Back on AppleTV+ for another
taste of their offerings, I follow up on my previous surveys here and here and here. It’s definitely a channel worth sampling from
time to time, though hardly capacious enough to maintain a year-round
subscription. Ted
Lasso (MC-73) may have become a bit bloated by the third season,
its half-hour episodes effectively doubling in duration, but retained many of
its charms (see earlier reviews here and here). By now the show was predictably unpredictable,
and somewhat insufferable in its incessant would-be life-lessons, but still
with a score of appealing characters, and a steady stream of witty pop cultural
references. The on-pitch action was
certainly more impressive with a bigger budget.
But the show concluded with curtain call after curtain call, which
outlasted my ovation and detracted from my retrospective enjoyment. I won’t review plot developments or character
resolutions, but just exemplify my equivocations in one scene. In the penultimate episode, Ted’s mother
shows up unexpectedly and she’s played by the mother from Freaks & Geeks,
of blessed memory. But she’s too
much for Ted, and at dinner in the pub, he flees her presence to go pretend to
take a turn at pinball; Mae the pub owner sees him frozen there and goes over
to recite an entire Philip Larkin poem without acknowledging its source, which
would have been all right if she had just quoted the famous first line, “They
fuck you up, your mum and dad,” but as an appropriation just goes on too long
(like a concluding bit filched from The Sound of Music). High-spirited and good-spirited as it remained,
I was not sorry to see it end. Some spin-off
series seems inevitable, but won’t be a much-watch for me, my English football
enthusiasm having turned to Welcome to Wrexham. I was looking forward to the second season of Swagger
(MC-79), as I said after
the first, and it did not disappoint. Creator
Reggie Rock Bythewood could easily have called this series Love &
Basketball, if his talented wife Gina Prince-Bythewood hadn’t already made
a great film of that name. But maybe he’d
reverse the terms, since Swagger’s most distinctive feature is the
authentic and immersive quality of its on-court action, which is not at all to
depreciate its Friday Night Lights model as a family and community
drama. Most of the characters return
from the first season, having leapt from 8th grade to senior year,
winning several championships in the interval and now at a lily-white prep
school vying for a national high school championship. Again the show is resolutely topical, about
issues involving young athletes such as college recruitment and endorsements
(this my first encounter with NIL revenue for amateurs – “Name Image Likeness”),
as well as tokenism, mass incarceration, social media, and various forms of
abuse. Earnest but not sappy, offering
life lessons without hammering them home, continuously engaging, this show is a
hidden treasure. I urge you to discover
it, if you’re any kind of hoops fan, or even if you’re not.
As my approach to bookselling
has narrowed, I no longer pay attention to bestseller lists, so when Brie
Larson (whom I’ve looked for since Short Term 12, not to mention her
Oscar-winning turn in Room) led me to the Apple adaptation of Lessons
in Chemistry (MC-68), I had no
idea of how popular the novel was till I saw its 240,000 ratings on
Amazon. I suspect people invested in the
book may have had more quibbles with this 8-part series than I did. My only negative observation is how alarmingly
thin Brie Larson has become (how does she play a Marvel superheroine with those
twig limbs? I don’t know, being a
dedicated avoider of the MCU). Here she
plays a brilliant, unnervingly candid chemist, derailed from a Ph.D. by her adviser’s
sexual assault. She winds up as a lab
tech, who develops a close working and eventually romantic relationship with the
research institute’s star chemist. After
several surprise developments, she finds a new career as the host of a television
cooking show. Larson’s committed
authenticity surmounts any questions of plausibility in the twists and turns of
the story, which delve into sexist and racial attitudes from the Fifties, nicely
articulated in a manner reminiscent of Mad Men. The series’ concluding episode removed
any reservations I may have had about its diffuse approach, by resolving the
various strands convincingly. My rating would
be substantially higher than Metacritic’s average.
Turning to films, Flora
and Son (MC-76) is John
Carney’s third attempt to recapture the magic of Once, and one more tale
of Irish music (and relationship) making comes close. This time the players are a
divorced young mother and her delinquent teen son. Eve Hewson makes her troublesome character appealing,
and so does Joseph Gordon-Levitt as her online SoCal guitar teacher, who literally
steps through her laptop screen for a romantic duet. Meanwhile music provides an avenue of
connection with her grumpy son. Once
more, melody brings people together in unexpected harmony.
Two canny conmen confront
each other in The Pigeon Tunnel (MC-79),
Errol Morris behind the camera and David Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) in
front, sparring around the elusive truth of the latter’s life, as a spy and
bestselling novelist, but particularly as the son of another conman. Derived from Cornwell’s memoir of the same
title, and based on a recollection of his sketchy father, the metaphor is driven
home by dramatization and repeated imagery, to complement the “interrotron”
interviews with Cornwall in a library of mirrors, piecing together shards of
truth and make-believe. The beguiling web-weaving
includes illustrative clips from film & tv adaptations of le Carré novels.
I was induced to give Fingernails
(MC-63) a
look by the presence of Jessie Buckley, along with Jeremy Allen White and Riz Ahmed,
but nothing could induce me to watch to the end of this inert treatment of a
ridiculous premise.
Before letting Apple lapse, I’ll
be starting the third season of Slow Horses in December (my rec
for first two here) and hoping for an early streaming release date for Scorsese’s Killers
of the Flower Moon.
HBO has been demoted to Max
by media villain David Zaslav and is no longer a good streaming channel (let
alone essential - you can always watch John Oliver on YouTube), so it’s only
worth a postscript here. It’s unlikely
that HBO documentaries will sustain their former quality and range, most reduced
to celebrations of celebrity. Case in
point: Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (MC-72),
which could have been another My Dinner with Andre, as Brooks and
director Rob Reiner, friends for sixty years, talk over his career at an empty
restaurant table. There are many
enjoyable tv & movie clips and the occasional personal revelation, but a
surfeit of encomia from other comedians.
I’m a fan myself, and happy to revisit his success, but it would have
been better to let the man – and the work – speak for himself. And a roast would be more fun than repeated toasts.
Alexandra Pelosi may derive
some celebrity from her mother, but she continues to carve out a good career with
highly personal documentaries. In The
Insurrectionist Next Door (MC-tbd), she
visits and directly confronts convicted J6-ers to find out what was on their
minds when they stormed the Capitol and how they feel about Trump now. The film is amusing and instructive, if
ultimately dispiriting.
On the upside, HBO is now
running a second season of Julia (MC-76), which pairs
interestingly with Lessons in Chemistry in chronicling the development
of cooking shows on early tv. It also
pairs with Happy Valley to demonstrate Sarah Lancashire’s range. The first season took me by surprise, but the
second seems more wobbly, unsure in its focus and purpose, but still engaging
and amusing. By the fourth episode, when
the second season of The French Chef goes into production, the show
seemed to regain its mojo and now I look forward to the rest.
One further postscript: PBS seems
determined to correct my impression that their documentaries are losing some
luster. On POV, they just released Aurora’s
Sunrise (MC-79),
a multi-layered film about the Armenian genocide of a century ago, but with an
upsetting contemporary relevance. It’s
the story of a teenager who remarkably survived the massacres to make her way
to America, where she became a celebrity and starred in a lavish Hollywood film
that spread word of the catastrophe. The
film recreates the story through beautiful, if horrific, animation, while intercutting
surviving footage from the epic silent film and interviews with the refugee in
old age. It makes an edifying double
feature with Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (reviewed here).
Through inadvertence I wound
up with an additional month of the subscription channel MUBI, a distant third
behind Criterion and Kanopy as a place to find offbeat, classic, and
international fare. MUBI doesn’t have
the monthly churn of curated collections that Criterion has, but they are
currently offering an Almodovar retrospective, for example. I started my survey here,
but I don’t expect MUBI to be a regular in my rotation of channels.
They did have one new
offering that I’d been seeking for years, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004,
MC-86). Thom Andersen’s long documentary essay on the
portrayal of the city in Hollywood movies is intelligent, provocative, and
entertaining. From well-known films like
Chinatown, Double Indemnity, and Blade Runner to
oddities like Kiss Me Deadly or a Laurel & Hardy short, he uses
clips to illustrate the history of the city and its architecture, and the
attendant mythmaking. With a strong if
not altogether convincing point of view, it’s a highly illuminating anthology
about urban development.
Mubi also had a recent French
film that I was happy to discover, Other People’s Children (MC-80). Writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski has clearly
been to school on the films of Rohmer and Truffaut, so she’s swell in my book. Virginie Efira is a striking actress, previously
unknown to me but apparently a major star in France, and I can certainly see
why, luminous and radiant being words that come to mind. She’s a 40ish middle school teacher, veteran
of several relationships but looking for another, hearing her biological clock
tick. (Her gynecologist is played by
Frederick Wiseman in an eponymous cameo, hilarious if you recognize him.) Meeting a likely candidate at guitar class,
she soon encounters his 4-year-old daughter and after a rocky start develops a
close relationship with the child.
Meanwhile she advocates for a troubled favorite student, and follows her
younger sister through an unexpected pregnancy.
This film is full of life as it is lived, given a special glow by subtle
and big-hearted creativity.
In search of more Virginie
Efira, I watched Sybil (2019, MC-59), though both the title character and Justine Triet’s
film are a bit of a mess, and less than the sum of their parts. She’s a therapist who wants to suspend her
practice and return to the writing career she abandoned after publishing one
book. She reluctantly takes on one
desperate new client, an actress played by Adele Exarchopoulos, who’s making
her first film while pregnant from her leading man, who happens to be married
to the director. Her story becomes grist
for the therapist’s book, and they become so enmeshed that the shrink has to
accompany the actress on location, to the volcanic island of Stromboli. A bunch of other stuff is going on, comic or
melodramatic, but not much of it makes sense.
I found several other Efira films
over on Kanopy, including In Bed with Victoria (2016, MC-58), also
directed by Justine Triet, and also rather muddled, but not entirely lacking in
interest. Here she’s a single lawyer
with two young daughters, and a trainwreck in both her professional and
romantic lives. Her travails are neither
comic nor dramatic enough to hold the film together, and her character is
similarly mixed. But Efira remains a
pleasure to watch.
On the upside, in An
Impossible Love (2018, IMDB), adapted by Catherine Corsini from Christine Angot’s
autobiographical novel of the same name, Efira credibly ages over forty years,
from ingenue to grandmother. The story
is narrated by her grown daughter, and tells of their relationship over the
years, from the romance that produced her through each of their tangled
relationships with the mostly-absent father in question. It’s an absorbing and provocative story,
impeccably handled all round.
Best of all was The
Sense of Wonder (2015, IMDB),
which seems to be a Kanopy exclusive, but well worth seeking out. Eric Besnard was not a filmmaker I’d even
heard of before, but he certainly charmed me at first look, with Virginie Efira
at her most delectable and a lovely setting on an organic pear farm in a
beautiful region. She’s a young widow
with two growing children, and the bank threatening her home and
livelihood. She has a chance encounter
with a mysterious stranger, who is something of an autistic savant (Benjamin
Lavernhe rather more believable than Dustin Hoffman was in Rain Man). We know where this is going, but we have a beautiful
time getting there, full of wondrous imagery.
(Kanopy may well be free with your local library card.)
Back to recent Mubi
offerings, Pacifiction (MC-75) attracted my attention
with a slew of French film awards.
Directed by Albert Serra, it’s set in picturesque widescreen Tahiti and
centered on the French colonial administrator played by Benoit Magimel, in a
parable of paradise under imperial control.
The film is languorously paced, enigmatically dramatized, and overlong
at 164 minutes, but intrigue and setting kept me watching all the way.
Everybody Loves Jeanne (Mubi),
except maybe herself, as she sinks into depression in this pleasant enough
French rom-com. Jeanne (Blanche
Gardin) has just lost her mother to suicide and her innovative do-good business
to mishap and bankruptcy. She is
bedeviled by an inner voice of anxiety and self-reproach, crudely but amusingly
animated by writer-director Celine Devaux.
In Lisbon to sell her mother’s flat to stave off financial ruin, Jeanne’s
immobilized except for a couple of flirtations that may lead her up from the
depths.
Passages (MC-79) is a new Mubi production from director Ira Sachs,
about an unconventional love triangle.
In what seems like a scathing self-portrait, Franz Rogowski plays an
arrogant, self-obsessed film director – married to Ben Whishaw – who falls into
a relationship with a woman (Adele Exarchopoulos), heedlessly doing damage all
round. The sex is graphic but the
motivations are mystifying, as everyone suffers from the director’s whims and
confusion. Hard to see the appeal, of the
main character or of the film. Not
altogether bad, but not good either.
On Mubi there are numerous films
well worth seeing that I have already seen, so my round-up is skewed. The service is worth dipping into from time
to time, but not retaining on a continuous basis.
