Newly released

We’re in a different mediaverse when I’m in a position to review a movie at the same time A.O. Scott is doing so in the New York Times or Stephanie Zacharek in Time or Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, so I am taking advantage of early viewing opportunities to create this open-ended post for continuing updates on brand-new releases.  Meanwhile I’ve updated and closed out the previous post with three strong recommendations, and have in process several composite reviews around specific themes, such as “Black films matter.”

Palm Springs (MC-84, Hulu) demonstrates, without redundancy, the repeatability of the premise of repetition.  Following in the footsteps of Groundhog Day and Russian Doll (and many others of lesser note), Max Barbakow’s debut feature still manages to trek a familiar path with a style, and a mind, of its own.  Having never watched Andy Samberg in movies or on tv, I wasn’t expecting more from him than goofball charm, but was pleasantly surprised by the shadings he brought to the lead role.  As his foil, the appealingly wide-eyed Cristin Milioti delivers a breakout performance.  They meet (and meet, and meet…) at her sister’s wedding, with ample opportunity to make mistakes and start over again, sometimes learning from them and sometimes not.  It remains a resonant premise (and don’t worry, I’m not going to quote Kierkegaard here), with each day offering a new take on an old idea.  And it lands at a moment when repeating the same situation every day has a definite resonance.  Furthermore, the movie brings it all back home in 90 fleet and funny minutes, virtually unheard of these days.

I’m of several minds about Spike Lee, having enjoyed some of his “Joints” a lot, but others have disoriented me, and those that some like best are not to my taste.  My own favorites are still his documentaries 4 Little Girls and When the Levees Broke, where the didacticism is thoroughly earned.  Most of his features have merits that are obscured by his scattershot approach and compulsion to say whatever he has to say, in whatever way and at whatever length he wants.  So it is with his latest, Da 5 Bloods (MC-82, NFX), in which he mixes genres with a vengeance, throwing ingredients in a blender to come up with a concoction that was more than I could swallow.  Some bits were tasty, but it was all too much.  The 4 surviving Bloods return to Vietnam to retrieve the remains of their fallen leader, and incidentally a cache of gold bullion.  DelRoy Lindo and Clarke Peters ably lead the group through shifts of tone and swamps of cliché to repeated shoot-em-ups and blood-splatterings, all while Spike underlines his points with mini-lessons from Black history, some interpolated and some offered up in narrow-screen flashback by the 5^th Blood.  He’s played by the Black Panther himself, Chadwick Boseman, while the older actors play themselves way back in 1971, referring to him in retrospect as “our Martin and our Malcolm.”  All I can say is that Spike didn’t make this film for me, so I am hardly the one to judge it.

To all the raves you’ve heard about Hamilton (MC-90, Disney+) add me as plus-one.  This movie (which truly moves) was compiled from nine cameras recording two of the final performances of the original cast on Broadway, with almost a third of the scenes also recorded with three on-stage cameras, as if you’re watching from all the best seats in the house at once.  Edited seamlessly, the performances definitely make it as a film, while retaining the flavor of the theatrical experience.  (And at $6.99 for a month’s subscription to the Disney+ streaming service, it’s quite a bargain when compared to Broadway tickets.)  I’m no theatergoer, but I have to surmise that Hamilton deserved its eleven Tonys.  Lin-Manuel Miranda won for book and score, but playing Hamilton himself, lost out to Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr.  Daveed Diggs as Lafayette/Jefferson edged out Jonathan Groff as King George and Christopher Jackson as George Washington.  As the Schuyler sisters, Phillipa Soo was nominated as female lead and Renee Elise Goldsberry won for featured role.  Thomas Kail won for direction, and directs the movie as well.  Choreography, design, and other technical awards seem amply deserved too.  As overwhelming as the theatrical experience may have been in the waning Obama years, it totally works as a movie in the dreg ends of the Trump era (as we fervently hope and pray).  This show is not just about our history, it’s part of our history.

The Last Dance (MC-91, NFX) is another program to which I add my superfluous praise.  Michael Jordan stuck too many daggers in the hearts of the Cleveland Cavaliers for me to be anything like a fan of his, and of course I would argue for LeBron as the real GOAT, but MJ was an epitome of excellence and an inescapable cultural figure for two decades and more.  So there is ample material for ten hours of documentation.  The frame is provided by the story of the 1997-98 season, as the Chicago Bulls go for their second “three-peat.”  The season started with the GM announcing it would be coach Phil Jackson’s last year, and MJ promptly announcing it would be his last as well.  Remarkably in that situation, the team granted extraordinary access to a camera team over the course of the season.  The series slides back and forth along a timeline between that season and flashbacks to all the defining moments that led up to this “last dance.”  Early episodes cover the background of MJ and Coach PJ, as well as Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, and other key players.  There’s plenty of memorable game action, as well as latter-day interviews with many of the participants.  Despite the appearance (and maybe the reality) of candor, this is definitely Michael Jordan’s effort to cement his legacy, and fend off LeBron’s claim to supplant him as the best basketball player of all time, just as MJ himself supplanted Magic and Bird.  Maniacally competitive to the end, though leavened with wit and self-awareness, he remains an amazing and towering figure. 

Perhaps you are like me, averse to so-called reality-tv shows, and especially dating ones.  For Love on the Spectrum (MC-83, NFX), two things overcame my aversion, that “Universal acclaim” from Metacritic, and as another program that explores autism, from which I always learn things about myself.  This five-episode series from Australia is charming and funny, sympathetic and insightful, and you don’t have to be on the spectrum to find it delightful.  All of the potential daters are extremely quirky and almost painfully sincere, but the series is much more about our common humanity – and the universal quest for connection – than their particular handicaps.  If my recommendation was superfluous for the previous two shows, I’m certain you will thank me for pointing out this obscure gem.

Reminiscent of Rohmer, Rebecca Zlotowski’s The Easy Girl (MC-85, NFX) may look like a T&A movie but is actually something quite different, though there is some notable T&A in it, courtesy of Zahia Dehar, sort of a Gallic Kim Kardashian.  But the movie belongs to her 16-year-old cousin, played memorably by the humbly-beautiful Mina Farid, as she follows the brash young woman of the title, who is not looking for love but sensations and adventures, luring men into providing whatever she wants.  That includes two men on a yacht in Cannes harbor, who take aboard the pair, the tycoon acquiring the va-va-voom girl for the expected reasons, while his art-buying advisor takes on the younger girl for fond mentorship (the dedication of the film to someone with the same name as this character suggests the autobiographical subtext here).  Despite the sun-kissed sensuality of the Riviera setting, this film is less about sex than money and power, race and class, freedom and vocation.  Easy on the eyes, but well worth watching – and thinking about.

In My Skin (MC-78, Hulu) is difficult to categorize in several ways.  Billed as a coming-of-age dark-comedy, it bears some resemblance to End of the F***ing World and Sex Education, but it’s more realistically dark than comic.  At five half-hour episodes, it could easily have been released as a movie, along the lines of Diary of a Teenage Girl.  This teenage girl is Welsh and played winningly by Gabrielle Creevey.  Her home life is a disaster, with a bipolar mother and an alcoholic father, but she compensates by lying constantly to friends, teachers, and schoolmates.  Rather than fault her for the lies, the series makes them understandable as a survival strategy, in a nearly unendurable situation.  It’s clear that the show’s creator, Kayleigh Llewellyn, knows whereof she speaks.  Both the series and the actress won the Welsh tv awards, for whatever that may be worth.  The series is in English, but benefits from captioning.

While the Criterion Channel is always a cornucopia of classic cinema, sometimes it also presents brand new classics-in-the-making, including the latest from the Dardenne brothers, Young Ahmed (MC-66, CC).  For starters I’m going to appropriate one reviewer’s summary of the Belgian duo’s work:  “social realist, heart-rending, minimalist, highly suspenseful, and borderline-spiritual.”  Though it does not rank with their best films, their latest certainly fits that description.  In this case, the specimen of humanity who draws their close observation is a 13-year-old Muslim boy in French-speaking Belgium, newly radicalized, by the absence of his father or the onset of puberty or any other reason – the filmmakers do not try to explain, but only to depict.  With their usual Bressonian spareness and transcendental aspiration, they show us the boy’s fumbling attempts at a purifying jihad, and the pained reactions of the women around him – mother, teacher, would-be teen crush.  We never come close to getting inside his head, but his actions tell a story, with rising tension till a climax you may find either revelatory or abrupt.  If you follow the Dardennes, then you will want to see this; if you’re not familiar with them, start with Kid with a Bike (also CC), Rosetta, or Two Days, One Night.

Ordinary Love (MC-73, Hulu) might be an ordinary film, except for the highly-distinguished presence of Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson.  They are a long-married couple, with a well-honed patter of affectionate insult, who have to contend with her diagnosis of breast cancer.  There is plenty of interest in simply watching Lesley and Liam interact, so I was thoroughly engaged, but the story plays out in a rather antiseptic environment.  And I don’t just mean the hospital.  I got no sense of what city, or even what country we were in, where they live in a handsome but highly-generic upper-middle-class home, doing no work apparently, and having no friends, family, or history.  Aside from a dead daughter, who is alluded to but about whom nothing is revealed.  So it’s just a year in the life of the couple, mainly the course of her treatment.  The direction is serviceable, but it seems the playwright who wrote the film from his own experience with his wife determined the outcome, truthful but with a narrow focus and rather stagey surround.  But who cares about the backdrop when you can simply look at Lesley and Liam giving a masterclass in screen acting, and maybe even in ordinary love.

The Trip to Greece (MC-69, Hulu) is the fourth in a series starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, and directed by Michael Winterbottom (fifth, if you include Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story – and you should), so we know what we’re going to get, two old frenemies traveling in some spectacular locations, eating amazing food at picturesque restaurants, and taunting each other with boasts and insults, while competing in celebrity impressions.  This one makes a half-hearted attempt to follow Odysseus’ journey from Troy back to Ithaca, and makes explicit the preoccupation of the whole series with aging and mortality, in a way that tends to deflate the sardonic hilarity that precedes it.  Still, Greece is a nice place to visit, in the company of a pair of funny guys conversing and playacting, in the great tradition of My Dinner with Andre.

I was happy to finally catch up with The Bread Factory (MC-91, Kanopy), one of Metacritic’s top films of 2018.  Patrick Wang’s two-part grab-bag film is definitely not for everyone, and in the course of its lengthy run-time, I sometimes wondered whether it was for me, but in the end, taken as a whole, it’s a coherent and engaging statement on the place of the arts in everyday life.  The eponymous Bread Factory is a community arts center in an upstate NY town, which has been mothered for forty years by a lesbian couple, played by Tyne Daly and Elisabeth Henry.  Their place is threatened by a flashier new center, headlined by a “Chinese” pair of conceptual artists, promoted by marketing specialists who are trying to steal away TBF’s educational funding.  Meanwhile, over the course of the two-parts, TBF rehearses and mounts a production of the Greek tragedy Hecuba, as one of its manifold efforts at community engagement.  Offbeat and frequently funny, with a large cast of actors more earnest than slick (incl. a rare sighting of Buffy’s Spike!), this group portrait of town and institution plays like a mash-up of Robert Altman and Frederick Wiseman.  Since I rather despair of describing the totality of this pleasingly small-scale, home-made 4-hour epic, or of guessing whether you might like it or not, I’ll defer to the picture’s trailer to give you a sense of this “What the …?” experience.

As someone who lives more in my own head than in the real world, I am highly susceptible to the writing and directing of Charlie Kaufman, but for the less weird, the best reason to watch I’m Thinking of Ending Things (MC-78, NFX) is Jessie Buckley, who is on incredible run from Wild Rose to this, with some high-profile tv-series in the same period.  She dazzles like her shock of red hair, spirited in emotion, with a quick tongue and expressive face.  The credits list her character as The Young Woman and she is called a number of different names in the course of this long and winding film.  She’s the one who’s thinking of ending things with the Jesse Plemons character (who – tellingly – does have a name), even though they are driving deep into the country to visit his parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) for the first time, despite an impending snowstorm.  I’m averse to giving away any of the film’s twists or easter eggs or cultural appropriations, but they are abundant, as are off-beat laughs and thought-provoking philosophical propositions about time and identity. Charlie K. is clever as hell.  I would have been more ecstatic about this movie if it had ended at the two-hour mark, but still found it witty, profound, and wonderfully performed all round.