjoyment, so I spread the 3¼ hour running time of About Dry Grasses (MC-87) over several evenings.  It’s slow-moving and extremely talky, but decidedly interesting, Chekhov filtered through Antonioni.  Set in desolate, wintry Eastern Anatolia, it follows three teachers who wind up on this remote posting for differing reasons.  One is a discontented art teacher who seems to have an inappropriate relationship with a middle school girl.  He and his roommate each form a relationship with a woman from another school who lost her leg in a terrorist bombing (Merve Dizdar won Best Actress at Cannes).  The film moves from desolate widescreen landscapes to crowded dark rooms, with long takes, stationary camera, and extended conversations with very little resolution.  So – not for everyone, but riveting for anyone who can get on Ceylan’s wavelength.
 
I missed a dimension of Anselm (MC-82), since Wim Wenders’ portrait of Anselm Kiefer is meant to be seen in 3-D, but I still found it engaging, though I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unfamiliar with the famous German artist.  There’s no narration and little speech altogether.  It’s mostly just Kiefer wandering around the large industrial estate where he produces and displays his art, in an installation as monumental as James Turrell’s Roden Crater.  For me it was enlivened by prior accounts from a friend who had visited both.  Kiefer is played as an 8-year-old boy in reenactments that convey what little is offered of his biography, and for later years there’s news footage of various sorts.  This documentary is reliant on how much interest and patience you bring to it.
 
Amanda (MC-81) is a privileged pain-in-the-ass post-adolescent, returned from college abroad and feeling stifled as she lazes about her parents’ mansion and tries futilely to connect with any other being, human or otherwise.  This is the debut film of Carolina Cavalli, and I appreciated its aura of authenticity as well as absurdity, sort of like a Milanese Lady Bird.  Amanda, a character made palatable by Benedetta Porcaroli’s portrayal, finally finds a best friend as aberrant and abrasive as herself, a match made in heaven, or some other place.
 
Unrest (MC-75) is an oddity that intrigued me, but seems unlikely to appeal to many.  The matter is significant, but the manner off-putting.  The story is set among Swiss watchmakers in the 1870s, when the engine of global capitalism is revving up, while the local workers strive to organize an anarchist commune, under the watchful eye of Pyotr Kropotkin.  The workers are primarily craftswomen doing incredibly detailed work, including placement of the all-important “unrest” wheel.  Much of the camerawork is off-center, from a security-camera-like distance where the viewer frequently cannot tell who’s speaking, among small figures crowded into a corner of the frame.  There are compelling close-ups of the painstaking work, some of the long shots privilege the natural background over the dialogue, and the viewer feels relief and impact when actually able to see the face of the person speaking.  But overall, all sorts of interesting notions about politics and economics, about timekeeping and working conditions, are adumbrated indirectly and offhand, some quite humorously.  The Swiss director keeps his distance even though (or maybe because) the subject is part of his family history.

Criterion always has one or more Noir collections running, with an unusual angle taken on 1950 Peak Noir, which includes noir-inflected classics such as Sunset Boulevard, In a Lonely Place, and Panic in the Streets, all of which I admired but didn’t feel the urge to see again.  What first caught my eye was a Barbara Stanwyck that I’d never seen before, and wanted to add to my career retrospective.
 
The File on Thelma Jordon (Wiki) remakes the story of Double Indemnity, with Stanwyck as the femme fatale luring a supposedly wised-up guy into becoming an accomplice to her own dastardly plot.  She is reliably great with whatever material she’s given, but Wendell Corey is no Fred MacMurray.  And I might have said that Robert Siodmak is no Billy Wilder, but instead I made a note to look for other films he directed, since this had a very distinctive look and style, even when saddled with a wooden male lead and a fairly nonsensical script.  It’s not among Stanwyck’s unmissable performances, but displays her characteristic quality work.  And served as an entrée into other viewing from one of my toddler years.
 
Joan Crawford is not among the old Hollywood divas that I’ve fallen for, but I gave The Damned Don’t Cry (Wiki) a try because it was supposed to reflect her own rise from rural poverty to stardom, and be loved in particular by her fans.  God knows it was campy enough to verge on self-caricature, but I had no conception that it was based on the same situation as Warren Beatty’s Bugsy – let’s just say Joan Crawford is no Annette Bening.
 
I’d watched a few films in a recent John Garfield collection, but didn’t catch The Breaking Point (Wiki) till it appeared in this 1950 collection.  A reworking of Hemingway’s To Have and To Have Not, this version is not highjacked by Bogie-Bacall chemistry as it pairs Garfield with Patricia Neal in a smaller but still effective role as a tramp.  Michael Curtiz directs with finesse, and Garfield demonstrates why he was a major star, anguished and soulful as a boat owner who must resort to smuggling, with mountingly disastrous results.   Within two years, hounded by HUAC, he would be dead of a heart attack at 39.
 
Caged (Wiki) has been called a “Camp classic,” but is something more than that, coming soon after The Snake Pit and leading to a whole subgenre of Women in Prison pictures (persisting all the way to Orange is the New Black).  It’s well-directed by John Cromwell, with a reasonable amount of verisimilitude and a pair of Oscar-nominated performances.  Eleanor Parker is surprisingly good in transforming from pregnant teen bride, jailed as accomplice to her husband’s fatal armed robbery, into a hard-bitten criminal in course of her sentence.  Hope Emerson plays the Nurse Ratchet-like prison matron, and Agnes Moorehead the reform-minded warden.  While not without its preposterous elements, the film is generally a serious-minded affair.
 
I’ve never really understood why some people consider Nicholas Ray to be a great director, and Born to be Bad (Wiki) does not change that.  And I’ve never seen much in Joan Fontaine, and her simpering mendacity here doesn’t change that.  Not quite bad enough to be good.

Not sure how I never saw a film as renowned as John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (Wiki), but I was happy to catch it at this late date, as the template for so many jewel-heist capers.  One of the epochal noir masterpieces, this crisply-made crime drama is dotted with memorable performances, from Sam Jaffe as the Germanic mastermind to Sterling Hayden as the muscle he recruits to Louis Calhern as the shady lawyer who bankrolls the operation and a startlingly young and magnetic Marilyn Monroe as his girl on the side.  Jean Hagan and James Whitmore are also effective in supporting roles.  Of course there’s the caper and its unraveling, but for me the character development impressed most, hardboiled but something deeper too.
 
I wrapped up this calendrical cross-section by watching an Alfred Hitchcock film that I hadn’t seen before, Stage Fright (Wiki).  His return from Hollywood to England is less a murder mystery than a comedy about stage acting, with Marlene Dietrich as a swan-like chanteuse (whose husband is the victim) and Jane Wyman as the acting student who takes on various real-life roles to try to clear her long-time friend (Richard Todd) of suspicion, while deceiving the police officer (Michael Wilding) who wins her heart.  The supporting cast is sterling, and the dialogue witty, though it’s not very stirring as a thriller.
 
Whoops, one more 1950 film that I’d never seen, Night and the City (Wiki), not to be confused (as I was) with The Naked City, which has Jules Dassin also moving to London, in the midst of being blacklisted in Hollywood.  Richard Widmark goes with him as a dreaming and scheming American, a tout scrounging around for money before trying for a big score as a wrestling promoter, where he runs into a rough crowd.  As with his earlier film about NYC and his later film about Cleveland (see below), Dassin demonstrates a distinctive, sometimes overwrought thriller style and relies on location shooting for his action scenes.  Considered too dark upon release, the film is now taken as an epitome of noir.
 
(N.B.  Many of the films in the “1950 Peak Noir” collection will depart the channel at the end of June, but many will return in other collections, or can be found on other streaming channels.)
 
While immersed in the era of Hollywood films around the time of my birth, I watched two other noirish films. Undercurrent (Wiki) is not what you expect from director Vincente Minelli or stars Katherine Hepburn and Robert Mitchum.  She’s a scientist’s daughter, falling for the businessman who buys his invention, only to discover he is not the man she imagined.  And the brother whom he despises (Mitchum) is the opposite of what he claims.  It’s all quite implausible, but not offensively so.
 
In The House on Telegraph Hill (Wiki), Valentina Cortese is another woman married to a man (Richard Basehart, whom she married in real life) who is not what he seems.  But then neither is she, having taken the identity of a friend who died in their displaced persons camp after WWII.  In this Robert Wise film, the couple comes together for highly mixed motives and goes to live in a scenic San Francisco mansion, where nasty business is afoot.  Another white knight emerges to save our beleaguered heroine, in this tale from back in a previous age when gaslighting was à la mode.
 
I also sampled a couple of films, new to me, in a recent collection called “Hollywood Crack-Up” containing American films from the 1960s depicting societal or psychological breakdown, from The Manchurian Candidate to Pretty Poison.
 
Uptight (Wiki) is a remarkable document, if not a good film.  Jules Dassin imports the plot of The Informer from Dublin in 1922 to Cleveland in 1968, about a Black Panther-like group instead of the IRA.  The film is colorful in several senses, and highly stylized, but I was particularly struck by some remarkable location footage in The Flats at the time I was working down there, and around the Hough neighborhood, from when I was driving through that area while the streets were occupied by the National Guard.  So I was willing to overlook the film’s declamatory staginess for that window back in time, as it opens with MLK’s funeral and surveys a cross-section of Black responses to the tragedy.  Frequently over-the-top and stereotypical, and hampered by the source material, this film is still a worthwhile time capsule.
 
Pressure Point (Wiki) has a surprisingly current resonance (post-Charlottesville, “very fine people on both sides,” and all the rest), flashing back from 1962 to 1942 as prison psychiatrist Sidney Poitier tries to treat an unrepentant Nazi seditionist, startlingly well played by pop singer Bobby Darin (“Somewhere across the sea . . .”).  Based on a case study in Robert Lindner’s The Fifty-Minute Hour, and well directed by Hubert Cornfield, it’s another evocative time capsule, speaking to the state of psychiatry as well as politics.  (And also hearkens back to Poitier’s doctor-treating-racist role in No Way Out, included in the “1950 Peak Noir” collection.)
 
Postcards from the Edge (1990, MC-71) has worn well.  Criterion had it in a collection of Shirley MacLaine movies, but I was most interested in Meryl Streep’s acting (and singing).  Mike Nichols directs Carrie Fisher’s story, based loosely on her relationship with her mother, Debbie Reynolds.  It’s a lively and funny Hollywood story, with many stars and stars-to-be parading through.
 
Criterion curates 4-8 new collections each month, so there’s always something new to explore in some depth.  (Which means some films leave each month as well.)  In June, there are new career retrospectives for the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Paul Schrader, and Céline Sciamma, each containing films well worth seeing or re-seeing. There are also clever thematic collections, which combine to make Criterion the one indispensable streaming channel, for which I have a charter annual subscription that comes to $8.33 per month.
 
In a previous compilation of Criterion reviews, I wrote at some length about my admiration for the filmmaker Mia Hansen-Love, and then on Kanopy I found her precocious first feature film All is Forgiven (MC-85), made in 2007 but not released in the U.S. till 2021.  What’s most impressive is how her distinctive observational style was established right from the beginning.  This is a bifurcated story about a bifurcated couple, earnest Austrian professional woman and French would-be poet, a layabout devoted to drugs and drink.  Inevitably they split up, and the mother forbids any contact between father and daughter.  Jumping ahead a dozen years, the girl is a senior in high school (played beautifully by the older sister of the young girl), and her cleaned-up father tries to reconnect.  Don’t expect resolution from Hansen-Love, but count on intimate exploration of everyday realities.
 
That leads me to two other films I caught up with on Kanopy, to use my “tickets” before they expired at the end of the month (with a library card, you get to watch a certain number of films and tv series per month).
 
I’ve recently been on the lookout for films starring Virginie Efira, so Revoir Paris (MC-71) caught my eye.  I didn’t know what it was about, or that the role had won her a César for Best Actress, but Alice Winocour’s film was well worth finding.  Directly inspired by Islamist terror attacks in 2015, it follows a survivor who struggles to piece together memories of the event after she had blacked out the experience.  Like a detective, she follows clues to recreate the story, and finds a measure of healing by communing with other survivors in solidarity.  The horrific event is sensitively handled, and other perspectives amplify the central character’s experience.  Politics aside, the film offers immersion in the psychology and sociology of trauma, and another striking performance by Efira, who makes any film she’s in worth your time.
 
The Royal Hotel (MC-77) is a witty misnomer for a godforsaken bar deep in the Australian outback, where two vagabond American girls wind up when their money runs out.  I’d been impressed by director Kitty Green’s #MeToo first feature The Assistant, and my summation applies equally to this film: “This is a horror story of everyday life, relying on suffocating detail and observation, rather than melodrama.”   This one also stars Julia Garner, along with Jessica Henwick, as the two women tend bar to earn money to move on, serving a virtually all-male clientele of miners, with sexual harassment a given and the threat of violence always present.  Subdued but tense as any thriller, the film suffers from a would-be cathartic ending, like waking up from a bad dream.
 
You can bet I’ll be back soon with another round-up of Criterion and Kanopy titles, but next I’ll be dipping back into Netflix and then Hulu for updates, with another round-up of recently acclaimed documentaries. 

Reunion with Jane Austen

I recently reread, rewatched, and reviewed Mansfield Park, which launched me on a deeper dive back into one of my very favorite authors, and all the adaptations since the immortal (and unsurpassed) Jennifer Ehle-Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice from 1995 (of the 2005 version with Keira Knightley there is no need to speak).  I read several biographies, reread Persuasion, and then undertook to slow-read Emma, savoring a few pages at a time and delighting in all the ironies and foreshadowings, as well as the penetrating psychology of it all.  So then I had to go back and see which adaptation best fulfilled my vision of the book.
 
Given her subsequent history, I was quite surprised to find Gwyneth Paltrow a perfectly decent Emma (1996, MC-66, AMZ), if a little swan-like, in Douglas McGrath’s lively but thoroughly Miramax-ed adaptation.  Toni Collette as Harriet Smith and Ewan MacGregor as Frank Churchill are good, Jeremy Northam is appealing if not severe enough as Mr. Knightley, but Juliet Stevenson steals the show as Mrs. Elton.
 
It wasn’t that long ago that I enjoyed Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma (2020, MC-71), but on re-viewing after recent re-reading, I was much more intolerant, not so much with the highly-stylized and unhistorical design (first-time feature director Autumn de Wilde’s background was in music videos) as with a bad tendency to misrepresent the psychology of the characters and to invent scenes and dialogue that are just plain wrong.  None of the performances are natural or definitive.  Not as objectionable as the 2005 P&P, and fine for anyone who doesn’t realize what they are missing.
 
Nonetheless, I’ve long thought that Kate Beckinsale was the perfect Emma (1996, Wiki), and now even more so.  The rest of the cast is top-notch as well, with unbeatable performances from Samantha Morton as Harriet, Mark Strong as Knightley, and Olivia Williams as Jane Fairfax.  As with so many Austen adaptations, the script is by Andrew Davies, and the production team came over from the Ehle-Firth P&P, though in more abridged fashion.  This film features a valuable new take on the sociological dimension of the story, by showing how the lifestyle of the characters is supported by the arduous labors of servants.
 
I’m leery of algorithms, but glad for the one that took me directly to another Beckinsale-in-Austen adaptation, Love & Friendship (2016, MC-87).  Where twenty years before, Kate had played an immature young woman as conceived by a mature Austen, here she plays the older Lady Susan – the most accomplished flirt in England – as imagined by the teenaged Jane.  Whit Stillman’s adaptation re-teams Beckinsale with Chloe Sevigny in a film that made my best of the year list at the time, and holds up quite well.
 
This survey prompted me to take yet another look at Sense and Sensibility (1995, Wiki), which may be taken to have started the Jane Austen boom in film adaptations.  Wow, it’s still great.  Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning script makes the most of the only Austen novel I have no interest in rereading, her first to be published.  She is also perfect as the sensible older sister, while a startlingly young Kate Winslet is superb as the sensitive younger sister.  Counterintuitively, Ang Lee was a wonderful choice to direct, with a fresh eye for the English countryside and a knack for social satire and family drama.  The supporting cast is exceptional, with many stars-in-waiting.
 
Roger Michell’s 1995 adaptation of Persuasion (Wiki) with Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds ranks at or near the top of my favorite Jane Austen movies, and there’s a 2007 BBC version (Wiki) with an admirable Sally Hawkins that’s pretty good as well.  (Reviewed here and here.)  I found the Netflix version of 2022 unwatchable, with an utterly miscast Dakota Johnson (as bad as Keira Knightley in P&P).
 
Did I somehow miss Northanger Abbey (Wiki) when it appeared on Masterpiece in 2007, or was I simply not astute enough to recognize the stars that Felicity Jones and Carey Mulligan would become, and passed over it as a mere TV movie not worth a review.  At any rate, I recently caught it on Kanopy, and whether I’d forgotten or not, was very happy to see it this go-round.  Felicity (though two years older IRL) is the young ingenue new to Bath taken in by marital schemer Carey.  As with so many British costume dramas, the character acting is good across the board, the settings and costumes first rate, and here one of Jane Austen’s slighter works, a parody of popular gothic novels, is handled with an appealing lightness.
 
Now I am back into re-reading Pride and Prejudice, and I’ll return with a postscript after taking another look at the canonical 1995 adaptation, and maybe even the one from 1940 with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier.  Perhaps I’ll even take another look at Romola Garai as Emma. 
 
To whom I revert for a final thought.  Famously, Jane Austen believed no one would like her title character, except herself.  Famously, she has been proved wrong.  Emma Woodhouse is no Emma Bovary, but in her own way just as selfish and self-deluded.   Nonetheless her playfulness, wit, and good nature balance off her snobbery, privilege, and amour-propre.  In her most mature work, Austen draws on her own younger self with satire and indulgence, and portrays in the person of Mr. Knightley the wisdom and acuity gained over time.
 
Paltrow gets the pampered princess, Taylor-Joy gets the supercilious snob, but Beckinsale gets it all, but most of all Emma’s youthful delight in her own small world, and her own active brain.
 
The Austen boom has petered out with lackluster extensions like Sanditon or pale imitations like Bridgerton, in which I take no interest, but leaves behind a handful of masterpieces.  Without shame, I declare myself a genuine Janeite, both in print and on screen.        

Consumer advisory

Since cable-cutting many years ago, I have lived almost exclusively in a streaming universe, and this blog has reflected that.  I was also an early adopter of the practice of rotating streaming channel subscriptions, to make sure the total monthly outlay was a mere fraction of what cable tv costs.  With sports fanaticism confined to my birthplace teams, the Guardians and Cavaliers of Cleveland, my fervor was simply fed by MLB and NBA passes, so I did not pine for broadcast tv at all.
 
Come the playoffs this month, and hopes high for my Cavaliers, streaming was sometimes preempted by network games, which meant going out to watch at a bar with a friend, or avoiding all news until the game could be streamed on delay.  Serendipitously, I happened upon an offer for YouTube TV, a 21-day free trial followed by three months at $15 off the usual $73. 
 
The Cavs expired before the free trial did, so I had no reason to continue, but I have to say that I was very impressed with the service, and would recommend it to any cable tv subscriber who is concerned about losing their familiar setup, with all the usual channels and DVR function.  YouTube TV replicates the cable experience with a very smooth interface and a much simpler remote.  The service was superfluous to me personally, but for anyone who is still hesitant to cut the cord, you’re likely to find it a very reassuring transition, with access to sports, news, and other live programming, and still a significant savings over the usual cost of cable tv.
 
While I’m at it, let me also flag YouTube itself as a streaming channel that can fill in a lot of regular tv viewing.  I use it to watch favorite regular programs like Stephen Colbert or Seth Meyers monologues, SNL skits, PBS Newshour segments, and the like.  So I never miss the typical channel-surfing experience.  To me it makes much more sense to pick and choose one’s viewing carefully than to drown in a flood of indiscriminately bundled content.
 
I’m not usually one to plug a megacorporation, but credit where its due, I thank Google for the free trial, and decidedly recommend YouTube TV, if you’re into that sort of thing. 

TV past peak

We may have passed the glory days of prestige TV.  With the glut of streaming options, channels like Netflix and HBO are turning from pricey productions like The Crown or Succession toward cheaper, crowd-pleasing, pre-sold programs to keep the firehose of content gushing.  Covid shutdowns, and strikes by writers and performers, have also thinned out the quality of product in the pipeline.  So here we survey the so-so offerings from several secondary sources.

There are still gems to discover – case in point: the third season of Slow Horses (MC-82), in which AppleTV’s continuing adaptation of Mick Herron’s “Slough House” series of spy novels really finds its groove, after its promising start.  Superior acting and dialogue, clever plots and stylish directing, general wit and verve – all conspire for shameless entertainment.  Gary Oldman has become even more seedy and disheveled as the leader of a disreputable cohort of MI5 rejects.  He’s caustically dismissive of his crew, and could easily pass for homeless himself, but he has a mind that instantly integrates disparate details together with a view of the big picture.  I would have preferred the last two episodes (of six) to have more plausibility, fewer bullets flying, and a lower body count, but oh well, if the makers have to appeal to the Ian Fleming as well the John le Carré crowd, then so be it.  I’ll look forward to the next six episodes that are already in the can.

Also new on AppleTV is Masters of the Air (MC-73), following the lauded Band of Brothers and The Pacific as the third in a series produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, portraying the experiences of American military men in different theaters of World War II.  It follows the men and Flying Fortresses of the Eighth Air Force on daylight bombing raids over Nazi Germany.  Many of the planes go down, and many of the men wind up in prisoner of war camps, or psychiatric facilities where they might have met the young doctor who was the father of my watching partner, which was my point of entry on yet another story of aerial combat in WWII.  The in-flight action is as gripping as a video game, and if the characterizations are paper-thin, the immersive experience of flying in a tin can under relentless fire from flak and fighter planes clearly establishes why so many of the surviving men needed psychiatric care.  Other than dazzling pictorial recreation, this is a standard-issue WWII drama, of the sort I grew up with while playing with plastic toy soldiers.

Apple does put money and care into their history-based series and, like Dickinson, Manhunt (MC-65) is a generally veristic look at America in the mid-19^th century.  But where Dickinson used anachronism consciously to satiric effect and retained fidelity to historic fact, Manhunt simply absorbs historical coloring to tell a typical police procedural.  I gave it a try, since Jill Lepore used the series as a jumping off place for a serious historical essay in the New Yorker, but by the fourth episode, the fakery wore me down and I bailed.  So I was leery of Franklin (MC-57), even though it was based on a Stacy Schiff biography – I’ll have to see rave reviews before I give it a try.

On the other hand, I was rather engaged by the first several episodes of Sugar (MC-67).  In my selective viewing I’ve always liked Colin Farrell, who plays the title character, an LA P.I. with many noirish predecessors, from Philip Marlowe to Jake Gittes.  And ever since The Wire, I’ve had fondness for Amy Ryan.  He’s not as rough as many a detective, and she’s sweeter than the usual femme fatale.  Everything else is something you’ve seen before, and are seeing all over again, explicitly in quick clips from old movies.  So all that attracted me, while a variety of stylistic tics put me off.  Having read allusions to a very alienating twist in episode six, I was quite content to stop when my current Apple subscription expired, but might find reason to continue with the series in the future.  

Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine followed up on their excellent Apple documentary Boys State with Girls State (MC-76), which is also very good, but in quite a different way.  In fact, that difference becomes the main throughline of the film.  This time we are in Missouri, where the boys and girls are meeting at the same time on the same campus, separate and decidedly unequal.  Where the boys focus on issues and replicate the partisanship of national politics, the girls focus on icebreakers, girl power, and solidarity.  Though filmed shortly after the Supreme Court leak about the reversal of Roe v. Wade, it barely registers as an element of debate even though differing views on abortion are broached in conversation.  With the contrast right in their faces, the girls come together over their disparate treatment from the boys, and overcome their otherwise differing views.  Seven camera-sound pairs, all female apparently, follow a diversity of appealing and sympathetic characters, as they run for various offices and subject their views to unfamiliar perspectives.

I’m deep into rereading Jane Austen and now in the middle of Emma, so when I noticed Clueless (1995, MC-71) on Apple, having seen it referred to once or twice as the best of all Austen adaptations, I took another look.  It’s certainly not the best of anything, but is quite fun to watch, closer to Amy Heckerling’s own Fast Times at Ridgemont High than any recollection of Emma.  Alicia Silverstone is delightful in the role of the teen matchmaker, though I am unaware of anything she has done since, in a very extensive filmography.  Paul Rudd, however, has gone on to a substantial career, even being named “Sexiest Man Alive.”   

One more AppleTV offering before I signed off again was Ridley Scott’s Napoleon (MC-64).  He’s far from a favorite of mine, but you have to give Scott credit for mounting such a mammoth production well into his 80s.  But not much credit otherwise accrues.  The battle scenes are spectacular (and gory), but the deadpan humor of Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal seems misguided, and Vanessa Kirby’s of Josephine as well, along with their decidedly unerotic rutting.  It’s one thing to cut historical figures down to size, but it’s another to make their actions and motivations completely inexplicable.  A four-hour director’s cut may fill in some of blanks in this historical epic, but is unlikely to supply the missing taste and sense.
 
I continue to lament the devolution of HBO into “max.”  I sampled but could not commit to recent seasons of The Regime or True Detective, but after a couple of episodes I’m more inclined to stick with The Sympathizer (MC-79), an adaptation of a Pulitzer-winning novel about the Fall of Saigon and the Vietnamese diaspora.  If I make it through all seven episodes, I’ll come back and comment further.

[Update:  Didn’t make it past third episode of The Sympathizer, and after this and Beef I’m beginning to worry that I have some hidden prejudice against Asian-Americans (not true, I hope).  But in fairness to the remains of HBO, I have to give credit where due to the third season of Hacks (MC-86), in which the comedic rapport between Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder shows no sign of wearing thin.]

So far “HBO Documentaries” still exists (until it’s slashed to pay the demonic David Zaslav’s salary), and God Save Texas (MC-84) continues the worthy tradition, inspired by a book of the same name from the estimable Lawrence Wright, who appears in each of the three episodes with three different filmmakers from Texas, returning to examine their roots.  The first and best is “Hometown Prison,” a feature-length meditation by Richard Linklater on how his hometown of Huntsville (vide Dazed and Confused) came to be defined by multiple prisons and a multitude of executions, delving into the liabilities of the prison-industrial complex, the carceral state, and the ethics of the death penalty.  Alex Stapleton’s “The Price of Oil” jumps off from the way the growth of Houston’s oil business has impacted the Black community from which she emerged, and explores the state’s long history of Black exploitation.  Iliana Sosa returns to “La Frontera,” the sister cities of El Paso and Juarez, a community once intertwined but now divided by The Wall.  The latter two episodes are hour-long, deeply-personal investigations highlighting significant themes.

And MAX did offer one last Best Picture nominee (with a consolation Oscar for Best International Feature), Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (MC-92) was inspired by the Martin Amis novel of the same name, based on the real-life commandant of Auschwitz.  The title refers to what the Nazis called the residential area immediately around the concentration camp.  I kept mistaking it as “zone of silence,” which would have been equally appropriate (the film won another Oscar for Best Sound).  I approached the film somewhat reluctantly but was won over by its mastery and seriousness.  Glazer is inventive, and adept at evoking horror by the quietest means, much of it as impassive as surveillance footage.  Sandra Hűller got her Best Actress nomination for another film, but is equally adept here as the wife of the commandant (Christian Friedel).  Along with their five children they lead an idyllic life, with their garden and swimming pool sharing a tall wall with the camp itself, managing to ignore the constant sounds of screams and gunshots, or the hellish glow of the crematoria at night.  Displaced Poles wait on them and their deluxe lifestyle is enhanced by appropriated fur coats and gold teeth.  They are monstrous, but oh-so-human, exemplars of the “banality of evil,” in this chilling but essential and all-too-relevant film.
 
Besides John Oliver’s continuing practice, the best comedy I’ve seen on MAX since Gary Gulman is Alex Edelman: Just for Us (his website), less a stand-up routine than a run-around-the-stage performance of a one-person play, about a very Jewish dervish from Boston who decides to infiltrate a white-supremacist complaint-fest in Queens.  This artfully put-together extended anecdote is pointed and very, very funny.
 
Here’s a recommendation from out of left field, only available on Kanopy so far, but as a BBC series likely to end up on Britbox or PBS Masterpiece.  Life after Life (Wiki) is a four-episode adaptation of the acclaimed Kate Atkinson novel, about an English girl growing up in a well-off family from WWI to WWII, who dies repeatedly in different ways but keeps coming back for another chance at life, with some inchoate knowledge of previous lives to guide her.  It stars Thomasin Mackenzie, who made an impression on me as a teen in Leave No Trace (reviewed here) but I haven’t seen much of elsewhere.  Her talent and appeal are certainly confirmed here, along with an all-round good cast.  I was also attracted by Lesley Manville’s name in the credits, but she is just the narrator.  Director John Crowley is familiar from two very good feature films, Intermission and Brooklyn, and handles this difficult assignment with aplomb.  This ranks among the better BBC dramas I’ve seen lately.
 
And as for BBC sitcoms, for a while I’d been looking for the show Stefan Golaszewski made before Mum, and I finally found Him & Her (Wiki) on Kanopy, starring Russell Tovey and Sarah Solemani as the title couple.  After an uncertain and rather raunchy start, I enjoyed all the first season, and soon caught up with the succeeding three.  Like Seinfeld, it’s “a show about nothing,” with two layabout twentysomethings never leaving their London bedsit but welcoming in a crew of weird neighbors and family.  There’s plenty of cringe-comedy, but the performances are appealingly naturalistic and the writing spot-on.  The final season, which breaks out of their flat to picture a wedding from hell, won BAFTA’s Best Sitcom in 2014.  Overall, this is a worthy precursor to great shows like Catastrophe and Fleabag.
 
Continuing with surprising finds on Kanopy, I half-recommend Surprised by Oxford (IMDB), a coy memoir-based rom-com enlivened by decent acting and excellent location shooting.  I enjoyed the travelogue aspect of being able to figure out exactly where the scenes were shot.  That may not work for viewers who have not spent as many hours walking those streets as I have.  Likewise with the focus on a book with personal meaning for me, C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy, which in turn recalls the great Anthony Hopkins-Debra Winger pairing in Shadowlands.  And then too, how many viewers actually want to be attending class for a DPhil in English Romantic literature?  Well, I enjoyed it anyway.
 
Speaking of PBS Masterpiece, I was drawn to Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office (MC-80) by the presence of the always-reliable Toby Jones.  And of course he delivers in the title role of this true story, about an “affront to justice” in which hundreds of “subpostmasters” who run local post offices were accused, dismissed, or even imprisoned for accounting mistakes caused by a newly-installed central computer system, whose bugs the head office refused to acknowledge.  This led to a twenty-year legal struggle, well-known in the U.K., of little guys banding together to get justice from a reluctant government.  As the presence of twinkle-eyed Jones would suggest, this is a tragedy with some comic moments and a redemptive outcome.  Well-cast and well-shot, these four episodes make you care about an unknown injustice, but do not overstay their welcome.

[Late drop-in]  Since Gentleman Jack, I’ve been willing to watch Suranne Jones in anything, so I was immediately drawn to a story of her own creation in MaryLand (PBS, MC-76).  As with many of her roles, this involves a close but fraught relationship with another woman, in this case well-played by Eve Best.  They are two contrasting and estranged sisters who are brought together on the Isle of Man when their mother is found dead on the beach.  Thankfully this is not a murder mystery, but a mystery about double lives and family enmeshments, especially sororal, played out over three 50-minute episodes.  Well worth the time. 

I’ll break off here, but will soon be back with more explorations of streaming options.  I will note that in support of the theme of this essay, on the very day I’m posting it, the New York Times chief TV critic declares “We have entered the golden age of Mid TV.”  If you’ve read this far, you really should follow that link.