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 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.
