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.)