Back to Netflix

After six months without Netflix, I’d built up a substantial list of shows to watch, which warranted resuming subscription for a month or two.  After my previous drop-by, here’s the new stuff I found worth watching. 
 
Starting with a trio of stand-up comedy specials:  Hannah Gadsby: Something Special (MC-tbd) lives up to its subtitle, as she ventures from unpacking trauma and difference (autism and queerness) to recording wedded bliss (having married her producer), without losing her biting wit and superb timing.  John Mulaney: Baby J (MC-74) takes a darker turn, telling the tale, soberly if not somberly, of his rehab stint after an intervention by his friends (mostly other comedians); he shows off his finely-honed impressions and self-banter while delighting the audience in Boston and at home.  Mae Martin: Sap (MC-75) follows up on their excellent Netflix series Feel Good with a well-done, piquantly-androgynous set of comic reflections – or campfire “snowglobes” – as a poster child for gender fluidity.
 
So many of my favorite half-hour shows from 2022 have returned as good or better this year, and Netflix has two of them:
 
Never Have I Ever (MC-81) completes its four-year run with high school graduation, and does so with honors, confirming my initial enthusiasm.  The finale is more about fan-service than revelation, but I consider myself well-serviced, like Devi and her friends at Sherman Oaks H.S.  For me, one word sums up this semi-autobiographical series from Mindy Kaling – endearing.  I binged the 10-episode final season in two nights, gratified but not overstuffed, amused if not surprised.  It’s all sprightly, intelligent, and well-portrayed.
 
Almost exactly the same could be said about Heartstopper (MC-81), whose first season I wrote up here.  All the characters at a British secondary school have returned for another year, continuing to explore romantic and gender questions.  Though even sweeter and considerably less raunchy than Sex Education or Never Have I Ever, this high school series represents Ron DeSanctimonious’ worst woke nightmare, a festival of LGBTQ+ antics and anguish.  This season expands to ten episodes, which allows more room to introduce parents, and to spread a school trip to Paris over several eps.  Across the board, the performers are charming and truthful, funny and insightful.  Don’t miss this, if you’re looking for warmth and humor.
 
Another returning favorite kept me on Netflix for an extra month: the fourth and final season of Sex Education (MC-78).  At first I thought the actors were getting a bit too old for their characters - and the premise a little too stale - to sustain the verve and tartness of earlier seasons (see here and here), but they were all still good company.  And by the time the series ended - in an absolute orgy of acceptance, forgiveness, and love - all my reservations were retracted. and this positively therapeutic show cemented a place among my all-time favorites.  Funny, touching, and wise, as well as fully woke, this series finale sticks the landing, gratifying and instructing, neatly resolving the stories of a score of engaging characters.  Don’t let the title or the graphic antics put you off, this show reveals a lot of heart, body and soul.
 
I was well-prepared for Cunk on Earth (MC-82), having watched Cunk on Britain via YouTube.  So I was aware of Diane Morgan’s longtime Borat-like portrayal of Philomena Cunk, the aggressively ignorant presenter for a BBC-like mockumentary series, interviewing real British academics who are in on the joke and advised to respond to her as a naïve child, sometimes playing along but sometimes simply dumbfounded.  Having done British history, here she takes on the story of civilization from cave painting to social media, presenting real history in a comically clueless manner.  Charlie Booker is the showrunner, which led me to give his Black Mirror another try, only to find nothing of interest.
 
Similarly, a prodigious haul of Emmy nominations led me to sample Beef (MC-86).  I watched half of the episodes while stationary cycling, but couldn’t be bothered to watch the rest.  I appreciate the ethnic focus on Asian-Americans as much as anyone, but the SoCal lifestyle does not engage me at all, and I couldn’t connect with any of these characters or their situations.
 
Love at First Sight (MC-55, NFX) is the generic title of a generic rom-com that is raised to a measure of authenticity by the performance of Haley Lu Richardson (a favorite of mine since Columbus, and if you want to see a really good film, watch that).  This film leaves out the first part of the title of the source novel, The Statistical Probability of …, but weaves the theme of statistics throughout a story about a chance meeting on a plane from New York to London, where an NYU student will attend the wedding of her divorced father (Rob Delaney) and a Yale graduate student in statistics (Ben Hardy) is returning for his mother’s memorial service, happening on the same day.  This involves a lot of hectic transportation around picture-postcard London, and a lot of un-statistical coincidence.  It’s all attractive and humorous, and presumably predicated on Netflix’s success with Emily in Paris, which I have no intention of watching.  This is all about Ms. Richardson for me.
 
Netflix usually bankrolls a few high-quality films per year, to give some prestige to their firehose of “content,” but they’re a long way from the broad availability of their DVD-by-mail days.  That said, Metacritic’s list of the top movies on Netflix still retains a lot of great films, but just a few I hadn’t seen already.  Here are #38, #22, and #11 in order.  
 
Andrea Riseborough deserved her unexpected Oscar nod for best actress in To Leslie (MC-84), in a performance that was both heartfelt and cringeworthy, all-out and nuanced at the same time.  The film was worth a look for that alone, but turned out to have other virtues as well.  Like a Texas dive-bar country-music song brought to life, it tells of a woman down on her luck, homeless and dissipated, after winning a lottery and then blowing the money on drugs and booze, abandoning her teen son in the process.  Marc Maron plays a motel manager who has been there and done that, and gives her a job and place to stay, as well as some hard-earned wisdom, on the long and difficult road to recovery.  Experienced tv director Michael Morris makes his feature film debut, creating a sense of place and community with minimal means.
 
Happy as Lazzaro (MC-87) had been on my list to watch for some years, but I finally got around to it after seeing an intriguing short by filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher.  Needn’t have bothered, since the film’s magic-realist approach did not resonate with me, even when the subject was Italian peasants, of considerable interest to me these days.  In a fragmented viewing, I never engaged with characters or story, despite the obvious care that went into the production.

Cousins (MC-91) is a lovely film from New Zealand, dense with life, following the destinies of three Maori girls from childhood to the death of one of them, each played at different ages by three different actress, all excellent and extremely well-matched.  That is essential since the story moves back and forth in time, allowing the viewer never to lose the thread of the individual and collective stories in a hundred minutes of free-flowing transitions.  One of the girls is taken away from the family, after her mother dies and her father goes back to England, and is adopted from her “home for desolate girls” by a wicked old bag.  Another flees an arranged marriage, and becomes a lawyer fighting for indigenous rights and looking for her long-lost cousin.  The third stays in the community and becomes a matriarch.  This is a film I never would have caught up with if not for the well-deserved Metacritic rating.
 
Acquired at Sundance, Fair Play (MC-74) puts a female twist on The Wolves of Wall Street, but as an unpleasant tale about unpleasant people it lacks the glossy-trashy bite and wit of, say, Succession.  Nonetheless, I watched Chloe Domont’s debut feature till the disorienting conclusion, a testament to the acting chops of Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich, both new to me.  They play a would-be power couple of horny hedge-fund financial analysts, disrupted when she is promoted ahead of him, leading to ugly fights and uglier sex.  This makes for characters you wouldn’t want to know in an environment you wouldn’t want to enter, and yet somehow you can’t look away.
 
Turning to documentaries, the highlight for me was Bill Russell: Legend (MC-81).  Sam Pollard follows up his excellent MLK/FBI with another winner, about one of the biggest winners of all time, a big man completely worthy of 200 minutes of celebration.  Winner of 2 NCAA championships, an Olympic gold medal, and 11(!) NBA rings, he is sometimes forgotten in the GOAT controversy between Michael and LeBron, but this program refreshes his claim, as many of today’s stars testify to his transcendent greatness.  It’s a real trip to watch all that 1950s hoops footage, especially when Russell in the NBA went from only-black-on-the-court to leader of the all-black championship Celtics.  This at a time when the Red Sox were the last team in MLB to have a black player, which in truth was more reflective of Boston racial attitudes, as Russell found out when he moved his family into a white neighborhood.  Always his own man, literally standing tall, he became even more of a civil rights activist, as this documentary makes clear.
 
I was similar engaged with Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song (MC-70), about a song that has a claim to be the GOAT, based on the way it has permeated the culture in being reinterpreted by countless different performers, many represented in this film.  Not bad for a song his record company refused to release.  In parallel, the film tells the story of Cohen’s life from Montreal beginnings to late career renaissance, after years in a Buddhist monastery and a fleecing by his business manager.  I think it was the 2006 documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man that ignited my latter-day obsession with the singer-songwriter, but this film makes a nice bookend to it.
 
Mostly, my musical tastes froze back in the Seventies, so I am always up for a film that revives some of my old favorites, and Travelin’ Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall fills the bill.  It weaves a history of the band around footage from a London concert on the very day the Beatles broke up, making CCR officially the most popular rock band in the world.  John Fogerty and company can still get me moving, not dancing but pedaling a stationary bike.
 
One technical note:  Netflix had been a reliable streaming service since inception (while Amazon Prime and HBO had various glitches that have been remedied) but now it’s the most problematic, not just slow to load and buffer, but prone to freeze and require re-booting of Roku device (and not just on mine).  So I’m more than content to pause my subscription (Netflix now offers a one-month pause in lieu of cancelling and then resubscribing – not as good as Hulu’s choice of 1-12 weeks), and come back in a month for the final season of The Crown and new list of other viewing, on which I will report.

This & that

This is a potpourri of recent films, that is a sampling of documentaries, and the other thing is a tv update.
 
Theater Camp (MC-70, Hulu) is a delightful trifle starring childhood friends Ben Platt and Molly Gordon (both co-wrote and she co-directed), in a mockumentary loosely based on their own experiences .  Gordon recently shone as The Bear’s girlfriend (and Ayo Edebiri also shows up here, though underused), and all the performing kids are just terrific, energetic and genuinely talented.  Fast-moving and funny, the film makes a serious case for the camp as a place where all kinds of misfit children come together to find a home homier than home.  Whatever the film’s flaws or gaps, they’re overwhelmed by its fleet gusto and warm feeling.
 
I enjoyed Emily (MC-75, Kanopy) for Emma Mackey’s portrayal of the wildest Bronte, especially seen back-to-back with her Maeve in Sex Education.  And I appreciated Frances O’Connor’s feel for the period - having turned writer-director after starring in Mansfield Park (1999) - and her passionate projection into the lives of the characters.  While not averse to imaginative leaps, such as a plot redolent of The Scarlet Letter, I was thrown out of the film by a few egregious falsehoods, persnickety English major that I am.  Still – the moors, the Victorian mores, the period clothes and settings, the ecstasies and agonies of love and creation – it all works well.  But it might have been better if it had been bit more scrupulous as a biopic, or somewhat wilder as an appropriation of the past by the present (on the order of Dickinson).  Instead, it’s somewhere in the muddled middle.
 
A Thousand and One (MC-81, AMZ) won a big prize at Sundance this year, and was certainly worth watching, if not a revelation.  The feature debut of writer-director A.V. Rockwell has a lot to recommend it, starting with the lead performance by Teyana Taylor, as an ex-con single mother trying to raise a son in Harlem, in the years around the turn of the millennium.  A tangled tale, with a strong sense of time and place, and sympathy for the trials of the underclass, it somehow ends up as less than the sum of its parts, but certainly a promising start to a Black woman’s directorial career.
 
Recently I was lamenting the paucity of new documentaries on PBS, but that seems to be turning around (Biden funding after Trump beggaring?), starting with two offered on American Experience, dealing with long-ago efforts to put the task of racial balance on the backs of schoolchildren, North as well as South.  The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi’s Schools (PBS) is a personal memoir of being in the first class to belatedly desegregate the schools in the rigidly segregated town of Leland, incorporating the testimony of many classmates and teachers.  The Busing Battleground (PBS) recovers the “the decades-long road to school desegregation” in Boston, almost as horrific as it was in the Deep South.  Both are well-made and well-balanced films with continuing relevance.
 
Though racism is the “American dilemma,” Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (MC-87, PBS) shows that the sins of segregation are by no means unique to this country.  What race is in the U.S. has been overshadowed by religious hatred through much of history, all going back to the initial inherited trait of tribalism – us vs. them.  This potent 5-part series recounts just how awful The Troubles were, while Ireland’s subsequent history demonstrates that such ingrained antagonisms are neither inevitable nor eternal.  It’s a timely reminder of the evils of sectarianism and partisanship.
 
Bad Axe (MC-82, Hulu) is an intimate family portrait with a wider resonance, historically and politically.  At the beginning of the Covid shutdown, filmmaker David Siev returns to his hometown, the small rural Michigan town of the title.  His Cambodian refugee father and Mexican-American mother run a popular family restaurant, and in the stress of the pandemic the eldest sister returns from Ann Arbor to take charge, and the younger sister postpones her post-college life to pitch in.  This is a home movie in every sense, compiled from a rich family archive and a prying camera eye on domestic and social stresses.  There are kitchen scenes that recall The Bear, and ugly confrontations between BLM protestors and masked neo-Nazi armed militia.  The filming can be helter-skelter, but the material is effectively edited to tell the story of America in 2020, and the rending of our social fabric, from a very particular but emblematic perspective.  This makes an authentic exploration of family as “haven in a heartless world.”
 
I paused my Hulu subscription after the superb finale of Reservation Dogs and will return once the extremely-promising second season of Welcome to Wrexham is complete, but I renew my recommendation for both, even if Hulu is raising its rates (easily combatted by toggling subscription on and off).
 
The third season of Starstruck (MC-83, HBO), composed like the first two of six swift episodes that add up to a feature-length rom-com, confirms the piquant appeal of show creator and star Rose Matafeo.  Her on-again, off-again affair with the action movie star played by Nikesh Patel seems to break off for good in the opening montage, but fate seems determined to bring them together again.  How they figure out their future, together or apart, transpires against the backdrop of a comic company of friends in London.  Not sure how this series could continue, but I will certainly give a look to whatever Ms. Matafeo does next.  (As good as this show is, I take this occasion to lament the banalization of HBO into MAX, which is no longer worthy of continuous subscription.)