Net-flix-ations II

After several months off Netflix, I had plenty to keep me watching for a month back on.  First off and probably best of all was Azazel Jacobs’ impeccable His Three Daughters (MC-84).  The writer-director is not a name that registers for me, but this affecting and amusing film will send me looking for his other work.  Though tightly scripted, it’s primarily carried by the three superb actresses who play sisters gathering in their father’s NYC apartment as he lies in his bedroom under home hospice care.  Carrie Coons is the bitchy older sister coping with her grief by berating the other two, and her teenage daughter by phone.  Elizabeth Olsen is the youngest, a Deadhead who has moved west and dotes on her toddler daughter.  Natasha Lyonne is the middle daughter, brought into the family with her mother, when the father married again after his first wife died.  A wake-and-bake stoner devoted to sports gambling, she’s the one who has been living with and caring for their ailing father up to these final days.  The film moves out of the tight constriction of the apartment only when the older sister forces the middle one to smoke her blunts outside.  Coons and Olsen are excellent, but Lyonne is flatly amazing.  In the last quarter-hour the film takes a surprising turn from kitchen-table drama into transcendent fantasy, but remains fully satisfying.
 
Not sure what led me to Steven Soderbergh’s 2017 film Logan Lucky (MC-78), probably the lead quartet of Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, and Riley Keough, but I was happy to go along for the ride.  Only intermittently have I admired Soderbergh’s films, and I certainly wouldn’t watch any Ocean’s 11 sequel, but this variant of cast and setting made one more fast, furious, and funny caper film palatable.  Here we’re racing back and forth over the West Virginia-North Carolina border.  Tatum is a former football star turned unemployed coal miner.  Driver is his brother, a bartender who lost his forearm in Iraq.  Keough is their multitalented hairdresser sister.  Craig is the con they break out of jail to bust into a vault beneath the Charlotte Motor Speedway, during the running of biggest race on the NASCAR circuit.  You’ll have no time to question plausibility as the jokes and complicated action speed by.
 
Rez Ball (MC-69) is Hoosiers-meets-Reservation Dogs, with a dash of Swagger and even Friday Night Lights, so I was bound to enjoy it.  Three of those are multi-season series, however, so Sydney Freeland’s movie is slimmed down considerably, in telling the story of a Navajo team competing for the New Mexico high school basketball championship, making the proceedings rather compacted, and somewhat predictable, in racing from tragedy to triumph.  But the performers are appealing and convincing, the on-court action plausible in this brisk but satisfying hoops flick.
 
Though Netlix is the province of “meh,” there are finds to be made.  For The Peasants (MC-61), ignore the mediocre Metacritic rating and focus on this review.  The film attracted me because of the title, since I’ve been working on an essay titled “Embracing My Inner Peasant.”  These peasants are Polish rather than Sicilian, but pretty much the same deal.  I was immediately drawn in by the animation style, composed of forty thousand individual paintings overlaid on live action, evoking Brueghel, Millet, Van Gogh and many others.  Later, I found out this film is by the makers of the equally impressive Loving Vincent, DK and Hugh Welchman.  It’s adapted from an early 20^th century Nobel Prize winning novelist, grimly folkloric and reminiscent of Hardy’s Tess.  A beautiful young girl is betrothed to the richest farmer in the village, while she is actually in love with his married son.  Not a prescription for happiness on any side.  First she is the envy of the village, and then the villainess against whom they turn.  Formulaic to be sure, but moving and beautiful.
 
All I knew about The Teachers’ Lounge (MC-82) going in was its Oscar nomination for best international feature, but soon I was fully held by the suspense German-Turkish filmmaker Ilker Çatak engenders.  And also by the lead performance of Leonie Benesch.  She’s a dedicated teacher new to a middle school where a cycle of thefts has put teachers and students on edge, with the music continuously contributing to the agitated mood.  Accusations are made, ethical questions are raised, the teachers’ lounge is divided and the students rebel against authority.  The idealistic Benesch character has a strong moral compass that keeps getting spun around, as she navigates rough waters with her students and other staff.  Doing the right thing just makes more trouble, as a multi-ethnic community is undermined by distrust.  The rising tension makes ordinary days in an ordinary school into an extraordinary event, and a provocative film.
 
I respect Denzel Washington’s family project of filming the plays of August Wilson, and I liked Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom as films, but for me The Piano Lesson (MC-69) was a bridge too far, or a lesson I could not take.  Adapted and directed by Denzel’s son Malcolm, and starring his son John David, the film is graced by the performances of Danielle Deadwyler and Samuel L. Jackson, but lacks coherence and conviction, with a literalness that forecloses metaphorical depth.  There are some impressive moments, notably when four men recall their time in Parchman by singing a chain gang song, but the whole fails to satisfy.
 
As for Netflix series, Heartstopper (MC-81), one of my favorites, returns undiminished for a third season (and sets up a fourth).  Like a kinder and gentler Sex Education, it follows the romantic explorations of a bunch of British teenagers, diverse in race, gender, and orientation.  Lots and lots of kissing, with cute animated butterflies and sparks enveloping the couple, until this season when they start to get down to business, but in a sweet and honest way.  Besides the will they or won’t they of several queer couples, lead characters Charlie (Joe Locke) and Nick (Kit Connor) have to cope with the former’s rehabilitation stint for an eating disorder and OCD (Hayley Atwell and Eddie Marsan are welcome additions to the cast as his advisers), and the latter’s choice of where to go to uni.  Highly recommended.
 
The title of the popular rom-com series Nobody Wants This (MC-73) is ironic in ways beyond the intended.  I certainly didn’t want any more of it, after three mercifully brief episodes.  This is the essence of Netflix pipeline product.  If Fleabag struck gold with the Hot Priest, how about a Hot Rabbi meeting cute with a sexy podcasting shiksa?  Leave out authenticity and raw feeling, our audience doesn’t go for that.  Get a few midlist “stars,” familiar faces from other popular tv shows.  Just keep the jokes and the LA lifestyle porn coming for 20-some minutes an episode and they’ll be satisfied.  Binge it all like a bag of chips or a box of chocolate.  I’ve had my fill.
 
Similarly, I gave short shrift to Penelope (MC-79), watching the first two episodes and the last of eight.  Megan Stott stars as a 16-year-old girl, first seen at a silent rave, who hears the call of the wild, and spontaneously ventures off into the Pacific Cascades (which do provide visual interest throughout).  She heads out (hobo-like on a train!) after a $500 spree on camping supplies, which still leaves her unprepared for life alone in the woods.  Her learning process and encounters with other forest dwellers read more like a YA fantasy than a genuine encounter with the wild.  If you want to see a real teen girl struggling to survive in a state of nature, then watch the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta.
 
There can’t be many films that contain and elicit as many tears as Daughters (MC-85), a documentary by Natalie Robison and Angela Patton, about a Date With Dad program run by Patton that allows girls to visit their incarcerated fathers for an in-person dance, after weeks of preparation.  This multiple-award winner is poignant and revealing, focusing especially on four Black girls of differing ages and relationships to their absent fathers, but also the prisoners’ preparatory group counselling sessions in which they get a rare chance to share feelings.  The dance itself forms the center of the film, followed by subsequent scenes of its lingering effects on the girls and men.  Implicit in all of it are the harsh effects of mass incarceration on the Black community.
 
Months back, after the Oscars, I started a post on the Best Documentary nominees, but I’ve been slow to watch them all, so here I’m going to tardily tack on my comments for a couple that appeared on Netflix, and are also focused on daughters.
 
Four Daughters (MC-80) is a Tunisian film about a single mother with four grown daughters, two of whom have been “devoured by the wolf,” i.e. Islamic jihad.  There’s direct-to-camera testimony and reminiscence by the mother and the two remaining daughters, but also an actress to play the mother in too-painful reenactments and two more to play the missing sisters, all of whom mingle in a pleasantly meta manner.  Visually and narratively inventive, Kaouther Ben Hania’s film covers many issues, motherhood and sisterhood, tradition and modernity, repression and expression, trauma and recovery.  Ultimately it ends up as a group portrait of a sextet of very appealing women.
 
There are no tigers in To Kill a Tiger (MC-88) except metaphorical in the sense of traditional Indian village mores, which dictate that the appropriate resolution for rape is to force the girl to marry her rapist.  The father of a 13-year-old gang-raped at a wedding refuses to go that route, and pursues jail time for the three boys involved, despite threats on his life and family.  Filmmaker Nisha Pahuja, an Indian-born Canadian, earned her Oscar nomination.  Both father and daughter showed courage, in the actions they took and the access they allowed, in a triumph of justice over shame and entrenched attitudes.
 
Now I’m pausing Netflix for a month, but will return in January for the new Wallace & Gromit film and maybe the Top Boy seasons that I’ve been meaning to watch for some time.  Next up will be updates on AppleTV+ and Criterion Collection offerings.

Maxed out

I’ve been snarky about the devolution of HBO into Max, but have to admit that their diluted programming has worked to my advantage at times.  I’d been wondering how I could stream the MLB playoff games of my beloved Cleveland Guardians, when they all appeared on Max due to the Zaslov connection with TBS.  I still think the guy is a villain, but at least he did me this favor.
 
I figured I’d never again see enough of interest on Max to warrant an actual survey of their programming, but they recently featured a film I’d been looking for eagerly, The Boy & the Heron (MC-91), the latest from venerable animation master Hayao Miyazaki (and at 83, his last?).  I think of the heron as my spirit animal, as well as my sometime neighbor in an adjacent field, so I thrilled to the animated depictions of its flight, and was disappointed when, in a plot development that went right over my head, it was revealed to be a cartoon gnome in a heron costume.  Nonetheless the visual wonderments keep coming   The story is so deep into Miyazaki’s own personal mythology that it’s likely to be incomprehensible to the uninitiated – or to those who have abdicated their sense of wonder and power of imagination.  But the pictorial delights are available to all, frame by frame as artful as any animation ever, a dazzling painterly exhibition.  The premise of the film is highly autobiographical, a young boy who loses his mother in a WWII firebombing and goes on a convoluted quest to bring her back to life.  Many of Miyazaki’s themes and obsessions (such as flight) recur, in this fine summation of a prodigious career.
 
I credit Max for also reviving an old Studio Ghibli film about the firebombing of Japan, Grave of the Fireflies (MC-94) which I don’t feel capable of watching again, given its contemporary relevance to the children of Gaza and Ukraine, so I’ll just recommend this admirable work by copying my write-up when I showed it at the Clark sometime back:  “Directed by Isao Takahata, Miyazaki’s longtime collaborator, this sensitive, harrowing film depicts the impact of war on children, warranting comparison to all-time classic Forbidden Games. Two orphans, a boy and his younger sister, struggle for survival in the aftermath of the World War II firebombing of Japan, finding evanescent beauty in a terminal landscape. This sad and powerful masterpiece evokes the horror of war and the hope of humanity as well as any live-action film.”
 
Though Succession recently bumped The Sopranos from my personal list of the top ten tv drama series of all time, I watched the two-part documentary Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos (MC-86) not so much for HBO’s self-promotion as for my appreciation of director Alex Gibney’s track record.  And it worked for me on both counts.  I was interested to recall the epoch-making show, but moreover admired how well the documentary was put together.  It won’t lure me to revisit the entire series (aside from random episodes watched with a newbie, which do rekindle my appreciation) but offered an excellent recap and deep background on its creation, and especially the demons of its creator.  Gibney interviews (psychoanalyzes?) Chase on a replica of the set of Dr. Melfi’s office and uncovers the personal backstories, as well as the process, behind the show, which remains a watershed in the landscape of quality television.
 
The legacy of HBO lives on with the fourth and final season of My Brilliant Friend (MC-89), the adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s quartet of novels.  I raved about the first two seasons here, but was rather lukewarm to this finale, with a change of actors for all the characters, which is well-orchestrated but still disorienting.  The main problem is that the two lead characters, Lila and Lenu, have been leading separate lives, so that the harsh beauty and intensity of their relationship is not the center of the story.  Without their intimate exchange each character becomes harder to understand, though they do come together again in the final episodes, as Lenu returns to their Neapolitan neighborhood, which is show’s main point of interest.  Excess narration is also a problem – make a movie, don’t recite the book.  Still, I recommend the show as a whole, and the NYT’s lead TV critic wrote an insightful appreciation of the entire series here.  But if you feel 34 hours is too much to take for a dense and complicated Italian family saga, I would direct your attention to one of my favorite films, The Best of Youth, which clocks in at a mere six hours.  My write-up when I showed it to an appreciative crowd at the Clark is here.
 
Another prestige remnant of HBO’s pre-Zaslov era concludes with the third season of Somebody Somewhere (MC-88).  From the first several episodes, this series about a group of lovable Kansan eccentrics seems to be going out strong, so I stand by my previous recommendation.  This show is original, authentic, funny, and heart-felt, sort of the four legs of my appreciation for any film or tv.
 
I don’t recall anything of Seth Meyers’ stint at the SNL Weekend Update desk, but after seeing his standup routine Lobby Baby, I became a devoted follower of “A Closer Look” segments from his Late Night show.  Now he has a new performance piece on Max called Dad Man Walking (MC-84).  It’s not as finely honed as the prior piece, more just a sequence of literal dad jokes (his two boys are 8 and 6, his daughter 2), but he remains amusing and endearing, and good company for an hour.
 
Response to Alex Garland’s Civil War (MC-75) has been appropriately contentious, despite (or because of?) its denatured political stance and ambivalent take on the ethics of journalism.  The one thing everyone can agree on is that Kirsten Dunst delivers a knockout performance as a jaded war photographer.  Her expressed credo seems to be Garland’s as well, that sending back horrific pictures from a warzone will warn America of the dangers of internecine conflict.  But now she’s facing the failure of her efforts and growing numb to the adrenaline rush of action photography.  All around the warring States, social and physical structures are crumbling.  And the Dunst character joins three other journalists on a circuitous journey to the siege of D.C. by the secessionist Western Forces (that improbable alliance of CA, TX, and FL shows Garland’s indifference to actual politics in this variant on zombie apocalypse).  Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla) stands out as a very young woman who emerges as Dunst’s protégé.  Technically this is quite a well-made action film, with plenty of tension and horror, if not much meaning.
 
Love Lies Bleeding (MC-77) is like Thelma and Louise on steroids, literally.  This neo-noir thriller from Rose Glass is made watchable by the always-gripping Kristen Stewart and her new-to-me co-star Katy O’Brian.  The former runs a gym in the desert Southwest, and the latter is a body builder who stumbles in on her way to a competition in Las Vegas.  They soon fall in together through a mixture of lust, need, and circumstance.  Stewart is the alienated daughter of spooky local crime boss Ed Harris, and devoted sister of battered housewife Jena Malone, meanwhile introducing O’Brien to the toxic magic of steroids to enhance her chances in competition.  Complications ensue, and escalate to violence.  Hard to find a redeeming value in these proceedings, but they do elicit a grisly fascination.
 
I didn’t like Janet Planet (MC-83) as much as I expected or wanted to, given its setting in Western Massachusetts, Julianne Nicholson in the title role, and raves from trusted critics.  Most reviewers came to Annie Baker’s debut film with knowledge of her work as a Pulitzer-winning playwright famous for pauses and silences; I did not, and took some time to get on her wavelength.  It was not immediately obvious to me how steeped in cinema history her intentions were, how layered her frame of reference.  I read the film as mainly autobiographical, about an 11-year-old growing up near Amherst in the summer of 1991, in a close but freighted relationship with her single mother, and the lovers and friends who intrude upon them.  Zoe Ziegler plays the owlish, eccentric girl with a mysterious opacity.  The luminous Nicholson is subdued but subtly effective.  I’m sure a second viewing would reveal deeper connections between scenes of dollhouse play and puppet theater, and background signals from offhand dialogue, but it was mainly the specificity of mood and setting, established from the girl’s perspective, that registered for me.
 
Okay, so now I’ve maxed out on Max, but since my access remains free, I will keep returning to update the dwindling number of worthwhile new shows on that streaming channel.  For now, two postscript recommendations.
 
I watch very little on Prime Video, but I made an exception for Challengers (MC-82).  I’d started watching on a plane, and was glad to revisit and finish this tennis-cum-sex love-triangle, featuring three hot and talented performers:  Zendaya (whom I had not seen previously), Josh O’Connor (who has become an actor I will watch in almost anything) and Mike Faist (who impressed as Riff in Spielberg’s West Side Story).  They meet at a national juniors championship, where she is a budding superstar, and they are doubles champs who vie for the men’s singles title and her favor.  There’s a heavy homoerotic vibe as Zendaya becomes a point of contention greater than any tournament trophy.  The narrative is sliced and diced, the camera work is wild if mostly effective, and a loud techno soundtrack pulses the action and overrides the dialogue at points.  Nonetheless Luca Guadagnino’s enjoyable film is carried by its stars, its energy, and its humor.
 
Also on Prime, Aubrey Plaza was enough to draw me to My Old Ass (MC-74); only afterwards did I find out that the writer-director Megan Park was someone I had praised for her debut film, The Fallout.  In fact, Aubrey is not very prominent as the title character, the shroom-materialized 39-year-old avatar of the 18-year-old main character played charmingly by Maisy Stella.  Also charming is the setting on a Canadian cranberry farm, in the summer before “Elliott” leaves for university in Toronto.  The age-exchange set-up is hardly unique, but is handled with surprising authenticity, as both Elliotts learn from each other in making sense of their life.  Comic and caring, this film is very likely to surprise and delight.