Coming home to Netflix

I maintain a manual watchlist of a dozen or so streaming channels, and I’ve begun to save money by subscribing only when I’ve developed a critical mass of programs on any given channel.  Earlier this year, when Netflix had literally nothing I wanted to watch, I suspended my subscription for the first time in 22 years.  After a number of months not sending them my $15.49 – which in turn caused their stock price to crater – I’d built up a list of shows-to-see that warranted a month or two back on the channel.
 
Preeminent among them was Borgen: Power and Glory (MC-87), and the belated return of one of my all-time top-ten tv-shows did not disappoint.  Having won and lost as Prime Minister of Denmark, Birgitte Nyborg returns as Foreign Minister in a new coalition government, still played by the dazzling Sidse Babett Knudsen.  Many other characters return as well, to good effect.  This delayed fourth season revolves around the ramifying crises emerging from the discovery of oil on Greenland, where the indigenous majority hopes it will finance independence from Denmark, while the Danes are caught between their Green commitments and a financial windfall of billions, and the U.S., Russia, and China all take a geopolitical interest.  Birgitte navigates these waters with impressive skill, but also with a compulsion for power that corrupts her thinking and makes her forget who her friends are.  This is a political show that believably takes you into “the room where it happens.”  If you were a fan of the first three seasons, rejoice at this reprise.  If you weren’t, be advised that they rank with the best tv ever, and that they’re also available on Netflix.
 
The second season of Russian Doll (MC-79) is more sci-fi and scattershot than the first, but Natasha Lyonne is still marvelous in the lead, and the show returns with an intriguing if incomprehensible story and a striking visual style.  This season has a time-travel rather than a Groundhog Day premise, with the character Nadia inhabiting the body of her mother in the 1980s and grandmother in the 1940s, in a quest to recover a cache of gold stolen from her family by the Nazis.  Though not as enthusiastic as I was about the first series, I still enjoyed this follow-up, at least till I gave up trying to decipher all the off-hand dialogue or follow the zigzags of the plot.
 
Candidly a rip-off of the original Australian series (my comments here and here), Love on the Spectrum U.S. (no MC) has its own appeal.  But its coast-to-coast coverage of familiar locations loses some of the piquant individuality of the original.  On the other hand, the “reality-tv” range of characters, with all their different manifestations of autism, conveys that while we are all different types, we basically want the same things, intimacy and connection.  Funny and touching, and never icky.
 
If you want - or need - a lesson on the legacy of white supremacy, then Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America (MC-89) would be good place to start.  Jeffrey Robinson’s illustrated presentation is for the most part common-sense, by-now-familiar history and not the Right’s boogieman of CRT.  It follows a timeline from 1619 to today that is cumulatively enraging and convincing, but the only news to me was a revolt of enslaved people in pre-Revolutionary times.  Built around an actual lecture, with graphics and cutaways to personal documentation, this show seems truthful and telling, with a minimum of exaggeration or special pleading.
 
The drama and the humor are a little thin in Adam Sandler’s Hustle (MC-68), but the basketball action is pretty great, with a bunch of current and former NBA stars playing themselves.  Sandler is an international scout for the 76ers, who finds a diamond in the rough in Juancho Hernangomez.  Jeremiah Zagar does a nice job of Philly-centric directing, which enhances the sports movie formula.  Of recent hoops-oriented shows, this movie cannot run with Swagger but posterizes Winning Time.
 
Richard Linklater is probably my favorite director from the generation after mine (late as opposed to early Boomer).  Apollo 10½ (MC-79) does not rank with his classics, but is a very pleasant memory piece about growing up in Houston in the late Sixties, given added dimension by the practice of rotoscoping, live action overlaid by animation, which Linklater debuted in Waking Life.  While slightly fictionalized, the film has all the specificity of memoir, and is more a matter of time travel than space travel, digging into the culture of childhood in that time and place, in a nuclear family of six siblings, and a new-built neighborhood crawling with other children.

Netflix has a nice thing going in the tradition of Sex Education, and the new teen LBGTQ+ comedy Heartstopper (MC-85) continues in that vein, though gentler and less raunchy.  Adapted by Alice Oseman from her extremely popular (but previously unknown to me) series of graphic novels, it’s live action with a few animated touches, and tells the story of an openly gay, but bullied, English 15-year-old with a crush on a popular rugby player, who amazingly returns his affection and struggles to come to terms with his apparent bisexuality.  In the group of friends are a movie nerd, a book nerd, a trans girl, and a lesbian couple.  Hard to say how this series remains so sweet without ever becoming saccharine, but it must have something to do with the authenticity and sincerity of the characters and their creators.  These eight half-hour episodes are highly recommended, and a second season is on the way.

In the same vein, Never Have I Ever (MC-84) returns for a third season (my rave for first two seasons here), and remains charming, truthful, and funny as ever.  This show I recommend without reservation -- I can’t imagine anyone not enjoying its wit and heart.  Mindy Kaling and her co-creators revisit the familiar territory of a SoCal high school, with an emphasis on broadly-appealing diversity.  Maitreyi Ramakrishnan is delightful as the lead character, now a junior (as the series, with one more season to go, covers high school year by year).  Devi is a brainiac nerd who somehow has landed her dream boyfriend, but that does not solve all her teenage problems.  (John McEnroe is also delightful, crankily providing her stream-of-consciousness narration.)  Her circle of friends confronts various other romantic surprises and quandaries, in refreshing a tried and true genre with ethnic spice.  Winsome and winning.

In a different vein, I returned to Peaky Blinders (MC-77) for its sixth and final season (MC-86), after skipping the previous two, having found the series to run out of interest, just repeating a stylistic exercise that was initially striking, but now reduced to formula.  Dark, heavy, loud, bloody, in thrall to the Godfather Saga – this show seemed a novelty at first, but wound up just going through the motions.

I usually get around to seeing the Oscar nominees for Best Animated Feature, so I caught up with the Netflix production The Mitchells vs. The Machines (MC-81), which deserved the nod.   The novelty of its visual style; the non-stop barrage of gags, too many for any single viewer, but something for everyone; the winking adaptation of action movie clichés; the tech satire of robot apocalypse; the anti-heroics of a normally dysfunctional family – all work well, even if the obligatory action scenes go too fast and too long.  

Following upon the success of Wild Wild Country, Netflix presents another documentary about a closed community out West with Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey (MC-80), this time a polygamous sect of Mormons, one of the models for the HBO series Big Love.  This series of four 45-minute episodes doesn’t have the scope or ambiguity of the prior doc, but offers some impressive personal testimony illuminated by home movies and photos, to tell the sketched-in history of the FLDS.  Two missteps are the inclusion of some recreations that undermine the veracity of the archival footage, and the failure to delve more into the psychology of believers, rather that making a mere crime (or horror) story about the pursuit and conviction of a moral monster.  What held this patriarchal tyranny together?  This story is only half-told.

So all in all, there is plenty of reason to subscribe to Netflix for a month or two at a time, but also no reason to automatically renew every month, given the workaday quality of so much of their programming.

Putting Showtime on trial

Nurse Jackie is in danger of losing its status as my all-time favorite Showtime series to Couples Therapy (MC-90).  The just-concluded third season was reason enough for me to sample another free trial of the streaming channel, nicely prefaced by a New Yorker profile of Orna Guralnick, the therapist around whom the show revolves.  Three people sitting in a room talking about feelings and interactions is much more involving for me than any gun battle, car chase, or action sequence.  And this series is brilliantly put together.  I was an early and eager adopter, reviewing the first season here and the second season here.  If anything, the third season is better yet, so all I’m going to do is reiterate my heartfelt recommendation of this truthful, moving, and funny show.
 
Back to Life (MC-88) definitely has merits, but I’m not going to say “you gotta see it.”  You might however like to see it, if you’re into British sitcoms about troubled but funny young-ish women, as I am.  Daisy Haggard is the writer and star, playing a woman just released from 18 years of prison for the death of her high school friend, and returning to her hometown on the Kent coast.  So it’s sort of a comic female twist on the premise of Rectify, and it keeps adding dimensions as it goes on.
 
Aside from the aforementioned, there are no Showtime series that I really recommend, so you’re on your own there, but their line-up of movies has enough interest to fill out your free trial.  Here are some of the latest:
 
Stanley Nelson’s Attica (MC-87) definitely earned its Oscar nomination for best documentary feature.  A half-century later, that prison uprising remains a resonant demonstration of official brutality with a racist cast, unpacking the significance of Nixon’s (and Rockefeller’s) campaign theme of “law & order.”  The max security prison in an all-white Upstate town, where it was the primary employer, was largely populated by blacks and others from NYC.  When the inmates turned the tables and seized thirty-some guards as hostages, the stalemate went on for several days, until the government’s show of force left scores dead, including ten hostages killed in the one-sided hail of bullets.  Covered both by news and surveillance footage, along with latter-day interviews with survivors on both sides of the event, this film is shocking and revelatory, somehow summed up by the reaction of one “lawman” after the massacre, jubilantly raising his weapon and shouting “white power.”
 
On a second and more satisfactory viewing, Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon (MC-82) strikes me as even better than my first impression, starting with the lustrous black & white cinematography.  So does the wonderful byplay between a surprisingly-gentle Joaquin Phoenix – a documentary interviewer of children, but childless and unattached – and his charming if troubled 9-year-old nephew, well-played by Woody Norman.  They are thrown together when the boy’s mother (Gaby Hoffmann) has to care for his ailing father, and they gradually come to mutual understanding and appreciation.  This rambling and impressionistic film succeeds in entering a child’s mindset in a variety of ways, as the pair travel from LA to NYC to New Orleans on work assignments.  Very nicely done all round.
 
I really liked Columbus, the first film of the pseudonymous Korean-American auteur Kogonada, not to mention his video essays for Criterion and direction of half the episodes of Pachinko, so I regret to report that I am less than lukewarm about his latest, After Yang (MC-79), a domestic drama with a sci-fi premise.  Yang is essentially a robot, the “techno-sapiens” big-brother companion to a young Chinese girl adopted by Colin Farrell, a thoroughly-subdued tea enthusiast, and his African wife.  When Yang starts to malfunction, the stresses in this blended family are explored, in an Ozu-inflected style and pace, which I however found somnolent rather than engrossing.
 
Before signing off Showtime, I caught two well-reviewed recent films that I found a chore to watch.  I have to confess that my English major sequence started with Chaucer, so I never read [Gawain &]The Green Knight (MC-85), or Beowolf for that matter, and I’ve never been a fan of sword & sorcery films (Game of Thrones notwithstanding).  So I am a poor judge of David Lowery’s adaptation, the more so since I’ve found myself resistant to all of his work.   But I will say that it bored me almost to tears, despite the visual dazzle and the presence of Dev Patel and Alicia Vikander.
 
The Souvenir Part II (MC-90) is even more obscure and self-important than the first part.  I don’t even know what to say about it, especially in the face of all those critics who saw so much more in it than I did.  The first film was a memory piece about a trauma that Joanna Hogg experienced while in film school in the 80s, and the second is about the student film she made about that painful affair.  I took an interest in the interactions of the students making the film with her, but it was torture for them and for me.  The whole thing is an enigma that I didn’t care to solve.
 
All in all, I can’t see paying for Showtime on any continuing basis, but an occasional free trial could be worth your while.  Some judicial systems offer a verdict of “not proven” as an alternative to guilty or innocent, so that’s what I’ll give to Showtime, along with a suspended sentence. 

Back to the tube

After more than a month “across the pond” and away from my usual screens, I’ve got some catching up to do, so let’s get right down to it.  First off, I have to mention two well-received films from 2021 that I caught as in-flight entertainment, with all the attendant liabilities, missing a lot of dialogue in one, and in the other scenes too dark to see, not to mention the tiny screen (and interruptions) for both.  Nonetheless, Parallel Mothers (MC-88) may muscle its way into my Top 10, and C’mon C’mon (MC-82) will slot high among my Runners-up (see here for the current state of my lists).  Both Pedro Almodovar and Mike Mills approach their best work with their latest, as do Penelope Cruz and Joaquin Phoenix in the respective lead roles.  And both films will warrant a second, better look.

 
Over in England, I happened to catch the first half of the final season of Better Call Saul (MC-94).  I’ll reserve comment till the ultimate episodes land later this summer, but the show would have to stumble badly for me not to anoint the BB/BCS duo my favorite television of all time.
 
While over there, I also happened to read the novel on which the outstanding AppleTV+ series Pachinko (MC-87) was based, which gives me a chance to redouble my recommendation for one of the best new shows of 2022.

Speaking of which, Julia (MC-76) will certainly figure in my best of the year list too, though I am far from a foodie and had to be won over by the sheer quality of the acting, writing, and production in general.  Caught the final episode upon my return, and it did not disappoint; now looking forward to a second season.  Can’t say the same for another HBO series, Winning Time (MC-68); I’m a sucker for hoops flicks, and I certainly remember the Magic-Kareem “Showtime” Lakers, so I watched to the end in spite of qualms about style and substance, suspect characterizations and weak game action.

[Update:  HBO now offers another Julia (MC-69), a documentary feature from Betsy West and Julie Cohen, who previously made RBG and My Name is Pauli Murray, other estimable portraits in female heroism.  This doc pairs nicely with the series, though I found it more interesting on Julia Child’s life before celebrity took hold.]
 
Two HBO series I’ll be sticking with are Gentleman Jack and Hacks, both having strong second seasons which I’ll highlight below.  HBO Max is the streamer of the moment for me, as the rest of this post will attest, but I have to highlight an unusual offering from that channel – an extensive retrospective of the films of Yasujiro Ozu!!  The Criterion Channel offers a deeper dive into the work of the master, but the dozen titles on HBO Max make a very tasty sampling (here are my comments from an earlier Ozu survey).

HBO continues to produce documentaries of interest.  The Janes (MC-83) were a feminist collective in Chicago, emerging from the civil rights and anti-war movements of the Sixties, who found their political and humanitarian purpose in providing illegal abortions in the pre-Roe v. Wade era.  This historical account by Emma Pildes and Tia Lessin is regrettably timely, in showing just what overturning that Supreme Court precedent may mean today.  An effective if workaday balance of period photos and footage combines with more recent interviews with the women involved, to make this film generational time-travel that hit very close to home for me.
 
Though too long at four hours in two parts, I’m not sure what I would leave out of George Carlin’s American Dream (MC-85), Judd Apatow’s follow-up to his similarly in-depth examination of Gary Shandling.  Carlin’s 40-year career certainly describes an arc of American humor and American history, and it’s more than amusing to take that journey with him, in an exploration of just what stand-up comedy can accomplish.
 
Shifting gears, HBO presented Sundance documentary award winner Navalny (MC-82), which was a worthwhile introduction to a significant geopolitical figure, as Putin’s foremost domestic opponent.  Daniel Roher’s film definitely conveys a sense of Alexei Navalny’s personality, but for me faltered in the end by going for a thriller vibe in the all-access, you-are-there, real-time account of his return to Russia, after proving who tried to poison him and implicating Putin himself.  That discovery anchors a remarkable sequence, but in the end we know he’s going to be arrested the minute he gets off the plane, so all that build-up could have been spent painting a fuller portrait of the man and his movement.
 
Unlike your Bridgertons or Sanditons, Gentleman Jack (MC-80) is an English heritage piece that is more interested in history than contemporary fashion, though its tale of lesbian romance in the early Victorian era seems very of the moment.  Show creator Sally Wainwright grew up close to the antique Yorkshire mansion Shibden Hall, which is the primary location of the series, and she’s been obsessed for decades with the voluminous diaries of gentlewoman Anne Lister, since they were decoded and published.  That level of detail and attention infuses the production, and Suranne Jones embodies the energies and passions of the formidably accomplished Miss Lister, a force of nature, bold not just sexually but entrepreneurially, a model industrialist, investing in canals and railroads, coal mining and casinos.  Sophie Rundle makes a good match as Miss Walker, wife avant la lettre, and the rest of the cast is sterling.  Beyond the entrancing production values of the series lie provocative storytelling and profound characterization.  Subsequent seasons have yet to be greenlit, but the second season finale works just as well for the series.   We can only hope that Wainwright gets to continue her historical affair with this “Yorkshire lady of renown,” though in the meantime she’ll be re-teaming with Sarah Lancashire (of Julia) for a third season of Happy Valley, which was certainly what I found the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales to be on a recent visit.
 

I’m a shade less enthusiastic about the second season of Hacks (MC-88), but the pairing of Emmy-winner Jean Smart as the aging Las Vegas star comedian, and Hannah Einbinder as her millennial writing assistant, continues to work well.  This season they’re trying to put her career (and their relationship) back together, hitting the road in a fancy tour bus, trying out new material in random venues.  Other characters weave in and out, with generally amusing tangents, while the frenemies keep bumping up against their generational differences, even as each has a passion for their common work.  Quite enjoyable, but I’m not longing to see more.
 
Of new limited series on HBO, We Own This City (MC-83) serves as a worthy postscript to The Wire, as David Simon and many of that superlative show’s writers and actors return to Baltimore and the underbelly of its poe-lease and politics.  This six-parter is a docudrama about an actual case of police corruption, as the investigation unfolds in pinball fashion with time leaps and flashbacks, frankly not so easy to follow unless you’ve read the nonfiction book on which the series is based.  The attendant temporal whiplash is this series’ biggest problem, though the viewer has to piece the story together just as the investigators do.  Still, the details accumulate and paint a fatal picture of the human costs of the war on drugs, and the police behavior it unleashes.  A solid cast led by live-wire Jon Bernthal is directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (King Richard), with a cameo by Treat Williams enunciating the primary theme of show, in a nice nod to Prince of the City, a memorable film that indicates how little reform has come to policing over the past forty years.  As a footnote to the postscript, also on HBO, Wire alum Sonja Sohn capably directs Slow Hustle, a documentary on the fate of one of the main characters in We Own This City, good in its own right but excellent as a companion piece.
 
But there’s one new film on HBO to mention.  First Reformed was announced as Paul Schrader’s final film, but here we have The Card Counter (MC-77).  Maybe he should have quit while he was ahead, though I suspect Scorsese put him up to this Taxi Driver/Color of Money/Zero Dark Thirty mash-up.  Though Schrader’s always been a film maker that I’ve taken seriously, this movie seems like a rehash of some of his obsessive themes and tropes, most dubiously the conclusion with some kind of redemptive violence for the troubled protagonist.  His spoiled Calvinism does not appeal to me, but much in this film is well done, topped by the riveting lead performance of Oscar Isaac.  And I credit the film for introducing me to the piquant Tiffany Haddish, whom I had not encountered before.  But I debit it for trying to be too many different things at once, and losing me after I was drawn in.

 
I’ll end this post by taking note of two offerings from Hulu, just as I am readying to rotate that streaming channel out of subscription and plugging back into Netflix.  For me, The Worst Person in the World (MC-90) did not live up to its Metacritic rating, Cannes acclaim, Oscar nominations, or even my own reaction to the previous two films in Joachim Trier’s “Oslo Trilogy.”  I seem to have a blind spot for the appeal of actress Renate Reinsve, somewhat as I used to for Greta Gerwig (though all is forgiven after her direction of Lady Bird and Little Women), as they played winsome but directionless young women approaching thirty (a genre revitalized by Fleabag and its successors).  So this is likewise a dark rom-com, and I appreciated the lived-truth of many scenes, but could not bring myself to care how the main character would wind up, or even whether she was in fact the title character.  Her fate was as indifferent to me as her bookstore job was to her – pretext without text, though with some texture.  Not painful to watch at all, but short of heightened expectations.
 
You don’t have to be in love with Emma Thompson to enjoy Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (MC-78), but it certainly doesn’t hurt.  She is joined by, and matched to, Daryl McCormack in this hotel-room two-hander, though a different part of the anatomy might be more descriptive.  She’s a fifty-something widow, a former religion teacher, who wants to discover what she’s been missing in her whole sex life.  He’s a twenty-something Irishman, though gorgeously biracial, who’s almost as much a therapist as a sex worker, confident but not without his own sore points.  Through a series of encounters, they explore each others’ vulnerabilities and gratifications.  It’s all about the two performers, but the writing by Katy Brand and direction by Sophie Hyde brings out the best in them, in this poignant and funny exploration of getting naked and achieving satisfaction.
 
One further postscript, from another streaming channel I’m signing off for now.  I thought a Sundance audience award winner on AppleTV+ might replicate the appeal of CODA, but Cha Cha Real Smooth (MC-69) had more in common with something like Garden State, an egomaniacal attempt to be ingratiating. Cooper Raiff writes, directs, and stars in this presumably autobiographical story of a recent college graduate working in a parody of a fast food place, who finds a more congenial job as a “party starter” at Bar/Bat Mitzvahs and other middle school celebrations.  He’s attracted to the mother of one autistic girl who shows up to many of the parties.  No mystery there, since she’s played by Dakota Johnson.  The first film I ever saw her in was The Lost Daughter, but now I discover that she was the star of the Fifty Shades of Gray movies, and many others I would never watch or even hear of.  So her mannerisms were fresh to me, and I was won over to her performance, while Raiff himself remained too sweet for my taste, too cute for my belief.