HBO to the Max

When HBO Go morphed into HBO Max, it wasn’t available through Roku for a while.  I missed it and I’m glad it’s back, better than ever, not just with the whole HBO back catalog, but with an enhanced line-up of recent films and even some good original programming, plus day-of-release availability of Warner Brothers films in this pandemic year. 
 
I’m not categorically averse to modern takes on old classics, or to color-blind casting, but I had more resistance to The Personal History of David Copperfield (MC-77) than I would have expected, coming as it does from Armando Ianucci, who has a track record I admire.  This is not a Dickens classic that I would resent tampering with, but I found it hard to get into the spirit of this enterprise, despite effective turns from Dev Patel as the title character, Peter Capaldi as Micawber, plus Hugh Laurie and Tilda Swinton in stylized comic roles.  It’s lavishly designed and briskly paced, but for me the story never took hold, and the insistent and illogical introduction of Black characters began to strike me as racist in reverse.  The film comes in at under two hours, so it doesn’t wear out its welcome, but would have been better as a six-hour series.
 
Miranda July is never going to click for me the way she does for some folks, but Kajillionaire (MC-78) won me over less than her previous films, despite some critics asserting it was her best.  She’s different for sure (I resolve not to call her quirky or whimsical), and she enlists some engaging co-conspirators, but I found myself stubbornly unmoved by the proceedings.  Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger (unrecognizable except for her voice) are aging scavenger/con-artists (possibly old hippies), who have raised daughter Evan Rachel Wood as an accomplice, without any parental affection.  Consequently, she is affectless and averse to human contact.  In the midst of a low-stakes caper, the trio meets up with congenial shopgirl Gina Rodriguez, who destabilizes the balance of the family, while eagerly buying into their con-games.  Is this a comedy, a caper film, a family drama, a fantasy, or a surprising romance?  All of the above, but less than the sum of its parts.
 
HBO continues to be a good channel for documentaries.  Alex Gibney’s latest, The Crime of the Century (MC-84), details the opioid crisis in two 2-hour segments.  Between Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room in 2005 (MC-82) and Totally Under Control (MC-80), last year’s dissection of the Trump administration’s handling of Covid-19, Gibney has become a prolific documentarian, almost always worth watching.  He addresses timely topics in a serious way with a lively style and a progressive bent.  This one pulls out all the stops, from an animated history of the opium trade, to legal and medical and business analysis, to ride-alongs on drug busts and police-cam footage of fatal overdoses.  It’s a long haul, but it rarely drags and always informs.  The first half focuses on the Sacklers and Oxycontin, while the second tells an even more horrifying tale of Fentanyl and its pushers, along with the D.C. revolving door of Big Pharma regulators and lobbyists, illuminating many of this century’s crimes.
 
Next up we have two new half-hour HBO series.  I was somewhat surprised by how much I liked Hacks (MC-82), in which Jean Smart plays a stand-up comedian, a longtime Vegas fixture reminiscent of Joan Rivers.  With her regular gig threatened, she reluctantly takes on a 20-something comedy writer (Hannah Einbinder), who is equally reluctant in turn.  Of course the story is going to be that they overcome their initial distaste for each other, and find out that they have something to learn from one another.  Obvious enough, but the playing out of the scenario is impressively smart (pun intended), subtle, and layered, and sustains itself well through ten episodes, with an ending that definitely sets up another season.
 
I was intrigued by the revival of In Treatment for a delayed fourth season (MC-73), the earlier seasons being aparticular favorite of mine.  Initially put off by the change of lead and setting – from Gabriel Byrne to Uzo Adubo, and from NYC to L.A. – I was gradually drawn in again.  Initially I considered Adubo miscast, in comparison not just to Byrne but to the actual therapist in the similar Showtime series, Couples Therapy.  I’d liked her in roles as different as Crazy Eyes and Shirley Chisholm, but here I wasn’t willing to suspend disbelief in this character.  Over the course of the season, six weeks of sessions for four separate characters, many layers of armor were peeled away and the therapist’s backstory filled in, and I found myself continuing to watch.  By now I’ve caught up with the first half of what will be 24 episodes, and may come back for further comment when the series is complete.
 
HBO Max also keeps a large selection of older films in rotation.  Recently, there were two I was happy to find on the channel.  After I read several John Quincy Adams biographies, he became a hero of mine, so I wanted to re-view him as played by Anthony Hopkins in Amistad (1997, MC-63).  That’s a low Metacritic rating for a Steven Spielberg film, but in retrospect I see it in light of his Lincoln and am more tolerant.  This film is not without its Spielberg-esque elements (not a compliment BTW), but having spent the intervening decades reading extensively in the history of that era, I was pleased with the general historicity of the piece.  Morgan Freeman’s character was a composite, but it was a kick to see Stellan Skarsgaard as Lewis Tappan, a little-known but absolutely central abolitionist leader (sort of the George Soros of the movement).  Matthew McConaughey still rubbed me wrong as the first lawyer to take on the Amistad case, and Nigel Hawthorne was too Mad King George to play MVB, the Sage of Kinderhook.  Djimon Hounsou remains impressive in a statuesque way as Cinque, the leader of an onboard slave mutiny on a ship that wound up in a northern American port, and generated a case that finally decided for their freedom, in a Supreme Court ruling that would be overturned two decades later in the infamous Dred Scott decision, which finally declared that Black people had no rights and were excluded from constitutional protection. 
 
A friend’s daughter produced and appeared in a YouTube short with Rajiv Patel, in an AAPI series on “Moms & Pops,” in which he tells his parents’ marriage story while playing each of them in turn.  He and they were quite endearing, so I was happy to find Meet the Patels (2015, MC-70) on HBO Max, and pleased to make their acquaintance.  The film is all about the mating game, Indian style, and the pull of the culture you came from, even after Americanization.  Rajiv at 30 is getting romantically desperate and allows his parents to match-make among the Indian diaspora, in this comic and semi-staged documentary, directed with his sister Geeta Patel.  Mom & Pop don’t care who he marries, as long as her name is Patel (as is nearly everyone from their native Gujurat).  Pleasingly diverse, this film put me in mind of the excellent AppleTV+ series, Little America.
 
Saving the best for last, I’ve been waiting for In the Heights (MC-84), a film adaptation of the Broadway musical Lin-Manuel Miranda did before Hamilton.  Filmed before Covid lockdown, after other unlucky delays, it’s a simultaneous release to just reopened theaters and HBO Max.  Unlike Disney’s Hamilton, which was simply an artfully-filmed recapture of the original cast in performance on Broadway, In the Heights opens out to the streets of New York in the pre-Covid era, under the deliriously energetic direction of Jon Chu (Crazy Rich Asians).  It’s a movie that moves, and an affectionate portrait of a neighborhood, a Caribbean melting pot in NYC’s Washington Heights, an intriguing heatwave counterpoint to Spike Lee’s Bed-Stuy in Do the Right Thing.  Led by Anthony Ramos, the cast is well up to the challenge of singing and dancing their hearts out.  I doubt I’ve ever enjoyed a movie this much while actually understanding so little of the dialogue and lyrics, but unlike Hamilton, which I gladly watched again with captioning, here I was content with the self-evident spectacle of the thing.  Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story will have to go some to top this.
 
I would consider HBO Max as somewhat pricey for a regular streaming subscription, but I confess to piggybacking on a non-streaming friend’s cable subscription to HBO.  But anybody who takes a stand-alone month-at-a-time subscription for HBO Max will find plenty worth watching.