Hulu-ciné-shins III

A Real Pain (MC-86) is a real pleasure.  Is that too easy – a ready-made blurb?  Never mind – it’s the real truth.  And Jesse Eisenberg is a real filmmaker – writer, director, and star.  He’s paired with Kieran Culkin, in a performance that in ninety fleet minutes rivals his Emmy-winning role in Succession.  He too is the real deal, as well as being the title character, as it were.  Two once-close cousins, in many ways polar opposites, use a bequest from their beloved and recently-deceased grandmother to take a Jewish heritage tour of Poland, including the house where she grew up and the concentration camp she managed to survive.  The Eisenberg character is an anxious New York City digital ad salesman with a wife and young child, while Culkin from upstate is a rule-breaking ne’er-do-well who “lights up any room he walks into, and then shits on everything in it.”  The result is both funny and penetrating.  Highly recommended.
 
In fact, enough to make me seek out Eisenberg’s first film as director, When You Finish Saving the World (MC-61, AMZ).  Eisenberg does not appear in that film, but adapted it from his original audiobook of the same name, with a clear autobiographical impulse.  Finn Wolfhard reprises his role as a teen devoted to social media, and Julianne Moore is his disenchanted mother, a former activist comfortably settled as director of a shelter for women and children.  Theoretically she’s devoted to helping people, while lacking people skills and self-knowledge, and sometimes even common sense.  Moore is excellent in drawing out the ambiguities of her character and engendering ambivalent reactions in the viewer.  I appreciated the film’s unpredictability and unusual setting in Indianapolis, and the foretaste of Eisenberg’s skill, but my recommendation is muted.
 
Returning to Hulu, I did watch the rest of the first season of Rivals (MC-84) and may even come back for the second, now in production.  It’s an amusing, soapy, thoroughly-retrograde British boink-fest set in the Thatcher years, based on a Jilly Cooper novel.  The entertaining cast is led by David Tennant, as the ruthless upper-class owner of a TV station, who hires combative Irish interviewer Aidan Turner as headliner, and feuds with aristocratic ladies-man showjumper-turned-politician Alex Hassell.  There are a host of other bed-hopping characters, and it takes a while to sort them out, and to understand their quirks and machinations.  The characterizations are far from deep, but it’s all good dirty fun.
 
I get the NYT “Watching” newsletter but rarely find it attuned to my tastes, yet they highlighted the French limited series Everything is Fine (IMDB), which I would never have discovered otherwise.  It caught my eye for the presence of Virginie Efira, whom I’ve been talking up for a while (here, e.g.).  Not usually a fan of hospital shows nor sick-child narratives, I nonetheless gave this a chance and was fully engaged.  It’s really a family portrait centered on a girl with leukemia, including her parents and sister, aunt and uncle (plus partners), and grandparents, each having an individual response to the central focus, whether it’s despair or denial, happy talk or panic attack, lust or its opposite.  The cast is good across the board, and creator Camille de Castelnau endows the eight-part series with admirable authenticity, seemingly personal.  Skirting the maudlin, the show remains serious while allowing for humor, and gives each character believable complications.  You’re gonna have to take my word on this one, but I thought it was pretty darn great.
 
Say Nothing (MC-80) is a dramatized companion to the superb documentary series Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (MC-88, PBS) in telling the still-relevant story of The Troubles of the last century.  Based on the highly praised nonfiction book of the same name by Patrick Radden Keefe, it centers on the case of a widowed mother of ten who was abducted and murdered by the IRA on suspicion of being an informer.  Over the course of nine episodes, the series focuses on two teenaged sisters who were implicated in that crime, and also a bombing campaign in London, but flashes back and forth in time to take in decades of conflict, and Gerry Adams’ long journey from terrorist to peacemaker.  Lola Petticrew and Maxine Peake share the central role of Dolours Price, who goes from teen insurgent to prison hunger striker to semi-repentant informer (not to mention the wife of Stephen Rea, star of The Crying Game), but the rest of the cast is equally effective.  Created by Joshua Zetumer, the series is even-handed in detailing the rights and wrongs of both sides of the conflict, offering much food for thought.
 
Like almost all of the best tv series on Hulu, Say Nothing comes via FX (Abbott Elementary being the exception).  They’ve always had some older classic tv shows, but I just went looking for Friday Night Lights and it’s no longer there (Buffy still is!).  A new (old) arrival is the hilarious and seminal British sitcom Peep Show (IMDB), featuring a lot of future award-winners early in their careers.  It has been available elsewhere, but all nine seasons are now on Hulu and decidedly worth watching.
 
In the Summers (MC-83) is a Sundance award winner directed by Alessandra Lacorazza, an autobiographical first feature about two sisters visiting their divorced father in New Mexico.  Played by different actresses – well-matched and persuasive – at three different periods from grade school to college, the sisters have changing relations with their father, a substance-abusing heavily-tattooed party-animal living in a house inherited from his mother, the condition of which is correlative to his own.  The film is composed of elliptical moments and images, more than dramatic events or psychological probing, but it’s evocative of moods and feelings associated with family relations among difficult individuals.  Nothing is resolved, but an impression is made.
 
Ghostlight (MC-83), another Sundance fave, is a family affair -- with a real-life father, mother, and daughter playing the same.  It’s written and directed by another couple – Kelly O’Sullivan is an actress-turned-writer-turned-director with her partner Alex Thompson (see review of their earlier Saint Frances).  Keith Kupferer and Tara Mallen are the parents, and Katherine Mallen Kupferer is a real find as the teen daughter, all in suppressed mourning over the recent death of their son and brother.  The tight-lipped father begins to get in touch with his feelings through participating in a community theater production of Romeo and Juliet, and the daughter joins in for some family healing.  The film is funny and touching in a manner that seems authentic and true to its milieu.  The title meaningfully refers to “the single bulb left on in a dark theater.”
 
The Taste of Things (MC-85) is so, so French.  As food porn, it turned me off more than it turned me on (ugh, all those fish dishes!).  I’m immune to the fetishization of food preparation and consumption.  But as a film about an artist at work, this worked for me, especially when the artist in question is Juliette Binoche.  She’s the longtime cook (and sometime lover) of a noted gourmet, “the Napoleon of gastronomy,” played by her onetime partner Benoit Magimel.  And there’s a beautiful little girl who is a prodigy of the taste buds.  Lovely to look at, Anh Hung Tran’s film transpires in the heyday of Impressionism and through fields of wildflowers, as well as protracted scenes amid the copper pots of a country kitchen, along with glimpses of the boudoir.  I rarely quote other critics, but Ann Hornaday of WaPo simply nails it: “Binoche is so gifted, she no longer seems to act anymore: She just is, in all her serene confidence and physical charisma.”  The same could be said of this film.
 
Thelma (MC-77) is a feisty 93-year-old, as is June Squibb, the actress playing her with considerable aplomb.  Josh Margolin’s debut feature was a Sundance crowd-pleaser, with all that implies.  Cute and soft-baked, family-friendly, undemanding, with a recognizable cast and a relatable theme.  The thin script is enlivened by the authenticity of Margolin’s affection for his own grandmother, on whom the story is based, until it takes a comic action-hero turn.  She’s an independent senior scammed out of $10K, who decides to take the matter into her own hands, enlisting a confederate with a two-seat scooter on a mission into a seedy area of LA to retrieve her money, gun in purse.  Weightless but inoffensive.
 
I wish I could recommend Lee (MC-62), but this disappointing biopic about Lee Miller, the first feature directed by distinguished cinematographer Ellen Kuras, is undermined by a diffuse script with some misjudged twists.  Kate Winslet is predictably excellent as the title character, a Vogue model and artistic muse who became a wartime photographer and documented the discovery of German concentration camps after WWII.  The supporting cast is stellar, but underused.  For example, what is Josh O’Connor doing here and why wasn’t his character properly defined?  This is a film that didn’t do enough by trying to do too much, but it does provide the backstory for many of Lee Miller’s most famous pictures.
 
I finally caught up with Robot Dreams (MC-87), an Oscar nominee for animated feature last year.  At first the animation struck me as simple and childish, but Pablo Berger’s film is neither.  It’s sophisticated both visually and emotionally, and full of old movie references.  It’s a soulful time capsule of NYC in the 1980s, with the Twin Towers still dominating the skyline.  The residents in the many street scenes are a vast assortment of animals, from an octopus as a sidewalk drummer to a bull as a policeman.  Dog is the main character; feeling lonely, he orders and assembles an Amica 2000 robot to be his best friend.  The robot takes to the role with gusto, and the two enjoy many outings in the city, to the joyous strains of Earth Wind & Fire’s “September,” until at Ocean Beach on the last day of summer the robot rusts in place and the beach is closed before Dog can return to extricate it.  They spend the long winter in wordless dreams of reunion.  You’ll have to watch to find out what happens, but this film is a treasure.
 
Here I must mention another wordless animation with animal characters, which could not be more different in style.  I watched it on the same night as the previous, so I’ll include it here, since I won’t be doing a MAX round-up any time soon.  Flow (MC-87) is a Latvian film nominated this year for both animation and international feature Oscars, and worthy of either or both.  It already has a case full of trophies for its blend of realistic yet magical animation, majestically beautiful.  After a devastating flood wipes out the human race, a black cat joins with a friendly labrador, a capybara, a ringtailed lemur, and a secretarybird in search of a safe harbor.  Not a word is uttered, but the animals all exhibit characteristic behaviors and personalities, as they face various trials on their “incredible journey.”  Wonder-full!
 
An Oscar nominee for best documentary feature, Sugarcane (MC-90) investigates the attempt by colonial powers to subjugate Indigenous peoples, specifically Canada’s attempt to “solve the Indian problem,” by wrenching children from First Nation communities (of which Sugarcane is one) to abusive residential schools run by the Catholic Church.  Something similar happened to Aboriginals in Australia and Native Americans in the U.S., all of it horrifying in retrospect.  The filmmakers and the community literally dig into the history of one such school in British Columbia, exhuming unmarked graves and histories of sexual abuse, infanticide, and suicide, among everyday cruelties.  Directed by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, this film is both an exposé and an exercise in truth and reconciliation.
 
Sly Lives (MC-77) is rather like an appendix to Questlove’s great concert film Summer of Soul (reviewed here), which prompted the question “Whatever happened to Sly Stone?”  This new film seeks to answer that question.  The first half is exhilarating as it shows just what Sly and the Family Stone represented during a five-year period around 1970 – with its blend of soul and rock, male and female, black and white – and the second is depressingly familiar in charting the corrosive effects of fame and drugs.  His downhill slide is depicted, but balanced by the commentary of Black musicians who followed in his footsteps, in a mix of jubilation and consternation.
 
I got stuck with another month of Disney on coming back to Hulu, and the only new thing I wanted to see was Beatles ’64 (MC-78).  I frequently talk about films as time capsules, and this documentary is exactly that, neatly positioning the Beatles’ first American tour as the cultural antidote to JFK’s assassination a few months before.  The film is a live-wire compendium of footage shot during those two weeks by the great documentarians Albert and David Maysles; television coverage of performances on the tour; and retrospective comments by the Beatles themselves and assorted superfans.  All the older footage is beautifully restored.  Sadly, older feet cannot be so restored, but they can be set to tapping.
 
I willingly stick with Hulu on a continuing basis, since its programming ranks with the best streaming channels and because its flexible policy allows the subscriber to pause the account for 1 to 12 weeks and reactivate at will.  But you need to know what you’re looking for on the channel, since the homepage and interface do not do justice to the breadth of offerings on Hulu, which for me is second only to Criterion, and a step ahead of the rest of the streaming pack.  Case in point – just as I was about pause my subscription, I saw that Hulu is poised to offer multiple-Oscar nominee Anora within the next month, along with other films on my must-watch list, so I’ll append another short post before pausing Hulu again.
 

Under the Kanopy

Over on Kanopy, the library-based alternative to Criterion, I found a new film I was very eager to see, The Old Oak (MC-69), reportedly Ken Loach’s final film.  And a fine swan song it is.  The title is the name of the surviving pub in an old mining village near Durham, where the mine shut down years ago, and in 2016 Syrian refugees are being bussed in to reside in vacant houses.  Dave Turner plays the depressed pub owner who is helping to get them settled (a former union man who is a proponent of solidarity rather than charity), and first-timer Ebla Mari superbly embodies the soulful young woman with whom he forms a platonic bond.  She’s an aspiring photographer who learned English in a refugee camp and speaks for her mother and younger brothers, with their father still imprisoned by the Assad regime.  There’s a Greek chorus of down-at-heels pub dwellers, undoubted Brexit voters who resent the newcomers, but who have a valid point about their own abandonment by the powers-that-be once the mine shut down.  Loach remains a progressive social critic, but allows himself a final expression of hope in the collective strength of the powerless joining together.
 
Also on Kanopy, Martin Scorsese follows up his “personal journeys” through American and Italian film with Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger (MC-83), in which he relates his intimate appreciation for the films of The Archers, the partnership between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.  He doesn’t just survey their Forties string of masterpieces from Colonel Blimp through I Know Where I’m Going and Black Narcissus to The Red Shoes, but also recounts his early viewings as a sickly child stuck at home and struck by seeing them on a small b&w tv, and his ultimate appropriation of some of their techniques in his own distinguished films, not to mention the close personal relationship he developed with Powell.  This documentary is excellent as an introduction to The Archers’ work or a reminder of their greatness, either way a prompt to watch these classic films, most available on the Criterion Channel.
 
Another Kanopy find was Aisha (MC-81).  The title character, a Nigerian woman seeking asylum in Ireland, is movingly played by Letitia Wright, a revelation to me but apparently already a star in the Marvel universe.  She’s hard-working and kind, but perpetually jerked around by the system.  A security guard in her group home, played by the always-accomplished Josh O’Connor (whose lower-class Irish accent requires captions more than her Nigerian inflections), takes an interest in her and tries to help her navigate the rocky road to permanent resident status.  Frank Berry’s film delicately follows the reticent arc of their relationship, in addition to documenting the harsh realities of immigrant life.
 
I’m always up for a new Virginie Efira film, so I was happy to see Just the Two of Us (MC-65) pop up on Kanopy’s new releases.  Perhaps you would need to share my (and the French film industry’s) infatuation with her to really like this film; or my attachment to strong, independent actresses in the mold of Barbara Stanwyck; or fondness for Sirkian “women’s picture” melodramas.  Valerie Donzelli’s film may be marketed as an erotic thriller, but it’s really a portrait of a marriage gone wrong.  We witness the first spark between Efira and co-star Melvil Poupaud burst into hot romance and quick marriage, and follow step by step as she begins to realize her husband is a domestic abuser, subtly at first and then overtly.  Efira has a double role as twin sisters, also alluded to in the title, but her husband breaks that bond to maintain exclusive control.  Tension is ratcheted up, but the violence is more emotional than physical.
 
That warmed me up for another French-language exploration of mating habits, The Nature of Love (MC-80), written and directed by the Canadian Monia Chokri.  The philosophical rom-com is a rare amalgam, and on the scale that runs from my personal favorite Eric Rohmer to a crowd-pleaser-that-doesn’t-please-me such as The Worst Person in the World, this one edges over the line toward the latter.  The unknown-to-me performers are all appealing enough, but the main character’s alternation of her classroom lectures to seniors on various philosophers’ definitions of love, her unexciting long-term relationship to a decent well-off guy, and her steamy Lady Chatterley interludes with the workman renovating their lake house in the country, fail to come together in a mutually satisfying way.  The social comedy with friends and relatives comes off best, but neither the romance nor the comedy of the woman’s quandary really landed with me.   
 
Turning back from romance to politics, here are several highly-praised films that I found on Kanopy:
 
Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border (MC-90) is a punishing but rewarding film about the immigration crisis on the wooded, swampy border between Belarus and Poland.  We follow a group of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan as they become helpless pawns in a geopolitical conflict, pushed back and forth by paramilitary units on both sides of the barbed wire.  This documentary-like film, brilliantly shot in black & white, is an immersive experience, bearing witness to all-too-prevalent human misery.  (And eliciting uncomfortable reflections on what’s about to happen on our own southern border.)  We follow a three-generation family group from their hopeful arrival by plane in Belarus, with arrangements to cross over into the E.U. to seek asylum with relatives in Sweden, joined by an “auntie” who speaks English and has money to offer bribes along the way.  Step by step, all that is stripped away, reducing them to the “animals” they are accused of being.  Their fates interweave with two other stories, of a border guard with some compunction about the mandated brutality, and a psychologist who joins up with a group of activists who provide what help they can to the refugees.  Thankfully, the film reaches some final gestures of ambivalent hope, or it would be just too dark to bear.  This caps Holland’s long, distinguished, international career in film and tv direction, but she’s not done yet, currenting shooting a film about Franz Kafka.
 
Too much of a good thing.  That’s how I would characterize Soundtrack for a Coup d’Etat (MC-91), an Oscar nominee for Best Documentary.  It’s a vital retelling of a nearly-forgotten episode in C.I.A. “diplomacy” – the assassination of Patrice Lumumba -- weaving together disparate themes in an effective manner, which is undermined by some stylistic innovations and a cavalier disregard for chronology.  Rather than voiceover, quotations are typed out on screen, with tiny citations that are impossible to take in, which adds to the visual jumble.  The basic juxtaposition of global Black liberation and American reaction around 1960, with performance clips of a variety of Black jazz musicians, does yield context for Louis Armstrong’s CIA-backed blackwashing tour of Africa at the time.  And examinations of Cold War ideology – embodied in Allen Dulles’ pipe-smoking smugness and Khruschev’s desk-pounding at the U.N. – are well-served by bringing in the commentary of Malcolm X on Third World decolonization and racialism.  A lot is covered, from the Suez crisis to the Congolese civil war, but the viewer must supply their own timeline to make sense of the sequence of events.  Lumumba himself remains an enigma, but Belgian director Johan Grimonpriz amply documents not just the Belgian mining concern that fomented division in the former colony, but the American pattern of undermining the elected leaders of other countries for its own political, economic, or strategic interests.
 
Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano (MC-79) won lots of awards and nominations last year, but I was daunted by the grim subject matter and delayed watching.  The story of two teenage cousins leaving Senegal in pursuit of some dream of Europe is hard and dark, rife with exploitation and savagery at every turn, but also heroism and endurance.  From endless bus rides to a brutal truck ride to treks on foot across a trackless expanse of desert to a perilous boat ride with Sicily as the goal, the boys are expressively depicted, subject to trials and torture graphically rendered.  It’s definitely a tough watch, but sure to engender compassion for the fates of so many immigrants worldwide, at least by those capable of compassion.  The end may seem improbable, but this true story was the germ of the film, along with the documentary testimony of actual immigrants.  
 
Are you ready for a three-hour Vietnamese film about death, faith, and immortality?  It took me a while to get there, but I was grateful for the experience.  Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (MC-94) is certainly a rarified taste.  I admired filmmaker Thien An Pham’s debut feature for its stylistic audacity, but did not always muster the patience he requires.  Still, so much of the film is beautiful and magical, verging on spiritual, that I didn’t mind the longueurs and the enigmas, many of which resolve if you’re willing to wait and pay close attention.  The story (and the camera) weaves its way back and forth in time and space, light and dark, dream and waking.  It follows a young man from the countryside, morally adrift in Saigon, who is forced by family tragedy to return to his home village, in a wandering and wondering search for lost connections.  The viewer is compelled to face the same question as the character, “What exactly is happening here?”  Not to mention, where is this going and when will it end?  These three hours are slow (and puzzling) to be sure, but worth the journey.
 
How about an under-two-hour Swedish film about death, faith, and immortality?  Hilma (MC-61) is a lot easier to watch, and it’s even in English, as most of journeyman director Lasse Hallstrom’s films have been.  This biopic of the belatedly-celebrated painter Hilma af Klint is sort of a home movie for him, as she is well played by daughter Tora Hallstrom in younger years and wife Lena Olin in later years.  It’s a lush period piece (incorporating old color footage of Stockholm street scenes) that does justice to the artist’s amazing story and her work.  She can be called a credible precursor to both Kandinsky and Pollock in painterly abstraction.  Her purity of vision prefigured her eventual resurrection.  Kanopy also offers the documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint (MC-78), which got my enthusiastic recommendation here (scroll down to end of that post).  
 
Having just watched Emilia Perez, I took the opportunity to watch Jacques Audiard’s previous film, Paris, 13^th District (MC-76).  If he was channeling Baz Luhrman in the newer film, he seems to have been bent on updating Eric Rohmer in the earlier.  You can probably guess which I prefer.  This black &white sexual roundelay of young people, set in an unglamorous section of the French capital of love, recalls several Rohmer films and has a decided nouvelle vague feel.  It also benefits from the writing assistance of Céline Sciamma, and her star from Portrait of a Woman on Fire, Noémie Merlant.  We follow our four lead characters from bed to bed, as the connections shift.  Tastefully sexy, the film is deliciously humorous and deftly characterized – just what one wants from a French rom-com in the age of Tinder.
 
Finally on Kanopy, there’s One Life (MC-69), a perfectly decent Schindler’s List Lite, in which a British stockbroker organizes an effort to get hundreds of refugee children out of Czechoslovakia before the outbreak of WWII, with his effort memorialized by a television program with the survivors in the 1980s.  He’s played by Johnny Flynn in the flashback sequences and Anthony Hopkins in the latter time frame.  Not a bad film, but nothing new or particularly revealing.  Striking how many of the films covered in this post deal with refugees and immigrants from a European perspective.
 
Besides these new releases, Kanopy has a huge back catalogue of films and tv shows, foreign and domestic, classic and recent.  If you have a school or public library card, it’s worth checking to see if it gives free access to Kanopy.  It’s even worth the effort to acquire a qualifying library card.  Start here.
 
[DVD addendum]  Getting a mammoth boxed set of Elia Kazan films from the library, I watched two I had never seen, from the beginning to the climax of his career as film director.  Kazan has made some of my favorite films, from On the Waterfront to Splendor in the Grass, but somehow I managed to miss his first, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Wiki), about an Irish-American family in Williamsburg in 1912.  After a prodigious career in NYC theater, this uncharacteristic assignment was the first film he directed.  Some traces of stage acting remain, but by the end more trust in the camera begins to emerge.  Peggy Ann Garner is more natural than most child actresses of the time, and won a special Oscar, as did James Dunn as her father, a good-hearted but alcoholic singing waiter.  Dorothy Maguire has the thankless role as the spoilsport drudge of a housewife, with Joan Blondell as her spirited sister.  Very watchable, on the whole.
 
Like me an ethnic loner as a student at Williams College, Kazan mined his immigrant background in America America (Wiki), telling the largely true story of his uncle, who emigrated as an ethnic Greek from Turkey (eventually bringing Kazan over from his birthplace Istanbul, as a child with his parents).  In widescreen B&W, with more than a hint of neorealism in its depiction, the film follows our young hero (?) from Armenian massacres in Anatolia to rug merchants in Istanbul to slave labor in order to purchase passage to America, and final arrival in the promised land of dreams.  Cinematographer Haskell Wexler and editor Dede Allen help Kazan make his favorite and most personal film, and certainly one of his best.