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.
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.
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