What this is all about

Here’s what I’m doing here, in creating these memoranda re: my viewing history.  First off I’m preserving my own memories and reactions against the erosions of time and age, but moreover I’m convinced that it’s a service I am able to provide that is worth something in an age of proliferating media:  a string through the labyrinth, to help you find and enjoy treasures buried under the avalanche of streaming availability.
 
I do not profess to write criticism, or even reviews in the usual sense, but aim to offer consumer guidance and covert autobiography, in a telegraphic style.  Not much more than giving a thumb up or down, I do try to offer a recognizable thumbnail sketch of each film or show, with my own fingerprint upon it.  After nearly sixty years of assiduous cinema engagement, I have fair confidence that my seal of approval signifies.  Not everyone will agree, to be sure, but if your reading on the barometer of taste ranges between “high-middlebrow” and “low-highbrow,” then I am likely to be a reliable guide.
 
In that same range falls my fellow Williams alum John Sayles, for whom I have just posted a career summary.   As time goes by, I expect to be adding more career summaries to the column on the right (as viewed on a computer), to express my enthusiasms more fully and to provide a different sort of guide from the mere notice of recent releases.
 
Having committed to keeping Cinema Salon going, I’d like to develop more readership (for utterly noncommercial reasons), so if what you find here amuses or edifies, then please forward link to any friends who might find it entertaining or useful.

Catching up with Oscar

[Updated through end of April.  By now the Oscars have been announced, but there are several prominent films I haven’t seen yet, including The Father, Minari, and Soul.  So I'll have to save those for a later post.  I was gratified to see Nomadland take the three major awards I anticipated it would, though I would've given the award for cinematography too, and maybe thrown in editing and adapted screenplay as well, even though Chloé Zhao did not really need to take home any more hardware.  I would have been okay with Carey Mulligan snatching Frances McDormand’s Oscar, since she had two already.  Anthony Hopkins will have to astonish me with his performance as The Father to justify the upset of Chadwick Boseman.  Daniel Kaluuya was certainly deserving, but I strongly dissent from the documentary and international feature winners (Collective would have been better in either category).
 
I focus this commentary around the Oscars even though I rarely respect the Academy’s selections, and almost never watch the ceremony itself.  It’s all part of the culture of celebrity (“being famous for being famous”) that I typically deplore.  But like other annual events (looking at you, Super Bowl), it becomes a whirlpool of public attention, sucking in observers on all sides.  So I enter the conversation to offer my views on something the public at large is looking at (or maybe not, which has also been one strand of opining).  This was a year when it felt as though I had a horse in this race, rooting for Nomadland to sweep the field.  But I note the reasonable manner in which the minor awards were distributed to other worthy films.  See my own ranking of the best films of 2020 here, though some Oscar nominees will actually fall into my list for 2021.]

I began this survey on the day the Oscar nominations were announced and will end it after the Academy Awards are actually given, catching up with various nominees.  Two of the notable Best Picture snubs were One Night in Miami and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, while the lesser (and later) Judas and the Black Messiah got the nod.

And then a Best Actress nom went to Andra Day as the title character in The United States vs. Billie Holiday (MC-52, Hulu), which is not even close to those other portraits of Black historical figures.  Ms. Day does a creditable impersonation of Lady Day (though not up to Renee Zellweger’s Oscar-winning turn in Judy, or Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues for that matter), but frankly Lee Daniels’ film is a mess, unable to make a coherent story of the character’s life, uncertain whether to foreground the music, the relationships, the drugs, the institutional racism of the FBI, or the activism implicit in the singer’s refusal to stop performing “Strange Fruit.”  And the musical performances are needlessly tarted up by excessive editing.  I watched this film all the way through, but I don’t advise you to.
 
A surprise nomination for Best Documentary Feature went to My Octopus Teacher (MC-76, NFX), so I caught up with this worthwhile but hardly award-worthy nature film, about a South African filmmaker who at a low point in his career decides to return every day for a year to the same ocean spot near his house, for some icy free-diving.  In the process, he develops an intimate relationship with a female octopus, and so enters into underwater life in a more consequential way than the typical cinematographer.  The octopus is certainly a fascinating creature, the diver somewhat less so, unbalancing the film a bit, but still offering an unusually detailed natural history experience.
 
I’d pass if I were you, but you’re welcome to have Another Round (MC-80, Hulu).  Enough people liked this Danish film to earn it a nomination for best Foreign Language Film, but Thomas Vinterberg’s libation was decidedly not to my taste, despite his unlikely nomination for Best Director.  Four high school teachers decide that alcohol is a performance-enhancing drug, and start drinking during work, to largely predictable results.  This film did not reach me in either its manic or depressive moments.
 
To comment on Promising Young Woman (MC-72, AMZ), I have to confess that I’ve never seen, and have no desire to see, Fatal Attraction.  On the other hand, I admit to seeking out anything that stars Carey Mulligan, and this femme fatale role demonstrates another arrow in her quiver, masterfully aimed.  So my reaction to Emerald Fennell’s film is mixed, as is the movie itself.  Is it a rape revenge thriller or a black comedy, a satire on toxic masculinity or a case study in self-destructive PTSD?  Yes to all, but no to coherence, or targeted thematic approach.  Creatively cast (with the likes of Bo Burnham, Connie Britton, and Alison Brie playing aslant type) and designed (with multiple looks for the star, and the settings, as well as spot-on music selections), this #MeToo film elicits a firm “Yes, but…”  Up against Nomadland for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and other categories, I can’t see this film coming away with anything but a consolation prize.
 
The Romanian documentary Collective (MC-95, Hulu) garnered two Oscar nominations, for Best Documentary and Best Foreign Film, and deserved them both.  Like Spotlight, Alexander Nanau’s film illuminates the process and the potency of investigative journalism.  After a horrific nightclub fire in Bucharest kills 27, even more people die in the burn hospital in following weeks.  The editor of Sports Gazette, an unlikely muckraking rag, forms a team to investigate.  The first half of the film follows their efforts to delve into medical malfeasance, which leads to the government’s resignation, and the installation of a technocratic caretaker administration.  The second half retains astounding access, now to the boyish new health minister, as he discovers just how deep the corruption goes, all the way from top to bottom it seems, aside from a few incredibly brave whistleblowers.  And the worst part is how relevant it seems to politics in this country; we can’t just say, “Oh, that’s Romania – a bunch of Draculas.”  Is our only choice between mobsters and mob?
 
Don’t know whether to call The Mole Agent (MC-69, Hulu) a documentary, let alone a nominee for best of the year, but Maite Alberdi has made a charming film, implicitly about gerontology.  A detective hires an 83-year-old man to go undercover and gumshoe an old folks’ home in Chile.  The geezer’s a tidy charmer and soon all the old ladies (who outnumber the men 10-1) are aflutter over him, and opening up about their lives and loneliness, in front of the documentary crew that was planted along with our mole.  John Grierson would turn over in his grave if this were to get the Oscar for Best Documentary, but he’d have to admit the film meets his definition of the term as “a creative treatment of actuality.”  But then, why not Borat too?  Collective is the clear favorite in this category, but Time and Crip Camp are worthy contenders.  [My Octopus Teacher shouldn't have been a surprise winner to me, I guess, since the Academy almost never honors the real best documentaries of any given year.  See my list for 2020 at the end of this post.]

Well, by now I’ve seen the Bosnian film that definitely should have won the Oscar for Best International Feature, Quo Vadis, Aida? (MC-97, Hulu).  A tough watch to be sure, but made with exhilarating sureness of touch by writer-director Jasmila Zbanic, the film details the Serbian genocide of 1995, when thousands of Muslim residents of the UN “safe city” Srebrenica were rounded up and summarily executed in what became known as the worst European war crime since WWII.  Our point of entry is a local schoolteacher recruited as a UN translator (an intense and impressive Jasna Djuricic), present in “negotiations” between the Serbian general and the Dutch commander of the helpless UN “peacekeepers,” with the town’s desperate leaders present but powerless.  Her husband and two sons are among those seeking refuge on the UN base, so her official role is superseded by frantic attempts to keep them safe.  The film has all the rising tension of a thriller, combined with a you-are-there potency of empathetic horror for the plight of all the world’s war-torn refugees.  A must-see, if you can bear it, and certain to make my best of 2021 list.

For my money, the only competition for that Oscar should have been non-nominee Martin Eden (MC-74, Kanopy), which did not win universal acclaim but was featured in the top ten of both M. Dargis and A.O. Scott of the NYT.  I’m with them, even if I found the end of the film profoundly disappointing, after being exhilarated throughout almost all of Pietro Marcello’s sweeping appropriation (rather than adaptation) of Jack London’s novel.  Turns out the problem was in the source, I discovered afterwards, as even London himself acknowledged; he makes his working-class hero, an autodidact writer, into an anti-socialist individualist, and therefore has to destroy him.  But up until the end, I was transported.  Marcello has been a documentarian and this film is in the great tradition of Italian neorealism, with obvious debts to Visconti and Truffaut as well, all influences endearing to me.  Luca Marinelli is brash and compelling as the title character, so you can believe his craggy visage would attract both the dark-haired waitress and the aristocratic blond student.  The location of the story is shifted from Oakland to Naples, and the time is somewhat unmoored in the 20^th century, with old documentary footage interspersed with scenes shot in varying states of period dress.  The film has a headlong, try-anything vitality that reminded me of Jules & Jim, than which I can offer no higher praise.
 

Apple in my eye

I keep an updated worksheet of films and shows I want to see, arranged by streaming channel.  When I build up enough titles to warrant it, I will sign up for a free trial and/or one-month-only subscription to catch up with a channel’s desirable offerings.  Over a period of time, I built up a number of programs to watch on Apple TV+, so here is a record of my choices.
 
At the top of the pops reigns Ted Lasso (MC-71), which overcame lukewarm early reviews to finish at #5 on Metacritic’s compilation of tv critic top ten lists, and tucks into my best of 2020 ranking right between Better Things and Pen15.  The show has gone on to achieve cult status, win awards, and be renewed for two more seasons.  The title character, played by SNL alum Jason Sudeikis, had an unprepossessing provenance in a series of ESPN commercials, back when they started broadcasting Premier League soccer games.  He plays an American football coach from Kansas, classically Midwestern-nice but apparently clueless about soccer, who is hired to coach a West London team on the verge of relegation to a lower league.  As in Major League, the owner is a woman (Hannah Waddington) who wants the team to tank.  With experienced showrunner Bill Lawrence, the series was written by Sudeikis and two of his co-stars, playing his assistant “Coach Beard” and the team’s gruff elder captain.  Initially Coach Ted’s optimism seems silly and insipid, but as the season unfolds, we begin to understand the method to his niceness.  There’s a fair amount of across-the-pond comedy, in language and behavior, but an underlying message emerges about cross-cultural understanding and acceptance, and an argument about approaching others with curiosity rather than judgment.  The show put me in mind of Parks & Recreation and Lesley Knope, as a workplace comedy where Amy Poehler started off as caricature and wound up as admirable.  Likewise with the lesser characters, here including Juno Temple as a seeming airhead model/groupie who turns out to be among the wisest and funniest of them all.  You don’t have to be a soccer fan to appreciate this show, which both exploits and subverts classic sports movie tropes.  And the way it meets our cultural moment may be suggested by Sudeikis having played Joe Biden repeatedly on SNL.  Believe the hype, and seek this one out.
 

Another Apple original series that has elbowed into the circle of my recent favorites is Dickinson (MC-66/81).  The reclusive poet is having her pop culture moment, with this half-hour comedy series pairing nicely with two recent estimable biopics, A Quiet Passion and Wild Nights with Emily.  Though the show takes a parodistic approach to literary-historical fact, and peppers the proceedings with current music, attitudes, and language, creator Alena Smith brings to the project truthfulness and respect for literature and history.  The always-appealing Hailee Steinfeld is fierce and funny as Emily, the twenty-something poet in the 1850s.   Ella Hunt is appealing in a different way as Sue, her best friend and lover, soon to be the wife of Emily’s brother.  Toby Huss and Jane Krakowski are Emily’s parents.  Despite the anachronistic flourishes, the texture and feel of Victorian era Amherst seems quite authentic, and the stories are largely true to life but embroidered entertainingly (it’s unlikely that Emily dispensed opium at a party, on a wild night when her parents were out of town).  The series wanders from fact into reasonable speculation, with cameos for H.D. Thoreau (in a “Pond Scum” portrayal mitigated by the likeable John Mulaney) and L.M. Alcott (Zosia Mamet accentuating her frankly mercenary approach to writing).  Each episode illuminates a different Dickinson poem.  I’ve just caught up with the ten episodes of the first season, and will comment further after seeing the recently-completed second season.  
 
[P.S. I felt the second season went fuzzy around the character of Samuel Bowles – publisher of the Springfield Republican, friend and editor of Emily – and in the transformation of Sue from sympathetic to unsympathetic, but brought everything back into focus by the final episode (not the series finale, already renewed for another season).  Sam Bowles was indeed a journalistic innovator, here a parody of a tech entrepreneur, but I’ve seen no support for the idea that he was womanizer flirting with both Emily and Sue, though he was indeed a long-time friend of both.  Contrariwise, the cameo for Frederick Law Olmstead was funny but seemed a genuine reflection of his character.  This season jumps ahead to 1859, and culminates with news of John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry.  Alena Smith adds five short extras on the historical underpinning of the series, jauntily animated with period illustrations, which indicate how seriously she approaches the era, as well as its contemporary relevance.  With my own obsession with the antebellum years in the North, Dickinson hits a sweet spot, particularly to my taste.  It will certainly lead me to read more of Emily’s poetry than I have heretofore.]

One more Apple series to recommend:  Little America (MC-85) is an anthology of eight half-hour true-life tales of immigrants to America, from India, Mexico, Nigeria, etc. etc.  High-level writing, acting, and production are the norm for these diverse stories, each unfolding an aspect of the immigrant experience – what drives people from their homeland, what draws them to America, and what challenges they face here.  Some stories are inherently sad, but all have a modest buoyancy, from adversity overcome with some semblance of success.  On the whole more amusing than wrenching, the series details many concrete aspects of displacement, but cumulatively celebrates what all these different people from different places bring to, and get from, this country.  Pick any of eight originating spots on the globe to sample, and I bet you’ll be back for more.  Each episode ends with a photo of the real person whose story has just been told.  Many hands make something special.  As Hamilton raps, “Immigrants – we get the job done.” 

 
Among Apple’s film offerings, Boys State (MC-84) won the top documentary prize at Sundance 2020 for partners Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine (The Overnighters).  A thousand teenage boys congregate in Austin TX to enact a simulacrum of democratic politics, divided arbitrarily into two parties, who each pick a chairman, develop a platform from scratch, and nominate candidates for governor and other state positions.  As in most of these school-age competition documentaries, by reverse-engineering we follow from the beginning those who will emerge as the most prominent characters.  The two party chairmen are a double-amputee Reagan fanboy, and a Black recent immigrant from Chicago who has “never seen so many white people in my life” but turns out to be fluently persuasive.  One candidate for governor is the son of Mexican immigrants, who beats out an opportunistic white boy for the nomination, and then runs against a pretty boy son of Italian immigrants.  That’s a surprisingly diverse slate for an overwhelmingly white convention that seems to settle on two issues, anti-abortion and “gun rights” (the previous year a proposition passed for Texas to secede).  This is less a youthful celebration of democratic governance than a cautionary tale about the inherent dynamics of party politics and performative polarization.  It definitely fits in with my top docs of 2020.
 
Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks (MC-73) is so fixated on “rich people problems” that even the appeal of Rashida Jones and Bill Murray is not enough to make it palatable.  We eat caviar, dine at 21, motor around Manhattan in fancy cars, shop at Cartier, talk Hockneys and Twombleys, weekend in Mexico, all bemoaning our fate.  Rashida is supposedly an author, but we never find out what she’s supposed to be writing, in her home office that looks like a Prada showroom in SoHo.  She’s mainly just worrying about whether her husband is having an affair, and Bill as her father is helping her sleuth out the situation.  Who is supposed to care, in this low-key comedy-drama?
 
A much more satisfying Apple original was Hala (MC-75), the story of a Pakistani-American girl in suburban Chicago, a rebellious high-school senior with a penchant for poetry and skateboarding.  Derived from the life of writer-director Minhal Baig, the film offers a novel angle on a familiar story of teen life.  It’s rather like Lady Bird in a headscarf.  Muslim girls wanna have fun too.  The title character is beautifully and touchingly portrayed by Australian actress Geraldine Viswanathan, who carries the film, even when in later stages it falls short of early expectation.  The name may be hard to remember, but the face is unforgettable, and will be looked for – and at – in the future.
 
Wolfwalkers (MC-87) comes with some expectation, having earned the Kilkenny-based Cartoon Saloon a profile in The New Yorker, not to mention an Oscar nom for best animated feature.  And it’s certainly in the running to win, representing the culmination of the studio’s trilogy on Irish folklore (following The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, as well as the estimable Afghani story The Breadwinner, all previous nominees).  A canny combination of history and myth, the film is set in 1650, when Kilkenny was occupied by the “Lord Protector” (i.e. Oliver Cromwell), who was determined to wipe out not just the wolves and woods of Ireland, but any vestige of Catholic or pagan belief.  An English girl forms an alliance with a wolfwalker, a woodland spirit who becomes a wolf when she’s asleep, to save the essence of the land.  The story is highly resonant and the characters engaging, but it’s the continuously and sinuously inventive hand-drawn animation that makes this “cartoon” a distinctive and transformative experience.
 
At $5 per month, Apple TV+ definitely earns its keep, month to month if not year round.

 

On with the show

In this post, I will accumulate comments on films of 2020, or even earlier, that I have finally tracked down on streaming.  First off is the latest from one of my very favorite filmmakers, which I’ve been awaiting since its film festival premiere in 2019, though technically it remains eligible for my best of 2020 list.
 
After winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Shoplifters, Hirokazu Kore-eda took the opportunity to make his first film outside Japan – The Truth (MC-75, SHOW) – and went total fan-boy, enlisting Catherine Deneuve and Juliet Binoche into a cinematic love letter that plays like a mash-up of Autumn Sonata and Call My Agent!  Kore-eda has a much gentler soul than Ingmar Bergman, and his portrait of the troubled relationship between a performing mother and her scarred adult daughter is less ravaging to the spirit than it was for Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann.  Deneuve and Binoche are caustic, yet with a twinkle that kept me quite amused throughout.  Deneuve plays an acting diva much like herself (the character has her real middle name), who’s just published an autobiography called The Truth, which the book is definitely not.  Binoche is a screenwriter in the States, married to tv actor Ethan Hawke, who returns to Paris for the book’s publication, and is roped into a role as on-set assistant to her mother.  She’s in a silly sci-fi film, as the elderly daughter of a space-traveling mother who has never aged, which continuously resonates with her own difficult mother-daughter relationship.  She took the role because her young co-star seemed an avatar of her long-deceased best friend (shades of Deneuve and her sister, Françoise Dorleac).  Deneuve is a sly monster of self-regard, and Binoche does her best to look plain as well as pained; Hawke is goofy and endearing, and as their daughter Clementine Grenier contributes another excellent child performance for Kore-Eda.  This may not have the overall impact of his other great films, but is full of small delights for the dedicated cinéaste.
 
To see that film, I took a free trial of Showtime, so I looked around that channel for anything else to watch, and came up with a sleeper, Driveways (MC-83, SHOW).  Films about the relationship of an old man and a young boy have a history of pleasing crowds, and this is no exception, but rather than treacly, Andrew Ahn’s direction is modest and subtle.  It stars Brian Dennehy in one of his last roles, and has a touch of elegy about it.  Lucas Jaye debuts delightfully as the 9-year-old Asian-American boy who moves in next door to the isolated widower.  His mother has come to clear out the house of her estranged and deceased older sister, who turns out to have been a hoarder (filmed in Poughkeepsie NY, I found out later).  These marginalized people gradually form a bond, in a way that warms the heart, without being “heartwarming.”  Brief and understated, with no twists in the tale, this film is mild but lingers in the mind as a paean to companionship, wherever it is found.
 
Digging deeper into Showtime’s offerings, I came up with Dark Waters (MC-73, SHOW).  Directed by Todd Haynes, though you’d never know to look at it, this is really Mark Ruffalo’s show (even more so than I Know This Much Is True).  Out of their shared environmental concerns, exec producer Ruffalo plays a corporate defense lawyer in Cincinnati, who changes sides when a farmer friend of his grandmother back in West Virginia comes to him with evidence of his herd being killed by toxic water run-off from a DuPont facility.   The film follows the tangled proceedings of the actual case over two decades, emphasizing the drudgery and dogged commitment of lawyer Rob Bilott, in a stand-out performance from Ruffalo.  Though the genre formula for such investigations into corporate malfeasance is pretty well set, Haynes keeps the complications and ramifications of the case clear and involving, without his usual stylistic flourishes.  Bill Camp and Tim Robbins stand out in the solid supporting cast.  When we’re told that corporations are people too, my friend, this film reminds us that if so, then those people should be considered sociopathic and committed to an institution.
 
I recently commented on “Aggressive silliness,” and have just come across another palatable example.  Extra Ordinary (MC-72, SHOW), plays like Ghostbusters in an Irish village.  Enda Loughman and Mike Ahern are the writer-directors of this supernatural rom-com starring Maeve Higgins, as the dumpy but endearing woman who renounced her ghost-detecting talents after a bad experience, and now makes a living as a driving instructor.  Her services are still in demand, but she only takes on another exorcism when appealed to by a widower played by Barry Ward, to whom she takes a nervous fancy.  Meanwhile Will Forte is a one-hit wonder who has retreated to an Irish castle, and is literally making a deal with the devil to revive his musical career.  It all moves along in fast and funny fashion, in the manner of Simon Pegg’s genre parodies, and does not overstay its welcome.   
 
This post has turned into an encore to “Show-me-time,” to which you can refer for other recommendations should you take advantage of a month’s free trial of Showtime.  After the Academy Award nominations come out, I will follow up with a post on “Catching up with Oscar.”