Netflix in excelsis

Since I last celebrated “Netflix originality,” their prodigious production schedule has become even more impressive.  All these within the past month:

Exhibit A: The Crown (MC-84, NFX).  I loved the first two seasons, but I adored the third; don’t know how to deliver my accolades without inflation, but this series has already secured a place in my top ten of all time (maybe in a tie with Borgen).  As great as Claire Foy and all the rest were in the first two seasons, the acting is even more stupendous in the third, the production values just as spectacular, and the drama even more finely tuned.  Olivia Colman’s Oscar-winning turn as Queen Anne was showy and expressive, but her middle-aged Queen Elizabeth is an even more amazing performance, reserved but deeply felt, showing the power of one tear versus many.  Tobias Menzies makes an equally rigid but more understandable Philip, Helena Bonham Carter a force of nature as Margaret, and Josh O’Connor a poignant and true-to-life Charles.  And so many of the subsidiary roles are filled by familiar and welcome faces, from Britain’s vast stock of high-quality acting.  The mix of history and soap opera, the personal look behind the impersonal façade of royalty, the blend of comedy and drama, the farce and force of monarchy – all of it comes through marvelously, sympathetic but not sycophantic.  Peter Morgan clearly knows this world, and the series continues the tradition of his film The Queen (a story he will cover again in season four), and his play The Audience, which revolved around the Queen’s tête-à-têtes with different Prime Ministers.  The Crown does not take down the Royals with the sweet venom of Succession, but has a similar vibe of voyeuristic  vengeance.

Exhibit A+: The Irishman (MC-94, NFX).  Martin Scorsese has been there and done that with mob movies, but still has something new to say within the genre.  With a personal point of view that enriches all his films, Scorsese in his late 70s is understandably exploring the theme of aging and death.  Even if our everyman is a hitman (or “housepainter,” in the lingo of the source book), the film is about the costs and consequences of survival, as well as the varieties of demise.  Getting the band “together again” for the first time, DeNiro and Pesci and Pacino do some of the best acting of their respective careers, aided by computer-assisted de-aging techniques.  DeNiro is the title character, a trucker who forms a fortuitous relationship with Philly-area mob boss Pesci, who in turn introduces him to Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa, head of the Teamsters and antagonist of the Kennedys.  In a series of nested flashbacks from the aged DeNiro’s nursing home, the film covers a large swath of mob activity from the Fifties to the turn of the century.  You might call it a compilation album of the Mafia’s Greatest Hits, with excellent supporting performances from familiar faces.  It’s all very engrossing, and no more violent than it needs to be, more about the nature of relationships, family in every permutation, than about mayhem per se, which is notated in cursory fashion.  A film that moves deliberately but seems much shorter than its three-plus hours, this is a mature piece of work in every dimension, and a capstone to many distinguished careers.

Exhibit B:  Marriage Story (MC-94, NFX).  At 50, Noah Baumbach has made his best film since his third, The Squid and the Whale, which for me was the best of 2005, returning to the theme of an artsy Brooklyn duo uncoupling, this time more from the perspective of the adults than the children.  Another point of comparison is Kramer vs. Kramer, which Baumbach has matched or even bettered by putting Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson in place of Hoffman and Streep.  Add Laura Dern as her lawyer, Ray Liotta and Alan Alda as his, Merrit Wever and Julie Hagerty as her mother and sister, and you have one heck of a cast delivering the director’s cutting dialogue, harsh and funny with an undercurrent of genuine sentiment and sympathy.  Then you have the time-honored antagonistic opposition between NYC and LA, and even two wonderful performances of Sondheim songs, along with a Randy Newman score.  No longer slavishly imitating the French New Wave, Baumbach has successfully incarnated its spirit into his own personal story.  What’s not to like?  As long as you can handle raw emotion, and a rueful embrace of truth. 

Exhibit C:  Atlantics (MC-85, NFX).  Having taken the Grand Prix at Cannes, Mati Diop’s film is set in Dakar, Senegal, where construction workers at a luxury tower are being stiffed out of their pay, and decide to take to the ever-present sea in hopes of reaching Spain.  One of the workers has a beautiful girl friend, who is unwillingly promised to a wealthy ex-pat.  The first part of the film almost feels like a very engaging documentary about the intermingling lives of rich and poor, men and women, Muslim and secular, cellphones and the supernatural.  But then the story takes a magic realist turn that leaves me behind to a certain extent.  I’m not going to give away any more, because the film is meant to be puzzling, as well as lush and sensual.  I was absorbed by watching its exotic and alluring visuals, if not finally convinced by its narrative turns.

Exhibit D:  Dolemite Is My Name (MC-76, NFX).  Eddie Murphy makes a big comeback as the real 1970s comic and “blaxploitation” filmmaker Rudy Ray Moore, who revived his career by adopting the persona of Dolemite, an unabashed “deep down in the jungle” character, both pimp and kung-fu fighter, as well as proto-rapper, first on scabrous comedy albums and then on film.  Craig Brewer directs a star-studded cast, in a return to his first success, Hustle & Flow.  The film is better in its first half, with its focus on Murphy’s reinvention of his character, rather than the more diffuse second half, about the slipshod making of the ridiculous project that became a surprise midnight-movie hit.  Still, as a celebration of the rougher edges of black popular culture, this movie shines (if you’ll excuse the expression, since it has to take what it's dishing out).

Stand-up update:  I don’t intend to dig as deep as I did last year into Netflix’s line-up of stand-up comic performances, but there’s one I want to highlight, while earnestly hoping they will soon present Hannah Gadsby’s latest performance piece.  Just recently I’ve found another satirist to follow regularly, if not obsessively, besides my handful of Daily Show alums, and that is Seth Meyers.  I rarely watched SNL when he did Weekend Update, and have never watched his late night talk show, but recently caught some of his “Closer Look” segments on YouTube, and found them to be on par with John Oliver as extended riffs, informative and funny.  So when his new stand-up routine Seth Meyers: Lobby Baby turned up on Netflix (MC-tbd, NFX), I tuned in, and have rarely laughed out loud so many times within one hour.  He’s sharp but humane, and a very skilled performer, mixing the personal with the political, as much about his wife and children as about Trump.  Highly recommended.

Random notes on random viewing

There’s nothing systematic about what I’ve been watching for the past month and more, and nothing especially coherent for me to say about it.  But to sustain this long streak of reviewing as it approaches its 15^th anniversary, I will offer some casual commentary and a few real finds.  I’m in process with two composite reviews (“Netflix in excelsis” and “Coming to the crux of the current year”) which I will post as they reach critical mass, continuing my effort to offer friendly advice to the thoughtful consumer of streaming media.  (For a guide to cord-cutting choices, see my post “Streaming along.”)

Silicon Valley (MC-84, HBO) makes an appropriate addendum to my recent post “Good as they ever were,” as the sixth and final season unfolded with undiminished wit and glee.  Just as I get much of my political news from Colbert et al, virtually everything I know about the world of big tech comes from this well-written and well-acted comedy (with pre-history supplied by the excellent dramatic series Halt and Catch Fire (MC-75).)  This season brings us up to the present, ripped from the headlines you could say, with a focus on the ethics of tech, and the potential for bad results as well as good, evil as well as virtue, in tech disruption.  The thinking is big, the writing is sharp, the acting is fantastic.  Many witty delights add up to make this one of best shows of the decade.

With Veep gone to its reward, Silicon Valley was now paired on HBO with the limited series Mrs. Fletcher (MC-72, HBO).  I found the series limited in a lot of ways.  I can’t quite say it was limited to the appeal of Kathryn Hahn, because a lot of the cast was pretty good.  It certainly felt unusually truncated at seven episodes, cutting off just when the diverging stories converge, of a kid off to college and a divorced mother left alone for the first time, each trying to explore a new sexual landscape.  Maybe that’s the set-up for future seasons after all, with the writer of the source novel Tom Perrotta running the show, and working off the success (so I’m told) of The Leftovers.  Personally, I won’t feel compelled to watch.  A nice little workshop, however, for exclusively female directors

As another postscript to “Good as they ever were,” let me say Doc Martin ended its ninth season on a high note, and I hope to see more in the future.  Meanwhile, I had occasion to revisit a few episodes of The Detectorists, which has sadly but wisely concluded after three all-too-short seasons.  Together these two shows offer ample reason to subscribe to Acorn TV for a month or two, but earlier seasons are available on a variety of streaming channels.

Within the realm of British comedies, I have to report enjoying the second season of The End of F***ing World (MC-77, NFX), but can’t recommend it as enthusiastically as I did the first.

I have a certain resistance to Ken Burns, the man and his work, but somehow he always seems to overcome it when given a chance.  I wouldn’t have chosen to watch his latest protracted, self-important effort, but my housemate was doing her exercises to it, and I was eventually drawn in, and wound up watching six out of the eight two-hour episodes in his Country Music (MC-80, PBS).  As long as he avoids portentous narration over lingering still images set to syrupy music, and can rely on live archival footage, Burns provides a valuable service despite the tendency to go on and on.

Not only that, the series set me off on a country music viewing jag, starting with the superlative documentary The Gift: The Journey of Johnny Cash (MC-tbd, YouTube), which is authorized but not sanitized, much of the narration taken from audiotapes made by Cash himself while composing his autobiography.  And director Thom Zimny is far from a paid hack, giving the film a distinctive visual style, around the delightful performance clips from every stage of the Man in Black’s long and fruitful career

I even watched (parts of) a Dolly Parton tv special celebrating her 50 years at the Grand Old Opry, and now I’m tracking down two feature films I remember quite fondly, Coal Miner’s Daughter and Walk the Line, in order to re-view them.

Though I no longer have a professional interest in films about painters, I’m still inclined to watch them, so on PBS I caught up with the play Red on “Great Performances” and the documentary Rothko: Pictures Must Be Miraculous on “American Masters.”  Alfred Molina is pretty great, if over the top, as Rothko, but the assistant who is his interlocutor is too “theatrical” for my taste, and the stage business generally unconvincing, but the dialogue definitely had merit as insight into Rothko’s approach to art.  The interrelated documentary was workmanlike but worthwhile.  I’m still on the lookout for two recent features about painters, Never Look Away and At Eternity’s Gate, and will report when I see them.

Final sort of past year's film & tv

Using Metacritic’s list of 100 best films of 2018, I weigh in with my own comparative list, which you may note pointedly excludes most of the Oscar “Best Picture” nominees.  Now that they're all available on one streaming channel or another, I fall back on my traditional distinction between “Exhortations” (which I urge you to see) and Recommendations (which I advise you to see), and try to rank them by urgency of endorsement, with some calibration of likeability and importance, and maybe a little special pleading.

Exhortations

Roma (#1)

Shoplifters (#3)

The Rider (#7)

The Tale (#15)

Private Life (#50)

Cold War (#11)

Eighth Grade (#14)

Leave No Trace (#22)

Paddington 2 (#20)

Free Solo (#52)

Recommendations

First Reformed (#38)

Summer 1993 (#67)

Wildlife (#80)

Bisbee ’17 (#32)

The Guardians (#68)

Lean On Pete (#75)

Burning (#12)

The Death of Stalin (#18)

Black Panther (#25)

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (#28)

Support the Girls (#36)

They Shall Not Grow Old (#6)

Amazing Grace (#2)

Minding the Gap (#5)

Tea with the Dames (#37)

As for television, my best of the year is not predicated on date-of-release calendar, but rather on all the shows I’ve watched over the past year that I would recommend, ranked and categorized loosely into hour-long drama (or documentary) series and half-hour comedies, with a sidebar on must-see British comedy.  Watch and enjoy. 

Drama

Succession

Better Call Saul

America to Me

When They See Us

Harlots

Gentleman Jack

The Deuce

Howards End

Unbelievable

The Victim

Call My Agent

A Very English Scandal

Comedy

Russian Doll

Better Things

Glow

Ramy

High Maintenance

End of the F***ing World

Best of the Brits

Fleabag

Catastrophe

Mum

Detectorists

Doc Martin
The Great British Baking Show

W1A

Please Like Me

Gavin & Stacy

Upstart Crow

You will find commentary (and further links and info) on all these in my previous posts.

New to home video

For more than a year my viewing has relied exclusively on streaming, with an occasional DVD from the public library.  I’ve felt no sense of limitation, except the occasional need to wait before watching.  And that’s no problem when there is always worthwhile product in the pipeline, in this era of peak content from competing services.  I still have a small handful of films to catch up with before drawing a thick black line under 2018, and adding up the sum.  Meanwhile (as Stephen Colbert would say), I’ve been watching some newer films that have come down the pipe already. 

It’s sexist of me, I know, but there are a dozen actresses who could induce me to watch any movie, for every actor who might make me look at something I otherwise wouldn’t.  Emma Thompson is certainly one of those, and thus I quite enjoyed Late Night (MC-70, AMZ), which is a Mindy Kaling vehicle that is driven by Lady Thompson.  I also enjoyed the entry into the writer’s room of the late night talk show host she plays, smart and sharp, but abrupt and impersonal with staff.  Mindy, who knows whereof she speaks, is the diversity hire in the writer’s room, who becomes the unlikely confidante of the beleaguered star Emma, as she may be nearing the end of her run.  A pleasant comedy with something to say, and saying it well.

It seems to be the case that I want to like each Isabel Coixet film more than I actually do.  She relies on good literary sources and good actors, but somehow the films rarely add up to more than the sum of their parts.  The Bookshop (MC-62, Hulu) should be just my thing, given subject and setting, though I don’t remember any particular fondness for the Penelope Fitzgerald novel.  In an English seaside town in 1959, a young widow played by Emily Mortimer opens her dream bookstore, but runs afoul of powerful local aristocrat Patricia Clarkson, though she wins the support and admiration of decayed aristo Bill Nighy.  This is something to look at, but lies rather lifeless on the page.

Non-Fiction (MC-79, Hulu) struck me as the most Rohmer-esque of Olivier Assayas’ films, and within his prolific and varied filmography most like Summer Hours, not least because it’s a communal talkfest centered on Juliet Binoche.  And what they’re talking about here is writing and publishing and bookselling, and digital disruptions to all three, plus the shifting balance between cinema and TV, with glances at politics and culture in general.  Being French, they are also sleeping with one another, and talking about that.  Add up all those factors, and you should be able to guess that I really enjoyed it all, though I can imagine many viewers being bored out of their minds.  But sexy, funny, Gallic high-mindedness is right in my wheelhouse.

I have to say, I may like Paul Dano more as a director than an actor, based on his first feature, Wildlife (MC-80, Showtime).  He had a lot of help, from writers to actors, from producers to designers to cinematographer.  With longtime partner Zoe Kazan, he adapted Richard Ford’s seemingly autobiographical novel about a teen boy in 1960s Montana, watching the slow split between his parents.  The watchful son is well-played by Ed Oxenbould, but with Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal as the parents, who would not be watchful?  As much as they were the draw for me, I took note of sound directorial choices all through, without knowing who the director was at the time.  The dad is a golf pro who loses his job and goes off to fight wildfires, while the mom is left alone to fight her own personal wildfires.  This one will force its way onto my Best of 2018 list.

It’s tempting to refer to Booksmart (MC-84, dvd) as Superbad soaked in estrogen, but it stands on its own in a distinctive tradition of last-day-of-high-school movies that goes back to American Graffiti and Dazed & Confused.  So – nothing we haven’t seen before, but from a female perspective we’ve rarely seen before.  Olivia Wilde is the director, and the quartet of screenwriters are all women.  Beanie Feldstein is Jonah Hill’s little sister, which reinforces the Superbad connection.  Kaitlyn Dever has mightily impressed in Justified and Unbelievable, and here she adds the arrow of comedy to her quiver.  The two of them are besties, and nerds who elected to grind their way through high school to Ivy League acceptances, only to find out that some party animals also got in.  So they decide to make up for lost time, on the night before graduation.  Nothing you wouldn’t expect – flares of teenage hormones, embarrassment, and gross-out humor – but rather a sweet story of friendship in the end.

A rather abrupt change of pace, for me and for the director, brings us to They Shall Not Grow Old (MC-91, HBO).  Peter Jackson turns from his Tolkien-based megapics to a documentary about ordinary British soldiers’ experience of WWI on the Western Front.  He brings his CGI wizardry to a compilation of old footage and recorded interviews, from the archives of the Imperial War Museum and the BBC, restoring 100-year-old film stock and colorizing it to convey you-are-there impressions of life in the trenches.  The dazzling images are complemented by brilliant editing of first-person accounts into an intelligible soundscape.  The result is both astonishing and compelling, as well as nauseating (you can almost smell the rotting flesh).  Cinematic trickery gives immediacy and impact to musty old material, and ever-renewed rage and disgust at the idiocy of trench warfare, or any other kind.

Woman at War (MC-81, Hulu) is a pleasant eco-fable made interesting by focusing on Icelandic landscapes and character types.  The woman in question is a choir conductor who in her spare time sabotages (frequently with bow and arrow) power lines that run to a smelting plant, for its outrages against the environment and contribution to climate change.  She (and her yoga teacher twin sister) are played by an engaging fiftyish actress, whose name I’m not even going to try to spell (nor the director’s).  The film is humorous and appealing, and righteous without being totally self-righteous, but likely to evaporate in the mind immediately after watching.  One of its cute aspects is having the musical score played within the frame, by a trio of accordion, tuba, and drums, with singing by three women in traditional Ukrainian folk dress (the film is a national co-production, and the woman herself is trying to adopt a Ukrainian orphan).

Trying to take advantage of a free month of Showtime, I’ve squeezed out some worthwhile viewing (beyond Wildlife) from the channel’s mostly unappealing or played-out offerings.  I sorta watched The Death of Stalin (MC-88, Show) on an airplane last spring, but felt it deserved a real viewing, to see where it might rank among the best of 2018.  This is what Armando Iannucci did after leaving Veep, his creation out of his superior British series The Thick of It.  A bit more slapstick, and a little less word-drunk, he continues to treat serious subjects with sardonic humor.  This film is about the maneuvering for power among Party leaders after the eponymous event.  Steve Buscemi is excellent as Khrushchev, but Simon Russell Beale is outstanding as Beria, the most evil clown.  Jeffrey Tambor and Michael Palin are Malenkov and Molotov respectively.  Can you make mass murder funny?  I’m afraid you can.  But the spectacle of conscienceless fools jockeying for power is not just amusing, but all too relevant to global politics today.

I’ve sampled quite a few Showtime series, but only made it all the way through one, Nurse Jackie (thanks to Edie Falco, and a number of female creators who have gone on to further success).  On Becoming a God in Central Florida (MC-76, Show) will not be another.  Presented as the passion project of Kirsten Dunst, I felt it deserved a look.  Intended as a satire on pyramid marketing schemes like Amway, it came across as broad and shrill, and like so many Showtime series, it privileges shock and twists over plausibility and empathy.  For Kirsten’s sake, I held on through four episodes before giving up.

To be fair, the Showtime documentary Couples Therapy (MC-80, Show) was much more authentic and revelatory than I expected.  A handful of couples go through six months of counseling with psychoanalyst Orna Guralnik, in nine half-hour episodes, filmed by fly-on-the-wall cameras.  This series could have exploited its voyeuristic appeal, or it could have droned on excruciatingly, but finds a happy medium, exploring true pain and conflict, but keeping the story moving on several fronts at once.  This show is much realer than reality tv.  If you enjoyed the HBO series In Treatment (and you should have), then give this one a try if you get the chance.

For those of us who found Motown the formative musical experience, Hitsville: the Making of Motown (Show) was not so much a Berry Gordy vanity project as a swinging trip down memory lane.  Look, there’s Smokey as a teenager!  There’s Marvin – so smooth and so pretty!  There are The Supremes – so swank!  The Temps and The Tops – look at them go!  But beyond the glorification of Gordy, the documentary is lively and well put-together, with organization and substance that carries it well beyond a fawning anniversary tribute.  I don’t recommend it for everyone, but I loved it.

I’ve been waiting ten months for Amazing Grace (MC-94, Hulu) to arrive on streaming, to complete my final ranking of 2018 films.  This documentary about the making of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 gospel album, recorded with James Cleveland and choir in an LA movie-theater-turned-church, ranks #2 on Metacritic’s best of the year.  Unfortunately, excessive praise raised my expectations higher than this modest production could sustain.  No doubt, eulogies to the recently-deceased Lady Soul inflected many reviews, as this cinematic restoration raises her from the dead.  I consider myself a fan of hers, and own a CD of the bestselling album, but I can see why she prevented the film’s release, aside from the synching problems that shelved the project.  She looks far from relaxed or joyous through most of the film, even when singing like an anguished angel.  Sidney Pollack somehow squeezed this film onto his schedule between filming Jeremiah Johnson and The Way We Were; he’s not really a documentarian, and did not produce a concert film masterpiece, such as Scorsese and others have done.  The staging is problematic, and compromised – it wanted to be a church service, giving vent to the spirit, but turned into a rehearsal.  Nonetheless, the performances are stirring and Aretha in her prime is a sight to behold.

My quest for the best of 2018 draws to a close (not to dismiss the possibility of a late surprise) with Bisbee ’17 (MC-87, AMZ), an intriguingly-layered documentary by Robert Greene, who put me in mind of Errol Morris, for unusual style and substance.  In 2017 the good people of Bisbee – once the richest town in Arizona but with the end of copper mining now the poorest, in a hellscape of ravaged land – decide to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of an event the town has long tried to forget.  The “Bisbee Deportation” was the day when 2000 vigilantes, deputized by the sheriff of nearby Tombstone, rounded up 1200 people – striking miners and other IWW sympathizers, a variety of immigrants, and anyone else who annoyed the plutocrats and nativists.  They were put into cattle cars and dropped off six hours into the New Mexico desert, warned never to return.  The contemporary relevance of this act is underscored as townspeople are selected to portray historical figures, sometimes with startling continuity of personality and belief.  Very subtly, we move from the present to the past and back again, in a robust restoration of memory.

As a postscript, let me add El Camino (MC-72, NFX).  I was happy to watch this addendum to Breaking Bad, written and directed by the terrific Vince Gilligan, but my first reaction is to say what it’s not.  This does not take the style, setting, and characters in a novel direction, like his own Better Call Saul; nor does it provide a totally satisfying capstone to a classic series, as David Milch recently did with Deadwood: The Movie.  That said, I enjoyed revisiting the world and characters of BB, and Aaron Paul does sustain interest in the fate of Jesse, but it’s nothing one couldn’t have projected from the final shot of him in BB.  I wish Gilligan would get on with completing the arc of BCS, since the fate I’m really interested in is Kim’s.  If you know what I’m talking about at all, you will probably want to watch El Camino.

As for Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat (MC-57, NFX), all I can say is that I watched it, and the next morning could not even remember doing so.  Despite the presence of Meryl Streep and many other stars, if I wanted to learn more about the Panama Papers, I’d rather watch a documentary.

Similarly with Modern Love (MC-67, AMZ), an eight-part series based on the NYT series of essays under the same heading.  Each half-hour segment has a different (estimable) cast and story line, though there is a perfunctory bit of interlock at the end.  Not a chore to watch, but not memorable either.  Somehow I made it through all of them, but none stands out as exceptional, unless you’re especially into the romantic travails of upscale New Yorkers.

I have to close out this post on a rather downbeat note, dissenting from the critical consensus on Gloria Bell (MC-79, AMZ), which I thought was less a “cover” of Sebastian Lelio’s own Gloria than a pale shadow of it.  Can’t imagine what possessed him to remake his Chilean original, except that Julianne Moore wanted to play the Paulina Garcia role.  But the result is washed-out and superfluous, and distressingly fake.  Garcia was a revelation, unfamiliar and ordinary-looking, and thus convincing as a middle-class middle-aged divorced woman, making unfortunate relational choices but dancing on gamely .  Moore is a well-known star, and a beauty despite the owlish glasses; accomplished actress she may be, but I just could not relate to her in this role.

Good as they ever were

This post is a check-in with new seasons of series that continue to engage and entertain me.  I’ve written about them before, but hereby renew my recommendations.

Sometimes the cheesiest premise can lead to the most audacious show.  Remember that the “new golden age of television” really began not with The Sopranos, but with Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Case in point, GLOW (MC-81, NFX) – this show about the 1980s-era Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling may come across as a T&A extravaganza, but each season has extended its reach at examining feminist issues in period costume.  In the just released 3^rd season, the group has had their tv show cancelled, but moved up to a live casino show in Las Vegas.  Like Orange is the New Black, this Netflix series features an unusual range of female characters in a communal setting, but unlike Orange, GLOW has retained my interest, and remains funny, sharp, and touching.  Alison Brie and Betty Gilpin are the headliners, but there’s a delightful diversity to the performers, with Marc Maron as the director and Geena Davis as guest star.  This show is much better than you may expect, and I hope it will be renewed for another season.  

Another show that redeems suspect male-gaze subject matter through almost exclusively female creators is Harlots (MC-77, Hulu), about prostitution in Georgian-era London (sort of The Deuce in fancy dress).  I wrote about the first two seasons here, and am equally favorable toward the third, filled with incident and surprise in a way that suggested they were trying to wrap up all the threads of the story in a headlong rush.  But then they managed to thread the needle with a conclusion that works well in its own right, but sets up intriguing possibilities for a fourth season.  This is prime Masterpiece material in period production values, but cranked to the max, heated up, and delivered with a gynocentric perspective.  I really love these actresses, led by Samantha Morton and Lesley Manville, and enjoy hissing all the evil males, aside from one stalwart black man.

The divine doubleness of Mum (BCG, Britbox) is suggested by its title.  Lesley Manville is a loving and beloved mother and widow, but she is also mum about her feelings in Stefan Golaszewski’s lovely comedy about grief.  She goes about her emotions as silently as she picks up after every other person who tramps through her house.  They are all caricatures – the clueless son and his dimwitted girlfriend, the hapless brother and the virago who uses him mercilessly, the cranky old in-laws – but so well scripted and performed that they take on more dimensions than you would imagine.  Manville, however, is achingly real and poignantly comic, as is Peter Mullan, cast totally against his steely-eyed type as the gentle, thwarted friend who has pined his entire life for his best friend’s wife.  Now the husband/friend is gone, and the sadness mingled with hope is nearly unbearable – as are the reactions of all the other characters – to the pair’s final stab at happiness.  The first season picks up on the day of the funeral, and covers a year in six half-hour installments.  The second season covers the same.  The third spans a week spent by all the characters at a posh country rental, in a beautifully realized and fully satisfying series finale.  I hope Golaszewski keeps to his resolve to end it there, but I certainly hope he teams up with Manville and Mullan again, a ménage made in heaven.   As a limited half-hour sitcom, Mum is in the same top-flight league as Fleabag and Catastrophe (i.e. among my all-time favorites), but a different sort of creature, dealing with the issues of being sixty rather than thirty or forty.  Warning: the theme song is an ear-worm that will drill into your brain after repeated hearings.

I’m amused at the thought of Lesley Manville commuting between the sets of Harlots and Mum, and going between the malign and the benign, between the pure evil of the grasping madam and the selfless serenity of the unflappable mother.  To square off the dimensions of her range, I tracked down DVDs of two of her outstanding performances in Mike Leigh films.  Somehow I had missed All or Nothing (2002, MC-72), a typical collaborative effort from Leigh, in which Manville is a supermarket cashier paired with cab driver Timothy Spall (James Corden is their son); other Leigh regulars like Ruth Sheen and Sally Hawkins also appear, all living in council flats and struggling to get by.  In his gritty kitchen-sink style, the story is grim but somehow funny and heartening at the same time.  These are unhappy people in unhappy circumstances, but the potential for redemption exists.  In Another Year (2010, MC-80, reviewed by me here), Manville is a drunken, desperate flirt, in four seasonal drop-ins on her rather self-satisfied married friends Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent.  They tolerate her behavior until they don’t, as she spirals toward self-destruction.  The situation is comic and heartbreaking in equal measure, and as always with Leigh’s method, the characters are fully lived-in.  On second viewing, I am more impressed with Lesley Manville’s range; like a Meryl Streep, she seems able to inhabit any kind of character, and to make them sympathetic in any kind of awfulness.

Another new British sitcom plays as the love child of my raving faves Fleabag and Catastrophe, the unmemorably-named This Way Up (MC-69, Hulu).  Creator and star Aisling Bea is one of two Irish sisters living in London; the other is Sharon Horgan of Catastrophe.  She has suffered loss and had a breakdown, but is an irrepressible jokester, and the sororal relationship is a delight.  The solid supporting cast has some pleasingly familiar faces, such as Aasif Mandvi.  In the typical UK format of six 23-minute episodes, this is a delightful taste of a wacky and winning show to look forward to, now that its progenitors have wrapped up their runs.

To fall under this rubric, Unbelievable (MC-82, NFX) has to be considered for its three lead actresses, who are indeed as good as they’ve ever been.  Kaitlyn Dever first made an impression on personal fave Justified and delivers an award-worthy performance here, looking far more frail and vulnerable as an 18-year-old rape victim disbelieved by the police, than she did eight years ago as precocious adoptee of a Harlan County crime family.  (I look forward to seeing her triangulate in Booksmart.)  I’ve followed Toni Collette’s career since Muriel’s Wedding (which deserves another look), and have always found her worth watching, here as a bad-ass detective who works the case of a serial rapist three years later in another state.  Merrit Wever, beloved from Nurse Jackie, is a younger and calmer detective from a nearby town, who joins forces on the case.  The series, especially toward the end, has too many odd-couple, cop-buddy beats, albeit with a female twist and well-performed.  But it’s based on a piece of prize-winning journalism about an actual case, and has veracity and resonance, if too much CSI detail.  A lot of important points are made about sexual violence, beyond the banner headline “Believe Women,” but it would have been better at six episodes rather than eight.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that the title of The Victim (Britbox) is misleadingly singular, since all the characters seem to be victims in one light or another.   Despite the set-up of a child’s murder, this is neither a criminal nor legal procedural, but a profound meditation on guilt and forgiveness, rage and revenge.  Though more limited in scope, I’d put it in category with Rectify, which happens to be my second favorite tv series of all time (after The Wire).  I do not have a thing for British mysteries, but while trying to make the most of a temporary subscription to Britbox (in order to watch Mum), I gave this a try largely because it stars Kelly Macdonald.  And she is fantastically good as the mother who cannot get past the murder of her young son almost twenty years before.  The juvenile who committed the murder served his sentence and was given a new identity on release.  The mother is determined to track him down and see that justice is done, according to her own lights.  This originally put me in mind of the HBO limited series, The Night Of, for an existential mystery that keeps one guessing through all its ingenious twists, but the fourth and final hour ascends to a powerful conclusion that transcends questions of good and evil, guilt and innocence, to propose something like redemption.

Not to be confused with Unbelievable is Undone (MC-88, AMZ), about which my feelings are confused.  In shorthand, I’d call it Waking Life meets Russian Doll, which probably doesn’t clear up much.  The technique is live action, animated through rotoscoping and other means, for a very distinctive look.  The story is about 28-year-old mestizo woman in San Antonio, who has a car accident and enters a state of madness – or what?  She sees her dead father, and is encouraged by him to travel back in time to discover the real cause of his death.  Rosa Salazar is the woman, and Bob Odenkirk is the father, still recognizable after the painted overlay.  She has a boyfriend, a mother, and an about-to-be-married younger sister, all of whom keep urging her to take her meds.  I was certainly drawn through the eight episodes of twentysome minutes, but I’m still not sure what to make of it.  Not inclined to watch again, however, though I do suggest you sample at least one episode to admire the technique.

In much the same vein, I might pitch Living with Yourself (MC-72, NFX) as Adaptation meets Russian Doll, but that would giving it too much credit, though I was happy to binge the 8-part series in a single night.  Paul Rudd shines as a sagging advertising “creative,” who seeks to refresh his life by a cloning treatment, which by mistake winds up with two of him.  Aisling Bea is also appealing as his frustrated wife, who inevitably finds out about the duplicate and actually prefers him.  With multiple viewpoints and a fractured timeline that overlaps events from differing perspectives, the story keeps moving along from cliffhanger to cliffhanger, in a way that is more artificial than organic, but still entertaining if you don’t think about it too much.  It’s all quite clever, though perhaps not as clever as it thinks.

In its second season, Succession (MC-76, HBO) finally generated the buzz this incisive and hilarious series deserved from the beginning, nailing a coiled-snake conclusion, to set up great expectations for a third season.  If you are a fan of Peep Show (and if you’re not, you don’t know the laughs you’re missing), you would expect great things from creator Jesse Armstrong, and he delivers cringe-worthy characters and biting, witty dialogue at impressively enhanced scale.  About a media colossus run by a family that resembles a mash-up of Murdochs and Trumps, the series combines soap opera and satire into a deliciously tart and tasty concoction.  The very rich are different from me and you, thank goodness, but there is a definite glee in watching scorpions in a bottle sting each other.  Brian Cox is the domineering patriarch, but it helps that the rest of the family is not so familiar from other work, though many of the passing characters have highly-recognizable faces (such as Holly Hunter in the second series).  Really, it’s time for you to get on board this bandwagon.

The Deuce (MC-85, HBO), like any David Simon production, is a solid piece of journalism about communities and professions that are generally unrecognized and underreported, though not quite up to the level of The Wire or Tremé.  The series follows the transformation of the eponymous 42^nd Street, and the evolution of prostitution and pornography from 1971 to 1985, with seven-year gaps between each of the three seasons.  James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal are the headliners, he playing twins who run various shady businesses beholden to the mob, she as a streetwalker turned filmmaker.  But again as is usual with Simon, the cast is broad, diverse, and solid, with many storylines juggled effectively, looking at the social system from different angles, based on first-person testimony from survivors of the scene.  In the final season, the porn industry has mostly moved to SoCal, drugs are taking over as the criminal profit center, with pimps and parlors becoming obsolete, and women reclaiming ownership of their bodies in various ways, though fitfully so.  In the final season, the AIDS epidemic becomes an underlying theme that affects all the characters.  Many characters come to bad ends, but an epilogue set in today’s Times Square rounds off the story impressively, if not exactly hopefully.

(As pendant or postscript to The Deuce, I recommend a well-made documentary that appeared in the POV series on PBS.  The title of Blowin’ Up (PBS) refers to prostitutes escaping from their pimps or from “the life,” and follows the activities of a judge, public defenders, and advocates for a diversion program in Queens NY, where (mostly Asian) women who have been arrested are given the opportunity to have their record expunged (and frequently, to escape deportation) by attending meetings and counseling.  It’s good to look at compassionate women serving others in dire straits.  The film is more observational than polemical, and I’ll be looking for more docs from Stephanie Wang-Breal.)

The perfect conclusion to the theme of “good as they ever were” comes with new seasons of two long-running British hits.  Perhaps my most unlikely recommendation of all, for someone who never watches cooking shows and never watches “reality tv” competitions, goes to The Great British Baking Show (MC-88, NFX).  But I am devoted to the series, having watched not just the most recent season, but the other six seasons available on Netflix.  It’s just so British; I would have enjoyed watching it with my mother.  I continue to enjoy it, even though three of the four regular ingredients have been replaced by inferior substitutes.  Each season is filled with a dozen diverse UK types, all plucky and all pulling together, under the blitz of baking challenges, in the established weekly sequence of signature, technical, and showstopper bakes, with one named “star baker” and one “leaving the tent,” all to have a reunion after the finals, in a reassuring ritual.  For me this fills the niche of “comfort tv.”

Equally comfy is Doc Martin (BCG, Acorn), which I’ve followed through nine seasons and will follow as long as it or I last.  Come for the cozy setting of a Cornish seaside village, stay for the village characters as they evolve over the years, in amazing continuity, with fresh faces cycling through.  Laugh with the comic interchanges, learn from the medical mysteries and diagnoses that are solved each episode by the title character, played with delicious obliviousness by Martin Clunes, as the brilliant London surgeon derailed by hemophobia and shunted to the position of rural GP.  He never met a medical problem he couldn’t solve, and never met a person he could.  Clunes has a native warmth that manages to shine through his character’s brusque and chilly behavior.  As broad as some of the characters may be, they do not remain one-note, not even the dogs.

Criterion's criteria

Never having gotten around to subscribing to Filmstruck before it was shut down, I became a charter subscriber to the Criterion Channel as soon as it was announced.  But for the first few months, I barely watched anything, so now I will devote a month’s worth of viewing to the channel, to determine whether to keep the subscription going forward.

In watching and showing films on DVD or Blu-Ray, I always gravitated to Criterion Collection disks, for classic selection, technical excellence, and impressive extras.  Now they are immediately available by streaming, and it’s a stupendous resource, but one I have not delved into much yet. 

I’d been looking for Visions of Eight (CC) for a long time, until it was released in a Criterion boxed set of Olympic films, which is also available on the Channel.  Eight different directors look at different events at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and the film lived up to my memories of it.  Kon Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad (CC) from 1964 was almost as good, and from time to time I will look at others of the hundred years of Olympic documentaries available to stream.   

For a little taste of Renoir in advance of the Clark’s summer exhibition, I watched Day in the Country (CC) for the first time in ages, and in preparation for visiting the H.M.S Victory at Portsmouth, I watched That Hamilton Woman (CC) with Laurence Olivier as Admiral Nelson and Vivien Leigh as Lady Hamilton.  All very good stuff, but hardly enough to warrant several months’ subscription.

I’ve built up a watchlist to work through, but first off I took note of films that were leaving the service at the end of July, part of a “Summer of ’69” collection.  So I watched Mazursky’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, which certainly evoked the feel of fifty years ago, but not the feeling that they don’t make movies like that any more.  They do, and better.  But you have to put them in context of what went before, say Doris Day & Rock Hudson films, or Hud for example, or further back, Of Mice and Men.  The films of 1969 are certainly artifacts of a culture freaking out.  Criterion’s other offering under that rubric was Easy Rider, which I’ve seen more recently, but get the point of putting those three together, suggesting that the channel’s programming is a reliable guide to informed viewing.

Well, not entirely reliable.  De gustibus non est disputandum.  The title Something Wild (CC) caught my eye, though this wasn’t the Jonathan Demme film with Melanie Griffith, but a Fifties indie that I thought might be a find like The Little Fugitive.  It did have some notable NYC street scenes, edited into a jazzy opening credit sequence by Saul Bass, but devolved into a claustrophobic melodrama that made no psychological sense at all.  Jack Garfein directs his wife Carroll Baker according to The Method, as a college girl who gets raped and then is “saved” from suicide by a man who in turn entraps her in his basement apartment.  This, however, is not The Collector, which might read differently today anyway, but at least made some sense at the time.  No, this film is flat-out insane, about that there can be no dispute, though some may have a taste for the insanity.

I got more old-time-y gratification out of two Ida Lupino films from the Fifties, when she was practically the only female director in Hollywood.  Edmund O’Brien is the star of both.  In The Bigamist (CC), he’s very sympathetic as the traveling salesman who has sincere attachments to his wives in SF and LA, Joan Fontaine and Ida Lupino respectively.  In The Hitch-Hiker (CC), he’s one of two buddies on their way to a weekend fishing trip, who are taken captive by a crazed but canny killer on the loose, and forced to drive him on escape through Mexico.  In the former, good acting makes for more than a potboiler, and in the latter, Ms. Lupino with an all-male cast creditably becomes the first woman to direct a film noir.  She was clearly one of the era’s intelligent and committed “Filmakers,” as her production company (with hubby) was called.

Since seeing First Reformed, I’d wanted to take another look at Winter Light (CC), which I remembered as my favorite of Ingmar Bergman’s faith trilogy of the early 1960s.  As Criterion will do, they presented an immaculate restoration of Sven Nykvist’s luminous cinematography, but Bergman’s grim obsession with the death of God no longer spoke to me directly.  Good compare and contrast exercise with Paul Schrader’s final film, however.  Characteristically good performances from Gunnar Bjornstrand and Ingrid Thulin.  But as much as I admire some of Bergman’s work, his cold and dark sensibility remains somewhat alien to me (except when made approachable by warm and life-filled actresses).  I will follow up with some other favorites from his filmography, and maybe even read his autobiography, which has been on my shelf for decades.

Ask and ye shall receive.  In my previous post, I asked where, oh where could I find Manny & Lo (CC)?  Lo and behold, it suddenly turned up on the Criterion Channel.  So that question was answered, and thereby also the question of whether to continue my subscription.  And then the question whether that 1996 film would live up to my memory of it?  Definitely so.  I remembered it for Scarlett Johansson’s debut, as an observant and thoughtful 11-year-old runaway on the lam from foster care with her 16-year-old sister, living in model homes and other hideaways.  When the sister can no longer ignore her pregnancy, they do the sensible thing and kidnap someone to help them with the birth.  And what a sensible person they pick, working in a childcare store and wearing a nurse’s outfit, with firm and certain answers to any question about babies!  We never get much of her backstory, but Mary Kay Place lets us in on the desperation behind the certainty, in a finely calibrated comic role.  So the film is funny and twisty, well-acted, well-shot, and well-directed.  So why hasn’t writer/director Lisa Krueger gone on to make more winning films like this?  I had one answer in hand from the recent documentary Half the Picture (MC-76, AMZ), in which many female directors lamented how much harder it was to get a second film made, even when the first was successful.  Manny & Lo remains a fine piece of work, though a more auspicious debut for the star than for the creator, who I suspect is telling a very personal story in comically exaggerated fashion.  So this film confirms my subscription, and certainly makes a 14-day free trial worth your while.

The program collection that really committed me to CC was "Pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck," which allowed me to add a half-dozen films to my summary of her career.

Filling in another female star’s filmography, I watched Katharine Hepburn’s second feature, Christopher Strong (1933, CC), directed by Dorothy Arzner.  Bizarre that a film written, directed, and headlined by women should be named for the main male character, a stodgy aristocrat and politician who falls for Hepburn’s daring aviatrix, winner of a round-the-globe flying contest.  If you wanted to watch a Kate Hepburn film, there’s at least a dozen I’d recommend more, but this one has multiple fascinations, from its pre-Code boldness to its half-feminist slant, but most amazingly its great young actress.

So now that I'm a confirmed subscriber to the Criterion Channel, I will round off this post with the promise of more commentary on its offerings, especially in the compilation of career summaries, which will become more and more the focus for this blog.

Close to home

This one may take a little persuading, but you really should see the new film Diane (MC-86, Hulu), for the title performance by Mary Kay Place if nothing else.  But there is plenty else.  This is the first dramatic feature from Kent Jones, whom I knew back in the day, when he was Marty Scorsese’s video archivist and used to drop into my video store in Pittsfield when home for a visit.  He went on to make documentaries with Scorsese, and then on his own, notably Hitchcock/Truffaut.  He’s also been a critic and editor at Film Comment, and director of film programming at Lincoln Center and the New York Film Festival.  He wrote and directed this character study based on his mother, who happens to have been my son’s favorite grade school teacher (where she recruited students regularly for help at the soup kitchen that figures prominently in the film).  Her son in the story is quite the opposite of Kent, an on-again off-again heroin addict who is a continual trial to our heroine.  

Though filmed in Kingston NY, the story is set in Western Mass and the locations feel awfully familiar, wintry and gritty.  Besides Mary Kay Place, for whom I’ve had a fondness going back to Mary Hartman in the mid-70s (and later, The Big Chill and many others, most notably the long-lost Manny & Lo, also notable as Scarlett Johansson’s first leading role – where, oh where can I re-watch that?), the film offers a welcome showcase for a number of older actresses (look, there’s Estelle Parsons from Bonnie & Clyde!).  Diane is an aging baby boomer (my cohort exactly), who makes up for past guilt and current loss by continually helping others.  Some communal scenes of tight-knit family and friends are reminiscent of Big Chill characters at double the age (though more working class, as several husbands had died early from PCB-related cancer – unspecified shout-out to “The GE” in Pittsfield).  

This is a film about what and who we lose along the way, but also about opportunities for connection, redemption, and ecstasy.  It’s subtle and sad, elliptical and quiet, but humorous too, well worth the attention that it requires.  In fact, worth a second look, to see the subtleties missed on first viewing.  The film belongs to Mary Kay as Diane, but she’s a jewel in a finely-wrought setting.

Last of the best of last year

Resuming my tardy quest for the best films of 2018, I start with Xavier Beauvois’ The Guardians (MC-81, AMZ), a film I would have been happy to program in support of a Millet or Pissarro exhibition at the Clark, for its portrait of rural labor in pre-industrial France.  The film cycles through the years of World War I, as the women take over the title role of maintaining a family farm, while all the capable men are away at the front.  And what women they are!  Nathalie Baye is the matriarch (I’ve admired her since she played the script girl in Truffaut’s Day for Night) and her daughter in reel as well as real life is Laura Smet (they did an excellent episode of Call My Agent together), but the revelation is Iris Bry, who had her career in library science derailed when she was recruited to play the role of the luminous red-haired orphan who is reluctantly hired as help on the farm, much to the benefit of both agriculture and cinema.  Painterly is the inevitable description of the film, and for some it may seem like watching paint dry, but for me it was rich and involving, worthy of comparison to one of my all-time favorite films, Tree of Wooden Clogs.

What does it all mean?  Hard to say, but Burning (MC-90, NFX) makes the question fascinating, and has the patience not to offer an answer.  Until a divisive ending, that is, which separates those who find Chang-dong Lee’s film great, from those who find it only very good indeed.  I was not aware of the source material, a Murakami story out of Faulkner, and was not familiar with the actors, and did not know what I was in for, with this high-rated film.  But I loved it for much of its somewhat-excessive length, just taking in the observant empathy of the Korean writer-director of Secret Sunshine and Poetry, sociologically as well as psychologically acute.  A captivating young woman, sensual and spiritual; a would-be writer consigned to working his family farm; a mysterious Porsche-driving tech entrepreneur.  These three people connect in a way that is anything but a conventional triangle.  Who is leading whom on?  To what end?  Sit tight, and watch. 

You won’t find Juliet, Naked (MC-67, Hulu) on any “Best of 2018” lists, not even mine, but I really enjoyed it.  It’s not easy to find a rom-com that doesn’t insult your intelligence, so this adaptation of a Nick Hornby novel stands out, most particularly for the performances of Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke and Chris O’Dowd.  If you enjoyed High Fidelity and/or About a Boy, this is definitely worth a look.  O’Dowd is the fanatical mega-fan of the vanished singer-songwriter played by Hawke; Byrne is disenchanted with her long-time partner and his obsession, but happens into an epistolary relationship with the elusive hero.  Jesse Peretz directs in workmanlike fashion, but many hands make for a script of literate froth, and the three stars are at their most appealing and convincing, which is delightful.

On the other hand, I found Robert Redford’s swan song in The Old Man and the Gun (MC-80, HBO) to be pretty disappointing all round.  I’m no fan of writer/director David Lowery, whose work I generally find oblique and empty.  I didn’t object to the “way we were” retrospect on Redford’s career, and welcomed the presence of Sissy Spacek, and even Casey Affleck, but never felt there was anything interesting going on here, either emotionally or visually.

That was the first DVD I’d watched in almost a year, having gone exclusively to streaming, but I happened upon it at the local library, and also few other films that haven’t reached any of my streaming channels yet.  I thought that The Favourite (MC-90, HBO) might figure among my favorites, but no way!  There is much to admire in the film, but director Yorgos Lanthimos will never be on my wavelength; his sensibility seems antithetical to mine, with his general misanthropy and disdain for historical accuracy, along with tendencies that go beyond quirky to downright annoying, such as use of fish-eye lenses and deliberately aggravating music.  Still, Olivia Colman has been justly praised for her portrayal of sickly Queen Anne, Rachel Weisz is quasi-regal as the Duchess of Marlborough, and though miscast, Emma Stone has moments as the ambitious young woman who supplants the Duchess as the Queen’s favorite.  Turning the political struggle into a lesbian triangle (and inferior to Gentleman Jack at that), and dotting the screenplay with anachronistic language and actions, detracts from the overall excellence of the production design.  Having just returned from those haunts, I was prepared to love a film that begins with the Queen giving the Duchess the present of Blenheim Palace, and then has parliamentary scenes shot in the Convocation House and Divinity School of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, but in the end the film neither moved nor tickled me.

On the other hand, I had few expectations for First Man (MC-86, HBO), but was won over by Ryan Gosling’s subdued portrayal of astronaut Neil Armstrong, and I always admire Claire Foy, who plays his wife.  Director Damien Chazelle follows up La La Land with another impressive technical achievement, which still seems somewhat superfluous after The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, not to mention Gravity.  The film does put you convincingly in the driver’s seat of Gemini and Apollo capsules, and recapitulates the history of the space program with an array of familiar faces in supporting roles, and impeccable special effects.  But still, the only scene that truly grabbed me was a kitchen-table encounter the night before the moon mission, when Armstrong is forced by his wife to have a (farewell?) talk with his two young sons.  As a whole, the film is watchable, but not unmissable.

The last and least likely “Best Picture” nominee was Bohemian Rhapsody (MC-49, HBO), which I watched in spite of the reviews, and was not sorry to do so.  I’m nothing like a fan of Freddie Mercury, though I have a passing acquaintance with some of Queen’s ear-worms, but the novelty made this standardized music biopic more interesting than I expected.  Rami Malek creates much of the interest, onstage and backstage, suggesting the performer’s magnetism.  But overall, acting and production values were good, even if the whole thing was more predictable than penetrating.  So the film’s climax did lead me to YouTube for footage of actual Live Aid concert, to confirm how closely the movie recreates the event, which in turn made me realize that a good documentary might have been more satisfying.  (I think, in particular, of docs on Leonard Cohen and Tom Petty that drew me much deeper into their music than I’d been before.)

Free Solo (MC-83, Hulu) was certainly a worthy Oscar winner for documentary feature.  I expected spectacular and vertiginous cinematography of mountain-climbing in Yosemite, but was surprised by the depth and intimacy of character portrayal in this film.  Free solo climber Alex Honnold granted the filmmakers access not just to his exploits but to his psyche.  No film could really explain why he does what he does, ascending sheer walls of stone like El Capitan, alone without any ropes or other margin for error, but this one digs deeper and climbs higher than I could have imagined.  With nary a misstep, thankfully.  Alex may be nuts, but you have to appreciate the majesty of his quest, and the quirky approachability of his personality.  I took the film as a direct rebuttal to myrecent essay propounding a “philosophy of radical ease.”  Alex is rad for sure, but his whole life is a flight from the easy approach to existence.

This time around it wasn’t a scandal when the latest Frederick Wiseman film wasn’t nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar.  Monrovia, Indiana (MC-77, PBS) is middling Wiseman, not in his top 10, or even top 25 probably, but that still makes it one of the most interesting films of the year.  Candidly, his films can be boring to watch – in this case, a high school teacher lecturing his indifferent students on the school’s legacy of basketball supremacy, a Masonic ritual, a Lions Club meeting about donating a bench to the public library, a town council meeting on fire hydrants, old men at the diner discussing their ailments, hairdressing, pizzamaking, tattooing, not to mention the everyday business of taking cows and pigs and corn to market – but through selection, sequencing, and duration, the scenes become indelible, so that connections and meanings emerge in reflection after viewing.  Even settings that seem ripe for incisive commentary or satire – a gun shop, an auction of farm equipment, a sad street fair, a wedding, a funeral – are presented in extended deadpan.  The choice of subject matter after the 2016 election suggests that we will be examining the mindset of Trump-Pence voters, and indeed we are, but their names are never mentioned.  Cumulatively fascinating on its own, this film grows more complicated and expressive in juxtaposition to all of Wiseman’s other films.  Seen in comparison to Belfast, Maine or In Jackson Heights, for example, it takes on added dimension in an overall survey of the institutions of modern American life.

Sally Potter’s The Party (MC-73, Hulu) is a black & white chamber piece for seven woodwinds, excellent instrumentalists all:  Kristin Scott Thomas, Patricia Clarkson, Timothy Spall, Cillian Murphy, Bruno Ganz, Cherry Jones, and Emily Mortimer.  KST is not just hostess of the party, but a leader of the British opposition party, just named Shadow Minister of Health, I gather.  The guests are a mix of political operatives and intellectuals, ostensibly friends but very prickly ones, with one wild card in the mix and the missing eighth guest becoming the crux of the matter.  With a stagey mix of melodrama and brittle comedy, the film covers some ground and uncovers some backstory, but at 71 minutes does not overstay its welcome.

For me Widows (MC-84, HBO) was an afterthought, in more ways than one.  Steve McQueen follows his award-winning 12 Years a Slave with this heist film, meant to be crowd-pleasing but thought-provoking, but falling between two stools.  I am less than thrilled with the thriller genre, and this film’s feminist and political overtones do not overcome my lack of interest, despite star power and filmmaking facility.  Viola Davis leads a group of four struggling women, finding a way to make it on their own.  Liam Neeson is her criminal husband, who disappears with the other husbands, one of many well-portrayed bad men, on both sides of the law.  So the women are forced to make a final score on their own, to get out of the hole their men have dug for them.  The result is more serious than it needs to be, but thereby less convincing than it ought to be, more defeated by genre than elevated above it.

Speaking of genre films that manage to achieve some cultural cachet, I was finally inclined to give the cross-cultural rom-com Crazy Rich Asians (MC-74, HBO) a chance, and I didn’t dislike it as much as I probably should have, “lifestyles of the rich and famous” blah-blah-blah.  But the actors were appealing, the Singapore travelogue was spectacular, the direction nimble and the writing not an embarrassment.  Beyond fulfilling the time-honored (and –dishonored) demands of the genre, the mostly-English-language film is an effective showcase for a disparate group of Asian actors and actresses.

Once I give Roma a second look, and maybe track down a few additional highly-acclaimed titles, I’ll recap my favorites of 2018, but The Hate U Give (MC-81, HBO) will make my best-of list, and I’m happy to close out this post with a strong recommendation.  Adapted from a bestselling YA novel with an intelligent script, and effective direction from George Tillman Jr., plus a standout supporting cast, this film is centered by the transcendent performance of Amandla Stenberg in the lead role.  She’s a 16-year-old living a divided, code-shifting life, coming from a rough neighborhood but attending an overwhelmingly white prep school.  The film starts off as a biracial, bicultural teen romance, but soon expands into a serious portrayal of the roots and reasons of the Black Lives Matter movement.  It could have gone wrong in so many ways, but threads the needle of an entertainment with a serious purpose, without pandering or special pleading.  And Ms. Stenberg is a lovely revelation – we can expect great things from her.