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.