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.