Merrily down the stream

I was an early adopter of the DVD-by-mail service of Netflix, signing up in June 2000, and maintaining my subscription without break to this very day, when few people watch DVDs anymore and indeed the company itself has orphaned its DVD division, to concentrate on streaming and original content.

As a cable TV subscriber, I was for a number of years happy with DirecTV satellite service with TiVo recorder, especially to follow my beloved Cleveland Indians with MLB Extra Innings, but became an early cord-cutter when streaming options began to supplement DVDs.  The problem there was an inadequate DSL internet connection, which frequently made watching a frustrating experience.

Last year, after four decades in this house, we finally got a cable company to extend the connection to our rural location, and signed up for a package that included cable TV and broadband internet.  The improvement in streaming was enhanced when we got a simple and economical Roku system.  From that moment, I was eager to cut the cable cord again, with news, sports, and Colbert the only hold-ups.  Now I’ve made the break and gone exclusively to a variety of streaming options, and this blog will reflect that change.

The “long tail” that offered so much choice in the earlier days of DVD has atrophied and fallen off, and now we are left mostly with the choices presented by various streaming services.  So instead of DVDs or cable broadcasts, I will be relying on Netflix, Amazon, PBS Passport, Hulu, YouTube, and other streaming channels to deliver my daily viewing.  And as I comment on a film or show, I’ll link to the service through which I watched it.

Not willing to give up my long-term source of DVDs by mail altogether, I’ve cut back to one disk at a time. Once my subscription was for eight at a time, but that was when Netflix had only one warehouse, out on the west coast, so turnaround was up to a week. 

Not altogether coincidentally, I won’t persist in my attempt of recent years to see all the best-reviewed films of the year just past (per Metacritic and other year-end compilations).  I will pre-select more according to my specific interests, and to themes offered by the respective channels.

Here are a few tv series and films that have caught (and held) my eye over the past several months, organized by streaming channel or other provider.  I’m going to power through with the most cursory of comments, just to feel current once again. 

Netflix still leads the list of streaming services, despite changing their focus from depth of “backlist” or reach of coverage to their own original programming, much of it very well done.  (Other services followed suit, and the proliferation of them compensates for the loss in comprehensiveness.) 

As an example, I was already a fan of GLOW (MC-85, NFX), and recommended its first season, but it only got better in its second.  The whole concept of 1980s female wrestling may come across as T&A exploitation, but the creators of this series are almost all women, except for the Marc Maron character who is the impresario and nominal director of the show within a show.  As in that show, the patriarchy is supplanted by a feminist (or at least female) collective.  Alison Brie and Betty Gilpin lead a diverse and talented cast.  Offering a wealth of women’s stories and portrayals, this show has more staying power than Orange is the New Black, in my opinion.

While eagerly awaiting another season of Fleabag from Phoebe Waller-Bridge, I caught up with her other series from 2016, Crashing (NFX), which certainly features her same brand of cringe humor, fearless and clueless, scathing yet humane, bordering-on-disgusting-but-nonetheless-hilarious.  This show is about a group of young people who get to crash in an abandoned hospital - as “guardians” until it is torn down - and makes for a diverting take on the typical Friends template. 

If you only know Hugh Bonneville as the pompous papa of Downton Abbey, you’re in for a treat with two series that show off his comic chops.  W1A (NFX) is the follow-up to Twenty Twelve, but it’s the better show and easier to see.  In each Bonneville plays the same character, Ian Fletcher, as the BBC’s “Head of Values” after serving as “Head of Deliverance” for the 2012 London Olympics.  In the distinguished tradition of dysfunctional British workplaces, from The Office to The Thick of It and beyond, this mockumentary brings us inside the modern organization to observe the (lack of) work done by its denizens.  It was one thing for the BBC to parody preparations for the Olympics, but a delicious layer of self-parody is added in W1A (postal code for BBC headquarters).  Each of the characters has catchphrases that they repeat endlessly, as bureaucratic cover for being clueless or devious.  The dialogue is inventively repetitious, and all the players have the expressiveness and timing to make the phrases, while absolutely predictable, always fresh and frequently surprising.  I don’t remember any show that made me giggle so continuously.

W1A makes fun of the BBC’s reliance on its flagship success, The Great British Bake Off, which was tasty to me, because I have quite unexpectedly become a devoted fan of The Great British Baking Show (NFX), as it’s known in the U.S.  Just as the BBC lost GBBO to a commercial network, with a change of cast, the latest seasons now appear on Netflix instead of PBS, where I watched most of the previous seasons.  I miss Mary Berry and the two original comedians, but the charm of the show still resides in the characters and travails of the contestants.  This is the only food prep reality show that I have ever watched, and I don’t intend to watch another, but I’m pretty well hooked on this one, for its cross-section of British character types.

As Netflix original series go, I have to register disappointment at the sequel to The Staircase (MC-92, NFX), brought back largely to cash in on the true crime serial craze.  I was riveted by the first ten episodes sometime back, but finally made up my mind of the convicted murderer’s actual guilt.  And these extra three episodes, as he is released from prison on a technicality and has to decide whether to take a plea or be subject to retrial, as far as I was concerned, just gave a narcissistic psychopath the chance to perform for the camera.  It was especially annoying because that difficult choice was exactly what was offered so poignantly to the hero of Rectify, one of my all-time favorite tv series.

On the other hand, Netflix’s money was very well spent with Tamara Jenkins’ film Private Life (MC-83, NFX), starring Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti as an artsy Lower Manhattan fortysomething couple trying to have a child “by any means necessary.”  Funny and true, at human scale, with generous acceptance of the characters and their foibles, this film is a delight.  Fertility treatments and adoption interviews consume much of the couple’s time and energy, with high hopes and crushing disappointments.  Hahn and Giamatti are outstanding as the neurotic and dyspeptic pair, who are amusing and affecting by turns.  Kayli Carter offers welcome support as the sort-of-niece who moves in with them and becomes enmeshed with their baby-making hopes and schemes.  This is independent filmmaking at its best, and Netflix deserves credit for throwing a bit of its money in this direction.

To a lesser degree, the same might be said of The Land of Steady Habits (MC-71, NFX), but while Tamara Jenkins outdoes herself, Nicole Holofcener does not come up to her very estimable best.  The title connotes suburban Connecticut, where Ben Mendelson has dropped out of the whole commuter-consumer lifestyle.  The best thing in this Cheever-esque film is his against-type casting.  His characters usually convey a sense of underlying menace or madness, but here he is by turns endearingly and infuriatingly bemused and befuddled by the new life he’s trying to find.  Edie Falco is his ex-wife, and Connie Britton is a potential new girlfriend.  (But where is Catherine Keener, Holofcener’s mainstay, in this man-centered dramedy?)

I doubt the Coen brothers were dependent on Netflix to back The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (MC-79, NFX), but I bet they relished not having to worry about box office gross, while still being in line for film awards recognition.  Though not always attracted to their gleeful mayhem or sardonic (if not nihilist) worldview, I always have to tip my cap to their mastery of filmmaking and witty approach to genre.  This six-part deconstruction of the Hollywood Western is shot and acted exceedingly well, beautifully designed and cannily directed, if a little off-putting in gore, and somewhat hollow at the core.  The gunslinger, the rustler, the traveling thespian, the gold panner, the gingham girl on the Oregon trail (an outstanding Zoey Kazan), the odd assortment of characters on a stagecoach – you’ve seen them all before, but given new life by the literate and visually acute style of Joel and Ethan Coen.

Netflix also unearths some otherwise hidden independent films like Krisha (MC-86, NFX), which won some festival awards in 2016, then disappeared from view.  Trey Edward Shults raised money on Kickstarter to shoot this film, his first feature, in nine days at his mother’s home in Texas, cast mostly with family and friends – but there is nothing amateurish about it.  It’s a typical story of family dysfunction at Thanksgiving, but with a granular particularity that sets it apart.  It plays almost like a real-life horror film, but clearly went to school on John Cassavettes’ A Woman Under the Influence.  The title character, as performed by Shults’ aunt Krisha Fairchild, is an aging hippie with a history of addiction, trying to reconnect with her estranged family.  His mother is her sister, in the film as in real life, and their mother also appears as the grandmother, while he himself plays Krisha’s son, who wants nothing to do with the mother who abandoned him.  It sounds like a prescription for embarrassment all round, but unfolds like an accident pile-up in slow-mo, from which you can’t look away. 

[Click through for further choices from Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and other streaming services]

Like a Zombie film programmer, I continue to watch films about painters, even though there will never be any question of showing them at the Clark, and I enjoyed Cezanne et moi (MC-54, NFX), though it is likely too factual for a general audience and not factual enough for the art history crowd (and thus, just right for middlebrow me).  Time-fractured telling makes the story unintelligible to anyone not already familiar with lives of Cezanne and Zola.  Lovely scenery and believable acting, though.

The movement of films among the various streaming services is impossible to keep up with, but I was glad to see The Commitments (MC-73, NFX) before it disappeared from Netflix, and Alan Parker’s 1991 film about a Dublin pick-up band playing Sixties soul music remains an infectious delight, pure pleasure to revisit.

On to Amazon Prime, engaged in a rewarding competition with Netflix over the best in original (or imported) programming.  Case in point: A Very English Scandal (MC-84, AMZ) is a brisk and very accomplished miniseries directed by Stephen Frears, featuring an outstanding performance, nuanced and funny, from Hugh Grant as Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal Party in the Sixties, brought down from his fantasy of Prime Ministership by a scandal involving still-illegal homosexuality and conspiracy to murder.  Ben Whishaw is the ex-lover who threatens to blackmail the respectably-married Thorpe, all in pursuit of his NHS ID card.  In three hour-long episodes, the series strikes a lot of notes, from comedy to near-tragedy, while remaining true to the facts of the case.

Homecoming (MC-83, AMZ), a 10-episode series adapted from a podcast, starts out feeling unsettled, but settles into an unsettling feel.  The half-hour format seems abrupt for a conspiratorial drama, but keeps the story moving along, like a cliff-hanging serial.  Julia Roberts is remarkably good in the dual role of administrator at a corporate pilot program for “treating” soldiers with PTSD, and in alternating sequences from four years later, a waitress with no recollection of her previous job.  She is well matched with Stephan James (who played Jesse Owens in Race) as a soldier she’s counseling.  Bobby Cannavale is her boss, and Shea Whigham is an investigator for the DoD.  Director Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) is visually inventive and audially acute, but somewhat relentless, in unfolding the story.  Uncertain for several episodes, I was eventually hooked and ultimately satisfied by the series.

You’re on your own with the best-known Amazon original series, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (MC-86, AMZ), which is, despite a variety of virtues, entirely too broad for me, theatrical and hammy.

My interest in films about artists did not end with my film programming role at the Clark so I was glad to see The Fabulous Life of Elisabeth Vigee LeBrun (AMZ), a surprisingly successful blend of talking heads, reenactments, and painting survey.  Director Arnaud Xainte uses that technique I usually dislike, where photos or other reproductions are rendered in floating 3-D, but does so subtly enough that it didn’t bother me.  Vigee-LeBrun had a hugely successful career as a portraitist in the ancien regime – endorsed by Marie Antoinette herself – and after the Revolution in exile all over Europe.  Her life spanned epochs as well as the continent, so it is interesting on several levels.  And her painting has always attracted me as well, with its direct and natural quality, despite calculation and fine finish.

While looking around Amazon Prime, I stumbled on a pretty good BBC Masterpiece film from 2008, Miss Austen Regrets (AMZ), which must have been lost in the shadow of the much-inferior Becoming Jane, which came out around the same.  The difference between them is as simple as that between the actresses playing Jane Austen – Olivia Williams vs. Anne Hathaway.  One is witty, cerebral, and period-appropriate: the other a cutie in a fancy-dress rom-com.  But I would not necessarily recommend the film to anyone who does not share my obsession with Austen and her milieu. 

Similarly, I wouldn’t recommend Under the Greenwood Tree (2005, AMZ) unless you’re like me, and can’t get enough adaptations of 19^th century English novels.  This early Hardy novel lacks his trademark fateful tragedy, but prefigures the plot of Far from the Madding Crowd, as a young Dorset village schoolteacher (Keeley Hawes) tries to decide among three suitors.  Eminently missable, this is comfort food for some of us.

I can almost recommend another literary adaptation on Amazon Prime, though not up to its source.  Ian McEwan wrote the screenplay from his own novel, On Chesil Beach (MC-62, AMZ), but couldn’t capture its interiority.  As the virginal couple on their honeymoon in Britain around 1960 (before sex was invented, according to Philip Larkin), Billy Howle and (especially!) Saoirse Ronan do their best to open up the depths of innocence and alarm.  Dominic Cooke directs competently, with a fine supporting cast, but the story is slight without the dimensions that prose narration can supply.  For me personally, scenes of Oxford and the Dorset coast were pleasantly reminiscent of a trip to England earlier this year.

Ian McEwan has also adapted another of his novels, not generally an ideal practice.  If you love Emma Thompson, you might want to see The Children Act (MC-62, AMZ).  If you don’t love Emma Thompson, then what is wrong with you?  She plays a British family court judge, enforcing the title legislation, under the workmanlike direction of Richard Eyre.  “My Lady” is committed to making very difficult decisions in the most thoughtful way, enough to estrange her from sympathetic husband Stanley Tucci.  Her most difficult decision concerns a hospital that wants to treat a teenage boy with leukemia by means of blood transfusion, which he and his Jehovah’s Witness parents refuse.  Will the court step in and allow the life-saving treatment?  The judge reaches a reasonable verdict, but then is drawn further into an emotionally compromised situation.  With opinions all over the map, it’s odd that these two McEwan adaptations came in with identical Metacritic ratings, though my own might have been ten points higher.

Disobedience (MC-74, AMZ) has much to recommend it, but not me.  You’ll have to exercise your own judgment, but over several nights I was happy to make it through this film by Sebastian Lelio (though not in a class with his Oscar-winner A Fantastic Woman).  Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams are the main attraction, as lovers who were long ago separated by their Orthodox community in London, RW leaving to become a photographer in NYC, RM staying behind to marry the rabbi-to-be (Alessandro Nivolo), who is the protégé of RW’s father.  RW returns when her father dies, where her presence is discomfiting to the congregation, and the three friends from childhood form an unusual triangle, in an unusually difficult situation.  The acting is fine, and well-observed, but if I say the film doesn’t quite hold together, that’s not just the result of how I watched it.

For me, the best value in streaming is the PBS Passport, which is the reward for a $60 annual donation, and gives access to current programming, but also an entire back catalog of programs on series like Masterpiece, Nature, American Experience, American Masters, Independent Lens, POV, and Frontline.  Lately I’ve enjoyed a Ken Burns-branded documentary on the Mayo Clinic, and the BBC series Civilizations, which updates and pluralizes the famous old Kenneth Clark series, with narrators like Simon Schama and Mary Beard.  I also loved Nature episodes on beavers and squirrels, and American Masters such as Andrew Wyeth and Elizabeth Murray.  Really a cornucopia of worthwhile viewing.

The priciest of services, but easy to hack, is HBO Go or HBO Now.  Though eclipsed by Netflix and Amazon in money spent on original programming, HBO is still a premium service, beyond the obligatory Game of Thrones.  Some of their recent series I didn’t care for, but two caught and held my interest:

The Deuce (MC-86, HBO) got even better in its second season, moving its portrait of Times Square vice forward to 1977.  It develops to be about the filmmaking business as much as about prostitution and porn, as the Maggie Gyllenhaal character moves up from streetwalking to the director’s chair.  James Franco’s Mob-enmeshed twin brothers also get deeper into character – and the shit.  Other characters and themes evolve, in anticipation of the time leap to the third and final season.  I’m a sucker for anything David Simon does, but this may eventually compare to The Wire and Treme.

I initially passed on Succession (MC-70, HBO), when I read it was like Billions (which I gave up after a few episodes) but not as good.  Luckily, reliable Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker set me straight and I gave it a chance, becoming quite a fan.  The key lies in appreciating how funny this obscenely-rich family soap opera turns out to be.  One giveaway is Adam McKay’s direction of the first episode, having made high finance so entertaining in The Big Short, but also the writing of series creator Jesse Armstrong, late of outstanding British comedies Peep Show and The Thick of It.  The family in question is a mash-up of the Murdochs and the Trumps, with the hateful paterfamilias played by Brian Cox.  He’s a media titan on the order of Rupert Murdoch, but his grown children are more reminiscent of Jared and Ivanka, as well as Don Jr.  They’re a bunch of scorpions in a bottle, and it’s bitterly amusing to watch them sting each other, as they battle to take over the family business empire.  I definitely intend to come back for more.

HBO also produces documentaries of interest.  Political docs Queen of the World (i.e. Elizabeth II) and The Final Year (i.e. of the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts) were blandly nostalgic, but two show-biz docs went well beyond the typical celebrity profile.  Though I figured her to be already over-exposed, Jane Fonda in Five Acts (MC-87, HBO) certainly revealed new dimensions of her character and career, and their reflection on the times she has lived through.  The five acts are titled for her father Henry and her three husbands, Roger (Vadim, the French director), Tom (Hayden, radical turned politician), and Ted (Turner, media mogul), and finally Jane (as she discovers her true self at last).  It was a pleasure to revisit her past incarnations, and the history from which they emerged, in this appreciative but candid portrait.

Meanwhile Judd Apatow’s appreciation of his mentor in The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling (MC-90, HBO) surprisingly held my interest through more than four hours.  Shandling was not someone whose career I followed, but his life turned out to be more involving than I expected.  With so many different comedians weighing in on that career, the film turns into a medium-deep reflection on the whole profession and the personalities attracted to it, with entertainment history reflecting wider cultural themes.

HBO’s line-up of movies contains little of interest to me, but they certainly have one gem in Paddington 2 (MC-88, HBO), which truly has appeal for all ages, in an absolutely stunning mix of computer animation and live action, continuously inventive and kinetic.  Ben Whishaw is the perfect voice of the small Peruvian bear now living in London, and the live cast is a Who’s Who of British acting, led by Hugh Grant, Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, and other familiar faces at every turn.  But writer-director Peter King is the star of the show, springboarding off the success of the first film to make an even more dazzling and satisfying sequel (this review accurately highlights his achievement).  Sweet and funny, but never arch or saccharine, this visual joyride may be one of the most enjoyable films you’ll see all year, whether you’re 7 or 70.

What a waste of talent in Game Night (MC-66, HBO)!  How could you go wrong with that cast (Jason Bateman, Rachel McAdams, Kyle Chandler, and a host of welcome faces)?  Especially after a set-up that was swift and visually inventive.  Well, what you do is devolve into another senseless caper/chase movie.  The film remains self-aware and parodistic, but with less and less payoff.

I took a free trial of Hulu to see The Looming Tower, and from month to month there has been just barely enough programming of interest to warrant continuing the subscription.  So far.

For example, this year’s widely-praised counterpart to last year’s Get Out – rapper Boots Riley’s debut feature Sorry to Bother You (MC-80, Hulu) – is a wild mélange of ideas and styles that sustains interest but doesn’t really add up or hold together.  All the various influences can be fun to tease out, but wind up wearying and distracting.  Lakeith Stanfield stars in a breakout role, as a job-starved fellow living in his uncle’s garage, who considers himself lucky to get a cubicle and a headset, but then discovers his “white voice” (too-literally dubbed-in) that opens the door to success as a telemarketer.  He’s moved upstairs as a “Power Caller” for a nefarious tech mogul (Armie Hammer) developing new forms of slavery.  Meanwhile his girlfriend (Tessa Thompson) is a radical artist, opposed to his newfound success, as various shapes of shit hit the fan.

In an odd coincidence (or maybe not, at a moment when “code-shifting” has become a codeword), Spike Lee’s latest joint features another black man finding success by using his white voice.  BlacKkKlansman (MC-83, NFX) looks to the past rather than the near-future to comment on issues all too relevant to today.  Based of the memoir of the first black cop in Colorado Springs (played by John David Washington, Denzel’s son), the film tells how he managed to infiltrate the Klan by phone, and then recruited a white fellow cop (Adam Driver) to represent him on the inside.  A visit from David Duke in 1972 (with Nixon/Agnew posters prominent) sets plot and counterplot in motion.  As is typical of Lee, there is much that is provocative or funny in the film, but at the same time it’s undisciplined and all over the place – he just can’t resist any of his own ideas, never takes the well-worn advice to “kill your darlings.”  (The newsreel epilogue on Charlottesville 2017 seems both inevitable and tacked on.)  I was prepared by reviews to find this Spike’s best film in years, but instead my immediate response as the credits rolled was, “What a mess!”

Hulu’s bread and butter is streaming current or recent network shows, which are almost never of interest to me (though they have a fairly rich vein of British comedy, which I will soon be surveying).  An exception is Better Things (MC-96, Hulu), which I re-watched after urging them on a friend.  With that confirmation, I can state with some assurance that Pamela Adlon’s very personal show about her life as a single working mother with three daughters, played by a delightful trio of young actresses, is one of the better things on tv these days.  Catch up in time to see season three early in 2019.

If you’re like me, it will take some convincing to watch a skateboarding documentary, so let me add my endorsement to the A-grade Metacritic score of Minding the Gap (MC-93, Hulu).  Bing Liu has been filming his diverse group of skateboarding friends in Rust Belt America (specifically Rockford IL) for years, as he escaped into a film career and they escaped into alcohol and drugs.  He’s developed an uncanny ability to shoot while skateboarding himself, which makes passages of the film like a continuous sinuous dance on wheels.  But aside from that exhilarating freewheeling, most of these young men’s lives, marked by family histories of domestic violence, have deflated or crashed.  Steve James was a producer on this film, and enlisted Bing Liu to direct episodes of the outstanding series America to Me (see below).

Another worthwhile documentary on Hulu is RBG (MC-72, Hulu), an adoring and ingratiating portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “The Notorious RBG” and our frail but stalwart hope on the Supreme Court.  For me, the most novel information was the history of her career before the Court, as a legal advocate for equal rights for women.  She’s a determined and witty character who’s developed a devoted public cultural following, rather unprecedented for a Justice of our highest court.

As for other well-regarded offerings, I don’t want to say the emperor wears no clothes, but Juliette Binoche frequently does not in Let the Sunshine In (MC-79, Hulu).  I can’t see what others see in Claire Denis’ writing and direction of a story that follows a middle-aged artist as she looks for love in all the wrong places.  Maybe the story is autobiographical, and simply does not intersect with my autobiography in any meaningful way.  Anyway, I saw it, and just didn’t get it, though Juliette kept me watching to the end.

I wish the film Love After Love (MC-84, Hulu) had been a little bit worse, since then I could have turned it off in good conscience, but instead I watched to the end and offered a one-word summation, “Yuck!”  It’s a bitter film about grief, but writer-director Russell Harbough could have given his characters at least some redeeming traits (Chris O’Dowd might have been able to let them through, though I’m not so sure about Andie Macdowell as his newly-widowed mother).

I digress a bit to talk about a film that offers an instructive contrast to the previous, despite virtually identical Metacritic ratings.  In Who We Are Now (MC-83, Starz), Julianne Nicholson is more than capable of conveying grief, in this case for the child she has lost through her years in jail for a manslaughter conviction.  In a parallel storyline that eventually intersects, Emma Roberts – new to me, but intriguingly reminiscent of her father and aunt – is a young go-getting lawyer.  Matthew Newton’s writing and direction, with a subtle approach to justice and forgiveness, mark him as a filmmaker to watch.  If you need a further prod to see this undervalued film, read David Ehrlich’s spot-on review. 

So I caught up with Newton’s previous film, From Nowhere (MC-75, AMZ), and was wowed by his debut, a story about undocumented teens graduating from high school and having nowhere to go, putting a timely face to the whole question of DACA Dreamers.  Julianne Nicholson plays a sympathetic English teacher trying to help, and the unfamiliar but extremely natural young actors convey a documentary authenticity, to match Newton’s empathetic filmmaking.

Ms. Nicholson also contributes solid work to Novitiate (MC-73, Starz), as the nonreligious mother of a teenage girl (Margaret Qualley, reminiscent of a young Isabelle Adjani), who enters an all-white Tennessee convent in 1964, in the midst of Vatican II changes.  This seems like an odd and bold choice for the award-winning debut feature by writer-director Maggie Betts, a non-Catholic woman of color.  Melissa Leo’s performance as the hard-assed old-school Mother Superior is uncharacteristically over-the-top and has been over-praised, but much of the film is lovely, serious, and thought-provoking.  It’s a film about a community of women, made by a different community of women.  Alive to the cult-like qualities of the cloistered life, the film is also intimate with the various desires within young women.

Until recently I’d taken little interest in Starz programming, but that might be changing.  Like me, you may want to take a free trial in order to watch what could be the best television program of the year, America to Me (MC-96, Starz), a documentary series of ten hour-long episodes that follows a dozen students and assorted teachers and staff through a single school year in a diverse but divided high school in the Chicago area.  It’s directed by documentary master Steve James (Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters, Life Itself, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail) and it’s revelatory, poignant, endearing, and funny.  These kids – mostly black or biracial, but with some token whites who are racially attuned – are all a pleasure to get to know, though sometimes frustrating, as teens will be.  Your heart – and your mind – will go out to them as they negotiate the realities of persistent racism in a supposedly post-racial environment.  Students, teachers, and parents each have their say, in a collective portrait of what seems like an exemplary high school, with hidden faultlines that reflect much in the surrounding society.

The first Starz original series that I cared to watch was Howards End (MC-86, Starz, AMZ).  I came to see the E.M. Forster adaptation by the estimable Kenneth Lonergan, but stayed to enjoy the outstanding lead performance by Hayley Atwell, and solid direction by Hettie Macdonald.  The production is sumptuous, and the acting certainly keeps pace with the 1992 Merchant-Ivory adaptation, starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins.  I don’t care to choose between Hayley and Emma, because they are both superb in different ways.  Likewise Matthew Macfadyen holds his own against Hopkins.  The eponymous house is better designed in the series, but Vanessa Redgrave is much better as its owner in the film, which I was very happy to re-watch.  There are plenty of differences between the two, but both are recommended.

Starz has surprisingly become the repository of some worthwhile foreign films that are otherwise unavailable.  Refer to my round-up of Best Foreign Picture nominees for comment on two such, the Oscar-winning A Fantastic Woman and Loveless.

A magazine squib made me seek out an early Emma Stone vehicle from 2010, and there it was on Starz.  Had I seen Easy A (MC-72, Starz) back then, I could easily have predicted her future stardom.  Will Gluck blends the traditional 1980s John Hughes teen film with updated literary adaptations like Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You.  In this case, the high school mainstay is The Scarlet Letter, which is referenced if hardly followed, in the plot of a good girl who gets a false reputation as a slut, and turns it to good purposes.  The adults are an all-star supporting cast, but the kids are pretty generic, with the shining exception of Ms. Stone as centerpiece.  The script is jokey and self-referential, but amusing enough – though did I mention Emma Stone?  Have to admit, I enjoyed the movie.

Once I decided to hang on to a Starz subscription for another month at least, I took in a few more of their offerings.  I certainly didn’t hate Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World (MC-72, Starz), but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see this (or the other recent) telling of the 1973 kidnapping of J. Paul Getty III by Italian gangsters, followed by his “richest-man-in-history” grandfather’s refusal to pay ransom.  Christopher Plummer (as last-minute replacement for Kevin Spacey) is excellent as the odious old man, but the movie is all over the place, in more ways than one.  Michelle Williams is the mother of the boy, trying to pry the money out of her ex-father-in-law (in perhaps my least favorite of her performances, as she is constrained to play an affected character, who never really elicits the sympathy she deserves), and Mark Walhberg is the Getty operative assigned to help her get the boy back.

Another middling new Starz offering is Final Portrait (MC-70, Starz), Stanley Tucci’s film about Alberto Giacometti (Geoffrey Rush) painting a portrait of James Lord (Armie Hammer).  Not without interest as an artistic chamberpiece, this is not a film I would have been eager to show at the Clark, unless I was running a series called “The Artist as Pain in the Ass.”  Still, it has some authenticity, and Rush creates a compelling if noisome character.

As for documentaries, Half the Picture (MC-76, Starz) is well worth watching for anyone interested in the making of films.  It’s largely a matter of talking heads, mostly female directors in this case, but edited to make an enlightening weave of women’s voices, well-organized by themes that portray the raw deal that women face in getting work in the male-dominated field, despite proven track records.  The result is much more thoughtful than special pleading, and offers a welcome perspective from behind the camera.

On Showtime, again worth the free trial on a network hardly worth a subscription, is the documentary series The Fourth Estate (MC-74, Show), which follows New York Times reporters and editors, as they follow the 2016 Presidential campaign.  Liz Garbus is a documentarian whose name I look for as a guarantor of quality, and she was granted extraordinary behind-the-scenes access.  It was interesting to see the personalities behind the bylines, but fascinating to see the processes of a modern newsroom, where the whole drama of “Stop the presses!” has been replaced with a finger hovering over the “Publish” button.  It’s painful history to relive, but from an enlightening perspective.  Let’s all give a round of applause for “the enemy of the people.”

I can’t wrap up a half-year of viewing without mentioning two other streaming options.  AMC has a very unsatisfactory service, so for the superb fourth season of Better Call Saul (MC-87, NFX) you may have to wait till it joins the first three on Netflix.  As a prequel bookend to Breaking Bad, this firmly supports Vince Gilligan’s claim to be the creator of best extended shelf of television ever, but BCS stands on it own with a distinctive identity, and I urge you to watch, whatever your history with BB.  The series is dramatically involving, visually inventive, and invectively hilarious, with the relationship of Jimmy-becoming-Saul and his better half Kim made absorbing by Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn, not to mention the converging meth business storyline.

As a last resort, you can find a way a stream almost anything on YouTube, which I now consult almost daily to see the likes of Colbert, news, and sports that I might otherwise miss.  So take it from me, there’s plenty to watch once you cut the cable cord.