Saturday, October 26, 2024

Hulu-ciné-shins II

Having decided to stick around on Hulu for an extra month before their subscription rates went up, I bundled it with Disney+ to catch up with a few recommended shows, which I’ll cover at the end of this post. 
 
My first order of business was to see what the fuss was about with Shogun (MC-85) and its massive Emmy haul.  The spectacle is undeniable, but most of the way through the meter of my appreciation kept fluctuating between Game of Thrones and Wolf Hall on the dial of dynastic dramas, with my decided preference for historical accuracy over D&D fantasies of swords and sorcery.  By the end, however, I was completely won over by Shogun, as show creators Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo prioritized political intrigue over big battle scenes, and an unexpected character moved to the center of the story.  We start in 1600 with an English mariner (Cosmo Jarvis) leading a Dutch ship to Japan, hoping to horn in on the Portuguese trading monopoly.  He is captured by a one of five regents (Hiroyuki Sanada) vying for control of the country in the name of the underage heir to the throne.  One of the ladies of the warlord’s entourage (Anna Sawai) is enlisted as translator.  The latter two deservedly won Emmys for acting.  Most of the dialogue is in Japanese with subtitles, while Portuguese is rendered in English.  It takes a while to get one’s bearings, historically and culturally, but in the end the series is both serious and sensuous, sweeping and intimate, intricate and powerful.
 
Shows like this -- along with other FX series and older classics like Buffy, Friday Night Lights, and Freak & Geeks   rank Hulu (no ads!) as one of the most essential streaming services, even at its escalating rate.  Don’t get stuck year round, but put it in lead rotation with Netflix, Max, and Apple for maximized streaming value.
 
So I was looking around for more stuff to watch on Hulu, before pausing my subscription again, and there was (there were?) Babes (MC-72).   Don’t know about you, but I was a big fan of Better Things while never seeing the appeal of Broad City.  This film is directed by Pamela Adlon but written by Ilana Glazer, who stars along with Michelle Buteau.  So Adlon’s feature directorial debut lacks the personal authenticity of her groundbreaking series, and relies more on New York-ish Millennial shtick.  It’s not bad, if you like that sort of thing, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it.
 
A NYT recommendation and a slew of César nominations led me to The Animal Kingdom (MC-69), a strange hybrid of a film by Thomas Cailley.  It’s a creature feature about a pandemic disease that is turning humans into strange animal hybrids.  Most of its César wins came in special effects and cinematography.  But it’s also an intimate family drama, with the mother having transitioned and been sent away, while the son is beginning to show signs as well, and the father is bending all his efforts to save both.  I’ve never had much use for magical realism, but there were enough real-world reverberations here to keep me watching, without really buying into it all.
 
On the other hand I was totally drawn into the historical recreation of The Promised Land (MC-77), a quasi-Western set in the wilds of Jutland in the 18th century.  Mads Mikkelson superbly personifies a military veteran who wants to establish a colony on the untamed heath.  Jerked around by indifferent or maniacally hostile aristocrats, he persists in efforts to make the land livable by cultivating a new sort of crop, potatoes.  In harsh conditions, he is assaulted by bandits, gypsies, and the local lord, but persists in his efforts to extract a livelihood from an unforgiving wilderness.  He also attracts the interest of a bereaved peasant woman, a young gypsy girl, and a high-born woman held in near-captivity by the evil lord.  Beautifully shot by Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, and embodied by the stonefaced Mikkelson, this is a masterfully involving frontier drama.
 
As I’ve noted before, if you bypass Hulu’s homepage, you can find some interesting documentaries and foreign films on the channel.  Based on reviews, and my memories of selling her books back in the day, I looked into The Disappearance of Shere Hite (MC-83) and was decidedly impressed by Nicole Newnham’s documentary (she co-directed Crip Camp).  I remember Hite as a controversial figure, maybe an attention hog, but the film reveals her as something of a feminist heroine.  While a doctoral student in social history at Columbia, she made a living by modeling, but was activated by the women’s movement and her own disgust at misogyny.  She dropped out and became a sexologist in the vein of Kinsey or Masters & Johnson.  Hite was a creature of many faces, so the film is an engaging visual archive, among other attributes.  Far from reveling in her notoriety, Hite fled from it, going into exile and renouncing her U.S. citizenship.  This film does a very creditable job of recuperating her reputation as an icon of female liberation.
 
The first thing I checked out on Disney+ was Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (MC-82), in order to sample a cultural phenomenon of which I was wholly ignorant.  Watching with subtitles, the first thing that struck me, besides the gargantuan spectacle, was the utter banality of her lyrics and the unmemorable drone of her music.  Unwilling to journey through time with her, I fast-forwarded through her eras but found the latest as unappealing as the earliest.  Thanks for the Kamala endorsement, Taylor, but no thanks for your singing.
 
Despite my distaste for sequels, I quite enjoyed Inside Out 2 (MC-73), as Pixar returns to the story of Riley and her personified emotions, with a new quartet of them added as she turns 13.  It wasn’t as good as the original, but pretty good anyway.  As an exploration of one girl’s puberty, it lacks the personal authenticity of another Pixar film, Turning Red (reviewed in another Hulu/Disney round-up here).
 
There’s a kinetic quality to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (MC-58) that made it a good accompaniment to stationary cycling, and it has Phoebe Waller-Bridge and the still appealing Harrison Ford to make all the hugger-mugger watchable.  (Bonus: much of it takes place in Sicily.)  Though my son went on to become an archaeologist like (and unlike) Indy, I didn’t admire the first movie and didn’t see any of the sequels till this finale.  Watch this only if you enjoy hilariously insane chase sequences.  The point is lost on me, but I did laugh out loud on occasion.
 
Since Happy Valley and Gentleman Jack, I’ll take a look at any series from Sally Wainwright, confident that it will center and empower female characters in a distinctive way.  Renegade Nell (MC-70) fills that bill, and does a good job of rendering England in 1705, but as a Disney show this one has an element of fantasy that prevented me from engaging fully.  I found the first episode not without its charms, but once I clocked to seven more episodes of 40+ minutes, I skipped to the last, which didn’t make me miss the stuff between.
 
I was tempted by The Mission (MC-74) because of directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, who made the estimable documentaries Boys State and Girls State. Its theme is a variant on Grizzly Man, where a young man embarks on a foolish solo journey into certain danger and never returns.  Rather than a bear, he confronts an indigenous people on an island near India, who want no contact with the outside world, especially not some guy in the grip of an illusion of bringing the message of Jesus to benighted savages.  The film is a very mixed bag, telling its story through John Chau’s original footage and diaries, interviews with people close to him, old movie clips and animated reenactments, but it holds together pretty well.  Chau’s mix of sincere devotion and delusion is unpacked, as well as the cultural colonialism it represents.
 
There’s no accounting for the tastes of different generations, but a concert film that appealed to me infinitely more than Taylor Swift was Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (MC-77), a rockin’ retrospective if I ever saw one.  Director Thom Zimny has long association and a deep visual archive to work with, following Bruce’s script just as the band followed his set playlist on this tour, meant as a summing up and definitive final statement, encompassing their 50-year history together (though the 10-year rift in the middle is never mentioned).  This post-Covid world tour was E Street’s first time performing together in six years.  The film demonstrates how the show takes shape and then takes it to the people, in huge venues around North America and Europe.   The spirit of the live shows, current and past, is conveyed in a layered way; rather than recording a single performance, the film itself works through the themes of the playlist.  Moments of mutual celebration may offer intimations of infomercial, but the authenticity comes through in the band’s drive to “Prove it All Night.”  Rock on, brothers.  And let me catch up with a couple of more recent Bruce albums I seem to have missed. 
 
Now I’m going to pause Hulu for up to 12 weeks, and when back, will certainly drop the Disney+ add-on.  But I’ll return to watch the new season of Abbott Elementary and possible more of the recent British series Rivals (MC-84), plus whatever new and surprising shows may turn up on the channel, when you know what to look for and where.