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.