The last of last year

It’s always deep into the next year before I catch up with all the worthy films of the previous year, so this is my final mopping up of the films of 2020.

 
Clearly, a lot of people really liked Minari (MC-89, dvd), but I did not share the enthusiasm.  There were certainly some attractive aspects to writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s autobiographical film, about his Korean family’s move to a remote Arkansas farm in the 1980s, but the characters didn’t make sense to me and the story seemed constructed more than observed and recollected.  You know – cute kid, crochety grandmother, fighting parents, trial by water and fire, the immigrant’s take on the American Dream.  I won’t warn you away from this film, but I wonder whether you will find more in it than I did.
 
Same deal with Soul (MC-83, dvd).  There must be those who believe Pixar can do no wrong, but I definitely would have voted for Cartoon Saloon’s Wolfwalkers as the year’s best animated feature.  This was not Inside Out, with its canny simplification of personal psychology, but an unintelligible mishmash about souls (ghostlike blobs reminiscent of Casper) in transit to and from the earth.  It would have been so much better if the movie had stuck to the sense of soul music or soul brothers and sisters.  Perhaps Disney needed to save money, since the scenes in heaven were so much simpler in design than the dense and amazing depictions of NYC street life.  If only this film had stuck to terra firma.
 
Though technically a 2021 release, The Father (MC-88, AMZ) was among last year’s Best Picture nominees, and deservedly so.  And having seen Anthony Hopkins’ title performance, I’m less inclined to argue that Chadwick Boseman was robbed in the Best Actor category.  Though Florian Zeller is a first-time director of his own stage play, he makes it highly cinematic in depicting dementia from the inside, with a subjective view of the old person’s surroundings and acquaintances, the viewer experiencing a cognate dislocation and befuddlement.  Hopkins is spectacularly good at inhabiting the confused mind, and Olivia Colman is also good as his caring but pained daughter, with the bonus of Olivia Williams as her alter ego in the father’s eyes.  Imogene Poots makes an impression in a small role as the old man’s latest carer.  Really a masterful production all round, though not everybody’s idea of entertainment.  What a dementia film series you could have with this film, Amour, Away from Her, Still Alice, and even Elizabeth is Missing!
 
And I wouldn’t quibble about Vanessa Kirby’s Best Actress nomination for Pieces of a Woman (MC-66, NFX), belatedly watched after I was taken with her performance in The World to Come (both roles quite different from her younger Princess Margaret in The Crown).  Descriptions of the harrowing home birth that opens the film had kept me away.  The scene is indeed visceral and eviscerating, but doesn’t turn into a horror movie.  Seemingly shot in one long, long take with a gliding, probing camera, it has immediacy and presence, but doesn’t rub your face in it.  The couple who made the film, director Kornel Mundruczo and writer Kata Weber, seem to have an intimate acquaintance with the subject.  The rest of the film follows the aftermath month by month, as the couple (Shia LeBeouf is the husband) struggles to build a bridge from an aching past to a hopeful future, their life complicated by Kirby’s mother, played by Ellen Burstyn.  The film goes off on tangents with some other characters, and relies heavily on some metaphorical objects to tie its disparate pieces together, but Vanessa Kirby offers a memorable portrait of excruciating anguish and muted grief.  The familiar feel of the Boston settings is a plus, but not quite enough to earn my outright recommendation.
 
There are films that I resent because they’re just good enough to keep me watching in the hopes that the whole will take shape and come together, but then the end arrives, and I have to say, “Is that all you’ve got?  You drag me along this far, and give me nothing in the end.  Why were you wasting my time?”  Case in point:  The Nest (MC-79, Show).  In my view, this is the second time that writer-director Sean Durkin has buffaloed a lot of critics.  Jude Law and Carrie Coon are enough to draw one in, as he uproots the mixed family (with two nondescript kids) from America to London, in pursuit of a big 1980s financial score.  They wind up in an ancient mansion in the Sussex countryside, which seems sure to be haunted.  As the deal-making bro’s plans and boasts prove hollow, the marriage frays and the kids act out.  I won’t say where the story goes, not because that would be a spoiler, but because it doesn’t go anywhere at all.
 
Misbehaviour (MC-62, Starz) is no great shakes as a film, but the presence of Lesley Manville, Jesse Buckley, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw was enough to draw me in (I find Keira Knightley generally less enticing), and I didn’t regret sitting through this fact-based film about feminists disrupting the 1970 Miss World pageant in London, but it certainly pales next to Mrs. America.
 
I don’t know what to say about The Disciple (MC-83, NFX), except that it takes one into a very unfamiliar world of Indian classical music, and shows the travail of a musician who can’t quite measure up to the stringent discipline of the form.  It’s definitely a serious piece of work, but I didn’t really get a lot of it, either the film or the music itself, though I persisted throughout its enigmatic length.

One last lukewarm response to report, since I finally got to see News of the World (MC-73, dvd).  Directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks, this film had plenty to recommend itself, but not enough for me to do so in turn.  It seemed like an utterly conventional Western, revisiting familiar scenes but not making anything new out of them.  In 1870s Texas, Hanks is a Confederate veteran who pieces out a living as an itinerant reader of news, storytelling out of the papers and passing the hat in remote outposts.  In his travels, he comes across a doubly-orphaned girl (Helena Zengel), stolen from her German immigrant parents in a massacre by Kiowa, who were later massacred by soldiers.  They journey together through the desolate West, every scene reminiscent of earlier Westerns, to the utterly predictable conclusion.  It’s all quite well done, but why?  We see myth and counter-myth, with a reverse echo from present politics, but we get little sense of actual history.

 
That about wraps up 2020 films for me.  Going down the Metacritic Top 100, I don’t see any more that I am dying to see, but I do notice one that I want to add to my best of the year lists (this one or that one) – the documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, now available on the Criterion Channel as well as Kanopy.

Best tv so far this year

A mid-year review of Metacritic’s top-rated television shows is prompted by one I would have missed if not for the list, where it comes in #5.  Last Chance U: Basketball (MC-90, NFX) arrives after five seasons of the series that featured football, and was therefore the first to attract my interest, and subsequent enthusiasm.  If you love b-ball and/or films like the superlative Hoop Dreams, then you’re in for a treat.  Over the course of ten hour-long episodes, we follow the East Los Angeles College Huskies as they have a season to remember, vying for the Cali JUCO state championship.  The charismatic coach, insane when it suits his purposes and highly considerate of his players in calmer moments, needs the title to avenge earlier tournament losses.  His players need to showcase their talents for potentially moving up to Div. I, or even the pros.  A lot of agendas have to align for them to reach their goal.  The coach and both his assistants get a lot of screen time, with three or four players in particular followed throughout the season, on court and off.  Game action, as well as incidents in locker room and elsewhere, are sharply distilled.  Wrenching and joyous by turns, the 2019-20 season unfolds dramatically to its unforeseen anticlimax.  Though the team of filmmakers may lack the singular vision of a Steve James, they are highly adept at combining sports with human interest.  See this, if you’re into hoops at all.

 
So here I’m going to run down the Metacritic rating list, commenting on the urgency and warmth of my personal recommendation,
 
I’m certainly on board with the top-rated Bo Burnham: Inside (98), a brilliant and hilarious deep dive not only into the performer’s psyche but into the whole experience of social media and Covid lockdown. 
 
Romeo & Juliet (92) was good, but not that good, a theatrical experience that made the most of the shutdown of theaters.
 
After one episode, I decided that Underground Railroad (92) was not something I had to watch.  Then wondering whether I’d missed something, went back and started a second episode, but before long, decided I was right at first glance.  If you want to watch something profound about the Black experience on Amazon Prime, watch Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series instead.
 
Similarly, I was not grabbed by the characters or situations of It’s a Sin (91), and bailed after one episode.
 
Hemingway (88) was not a subject I cared to delve into, but the second season of Ted Lasso (87) will definitely warrant another month of AppleTV+.  After several shows that I sampled slightly or not at all, comes Elizabeth is Missing (86), not all that good but notable for the return of Glenda Jackson.
 
Clustered at a Metacritic rating of 85, I certainly endorse two British comedy series that are just back with strong second seasons, Mae Martin’s Feel Good and the newest Mitchell-Webb series Back.  Also the British psychological drama, Too Close.
 
I was moved by, but not ecstatic about, The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song (85), though I ran out of patience with Exterminate All the Brutes (83).  Among documentaries, I preferred Alex Gibney’s analytic series on the opioid crisis, The Crime of the Century (84).
 
There follow several shows of which I have no experience, but down at 81 (typically my threshold for “must viewing”) are two half-hour comedy shows that I found surprisingly entertaining and substantial, the second season of Dickinson (with Hailee Steinfeld as the young Emily) and the first of Hacks (with Jean Smart as a Joan Rivers-like comedian).
 
One more new tv series I highly recommend, absent a rating, is the second season of Couples Therapy.  So let’s see what the rest of the year will bring.
 

Delving into mental health

Mysteries of Mental Illness, a 4-part series on PBS, is an illustrated recapitulation of two books that I read with great interest – Madness in Civilization and The Mind Fixers –  while working with a friend on a memoir of his thirty years as a psychiatric nurse.  Andrew Scull and Anne Harrington, the respective authors, appear repeatedly as talking heads throughout the series, along with many other practitioners and theorists.  Therefore much of the material is old hat to me, but even with a bit of redundancy and stretching to fill four hours, the visual accompaniment was enough to maintain my interest, though the optimistic prognosis in the final episode struck me as dubious, especially with the lessons learned in the previous episodes, about treatments that were ballyhooed in their time but now strike us as barbaric and counterproductive.
 
That show led me back to other PBS programs that I had bookmarked, but never gotten around to.  That Way Madness Lies… (MC-tbd, PBS) is a personal film by Sandra Luckow, made about (and initially with) her brother, as he descends into insanity, overcome by delusions and obsessions.  This film doesn’t deal much with diagnoses or treatments, but rather with the way a family can be destroyed, physically and financially, as one member loses touch with reality, and winds up in and out of state hospitals, halfway houses, and prisons.  Both siblings began filmmaking as teens, so there is a wealth of archival material to tell the family’s story, which winds up as a 60 Minutes segment, since the sister apparently works for CBS News, which explains the continuing presence of a cameraperson, as the family unravels.  I’d call the result interesting and informative, though hardly revelatory.
 
The Definition of Insanity (PBS) deals with the intersection of mental health and the legal system, not in order to define “insanity,” but to apply the definition “doing the same over and over again and expecting a different result” to the system itself, where state hospitals were emptied only that prisons could be re-filled as treatment-less warehouses for the mentally ill.  It follows a judge in Miami-Dade Country who tired of sending people who were clearly suffering from mental issues to jail rather than to treatment, and started a long-running demonstration project of a Jail Diversion Program, a glimmer of hope in a grim reality.
 
On the same theme in a different vein, Emily Watson is having a nice run in high-quality limited tv-series featuring brainy women in their fifties.  After playing a nuclear scientist in Chernobyl, she has a recent turn as a forensic psychiatrist in Too Close (MC-85, AMC+), which led me back to an earlier series, Apple Tree Yard (IMDB, Hulu), where she begins as a genetics expert testifying in Parliament.  One never has trouble believing that Ms. Watson is a woman who thinks for a living.  Both these series are written and directed by women, and it shows to advantage.  In Too Close, she is recalled from leave after a traumatic incident, to determine the sanity of a mother who drove off a bridge with her young daughter and a friend strapped in the back seat.  The notorious “yummy mummy” is played by Denise Gough (who also has a small role in ATY, from the opposite side of the docket), developing a pas de deux of psychic damage with Watson’s psychiatrist.  Who is getting inside whose head?  It’s a fascinating dance through three episodes, though the conclusion is too tidy in tying up loose ends.  I’m no great fan of British mysteries or police procedurals but both of these series are more psychological than strictly case-oriented, with more emotional than physical violence.  In Apple Tree Yard, the geneticist has an uncharacteristic walk-on-the-wild-side affair with a mysterious Ben Chaplin, with several twists that ensue, leading to a murder trial, which is reasonably well-handled but still less interesting than the human relations depicted.
 
Under this heading, I can report that HBO Max is functional again, after streaming problems, so I watched the rest of the latest season of In Treatment, though I did not feel rewarded for the effort.  Stick with the first three seasons, which are excellent.  In conjunction with In the Heights, however, this series confirms Anthony Ramos as an actor to watch.  In a reversal of the usual hierarchy of value, I much preferred the Showtime series Couples Therapy, reality providing the better script.
 
With the return of HBO service, I was also able to re-watch Madness of King George (1994, MC-89, HBO), a film I couldn’t lay my hands on when I wanted to show it at the Clark a while back, to tie into some Georgian era art exhibit.  Nicholas Hytner directs Alan Bennett’s adaptation of his own earlier play, and everyone makes a fine job of it – what, what!  Nigel Hawthorne is the mad king, Helen Mirren is his queen, Rupert Everett his resentful son, and Ian Holm his mad “doctor.”  I mean it as a complement to say that this film plays as an 18^th century prequel to The Crown, but also as a parody of all “diagnoses” and “treatments” for mental illness up to our very day.
 

Luau on Hulu

The streaming channel Hulu lays out a smorgasbord that looks unappetizing at first glance, partly because its format highlights inedible network fare, and partly because the basic subscription includes indigestible commercials.  But if you pay extra for the commercial-free option, and know what to look for, you may - like me - find more delicacies on Hulu than any other channel, whether it be a ballyhooed new foreign or independent film, or award-winning documentary, or edgy TV series, or some distinctive original programming.  To take the most obvious example, start with last year’s widely-acknowledged best film, Nomadland.  Look at this NYT list to get some idea of the range of what you can find on Hulu.  And read on to find some of the more recent additions to the groaning board.
 
For those of us eagerly awaiting the Covid-delayed second half of the second season of their original series Pen15, Hulu has filled the gap by offering Plan B (MC-74), another tale of two misfit teenage besties, out of place in their South Dakota town, one Desi and brainy (Kuhoo Verma) and one Latina and bi-curious (Victoria Moroles), both appealing and funny.  This high school sex comedy plays like a female Superbad, but director Victoria Morales flavors the proceedings with a bit of Never Rarely Sometimes Always, as the two girls go on a risky roadtrip in search of the eponymous pill, in a reproductive healthcare wasteland.  Wacky adventures ensue, but also some genuine feeling and observation.  It’s not supergood, but it’s good enough to keep Hulu viewers amused till Pen15 comes up again.
 
Supernova (MC-73) features another roadtrip, this time through the English Lake District, by a graybeard-baldhead gay couple.  They are played by Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci, and that’s really all you need to know, guaranteed to be worth seeing.  One of them has early-onset dementia and both are coming to terms with their impending loss (they’ve said in interviews that they switched the roles as first assigned).  Harry Macqueen’s writing and direction are blunt about the choices they face, but the actors provide nuance and shading, and the landscape provides some relief from the grim prognosis, in this loving portrait of a couple facing the worst together.
 
The “period lesbian romance” has become enough of a thing to be parodied on SNL – here comes another:  The World to Come (MC-73), which I am happy to put in a class with Portrait of a Woman on Fire and Ammonite, not to mention Gentleman Jack.  This one in particular is right in “my” period, America in the 1850s, with Romania providing an excellent location stand-in for Upstate New York wilderness.  The movie is based on a story by Williams College English professor and writer Jim Shepard, with a screenwriting assist from Ron Hanson, who also brought aboard actor/producer Casey Affleck.  Mona Fastvold offers excellent direction and period-flavored cinematography, to complement the highly-literate script and captivating lead performances from Kathryn Waterston and Vanessa Kirby, as unhappy farm wives who find a new world in each other.  The tightly-wrapped Waterston narrates the story through her diary entries, and Kirby brings some devil-may-care sunshine into a cold and desolate, gray-green landscape.
 
Not interested in period lesbian romance?  Then how about geriatric lesbian romance, i.e. Two of Us (MC-82)?  Much in this film seemed admirable to me, in cleverness and craft, feeling and truth, but I didn’t feel that all the pieces held together.  First-time director Filippo Meneghetti effectively establishes an atmosphere, but takes a little bit from this film and that, from Amour to Hitchcock to one more lament for the love that dare not speak its name, dissipating the force of the central story.  Two handsome older ladies have pretended to be just neighbors in a Paris apartment building, while maintaining a longtime secret affair.  Now that the married one (Martine Chevallier) has “lost” her husband, she is free to come out to her children and move to Rome with her lover (Barbara Sukowa).  But of course it’s not as easy as that, and worse is in store for the would-be couple, to the brink of melodrama and back again.
 
MLK/FBI (MC-81) is a substantial documentary by Sam Pollard, an impressive survey of M.L.King’s heroic career, the arc of which bent toward justice, as viewed through the surveillance of the Department of (In)Justice, which saw him as a subversive, not to mention a liar and pervert.  Not sure I learned anything I was unaware of going in, but this film puts it all together in a compelling way.  The archives of material are very rich, and Pollard’s innovation, which I hope will be widely followed, is to avoid talking heads, by allowing audio commentary to run over accumulating period visuals, with the speaker’s name in an on-screen caption.  In memorializing King, this doc goes well beyond “I have a dream…”  Definitely recommended.  
 
In Some Kind of Heaven (MC-73), a very young Harvard-trained, NYT-produced documentarian named Lance Oppenheim returns to his native Florida in quest of local oddities, and comes up with a doozy – The Villages, the world’s largest old-folks community, known as “Disney World for retirees.”  Immense and highly-regimented, this self-contained, make-believe town of more than a hundred-thousand residents has activity groups of all kinds, from golf-cart precision drill team to belly dancing to singles hangouts to synchronized swimming.  The film follows four individuals or couples, with differing experiences of the place, intermingled with highly-stylized visuals accentuating the artificiality of the environment, and marked by a serious anthropological intent leavened by humor.  (It doesn’t capture, however, the Trump-supporting Villages resident who went viral, riding around in a golf cart with a big, bold “White Power” sign.)
 
Stray (MC-83) is a dog’s-eye documentary set in Istanbul, where in reaction to government attempts to exterminate all strays, a law was passed to prevent euthanization or capture, so the loose pooches have the run of the city.  We mostly follow one endearing dog on its rounds, though she chums up with another, and then a cute little pup, all of them following a group of glue-huffing street kids, refugees from Syria.  It’s a dog’s life for both canines and humans without caretakers, free-ranging but continuously at risk.  All-purpose filmmaker Elizabeth Lo followed her primary subject for two years, and cannily put together this dark but empathetic take on an anti-Disney “incredible journey.”  Humans come into it only from the dogs’ perspective, but even they can see what’s going on in Erdogan’s Turkey.
 
Last but far from least, Hulu offered Summer of Soul (MC-96) the same day it was released in theaters.  Exceptionally well put together by director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, this documentary is a rousing concert film and a painless (though tearful) history lesson.  He resurrects the lost footage of tv director Hal Tulchin from the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, a series of free concerts held in what is now Marcus Garvey Park in the center of Harlem, and situates it within the context of major events happening at the time:  assassinations and riots, the transition from “Negro agitation” to Black Power, white backlash and Nixon’s “law & order” presidency, the first moon landing, Woodstock.  The film’s subtitle is “(…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)” and it reconsiders all this within the memories of performers and attendees, in an extremely potent mix of pride, joy, and sorrow.  Also within the context of changing styles in Black music, fashion, and politics.  Whether blues, soul, gospel, jazz, funk, pop, with Latin or African inflections, all this music rocks hard and true, be it Stevie Wonder or B.B. King, the Staples Singers or Mahalia Jackson, Gladys Knight or Nina Simone, the Fifth Dimension or Sly and the Family Stone.  I felt a particular force from this film, since I watched it in the context of re-reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, appreciating how far we’ve come but lamenting how little has changed in fifty-odd years.  If you don’t have Hulu, or even if you do, go see this in a movie theater, for an extraordinarily moving experience that will take you “Higher.”