Return to bedrock

As indicated before, I’ve adopted a change in voice.  From hectoring “you” with friendly viewing advice, I’ve switched to talking to myself, mainly as a diaristic aide-mémoire, which is how I started out two decades ago.  Perhaps I should change this blog’s name to Cinema Soliloquy?  Now I address my remarks to nobody, because that is likely my readership.  Nonetheless, I invite intrepid souls with time on their hands to listen in.  So this is a quick whirl through several months of film viewing.
 
Though I have sometimes gone months without watching anything on the Criterion Channel, I’ve always considered my charter subscription not just a fee for service but an act of cultural patronage, because the Criterion organization is so important to the preservation of the history and diversity of cinema.  In a hard assessment of value for money in various streaming subscriptions, I recently converted to an annual subscription for Criterion, (amounting to $8.33 per month), while adopting an intermittent approach to Netflix and Hulu, as well as more specialized channels.
 
Having thus returned to basics, I actively looked for films to watch on the channel, and found much of novelty and interest.  Criterion has a massive back catalogue of Janus Films, the distributor of so many mid-century international classics, which formed the core curriculum of my education in film, but they also rotate in a lot of old Hollywood TCM-type titles, which fill in gaps in my viewing history.  They rotate thematic collections, and also have some streaming premieres of more recent films.
 
For another in my series of periodic diaries of Criterion Collection viewing (e.g. here, here, and here), click on “Read more.”

Under the Kanopy

Kanopy is a streaming service whose offerings overlap the Criterion Channel, and it’s free with a participating library card.  Here are a number of titles that I found on Kanopy before anywhere else, starting with two documentaries of highly-local interest.
 
Museum Town (2019, MC-57, website, trailer) is a well-made portrait of MassMoCA in North Adams MA - a 19^th-century factory complex turned immense museum of contemporary art - with which I have been peripherally involved since it was just an idea in the head of my Williams classmate Tom Krens.  I recommend the film, but I recommend a visit to the museum even more.
 
The title of Hello, Bookstore (2022, MC-74), website, trailer) references the way owner Matt Tannenbaum has been answering the phone at The Bookstore in Lenox MA for forty years or more, becoming a community institution.  There’s a reason he keeps his desk in the display window of the store, since he’s the show, the draw that has kept the enterprise going for all that time, and generated an enormous GoFundMe success to survive the Covid shutdown.  Back in my day, there were three personal purveyors of new books in Berkshire County, including yours truly -- and Matt is the character who survived, though after Either/Or I’ve kept my hand in at the Clark, and Eric Wilska sold the Bookloft but retains Shaker Mill Books, a wonderful used and rare store.
 
I happened upon one documentary I’d never heard of, Look Away, Look Away (2021, IMDB), that proved to be well worth watching.  It covers the long campaign to remove the Confederate insignia from the state flag of Mississippi, which faltered and failed in referendum, until public opinion was galvanized by the Charleston church shootings in 2015.  Patrick O’Connor’s film comes at the issue from a number of illuminating angles, to make it worthy of feature length and wide viewership.
 
Kanopy has a lot more than documentaries, and is worth checking for hard-to-find titles.  Inspired by The Last Movie Stars documentary series about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, I went in search of a Tennessee Williams adaptation that I’d never seen, The Fugitive Kind (1960, Wiki).  Sidney Lumet’s film was certainly not unmissable, but held my interest, largely for Joanne without Paul, paired instead with Marlon Brando, as the guitar-playing drifter Snakeskin for whom the party girl sets her cap, in competition with shop owner Anna Magnani.
 
There are even recent films that can be found on Kanopy before commercial streaming channels.  Benediction (MC-81) is a good example, in which Terence Davies follows one quasi-autobiographical portrait of a poet with another: formerly Emily Dickinson (played by Cynthia Nixon) in A Quiet Passion, and here Siegfried Sassoon, played by Jack Lowden as a poet of WWI and a bright gay thing of the interwar years, and by Peter Capaldi as a cranky older man.  Rich with visual poetry and wit, the film is more overstuffed than trenchant, or even comprehensible, but well worth watching.
 
A very notable find is Hit the Road (MC-90), a debut feature by Panah Panahi, who joins his father Jafar Panahi and mentor Abbas Kiarostami in a distinguished line of Iranian neorealism, predicated on patient, attentive looking in constrained circumstances. (Jafar now in prison, Kiarostami in exile).  So most of the “action” takes place in a car with a family of four:  gruff bearded father with his leg in a cast, soulful white-haired mother, introverted twentyish son driving, hilarious six-year-old son babbling nonstop, dog dying in back of SUV.  Traveling through painted desert landscapes to greener elevations near the Turkish border, for reasons we learn only indirectly, just as we watch a key scene transpire from more than a hundred yards away.  Impeccably filmed in close quarters and in wide vistas, enigmatic and comic by turns, warm and acerbic, tragic and joyful, this will be hard for the director’s father to top with No Bears, when it comes to streaming.
 
Kanopy also has a nice collection of restored Buster Keaton shorts and features, amidst so much else, and is definitely worth looking into if your library subscribes.

Polishing the Apple

Perhaps because it’s a loss leader, AppleTV+ is one of the better values in streaming channels at five bucks (oops, now seven) per month, and free trials are available in many ways, including three months with a new iPhone.  So I’m back for another look, to follow up on earlier favorite series like Dickinson, Pachinko, Swagger, and Ted Lasso (many might include Severance), not to mention films like CODA or Come from Away.
 
Ever since Catastrophe, I’ll watch anything that Sharon Horgan is involved in, since her dry and fearless Irish humor appeals to me.  She’s the creator and star of Bad Sisters (MC-79), which seems like a black comedy take on Big Little Lies, with a group of women involved in the death of one’s odious abusive husband (though it’s explicitly based on a Belgian tv series).  Instead of the Monterey coast, the setting is the upscale environs of Dublin, where four sisters conspire to murder the husband who is destroying the fifth, and hounding them all.  Well-acted, in a beautiful coastal setting, with a cunning structure and excellent song selection, sustained through ten hour-long episodes, this series is shocking and funny without losing touch with the reality of its characters.
 
I passed on the first season of Slow Horses (MC-80), but after reading a New Yorker profile of Mick Herron – the author of the “Slough House” series of spy novels on which the series is based – which highlighted him as the successor to LeCarré, and seeing critical enthusiasm increase with season two, I gave the series a worthwhile second chance.  Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas as two adversarial leaders in MI5 are by themselves worth the price of admission, but the rest of the cast is fine too, featuring Jack Lowden.  Like LeCarré, Herron is the antithesis of James Bond, playing on the grit rather than the glamour of spycraft.  The second six-episode season is a little more bloody and action-oriented rather than character-based, but still very witty and smoothly-made. Two more seasons are already in the works.
 
Second time around, Little America (MC-87) is just as good as the first series.  And timely as a clear-eyed celebration of what draws immigrants to America, and what America draws from immigrants.  Each of eight half-hour-plus episodes tells the largely-true story of someone who came from elsewhere and genuinely found a land of opportunity here.  Well-acted and well-made all round, with plenty of pathos and humor.
 
The BBC Planet Earth team fronted by David Attenborough shifts gears with the 5-episode series Prehistoric Planet (MC-85).  With up-to-date paleontological research informing cutting-edge CGI, plus their well-honed approach to nature documentary, we are given a highly-convincing look at the age of dinosaurs, well beyond Jurassic Park.
 
Turning to Apple original films, the pairing of Ethan Hawke and Ewan Macgregor was enough to make Ray & Raymond (MC-49) worth watching.  They’re two estranged half-brothers who must join forces to bury the father they hardly knew.  Written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia, whose work I’ve appreciated in the past, this film is no great shakes, but the antic byplay between two extremely appealing actors delivers.
 
Causeway (MC-66) is a low-key but truthful account of a brain-injured Afghanistan vet trying to put her life back together in her hometown of New Orleans.  In an unadorned role that calls back to her debut in Winter’s Bone, Jennifer Lawrence offers a stripped-down performance of step-by-step recovery.  She is fortuitously matched with a likewise-damaged interlocutor in Brian Tyree Henry.  That’s about it, and it’s quite enough, under Lila Neuberger’s direction.
 
One more Apple (and BBC) original: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse (MC-81), is a lovely animated adaptation of a popular and Pooh-ish illustrated book by Charlie Mackesy.  In a snowbound British landscape the four title characters (the latter two voiced by Idris Elba and Gabriel Byrne) meet and go in search of the lost boy’s home and the wisdom to make sense of life.  Gentle and pacific, short and sweet, this will likely win this year’s Oscar as Best Animated Short.