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 20th 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment