Net-flix-ations III

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (MC-83) brought me back to Netflix for its day of release, and brought Nick Park and Aardman Animation back to their glory days, with the return of the wacky inventor and his canny canine companion.  Animation has moved largely to CGI over the past two decades, but Aardman retains their handmade quality in malleable clay figures on custom-built sets.  The nonstop wit remains, in tiny details and sweeping cinematic scenes, as well as the endearing relation between the title characters.  Wallace’s invention of a garden-gnome odd-job robot threatens to come between them, until Gromit solves the problem, as he usually does.  A diamond-heist villain returns to raise the stakes and provide wild action sequences.  Love the canal boat chase sequence!  Perhaps this wouldn’t be a bad intro to W&G, but I advise starting with their string of Oscar-winning shorts from the 1990s.
 
Writer-director Nathan Silver breaks out of the indie ghetto with Between the Temples (MC-83).  I can imagine the elevator pitch, “It’s A Serious Man meets Harold and Maude – picture Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane as the leads.”  And lead they do – to quite a funny and touching mélange of satire and romance.  He’s a cantor who lost his voice when he lost his wife, in a fall on the ice of upstate NY.  Living in his “moms’” basement, in desperation he goes into a bar, has some unfamiliar drinks, gets into a scuffle, and is rescued by an older woman in similarly desperate straits.  She turns out to be his grade school music teacher, and soon asks the cantor to prepare her for a long-denied bat mitzvah, which becomes a redemptive bond between them.  Carol Kane is marvelous in the role, and Schwartzman inhabits the skin of the schlubby cantor.  Shot and edited in a jagged style that can be hard to watch but ultimately conveys an effective intimacy, this film includes a lot of good Jewish jokes, verbal and visual, and a fair share of heartfulness.
 
I Used to Be Funny (MC-74) is definitely the Rachel Sennott show, as she plays her character, a stand-up comedian in Toronto, both before and after a traumatic event, which is arrived at circuitously in the back-and-forth narrative.  First-time writer-director Ally Pankiw honed her chops on the excellent Mae Martin series Feel Good, and maintains the balance of comedy and drama here, working in a number of contemporary themes.  A good and honest effort, this film is watchable but not unmissable.
 
Cunk on Life (MC-75) offers more of the same after Cunk on Earth (reviewed here).  Not much to add other than I laughed a lot, continuing to enjoy Diane Morgan’s portrayal of clueless tv presenter Philomena Cunk, and the assorted British academics she pranks with ridiculous questions.  Not sure which to recommend – Earth was a well-structured series of six half-hour episodes, Life is a 71-minute potpourri of afterthoughts.  Best to watch both.
 
I wasn’t pre-sold on A Man on the Inside (MC-75), but recommendations from two couples who are fellow shoppers for a retirement community, plus its inspiration by the celebrated Chilean documentary The Mole Agent, were enough for me to give it a try.  Which I never did to creator Mike Schur’s previous series The Good Place or Brooklyn Ninety-Nine (though I was very fond of his co-creation Parks & Recreation).  So I was somewhat surprised by how much I liked this gentle comedy-mystery about aging.  Ted Danson holds it all together as a retired engineering professor and recent widower, who’s hired by a private investigator to go undercover into a well-appointed San Francisco old-folks home to solve a series of thefts, and incidentally to interact with a variety of staff and residents.  While funny at times and moving at times, the clincher here is truthfulness of characterization.  The series doesn’t overstay its welcome in eight roughly-half-hour episodes, but I’d have to be lured back for further seasons, which are already teased.
 
With its 13 Oscar noms outweighing my suspicion that it was not my sort of film, I took a look at Emilia Perez (MC-71).  And my conclusion was – that it’s not my sort of film, but nonetheless has some redeeming qualities.  Largely, the cast of women who collectively won Best Actress at Cannes, and particularly Oscar nominees Zoe Saldana and Karla Sofia Gascon.  The latter plays a Mexican drug lord who transitions into the eponymous female activist trying to ameliorate some of the violence he was responsible for in the past.  The former is a brilliant but underappreciated lawyer who is recruited as consigliere.  Jacques Audiard’s film is a wild mix of genres -- musical, thriller, melodrama – which was enough to keep me watching, but less than enthralled or convinced.
 
Saturday Night (MC-63) is a hectically-paced 90-minute run-up to the debut of Saturday Night Live in 1975, a show destined to die a chaotic early death that has somehow endured for 50 years.  I approached Jason Reitman’s film with some skepticism but was won over by its fast-paced recreation of a seminal moment in TV history.  Most of the central cast is unfamiliar (though Rachel Sennott is becoming better known), but surprisingly reminiscent of the original characters.  The currently familiar faces (e,g, Willem Dafoe, J.K. Simmons, and Nicholas Braun) are all in hilarious cameos.  Maybe you had to “be there” at the creation to appreciate this fond and funny retelling, but it certainly got a marginal “thumb up” from me.
 
With this month of Netflix, I watched the second season of Top Boy (MC-86) from British TV in 2013.  When I return for future months, I’ll go on to the three subsequent seasons produced by Netflix.  For now, all I’ll say is that this UK clone of The Wire is not humiliated by the comparison, at least as far as the drug dealing storyline goes.  It will be interesting to see if the remaining seasons broaden their focus, in the way that The Wire did so memorably.
 
Netflix was once, back in DVD days, the be-all and end-all of viewer choice, and then had a brief phase of throwing money at all kinds of content providers, including genuine auteurs, but now has settled into an algorithmic content-provider that does not rank among the top three (or five?) streaming channels for quality.  As of now, I’m cancelling until they give me a solid reason to renew.
 
Speaking of once-substantial streaming channels that have really given up on producing or offering outstanding content, there’s Amazon Prime.  Hard to find much worth watching there (plus having to endure commercials), but I was drawn to The Road Dance (MC-54) by its setting in the Outer Hebrides a century ago, then put off by its low Metacritic rating.  But casually browsing one time, I thought to give it a try, and surprisingly watched the whole film.  The location, already familiar from the writings of Robert Macfarlane, was indeed appealing, as was the unfamiliar lead actress, Hermione Corfield.  Both were pretty as a picture, and enough to keep me watching all the way through a rather familiar melodrama of love, sex, childbirth, and war.