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.