More of MUBI

Except for special tastes, MUBI is overpriced at $15 per month, but frequently offers specials, and through Amazon Prime I just got a two-month subscription for $4.  I had only one must-see film of theirs on my list, but encountered little trouble finding others.  The channel is a worthy haven for the offbeat, but only worth the occasional month’s subscription.  Here I return for a follow up to my last go-round.

Eephus (MC-83) is a baseball film like no other.  I’m not sure how someone who has not “been there, done that” will respond to this film, but as one who played sandlot ball in a small Massachusetts town around 1990, this resonated for me on a profound level.  You can also approach Carson Lund’s film as an idiosyncratic indie with a bunch of unknown faces, but two hilarious cameos, Frederick Wiseman and “Spaceman” Bill Lee.  Most of the humor is deadpan but occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.  Like most beer league baseball, it’s slow and pointless, as a mixed bag of players congregate for mysterious (to outsiders) rituals of male bonding.  The game comes as a last call for many, as their ballfield is being torn down after this picturesque October day, to make way for a new school.  Their unwillingness to let the game end turns ridiculous but poignant.  The baseball itself is not actually believable, but perhaps the players’ ineptitude is.
 
The pairing of Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal was enough to make me overlook the indifferent Metacritic rating of The History of Sound (MC-63), and this film by Oliver Hermanus turned out much better than expected.  Maybe there’s more objection to straight actors playing gay lovers now than there was with Brokeback Mountain twenty years ago, but both these actors have done so admirably in the past and do so here.  In Boston at conservatory in 1917 - Paul a scholarship singer from Kentucky, Josh a well-off orphan from Newport - they meet in a bar and bond over a love of folk music, but separate when the war comes.  After the war, Josh invites Paul up to Maine to go on a backcountry expedition to record rare folk songs on wax cylinders and sleep together con-tentedly.  Again they part, and Paul goes on to a singing career in Europe, but never gets any reply to his many letters, eventually leaving it all behind to go in search of Josh.  Chris Cooper narrates from the beginning, and in the end emerges as the older Paul, now a distinguished musicologist.  Among the film’s many virtues are the various song performances.  Pay more attention to the favorable reviews than to the spoilsports.
 
Of course, MUBI has lots of worthy films that I’ve already seen, but in searching around I found one rare favorite that I want to highlight, the photographic documentary Finding Vivian Maier (MC-75).  I never got a chance to show it at the Clark, when the auditorium shut down for renovation, but I did strongly recommend it here.
 
Another unique documentary is Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (MC-83), in which a group of Estonian women meet and get naked – emotionally as well as physically – in a shed where meat gets smoked, and go through a variety of traditional sauna rituals and sororal revelations.  Director Anna Hints captures the experience in lovely pictures of sculptural flesh and drifting smoke, with occasional sprints into a nearby pond or visitations by ancestral spirits.
 
As we Boomers reach old age (and refuse to leave the stage), we (or me at least) are seeing a lot of films about dementia.  In recent years we’ve had the pleasure (?) of seeing the likes of Julie Christie, Julianne Moore, Glenda Jackson, and Anthony Hopkins lose their minds on film.  (And the political pain of watching two presidents lose theirs in office.)  Familiar Touch (MC-87) is a semi-documentary first feature from young filmmaker Sarah Friedland, about an 80-year-old woman with dementia, as she is moved from her home to a care facility.  Most of the people in the film are residents of the actual location (a “geriatric country club” in Pasadena), but the lead is accomplished actress Kathleen Chalfant in a deep and delicate performance filled with humor and heart.  The film itself is tender, sweet, and serious, though ultimately heavy in implication.  As a young person’s imaginative reflection on the experience of old people, Friedland’s debut puts me in mind of Updike’s first novel Poorhouse Fair, which portends more awards for this writer-director’s career.
 
I’m not sure how Lingui, the Sacred Bonds (MC-83) wound up on my list, but I’m glad it did.  It’s the first film I’ve ever seen from Chad, even though writer-director M-S. Haroun has made a half-dozen well-received films before this.  It follows a 30-ish single mother and her 15-year-old daughter, as they struggle through a maze of patriarchal strictures to make sure the girl does not suffer the mother’s fate of expulsion and shunning.  The mother maintains them by laboriously extracting wire from old tires and weaving it into coal stoves, which she roves the streets of the capital to sell.  Outside of political and religious rule, the communal impulse of the title allows the pair to find the help they need from other women.  The documentary and pictorial elements of this compact film enhance the folkloric force of the story, as does the acting and the farflung location.  I recommend it to anyone with the patience and curiosity to seek it out.
 
Likewise, I’m not sure what led me to Falcon Lake (MC-71), but this find is definitely a keeper.  Canadian actress-turned-director Charlotte Le Bon situates her first feature on an isolated lakeside cabin in Quebec, and it’s très bon.  The mood suggests a teen slasher film, ridiculously played up in the trailer, but the film itself delivers a sensitive portrayal of adolescent desire.  A 13-year-old boy and 16-year-old girl are thrown together, even to the point of sharing a tiny bedroom, when their parents vacation together.  She’s a dark-browed Goth-in-the-making, he’s a dewy-eyed youth contending with puberty.  Forced into contact, they begin to find some common ground, and a mutually satisfying exchange of fantasies and fears.  A casual betrayal leads to disenchantment and break-up, with untoward consequences.  I’ll say no more, except that despite some trappings of a horror film, this story is grounded in real life with humor and sympathy, well-acted and beautifully shot.
 
MUBI has been in film production and distribution for a while, but now they’ve branched into tv series, with two estimable efforts.
 
Mussolini: Son of the Century (MC-74) rests on the bravura performance of Luca Marinelli in the title role.  He schemes and struts and spouts, often turning to the camera to explain what’s going on.  Starting from a place of extensive ignorance, I learned a lot about the rise of fascism in Italy after WWI, and had no trouble drawing the intended parallels to our own historical moment.  I’ve never admired Joe Wright’s films, but here he finds a subject that suits his over-the-top style, all pomp, no circumstance, a sort of frenetic factual phantasmagoria.  Got to give him credit as a Brit directing an 8-hour tv series in Italian without giving himself away.  This story of a bombastic buffoon’s rise to power follows in a tradition that runs from The Great Dictator through A Face in the Crowd to The Apprentice.  Both the humor and the razzmatazz seem appropriate to this serious and highly relevant subject, as the fascist impulse revives here and abroad.  The series concludes with a twist as Il Duce escapes his most difficult moment and consolidates absolute power at the beginning of 1925, when Marinelli turns and leans into the camera for one triumphant blackout word, which serves as an alarm bell to the rest of us.
 
I stumbled through Hal & Harper (MC-82), Cooper Raiff’s self-indulgent 9-episode series about a pair of siblings clinging together through dysfunction, mainly for Lili Reinhart’s performance as his sister.  Also Mark Ruffalo as their depressive father.  In writing, directing, and starring as one of the title characters, even as a first grader in classroom flashbacks, Raiff may have taken on more than he can chew, but does display a variety of talents.  My main complaint is the fractured time scheme, with continual jumps back and forth in a way that seems more annoying than illuminating.  The business of adults playing children among real children worked for PEN15 and might have worked here without the temporal whiplash.  When there was an episode that did stay in one time frame, I began to notice the jagged editing and the mostly-grating background music, and began to think it was a generational thing.  Nonetheless, Raiff demonstrates considerable sincerity and humor in celebrating the resiliency of family relationships.

Dip into MUBI when they have one of their special offers, and you will find plenty of interesting stuff to watch.

Stray viewing III

My devotion to Astrid et Raphaëlle (and hope for January arrival of season five) led me to look for another “Walter Presents” program on PBS.  The general opinion seemed to be that the next best (aside from murder mysteries) was the Danish series Seaside Hotel (IMDB), so I gave that a try.  I liked it enough to finish one season of six episodes, but felt no urge to persist through all ten, in much the way that Downton Abbey or Call the Midwife held my interest only for a limited time, as opposed to something like Doc Martin that attracted me for the long haul.  Set in a remote inn on the wild shores of Jutland, the establishment is run by a mismatched couple, with four maids (one of whom is the endearing main character) waiting hand and foot on a half-dozen well-to-do guest families.  The only outside character of any importance is the hulking hunk of a young fisherman nearby.  The first season occurs in the summer of 1928, and subsequent series go through WWII, apparently with most of the same characters.  The setting is very nice and the acting is good, with a mix of comedy, drama, and romance, but as far as tv from Denmark goes, this is no Borgen, but rather an intelligent, well-made soap opera with a touch of French farce.  [P.S. That said, my partners’ appetite for this cheese Danish exceeded mine, so I remained willing to sample occasional evening episodes, watching most of five seasons, without wearying of the characters.  The sixth season follows a gap of years and a shuffling of characters, and my interest waned a bit.  This series found a successful formula and stuck with it; highly watchable but hardly essential viewing.  The story beats are very predictable, but the treatment is appealing.]
 
By itself, “Walter Presents” justifies a bargain annual subscription to PBS Passport, but given the obvious value yet precarious state of public television, I intend to double my contribution at renewal.  I’m currently immersed in the latest Ken Burns documentary The American Revolution (MC-80), learning stuff and loving the visuals, and will report when I’ve made it through all twelve hours.  [Follow up: this had the stately pace of the Ken Burns brand, but focused more on military campaigns and less on the making of the constitution than I expected.  It demonstrates that we’ve always been a divided country, but not how we managed to come together in the first place around a founding idea.  I’m much less familiar with the campaigns of the Revolutionary War than those of the Civil War, so I appreciated all the battle maps.  I also appreciated the concerted effort to include Blacks and Native peoples in the story, and much of the artwork was of particular interest, though many repeated shots padded the length.  My biggest takeaway was the realization that the War of Independence was really the first Civil War – are we on the brink of a third?]

 
HBO and Hulu are two once major streaming channels that have suffered quality-wise under their corporate overlords.  While they once deserved their own round-ups, at this point they get lumped in with stray viewing.
 
Sorry, I’m just not certain what I think about Sorry, Baby (MC-89, HBO), even after watching it twice.  Repeat viewing speaks to being intrigued, but I remain somewhat baffled and leave it up to your judgment (of course I always leave it up to your judgment, but you know what I mean).  Writer, director, and star Eva Victor is obviously a well-rounded talent and an interesting character.  And I could certainly relate to the New England college campus setting.  Victor plays a graduate student and literature teacher whose thesis is about the short story form, and the film itself takes the form of five short stories out of chronological sequence.  The second episode gives the backstory of elided trauma, and the others show the various sequelae.  There’s a lot of deadpan humor, but also depression and panic.  I’ll certainly pay attention to whatever Victor does next, but I don’t feel that she precisely hit the bullseye on this maiden effort.  I’d put her in a category with Miranda July – provocative, witty, but not entirely comprehensible, to me at least.
 
As Auden says of Austen, Materialists (MC-70) aims to “describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,” but fails to bring Jane’s sparkling wit to the task of revealing “frankly and with such sobriety / The economic basis of society.”  Or at least, of dating in contemporary NYC.  Dakota Johnson intrigues me, having caught my eye in The Lost Daughter but earning my derision for Persuasion (as bad as KK in P&P).  Of course I’ve never seen any of the Fifty Shades movies nor her Marvel incarnation).  I recently learned that she’s the daughter of Melanie Griffith and the granddaughter of Tippi Hendren, and I try to read that Hollywood genealogy in her face. Here she plays a high-end Manhattan matchmaker, who admits that she knows about dating but not about love, and it's all about perceived value.  She submits to wooing by rich guy Pedro Pascal as a confirmation of her own value, though deep down she values Chris Evans, the broke actor she dumped some time back, a far cry from his Captain America (or so I’m told).  Director Celine Song follows up Past Lives with a rather compromised effort to make a serious rom-com, sacrificing some of the authenticity of her first film while not really delivering the pleasures of genre.
 
One last film to check out on HBO.  I read that Weapons (MC-81) was a horror film for people who don’t like horror films, so I gave it a try.  I got maybe 15 minutes in before the first jump scare, then called it quits.
 
For what remains of once-exceptional HBO series, I’m not up to the task of watching Task (MC-77) right now, but since it stars Mark Ruffalo and has the imprimatur of my brother for its Philly-DelCo local credibility, I’ll probably get around to watching at some point.  If so, I’ll insert comment here.
 
I might have canceled my Hulu subscription to protest Disney muzzling Jimmy Kimmel, but I was in the middle of a 12-week pause and they wouldn’t accept a cancellation, so I was stuck for another month.  On the upside, I could then watch one new FX series I really wanted to see, The Lowdown (MC-86), starring Ethan Hawke and created by Sterlin Harjo (of Reservation Dogs!!), a throwback private-eye drama set in Tulsa OK.  Gotta love it because here the P.I. is a constantly-vaping bookstore owner and part-time muckraking journalist.  I once had a book buying gig in Tulsa, so I enjoyed clocking familiar sights.  Hawke is for me the premium American actor of his generation, with the most interesting career choices from his teen years on.  He sinks his teeth into this role with relish.  Ryan K. Armstrong is delightful as his 13-year-old daughter, and many familiar faces fill roles large and small, as Hawke dives into the misdeeds of a rich local dynasty.  There’s quite a bit of Chinatown here, Jim Thompson’s work is a major plot reference, and dashes of Chandler or Hammett and their cinematic progeny are everywhere.   The settings seem authentic, and the country music accompaniment is great, not that I recognized much of it.  This also reminded me of another FX series, Justified, which is among my all-time favorites.  The eighth (and final?) episode makes a perfect ending, with several climactic scenes shot at the Philbrook Museum (where I worked) and Leonard Cohen on the soundtrack, but I would surely be eager for more.
 
A rave review in The New Yorker last year put Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point (MC-72) on my watch list, and this month it came round to Hulu.  I’d rank my own enthusiasm at about the level of the Metacritic rating.  This is the product of a collective of recent Emerson College grads (who also made Eephus), here directed by Tyler Taormina.  It follows a holiday gathering some twenty years ago of a large Italian family on Long Island, but it’s no competition for the Christmas dinner episode of The Bear.  There are authentic moments of memory amidst the hurly-burly, but no overarching story emerges, though the first half centers on the siblings’ argument over whether to move grandma to an old folks home, and the second on a teenage granddaughter’s wild and/or mild night out with friends.  Some of the humor is entirely too deadpan, nothing seems very consequential, and little is resolved, but I suspect many might enjoy this upside-down Xmas family festival.
 
My favorite active American director Richard Linklater has two new films just out, but as I wait for the opportunity to see them, I took a look at one I haven’t seen since its initial release, School of Rock (MC-82).  It just turned up on Hulu and was as crowd-pleasing as I remembered.  Jack Black is manic and over-the-top, but still appealing.  It’s the kids, however, who make the film, as well as constituting the eponymous musical group that vies for a band competition and rocks their way into your heart.  Linklater is almost unique in his ability to range between popular entertainment and serious filmmaking.
 
I’d been looking for The Apprentice (MC-64) for so long that I assumed Trump had somehow blocked its distribution, but then it turned up on Prime and some other free-with-ads channels.  I found Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn highly believable, and the portrayal of The Donald as a young-ish man on the make fit right in with my own observations and preconceptions.  The settings are credible as well.  And the main thesis – that Cohn was the source of the Trump playbook of attack, deny, and never admit defeat – is undeniable.  It underlines the right-wing progression of the Republican party from McCarthy to Nixon to Reagan to Gingrich and through Cheney’s Bush to the brink of Trump’s fascism.  Iranian director Ali Abbasi has enough distance to walk a fine line between humanizing and demonizing the monster who rules us these days.  Unless you’ve already had too much of the attention hog dominating our public discourse, you’re likely to find this film entertaining and edifying, if also horrifying, for its masterful performances and sleek surfaces.
 
After enjoying Sarah Solemani’s performance in Him & Her and looking up her other credits, I saw she had written and starred in a series with Steve Coogan, another favorite of mine.  So I put Chivalry (IMDB) on my look-for list, and it finally turned up on Kanopy, in a breezy six episodes that only added up to feature length.  It’s a post-#MeToo satire on Hollywood with some amusing cameos.  Coogan is a loutish producer who must bring in feminist indie director Solemani to salvage a French misogynist’s film.  I still like both of them, but this seems a misfire, needing some third writer to salvage the series.
 
All to Play For (IMDB) caught my eye on Kanopy by headlining Virginie Efira, as they have many of her films, which I have been following assiduously, starting here.  She is predictably virtuosic as the single mother of two boys, who loses custody of the younger son after he’s burned in a cooking accident while she was at work in a bar.  She seems to have a good if somewhat loose relationship with her children and with two similarly unmoored brothers, but as her behavior becomes increasingly extreme, you have to wonder whether some fundamental instability is coming through, or whether she’s being driven insane by the child welfare system.  Don’t expect the film to decide that for you, but Efira’s natural warmth and empathy tilt the question her way.  Writer-director Delphine Deloget’s debut feature, properly translated from French as “nothing to lose,” benefits from her documentary background and suggests she may be a name to look for in the future.
 
I’ve got a lot more viewing to look for in the future, so come back here for reports on what I’ve been watching, next covering Mubi and AppleTV, and then a long-deferred return to Netflix.

Criterion of choice

The Criterion Channel is my most essential streamer (aside from YouTube perhaps), and the only one for which I have an annual subscription, so I don’t mind going a month or more without watching any of their films, but I always have a lot to catch up with when I do.  I’ll start with some of their new exclusive releases, and proceed to recent collections that explore corners of cinema history.
 
Vermiglio (MC-85) is a sad and lovely, funny and touching film set in the Italian Alps in the last year of WWII.  Filmmaker Maura Delpero returns to the village of her just-deceased father’s childhood to recreate the era and setting, drawing on her documentary (and painterly) background and inspired by great Italian neorealists like DeSica and Olmi, in the most immersive portrait of peasant life since the latter’s supreme Tree of Wooden Clogs (also on Criterion, and due for yet another look).  Eight surviving children live with their teacher-father and always-pregnant mother on a farm in a remote Alpine village, but the film concentrates on three sisters who share the same bed.  The youngest is the brightest, whom the father intends to send away for further schooling.  The middle daughter is most religious but struggles with her emerging libido.  The oldest is immediately attracted to a handsome Sicilian stranger, who has deserted the army with an older cousin of hers.  Her story emerges slowly and delicately as the focus of the film, which gradually reveals layer upon layer with an exquisite touch, as the mountain landscape progresses from deep winter through spring and into autumn.  Don’t miss this, if you have the patience and the eye for acute, subtle, and heartfelt filmmaking.
 
All We Imagine as Light (MC-93) is the second feature from the young Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia.  The first was a hybrid documentary-drama about film school protests against PM Modi, and the second maintains a similar balance in the story of three hospital workers from the provinces now living in Mumbai.  The “city symphony” is one of her influences (plus Satyajit Ray obviously, but Fellini also, and the “New Waves” of various nationalities) and this portrait of the teeming, polyglot metropolis in monsoon season is very strong.  The three main characters are introduced serially: a senior nurse whose husband left for work in Germany shortly after their arranged marriage and hasn’t been heard from since, a young nurse in love with a Muslim boy and fending off suitors proposed by her distant parents, and a widowed cook being evicted for construction of a luxury high-rise only to find she has no rights without a husband.  In the second half of the film, the cook returns to her native seaside village with the help of the two nurses.  The pace of the film changes, and we get closer to the women as they get closer to each other, while modernity recedes into folklore.  Inventive and very well-acted, this is a film of multiple pleasures, mysteries, and surprises.
 
Wikipedia characterizes Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia (MC-83) as a “black comedy thriller,” which only requires the additional word “gay” to be an adequate description.  A baker of indeterminate age, say thirtysomething, returns to his home village in the south of France, when the mentor to whom he apprenticed dies.  He looks innocent enough, but is he angling to take over the boulangerie or to sleep with the widow?  He moves into the room of the dead man’s son, who used to be his friend but is now his adversary.  He wanders around some of his old haunts among the autumn hills (slightly reminiscent of the Berkshires, in the exquisite cinematography of Claire Mathon) and drops in on old acquaintances.  What is he up to, whose bed will he wind up in?  And why does that mushroom-hunting priest keep showing up everywhere?  The mystery unfolds but does not resolve.  It’s hard not to imagine that Guiraudie went to school on Pasolini’s Teorema.
 
All Shall Be Well (MC-82) is a delicate family drama set in Hong Kong and directed by Ray Yeung.  We are introduced to a loving lesbian couple who has been together for forty years, though never able to formalize their marriage.  One of them dies suddenly, and the other is left without legal standing.  Though their relationship has been fully accepted by the family of the deceased, each of her relatives has hope of economic relief from an inheritance, which qualifies their affection for the survivor.  Will she be evicted from her longtime home, so they can move up in the world?  How shall she respond?  Where do the rights and obligations of family lie?  This well-acted and gentle film raises many questions in a small compass.
 
The appeal of Caught by the Tides (MC-87) is decidedly specialized, as Jia Zhangke revisits his films from the past twenty-odd years, all starring his wife Tao Zhao, along with outtakes and documentary footage he shot along the way, and constructs a portrait of vast changes in China over that period.  Her character never speaks a word, but she has the expressive qualities to pull it off.  In the first segment, she’s a young performer in a difficult relationship with her manager.  In the second, he’s gone to work on the Three Gorges Dam project, and she goes searching for him, and observes the massive dislocation as millions of people are evacuated.  In the finale, shot during Covid, the pair meet again, having aged quite differently.  This simple summary is rather hard to discern in the process of the film, with its unrelated documentary scenes and unexplained transitions, but is subsumed in the examination of a generation’s worth of cultural change.
 
One facet of Criterion’s appeal is that I could immediately catch up with two other recent films of Jia Zhangke that I had missed, since I’ve no longer been programming films at the Clark.  Ash is Purest White (MC-85) and Mountains May Depart (MC-79) are all of piece with his latest, as time-spanning semi-documentaries centered on Tao Zhao.  Not only can I not separate the films in my mind, they tend to share scenes and outtakes from one to the next, which for a cinephile is part of the appeal, but I’m not sure how much a casual viewer could get out of his work.
 
Criterion had a collection ironically called “Fun City” about NYC in the 70s era when I was living in Brooklyn, and I was glad to see Dog Day Afternoon again, which inspired me to watch other old Al Pacino films.  His first, Panic in Needle Park, was also in the collection but too grim and predetermined for me to finish.  I also tracked down Serpico and Sea of Love for viewings that confirmed my positive memories of them.  In a timely coincidence, Paramount+ had a special offer and just cycled The Godfather films back into streaming availability.  They looked great and remain among the best films of all time, utterly familiar yet still impressive.  Same goes for Pacino.
 
Coincidentally, I also rewatched Pacino’s favorite film, The Tree of Wooden Clogs (IMDB), always secure in my short list of most significant films.  This semi-documentary portrait of peasant life in Lombardy at the end of the 19^th century never fails to have a profound effect on me.  As I wrote when I showed it at the Clark in connection with a Pissarro exhibition, “Crushingly sad but transcendently beautiful, this slow and patiently observed masterpiece is among the greatest films ever made.”
 
For another celebration of the difficult but lovely day-to-day lives of poor rural folk, turn to That They May Face the Rising Sun (AMZ, MC-81), from a distant but surprisingly related perspective, County Mayo in the 1980s.  That was shortly before I toured the area with my friend Kevin O’Hara (while we were working together on his book Last of the Donkey Pilgrims).  Writer-director Pat Collins’ adaptation of John McGahern’s final novel is quiet, deliberate, evocative, and reflective of his documentary background.  Barry Ward plays the McGahern character, a writer who has returned from London with his artist wife to his roots in the West of Ireland.  They farm with the help of neighbors, classic Irish characters who are always welcome for a meal or a drink.  Days pass, the season turns, the community gathers for weddings and funerals.  That’s it, and it’s more than enough – beautiful, truthful, and moving.
 
Returning to Criterion classics, Yojimbo (MC-93) was an Akira Kurosawa film that I’d never seen, and one of the first films I added to my CC list six years ago.  That’s the beauty of Criterion for me, it’s always there and always has something new or old worth watching or rewatching.  I can’t imagine a samurai film ever reaching the heights of The Seven Samurai, but this is a worthy entry in the canon, and actually Kurosawa’s most popular film.  Toshiro Mifune expands on his comic persona, as the lone wolf entering an isolated town riven by a feud between the silk merchant and the saki brewer, along with their hired thugs.  He offers his unbeatable swordplay as bodyguard (yojimbo) to each in turn, and plays them off against each other for his own advancement and amusement.  Kurosawa borrows from American Westerns, and then is borrowed from in turn, and this certainly paves the way for Clint Eastwood’s “man with no name.”
 
High and Low (MC-90) was one of my favorite Kurosawa films, and I gave it another look in advance of Spike Lee’s remake, Highest 2 Lowest.  Here he’s adapting an American police procedural, and bringing the impressive widescreen choreography of his battle scenes to an indoor setting.  Mifune plays a hard-nosed business executive whose son is believed to be kidnapped, with the police laboring mightily to track down the culprit and recover the ransom money.  He lives in a hilltop mansion that looks down on Yokohama, as the kidnapper looks back up at him vengefully.  Behind the dazzling direction are moral and social quandaries aplenty.  Let’s see what Spike does with his “joint.”
 
Another film on my CC list for six years was Kenji Mizoguchi’s Utamaro and His Five Women (IMDB) and it turns out I wouldn’t have shown it at the Clark, even if it had been available when I was surveying films to accompany an exhibition of Japanese prints.  This was made under postwar Occupation, before the director’s superlative films of the early Fifties, and does not approach their mastery, though it may be one of the most personal films from this painterly filmmaker/.
 
Filling in another filmography, I watched Robert Bresson’s penultimate film The Devil, Probably (IMDB).  His severe style produced several all-time classics (A Man Escaped above all) but this attempt to dissect the youth culture of post-1968 France is woefully misguided.
 
A Robert Altman collection featured one of his films that I had never seen.  He was an important maverick and innovator whose career is all over the map, from great to unwatchable.  Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (IMDB) is below the median line, but I still found reasons to watch it all the way through.  One was trying to figure out just why I’ve always found Sandy Dennis so unpalatable, but more satisfyingly seeing a so-young Cher and Kathy Bates, and Karen Black as a trans woman (in 1982!).  This is a filmed play that makes no attempt to hide its provenance, except for a few lame special effects.  Don’t bother unless you’re an Altman completist.
 
Director Bertrand Tavernier and star Nathalie Baye were enough to draw me to A Week’s Vacation (IMDB), and did not disappoint, even though the film struck me as warmed-over Eric Rohmer, about a thirtyish school teacher trying to get her bearings in love and work.
 
After watching the excellent Netflix series adaptation of The Leopard, rather than returning yet again to Visconti’s version, I re-watched his Senso (IMDB), an historical melodrama set in the period of Italian unification, as the Venetians seek independence from Austria.  Alida Valli is the patrician wife who throws away her life in a mad passion for the Austrian soldier played by Farley Granger (the dubbed American version was called The Wanton Countess).  It’s operatically over-the-top, like much of Visconti, but historically quite interesting, as well as lavish and deranged.
 
Criterion lists the films that will depart at the end of each month, which often prompts me to watch.  La Guerre est Finie (IMDB) was one such.  Director Alain Resnais and star Yves Montand made a big impression on me when I first saw this film, probably around the time I was dropping out of school, disillusioned with my studies in political economy.  I returned in two years to study literature, philosophy, and religion exclusively.  In the film Montand is a Spanish Communist in Parisian exile, still working to subvert Franco’s regime three decades after the Civil War and growing weary of fruitless political struggle.  It spoke to me then, and speaks to me now.
 
Criterion recently offered an excellent collection of films by the seminal documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, from Don’t Look Back to The War Room to Kings of Pastry.  One night it suited my mood to rewatch Monterey Pop (MC-77) and revisit the Summer of Love in 1967, when I was a 20-year-old college dropout.
 
In the midst of Jamie Lee Curtis’s late career renaissance, it was amusing to look back forty-plus years to an early film that aimed to lift her out of the teen horror genre.  In Love Letters (IMDB), she’s a public radio host who finds a cache of her deceased mother’s letters to a longtime lover, and tries to relive that experience by embarking on an affair with a married man.  Not great, but interesting as foreshadowing a long career.
 
I’ve long enjoyed the animations of Faith and John Hubley (as well as their daughter Emily) and showed a program of their work at the Clark way back when.  It was great to revisit some of them in this collection.
 
Last but far from least, I was mesmerized by the spectacle of Gerhard Richter Painting (MC-77).  I’ve been enamored of his scraped paintings since I encountered a whole wall of them at the Art Institute of Chicago some years back, and this film details just how they are made, along with interviews with the artist and visits to gallery exhibitions of his earlier (and quite different) work.  These paintings are different in method and style from Jackson Pollock’s, but similar in creating an immersive visual universe of their own.  Director Corinna Belz is an effective documentarian, and Richter is articulate about his artistic practice. Moreover, just watching the paint go on the canvas is a magical process.
 
I regret that a number of these films will have departed the channel by the time you read this, but may well return or turn up elsewhere.  This diverse sample of Criterion’s offerings demonstrates that there’s always something to watch on the channel for any serious film viewer, from the latest releases to the oldest classics, from hits to sleepers, from all corners of the world and all kinds of film artists.  When it comes to quality cinema, there’s no better value out there.

Peacock postscript plus

After my last Peacock round-up, I returned to the channel when enough new content warranted one month’s (overpriced) subscription.  The second season of Poker Face (MC-83) was the main draw, since I am a Natasha Lyonne “stan” (if that’s the word young whippersnappers use).  And it lived up to the first so well that I simply refer you to my earlier comments.  Stoner redhead Lyonne keeps solving crimes and dispensing justice using her bullshit-detector superpower, the cases secondary to the gravel-voiced humor and the witty appearances of guest stars.  The show was created by Rian Johnson, best known for the Knives Out films in the same comic-mystery vein.  Surefire light entertainment, clever and funny.  They do make them like they used to (e.g. Columbo in this case), but better.
 
My question about The Paper (MC-66) was whether, among creator Greg Daniels’ previous work, it would be more like The Office (which I never bothered to watch after enjoying the British version) or Parks & Rec (which I came to late but then watched religiously).  So I approached this series warily, but was won over by the time it was revealed that the main character hailed from Cleveland Heights, even though played by Irish actor Domnhall Gleason.  He was a supersalesman for Dunder Mifflin, which has been acquired along with the Toledo Truth Teller (toilet paper, newspaper – all the same business) by the conglomerate Enervate, which has made him editor-in-chief.  His second-in-command (and possible love interest) is played winningly by Chelsea Frei, and some of the other characters have their moments in these ten episodes, but not enough to make me eager for more seasons.
 
Steven Soderbergh is an accomplished director but not one of my favorites, nor is the James Bond-ish genre he’s working with in Black Bag (MC-85), but Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender are sure to be worth a look.  They play a married pair of spies conspiring to discover a mole in their division of British intelligence.  The “black bag” is where they put the intel they can’t share with each other, to maintain the trust of their personal relationship.  Fassbender is detailed to find the mole, but one of the five suspects is Blanchett.  Things get sticky and many psychological games are played, especially around the dinner table with the six main characters.  It’s all very sleek and swift and in good company – but instantly forgettable.
 
Ballad of Wallis Island (MC-78) is inoffensive but not really stimulating, with best performer Carey Mulligan given a truncated role.  This feature is an expansion of an earlier short created by the two leads, Tim Key and Tom Basden.  Key is a lottery winner living on a nearly deserted island (exquisitely shot in Wales), who has lured folksinger Basden there with a promise of a gig for a half-million pounds.  Key and his deceased wife were superfans of Basden’s former duo with Mulligan, and he wants to reunite them as a way to relive his marriage through a concert for himself alone.  The pair have their own feelings about the reunion, but they do harmonize nicely despite their differences past and present, while Key yammers nervously on.  Not a rom-com but a gentle portrait of fellowship, this film aims to please and mostly does.
 
I missed Housekeeping for Beginners (MC-80) when it was streaming on Hulu but found it afterwards over on Peacock (typical of how films are always moving between platforms).  How many Australian-Macedonian films have you seen?  This was my first, but maybe not my last.  Writer-director Goran Stolevski was born in North Macedonia but moved Down Under when he was 12.  Set among the lingering ethnic conflicts of the Balkans, this film follows a welfare worker who has turned her home into a lesbian and gay refuge, with a female Roma lover and her two daughters, a trio of young gender-fluid women, and a gay man who brings a Gypsy youth into the mix (he’s good at taking care of the firecracker preteen daughter).  As you can imagine, there are conflicts aplenty, but an unlikely but lively queer family emerges.  Stolevski throws us into the middle of this menage and lets us make sense of the chaotic household and its misfit inhabitants.
 
In similar channel-switching, Time (MC-81) was a Britbox series that I happened to catch in its brief run on HBO Max.  Two seasons of three episodes each look at prison life from a newbie’s perspective, and the effect is disturbingly you-are-there, adding dimension to the notion of “doing time.”  In the first series, Sean Bean is a teacher ushered into prison after he kills someone while driving drunk.  Stephen Graham is a prison guard compromised because his own son is in prison and threatened by a gang.  In the second, Jodie Whitaker is thrown in jail for “fiddling the lecky” (watch and find out), where she bunks with pregnant drug addict Bella Ramsey and infanticide Tamara Lawrance, each a well-drawn character.  Both series are persuasive and wrenching.
 
Most of the time I don’t pay any attention to Masterpiece Mystery on PBS, but a friend’s recommendation (confirmed by an 8.2 IMBD rating) led me to the French police series Astrid (et Raphaélle).  I started out dubious but was soon hooked and made my way through all four seasons on PBS (it seems a fifth has been broadcast in France).  I came for the portrayal of autism, stayed for the appealing characters and relationships, and tolerated the murder mysteries because the violence was minimal and the settings and motives always held interest, with subjects explored and not simply exploited.  The growing friendship between the two women is beautifully developed from season to season, with Sara Mortensen brilliant in her depiction of the autistic criminal records archivist Astrid, and Lola Delawaere brash and engaging as lead detective Raphaélle.  Each murder solved (emphasizing clever puzzle over grisly forensics) only brings them closer as they complete each other as “thimble” and “compass,” part of a congenial work family.  And each brings me closer to including this series among my all-time favorites.  (On the other hand, I watched one episode of the show’s pallid UK remake Patience, and was relieved of any impulse to watch more.) 
 
In the migration of films between channels, I caught up with The Truman Show (MC-90) somewhere or other, and it seemed as fresh and relevant as it was three decades ago.  What if your life were a sitcom, stage-managed by some overarching creator for the amusement of the multitudes?  Jim Carrey gives a career-best performance as Truman, Laura Linney as his wife gives a performance that foreshadows her sterling career, Ed Harris is maniacal perfection as the director of the show, and Peter Yates is also career-best as the director of the film.  Like Groundhog Day, this is a comedy with metaphysical implications.
 
Among the surprises on Kanopy, I found a British film that hadn’t even reached its official American release date.  Brian and Maggie (MC-73) was originally presented as a two-part series, but actually makes a tidy 90-minute movie, written by James Graham of Sherwood, directed by accomplished veteran Stephen Frears, and starring Harriet Walter as Margaret Thatcher and Steve Coogan as the journalist who befriended her and eventually brought her down.  I found it so engaging that I immediately went back and re-watched The Iron Lady (MC-52) to compare Meryl Streep’s Oscar-winning performance to Walter’s, interestingly different but both excellent (as was Gillian Anderson in The Crown). Thatcher’s political influence was (and remains) malign but both films humanize her malfeasance, and make it relevant to our own political moment.
 

Stray viewing II

Wherein I check in with new offerings on a variety of sub-channels available on Prime Video through Amazon 99¢ per month specials.

Paul Feig earned permanent credit with me for Freaks & Geeks, so even in genres that do not generally appeal to me, I’m willing to give him a chance, such as the 2018 comedy-mystery A Simple Favor (MC-67, AMZ).  Anna Kendrick is a widow who vlogs for stay-at-home moms; at school pick-up, she meets Blake Lively, the glamorous, successful mother of her son’s best friend.  As is customary, opposites attract, but with hidden agendas (and sins) on each side.  Their relationship is funny and layered, before taking a dark turn and winding up in a rapid-fire flurry of twists that left this viewer behind.  But I appreciated cameos from Jean Smart and F&G discovery Linda Cardellini, each about to embark on their own comedic series about female frenemies (i.e. Hacks and Dead to Me)

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September 5 (MC-79, AMZ) is a retelling of the massacre at the Munich Olympics in 1972, from the perspective of the ABC Sports people broadcasting a terrorist act live for the first time.  The writer-director is the German Tim Fehlbaum, and the film won nine of their equivalent to the Oscars, but the dialogue is virtually all in English.  Peter Skarsgaard is good as Roone Arledge, making unprecedented judgments about coverage on the fly, but especially impressive are the control room director played by John Magaro and Leonie Benesch as the German translator.  The script is weighty with moral quandaries, and the action is nonstop, with an historical veracity that echoes through the half-century since the events.  I initially questioned whether this story needed to be filmed again, after One Day in September and Munich, but the approach and the execution made it well worth watching.  Disarmingly apolitical (to the ire of some), it’s more a taut thriller about media methods and ethics.
 
I quite enjoyed a sampling of Makari: Sicilian Mysteries (IMDB, MHZ) for its mix of mystery, comedy, romance, and travelogue, but reading that it’s but a pale imitation of the long-running series Inspector Montalbano (IMDB, MHZ), I took a look at that as well, when struck by the urge to travel vicariously to the island of my forefathers.  Montalbano is based on a series of popular mystery novels, and altogether too talky, with Makari having better characters, more amusing stories, and superior cinematography with HD and drone footage.  There are 35 feature-length episodes of Montalbano over 15 seasons, followed by Makari’s 11 over three seasons so far.  I’ll stick with the newer series when I want a dose of Mediterranean light and the company of my paesanos.
 
Exterior Night (IMDB, MHZ) is a 6-hour Italian miniseries about the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro, former prime minister of Italy and head of the ruling Christian Democratic party, by the Red Brigades in 1978, an event likened to the JFK assassination in this country.  I was amazed to see that this series was directed by Marco Bellocchio, whom I remember for Fists in the Pocket and China is Near from the mid-Sixties, when he was the hot new director of Italian cinema (to be followed by Bernardo Bertolucci, who achieved more prominence but faded much earlier).  Well-acted across the board, each episode focuses on a different character: Moro himself, the friend who is the minister responsible for freeing him, the pope who is also his friend, the terrorists who abducted him, his wife and children, and finally the tragic ending.  Bellochio directs with award-winning clarity and impact, and the series earned its spot on the NYT list of the best TV so far this year.
 
On that list I agree with the choices of Asura and Couples Therapy, and also with Mr. Loverman (MC-79, Britbox).  Lennie James is terrific as the dapper Antiguan granddad living in London; he’s a closeted gay man contemplating leaving his wife of fifty years (Sharon D Clarke) to live with his male friendand secret lover (Ariyon Bakare) going back to their teenage years in the Caribbean.  The married couple have two adult daughters of opposing personalities to complicate matters and flesh out the family.  Not a lot happens, except drinking and talking and fussing at each other, but in eight half-hour episodes a memorable portrait is painted, and heartfelt questions of wider import are raised with humor and insight.
 
Another new BBC series worth watching is Outrageous (MC-74, Britbox), the unbelievable true story of the six scandalous Mitford sisters.  Created by Sarah Williams out of a Mary Lovell biography, the series follows a posh English family through the Thirties, as two of the sisters fall for very prominent Fascists while another goes to fight with the Communists in Spain, and the others tend to fall in line with Uncle Winston (Churchill, that is).  The series is narrated by the oldest, the comic society novelist Nancy.  Well-acted across the board, with a satirical eye on British aristocrats and socialites, both amusing and pointedly topical, the first series only makes it into 1936 so it’s likely to go on to WWII in future seasons, and I for one would come back for more.
 
Over on Acorn, I couldn’t miss a recent miniseries with Sharon Horgan, Best Interests (MC-85), where she is paired with Michael Sheen as the parents of a 13-year-old daughter on life-support, who differ on whether to give her aggressive treatment or palliative care.  They are both excellent, as expected, but Alison Oliver also deserves a shout-out as their older teen daughter.  The four-part series is written by the prolific British screenwriter Jack Thorne, who’s made a name over here with two recent Netflix series Adolescence and Toxic Town (see here), all dealing with significant medical issues involving children.  This one is similarly wrenching, provocative without taking sides, but dramatizing personal and moral issues in an even-handed and comprehensible way.
 
Acorn has some older series (not exclusively) that I recommend enthusiastically – Doc Martin, The Detectorists, This Is Going to Hurt – but leans heavily into British mysteries and procedurals, which I’m not into.  The long-running documentary series Digging for Britain might have more interest when my son finds another job in British archaeology, but for now I sampled Art Detectives (MC-72), which I expected to be a documentary series, but turned out fictionally to emphasize the “detective” over the “art.”  It’s not bad, but it’s not my sort of thing.
 
Paramount is so desperate to sell itself that it’s not only willing to give the Grifter-in-Chief an upfront bribe of $16 million, but to offer subscriptions at 99¢ per month to increase its subscriber base.  That was the perfect opening to watch the handful of programs I’d accumulated to watch there.
 
My immediate recourse was to one of my all-time favorite shows, Couples Therapy (MC-tbd, P+), now having completed the second half of its fourth season, with no diminishment in my appreciation.  I’m not generally a fan of Showtime series or “reality tv” in general, but this program transcends both categories.  I refer you back to my original and later reviews for more detail.  Here just let me say this recommendation comes with jumping up and down and waving my hands – look here! watch this! You’ll laugh, you’ll wince, you’ll nod your head and ponder!
 
The next essential new viewing on P+ was Hard Truths (MC-88).  Mike Leigh likes to make films about deplorables, various sorts of unlikeable and damaged people, aiming to elicit understanding rather than sympathy.  Marianne Jean-Baptiste (from Secrets & Lies) adds another memorable character portrait to his sardonic gallery.  She’s a cyclone of anxiety and rage, as likely to take it out on people in the grocery store as her husband and layabout grown son.  A hairdresser sister is her polar opposite, friendly and outgoing, as are her two daughters.  Our Pansy is irascible, vituperative, and misanthropic – the flip-side of Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky – but funny enough that labeling this film a comedy is not entirely risible.  The hard truths of mental anguish for some people is compounded in the lives that surround them.
 
Juliette Binoche as Penelope was enough to draw me to The Return (MC-66), but Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus, returning to Ithaca after the Trojan War, certainly adds value to this retelling of the classic tale.  The pair team up three decades after The English Patient and continue to burn up the screen.  This remake of the conclusion of the Homeric tale starts with Odysseus washing up naked on the shores of his island kingdom, where belligerent suitors vie for the hand of his supposedly-widowed wife.  Suffering prehistoric PTSD and survivor guilt, he hides his identity until he can avenge himself and reclaim wife, son, and realm.  In addition to the two lead performances, this film has a feel for period and landscape that makes yet another retelling worth a look.
 
For some time I’d been looking to watch The Godfather films again and couldn’t find them on streaming till they reappeared on P+, looking very good indeed.  I was thinking about my father’s firm resolve never to see the original, and what it would have been like to sit down and watch with him at some later date (he died before Part II was even released).  Even with shot-by-shot memories of the films, they still have the power to surprise and enchant, certainly a feather in Paramount’s cap.  And what Coppola now calls The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone was substantially new to me, and a not-bad conclusion to the saga.  So I got my money’s worth from P+, if not the massive payoff that Il Dunce exacted.  [Update: The CBS cancellation of Stephen Colbert – at the unspoken behest of Trump – makes this the last time I’ll ever have anything positive to say about Paramount programming.]
 
Speaking of the dirty bastard, let’s say a good word for PBS as he eviscerates it.  They had their comeback ready for him, in the well-made “American Masters” episode Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny (PBS), which follows her career through an early affair with Heidegger, her flight from the Nazis, and her writings from The Origins of Totalitarianism to Eichmann in Jerusalem, with many lessons for our present moment.
 
Free for All: The Public Library (IMDB, PBS) appeared on “Independent Lens” and far exceeded my expectations, a history of American public libraries that captured the noble spirit of the enterprise through its changing history.  As a lifelong librarian/bookseller (my career started at 16, as a page in my local public library), I found it immensely informative and inspiring.
 
Union (MC-80, PBS) appeared on “POV,” the third of public television’s outstanding documentary series that will be sorely missed if they don’t find another home or another means of funding.  Union organizing is literally in my blood, from my father’s life-long struggle, so I was absorbed by this effort to unionize an Amazon facility on Staten Island, a first and formidable task led by a self-described NWA.  The organizers deal not just with their monolithic opponent, but their own differences and debates about strategy and conflict.  The film itself is loosely organized and observational, but powerful nonetheless.

[Late update]  PBS has a lot of foreign mystery series that I just ignore, but a tip from a friend who had read my recent essay on autism recommended Astrid (properly Astrid et Raphaëlle, IMDB).  I sampled the show as a courtesy, and was soon hooked, since the characterizations far exceeded each episode’s mystery, which tended to have an interesting setting and motive in addition to the essential puzzle.  Astrid (Sara Mortensen) is an autistic criminal records archivist who’s enlisted by disorganized detective Raphaëlle (Lola Delawaere) to help solve puzzling Parisian murders.  The mutually incomprehensible personalities come to comprehend each other quite touchingly, and the excellent acting is supplemented in flashbacks by a child actress who is a dead ringer for the older Astrid.  When starting, I found it unlikely that I would make it through one season of eight episodes, but now I think I may wind up watching all four.

Finally, let me add a postscript to my minimizing of Max, as it tries to reclaim the mantle of HBO. 

I would have liked Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (MC-84) more if I’d seen it in IMAX for the full effect, but it never would have been my sort of cinema.  Impressive in parts, the movie did not hang together for me.  Like Get Out, it was an engaging film that lost me when it went in the direction of the horror genre.  Outside of Buffy’s comedic slayings, I never had a thing for vampires.  On the other hand, I’ve liked Michael B. Jordan ever since The Wire and Friday Night Lights, but here I never really figured out which of the identical twins Smoke and Stack he was playing at any given time.  They’re vets of WWI and Al Capone’s gang in Chicago who return to Mississippi in 1932 to open a juke joint.  The rest of the cast is quite good, the design and execution admirable, and the scenes of singing and dancing, from blues music to Irish jigs, are inspired and layered, but incidents of blood geysering or dripping down chins do not inspire me at all.

Hard to figure how something like On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (MC-87) wound up on Max.  Writer-director Rungano Nyoni was born in Zambia but grew up in Wales, and like her protagonist Shula (an arresting Susan Chardy) returns to her native roots.  Driving home late from a costume party, she sees a body lying in the road and recognizes her abusive uncle.  She’s impassive about the corpse, but a drunken cousin who also passes by is quite exhilarated.  It eventually emerges that both of them, another cousin, and several other young girls have been abused by the malefactor, but his behavior was hushed up to preserve the family veneer of respectability, in a conspiracy of ignoring and forgetting that is both matrilineal and patriarchal, in the same way the culture is both modern and traditional, the film realistic and hallucinatory.  We come to understand that the guinea fowl is the bird that warns other animals of danger in their midst.

Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print (MC-tbd) is in the proud tradition of HBO Documentaries, as three different directors approach the same material about the creation of Ms. magazine, and some of the same interviews with founders like Gloria Steinem, from the perspective of three different themes, delineating issues of the women’s movement from the Seventies till now, in a way that helps illuminate the past and the present.

In Marc Maron: Panicked (MC-84), Maron continues to make stand-up comedy out of his sardonic and anxious personality, and the “intrusive catastrophic thinking” that his therapist diagnoses.  He’s certainly an interesting character with many interesting observations, but I still prefer his acting roles to his solo performances. 

After scrounging around on these secondary streaming channels, I’ll be returning to bedrock and catching up with new and old offerings on the Criterion Channel.

Hulu-ciné-shins IV

A 12-week pause on my Hulu subscription ended conveniently just as the fourth seasons of two of my very favorite series became available for bingeing.  I get rather exercised telling people how great Welcome to Wrexham (MC-77) is, and here I’ll just add more hyperbole to my initial recommendation.  Like the Welsh town and football club it celebrates, this documentary series just keeps getting better and better.  You don’t really need to know anything about soccer - or about the ins-and-outs of promotion and relegation in the English Football League - to enjoy this show.  All you need is some appreciation of the role of sport in community development, social and economic and dare-I-say-spiritual.  This show is funny, exciting, and inspiring in its depth and breadth.  Don’t get me wrong, the soccer is involving even to the uninitiated, but that’s only the beginning of the story.  And the series has found its perfect format in eight 40-minute episodes; further seasons will keep me coming back to Hulu  to follow the inexorable rise of this team and this show.  (Help, I can't control this rogue underlining!)

The third season of The Bear (MC-83) was a bit of a comedown from the very strong second (scroll down here for my rec), but the fourth gets Carmy out of the freezer and back in touch with his friends, confirming that Christopher Storer and his team know what they’re doing and where they’re going, perhaps more than Carmy and his team.  They’re both in the business of offering the public sensuous experiences of taste and feeling, art and delight, along with the occasional pratfall.  Just looking at online viewer comments, I’m amazed at how divisive this show has become, probably because it aspires to be a work of art and not just an entertainment.  I’m still fully on board, and eager for the just-announced fifth season.  Not every character or episode is going to appeal to everyone (though it’s hard to imagine Syd- or Claire Bear- or Sugar-haters), but each of them has dimension and complexity, and something to say.  Like the Christmas dinner of season two, this season’s wedding episode is an extended gathering of all the Bears that demonstrates what an organic whole this series is, even with a star-studded string of cameos.  Hulu has a variety of strengths, but as far as tv series go, its FX division has inherited the mark of quality once held by HBO or AMC.  Aside from that, Hulu’s weekly “Top 15” rarely has anything that I would deign to watch, so be prepared to search for the many hidden gems on the channel.
 
Such Brave Girls (MC-73) is deep in the tradition of British cringe comedy, but with the bright new voice of show creator and star Kat Sadler.  She’s a deeply-troubled young woman in a family of toxic narcissists, her sister played by real-life sister Lizzie Davidson and desperate mother by Louise Brealy, each disastrously attached to sketchy men.  The humor is raunchy and pointed, the characters are broad but relatable, and two seasons of six episodes do not overstay their welcome, but the award-winning show would have to add a new storyline or dimension to bring me back for a third.
 
The Order (MC-75) is a near-miss.  For most of the film’s length, it’s a truthful account of a 1980s white supremacist uprising in the Northwest, which echoes down to our current moment, but in the end director Justin Kurzel succumbs to action movie tropes and loses the opportunity to make a significant statement.  Admittedly the action scenes are well-done, and the rugged landscape is depicted impressively.  Jude Law is cast against type as a grizzled FBI veteran; Tye Sheridan is the young cop who joins him on the mission to track down baby-faced killer Nicholas Hoult and his gang of neo-Nazis itching for a fight.  Jurnee Smollett leads the FBI team, ironically just about the only non-white face to be seen.  What motivates these knuckleheads to violent hate against distant Blacks, immigrants, and Jews?  Must be irrational fear of the Other, and yearning for a return to some imaginary lost Order.  MAWA.
 
Hulu offers a surprising selection of outstanding foreign films, and Seed of the Sacred Fig (MC-84) is an excellent example.  After a brief flourishing of Iranian cinema decades ago, many of their directors were consigned to exile, imprisonment, or silence.  But some still get their films made, however surreptitiously.  I was previously unfamiliar with director Mohammad Rasoulof and daunted by this film’s runtime of almost three hours, but once started it carried me along and absorbed my attention.  It was made clandestinely, and the tension seeps into the very effective performances of a family of four, the father aspiring to become a judge in the regime of the mullahs, the mother aspiring to a well-off existence, the two girls of college and high school age aspiring to liberation and inspired by the ”Women, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022, of which the film includes documentary cellphone footage.  Under shooting constraints, Rasoulof turns to isolated domestic thriller, which morphs into political allegory.  The allegory may be specifically Iranian but has decided relevance to current American politics.
 
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found (MC-82) tells the story of a young photographer who documented apartheid and was banished from South Africa, and thereafter led a tragic life in exile, photographing Harlem and the Jim Crow South before becoming homeless as well as stateless, and then dying young of cancer.  Raoul Peck directed the great James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro, and here makes use of a cache of sixty thousand of Cole’s provocative and evocative photographs, which were recently and mysteriously found in a Swedish bank vault, accompanied by Cole’s own words as read by Lakeith Stanfield.  It’s a troubling yet inspiring resurrection of the sad history and fine eye of a forgotten artist.
 
Ocean with David Attenborough (MC-93) may seem superfluous after decades of Planet Earth documentaries, but it’s a brilliant summation of his career concern for the survival of the natural world in the context of human intervention, and even manages to confront environmental catastrophe with an element of redemption, along with the reliably dazzling photography, in a parting message released on his 99^th birthday.  This film moves effectively from wonder to horror to hope.
 
I’m not here to tell you it’s a great movie, but I did enjoy re-seeing Working Girl (MC-73).  In many ways, it’s as dated as a Hollywood film from the 30s or 50s, but Mike Nichols’ direction is fresh and Melanie Griffith carries the film with her innate appeal.  Though not exactly my type, she wins me over here (and elsewhere) as an example of movie royalty, passing the torch along from her mother Tippi Hedren to her daughter Dakota Johnson.  Here she’s a Staten Island secretary with big, big hair and ambition to match, who fills in for her downtown Manhattan M&A boss Sigourney Weaver and teams up with Harrison Ford for a big merger deal and some incidental hanky-panky.  Retrograde it may be, but this film has its moments.
 
Re-watched alongside The Godfather films, Barry Levinson’s Bugsy (MC-80) plays almost as a romantic comedy, given that it famously led to marriage and four children for Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.  Though the film nods to the fact that Bugsy Siegel was a brutal thug and Virginia Hill a vicious mob moll, there’s a veneer of Hollywood glamour over the proceedings, in this origin story of organized crime’s makeover of Las Vegas.  From Clyde to McCabe to John Reed to Bulworth and all the stops along the way, Beatty plays someone very like his own persona, a charmer who can coax money or sex out of anyone, without ever really understanding himself.  So much for Reagan-Bush era films, but it was nice to see these cycle through Hulu, now that we’re no longer in the era of universal DVD rental availability.
 
You may have noticed that I’ve given up any attempt to come up with fresh clever headings for these channel-by-channel round-ups, the better for specific channel subscribers to thread back through my previous coverage of it.  At this point, I’m going into another extended pause to Hulu, but I still consider it one of the very best streaming channels, if you know how to approach it.

Kanopy covers multitudes

Many libraries offer free access to Kanopy, a worthwhile streaming service with a surprisingly broad range of offerings, and an interface conducive to finding unexpected gems.  Usually I just incorporate programs I happen to watch on the channel under other headings, but recently it’s earned its own round-up.
 
Just as I was starting to read Robert Macfarlane’s latest book Is a River Alive? (the fourth of his I’ve read aloud with my daughter), I realized that he also wrote the script for River (MC-58), a documentary that had been on my Kanopy watchlist for some time.  Director Jennifer Peedom mixes music, and narration by Willem Defoe, with spectacular aerial footage to give an affirmative answer to the book’s title query, at least till killed by human intervention.  The same contributors previously made Mountain (MC-82), which jumped off from, or should I say climbed up behind, Macfarlane’s footsteps in his first book Mountains of the Mind.  Plenty of majestic mountain imagery, somewhat spoiled by the insane antics of tiny humans in that sublime setting.
 
Jazzy (MC-83) is a companion piece to director Morrisa Maltz’s promising debut feature, The Unknown Country (see here), with a reversal of lead and supporting actresses.  Lily Gladstone appears here late, as the main adult in a film focused closely on two tween girls in South Dakota, the title character being Jasmine Bearkiller Shangreaux.  Her best friend is Syriah Fool Head Means, and we spend a lot of time just hanging out with them, as they discuss their ambivalent feelings about growing up and maybe transferring their affection from stuffed animals to boys.  They are split up when Syriah goes to live with her grandmother on the reservation, and they pine (ridge) for each other.  The film can seem aimless at times, like the girls it portrays up close and personal, but ends up as a convincing rendition of a phase in young girls’ lives.
 
With a similarly intimate, immersive, evanescent style, Raven Jackson’s debut feature All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (MC-87) follows the growing up of a Black girl in rural Mississippi.  The film is more poetic than narrative, with a close-up, associative approach that finds hands as expressive as faces.  It wanders back and forth through decades of time, with several different actresses playing the central character at different ages, but reaches its destination decisively.  Slow and enigmatic, it mixes water and dirt to create a sense of life in crystalline images, however muddy in the telling.  This was one of those films where it helps to have a fellow viewer to turn to and ask, “what’s happening here?”  David Ehrlich of IndieWire, as he often does, offers a perfect summation of this film, “a whispered symphony of sense memories,” and nails it with “vague but vividly rendered.”  I also agree with Justin Chang’s observation that “This is a movie that teaches you how to watch it.”
 
Kanopy offers a lot of series from the BBC and elsewhere, and I happened to take note of Tipping the Velvet (2002, IMDB), an unapologetically lesbian historical drama set in Dickensian times and the realm of music hall entertainers, starring Keeley Hawes and Rachel Sterling, and other familiar faces such as Benedict Cumberbatch and Sally Hawkins early in their careers.  Not quite at the level of Gentleman Jack, this is a groundbreaking three-part series that remains highly watchable.
 
Fish Tank (MC-81) was one of the few films on the NYT list of the 100 best movies of this century that I hadn’t seen, so I filled in that gap.  Andrea Arnold’s film about a very angry 15-year-old girl living in lower-class East London is more miserabilist than similar films by Ken Loach or Mike Leigh or the Dardenne brothers.  This iteration demands our attention but does not solicit our sympathy.  As the girl, Katie Jarvis was hailed for her close-to-the-bone performance, but her subsequent history of few roles and an assault conviction suggests she was just being herself.  She’s certainly put through the ringer in this film, and returns violence for violence with misguided but justifiable spirit.  As usual, you can blame the mother, and also her seemingly-friendly boyfriend, played by a young Michael Fassbinder (alarmingly thin just after his role as Hunger striker Bobby Sands).
 
Programs turn up on Kanopy both before and after appearing on other streaming channels.  For example, multiple-Oscar winner Anora started on Hulu but is now also on Kanopy, while The Old Oak (see my review) streams only here or on the other library-based service Hoopla.  I strongly advise getting a free subscription to one or the other through your participating library, to supplement whatever other streaming channels you receive.  Another Kanopy offering I recommend is the excellent “Exhibition on Screen” series I used to sell on DVD at the Clark Museum Shop (see here to search for that, or other titles).