Peacock preens

Most of the time I don’t see the point of Peacock as a streaming channel, but several Oscar-nominated films brought me back for a month’s subscription.
 
Despite its eight nominations, I had a limited and ambivalent response to Edward Berger’s Conclave (MC-79), based on a Robert Harris novel, of a sort I would never read.  I appreciated the look inside the Vatican, but Roman Catholic ritual has never seemed so ridiculous.  Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci are their excellent selves as two cardinals who are not interested in becoming pope, but leery of the leading candidates for one reason or another.  Isabella Rossellini is a welcome but underused presence.  The politics of the deliberations are sketched in, but the focus remains on personalities and process, and the airing of dirty laundry, rather than probing of issues.  The preposterous machinations are twisty enough and the cinematography opulent enough to keep one watching, even after it becomes clear that this is in no way a serious film.
 
Is Wicked (MC-73) wicked good or wicked bad?  It’s not for me to judge, having no familiarity with the Broadway musical, and little attachment to its Oz-ian precursors.  Two things I can say for sure: it ain’t no Barbie (lacking the wit and personal touch), and it’s way too long (and only Part One!).  Where the dance numbers by director Jon Chu for In the Heights seemed anarchic and energetic, here his stagings seem cluttered and clunky, overwhelmed by an excessive budget, lost in a lavish land beyond the rainbow.  This may give some people what they want, but I was more bemused than amused or enthused.  We can all agree that Cynthia Erivo is great, and that Arianna Grande is . . . something.  There are definitely a plenitude of “Oh wow” moments, but not all of them are the good sort.  So call me a curmudgeon on this one, but you may enjoy it.
 
The well-received Dreamworks animation Wild Robot (MC-85) has considerable visual appeal but is too busy and too sentimental to compete with Robot Dreams or the latest Wallace & Gromit adventure in the field of recent animated robot capers.  While its characterizations of many wild animals are impressive, they’re not a patch on the Latvian Oscar-winner Flow.  A service-minded robot washes up on a remote island, where she soon machine-learns the languages and manners of the local fauna, and takes under her “wing” an orphaned young gosling that imprints on her, as well as finding ways to help all the other species.  The other three “cartoons” I can recommend for viewers of any age, but Wild Robot seems to target grade schoolers and push a message of being nice and taking care, though not without some visual pleasures and tear-jerking moments.
 
Edie Falco rarely disappoints, and she was the main reason I gave a look to the unheralded I’ll Be Right There (MC-66).  She probably formed a relationship with director Brendan Walsh on her outstanding series Nurse Jackie, and the well-written lead role here seems ideal for her, so sympathetic, funny, and true.  She’s a divorced woman in upstate New York, with two problematic adult children, a problematic mother (the always-effective Jeannie Berlin), a problematic ex-husband, and two problematic lovers, one male and one female.  It’s a lot, but she seems up to it, and does not really mind being on call for so many people in need.  But maybe she should take a moment to consider what she needs?  The title may seem nondescript, but is in truth highly descriptive.   Consider this a worthwhile sleeper, you may not need to see it, but it’s a brisk and engaging film.
 
One Peacock show I’d earmarked to watch was the return of We Are Lady Parts (MC-84), whose second six-episode season might have been even better than its first, which is saying something.  Nida Manzoor’s series about a punk band of British Muslim women of varying ethnicity is comic and serious in equal measure, each of the women of distinctive type and individuality, and each given her due this season.  The music is hilarious and intense, and the exploration of diversity and sisterhood pointed and moving.  Over recent years, I have become a big fan of many English sitcoms, and this ranks with the best, and stands out for its novel perspective on life in the UK.
 
With The Americas (MC-60), the BBC Natural History Unit visits the Western Hemisphere and swaps out David Attenborough for Tom Hanks as narrator.  The spectacular but now-familiar wildlife footage remains a draw, though Attenborough’s eco-warnings are replaced by warm-and-fuzzy stories that anthropomorphize and denature the wildness they explore, not quite Disney but not exactly real world either.  Nothing against Mr. Hanks, but this series is blander than it ought to be, with no overarching narrative.
 
Peacock has a whole sub-channel celebrating the 50^th anniversary of Saturday Night Live, including the entire run of the show.  I feel like I was present at the creation, so to speak, but my attention to the program has waxed and waned over the years, more recently being piqued by YouTube clips that my grown son urged watching, especially of Kate McKinnon.  I missed the tenures of many cast members who later went on to become favorites of mine, like Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers.  SNL50: Beyond Saturday Night (MC-72) is a quartet of documentaries about the production of the show.  At least two of the roughly hour-long segments are well worth watching: “Five Minutes,” which matches cast members’ initial audition tapes with their own later commentary; and “Written By: A Week Inside the SNL Writer’s Room,” which describes the pressure cooker of putting on each week’s show.
 
While I still consider Peacock a third-tier streaming channel, there’s enough worthwhile viewing to subscribe for a month from time to time.  And don’t miss We Are Lady Parts.  I’ll be back sometime after the second season of Nathasha Lyonne’s Poker Face comes round.

Hulu postscript

I stuck around on Hulu an extra month to see Anora (MC-91), which won Sean Baker four Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Editing) and eponymous lead Mikey Madison (of Better Things!) Best Actress.  Social realism meets screwball comedy in this story of a sex worker with a will of iron more than a heart of gold.  Her name means “honor” or “grace,” but she prefers to go by Ani.  Brooklyn through and through, she works – very competently – in a high-toned Manhattan strip club.  Because she spoke Russian with her grandmother, she is assigned to the callow young son of a Russian oligarch, and enters a dream world of wealth and privilege in her home borough.  On a wild, drug-fueled vacation in Las Vegas, the two get married.  But consequences ensue, and her Cinderella story turns sinister.  The oligarch’s wife sends three Armenian thugs to break up the marriage, but they are no match for Ani, who makes common cause with them in going on an all-night search for her fleeing boy-husband.  Sean Baker upscales the diverse energy of his marvelous indie evocations of marginal lives in Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket, achieving mainstream acceptance and then some.
 

The crucial question for A Complete Unknown (MC-70) is whether you can believe Timothée Chalamet as a young Bob Dylan, and for me the surprising answer was a resounding yes.  He’s an opaque character, in keeping with the film’s title, but inhabits the music in a way that is fully satisfying.  Edward Norton is an earnest, kindly Pete Seeger.  As Joan Baez, new-to-me Monica Barbaro nails the voice more than the look, in an effective performance.  Elle Fanning is fine in the thankless role of Dylan’s early Sixties girlfriend.  James Mangold, an accomplished director who has been down this road before with Walk the Line, stages all with confidence.  The film runs from Bobby Zimmerman’s teenage arrival in NYC to the moment he went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, offering convincing renditions of so many songs to which I can mouth along the words.  TC as BD goes from nobody to somebody, and needs to shield himself from celebrity (and affection?) in order to remain obstinately his own obsessive person.  This film should work for all but Dylan superfans or the utterly indifferent, a great companion to the Scorsese documentary No Direction Home.    

I’ve never read Clare Keegan, but the film adaptation of her novella Small Things Like These (MC-82), along with the even better adaptation of The Quiet Girl, suggests that she is a writer who can do a lot with a little.  And Cillian Murphy is an actor who has proved that he can do a lot with a little, here playing a coal merchant in 1985 Ireland who begins to pry into the local “Magdalene Laundry,” the abusive “refuge” for unwed girls and “fallen women” run by the Catholic Church for centuries.  Emily Watson is creepily even-tempered as the steely Godmother of the institution, someone inadvisable to cross.  But the Murphy character has five young daughters of his own – along with a conservative wife unconcerned with matters that are “not our business” – with flashbacks to his own history as an illegitimate child.  His conscience will not let him close his eyes to what he has seen, and Tim Mielants’ film paints an effective portrait of the small Wexford town in which his moral quandary plays out.  I certainly prefer films about moral quandaries to action films, and Murphy has an appealing and revealing inwardness that suits the story.  Too bad his moral decision ends the story without revealing its costs or outcome, but otherwise this is a deeply involving film.

It's been a decade since I ran film programs at the Clark, but I still have an eye out for art-adjacent films, and thus Exhibiting Forgiveness (MC-82) had been on my watchlist since initial release.  So its eventual appearance on Hulu constitutes a further feather in the channel’s cap.  I did not realize going in that writer-director Titus Kaphar was in effect making a docudrama about his own paintings.  That takes balls or brass or something, but he pulls it off.  With a large measure of support from his avatar, André Holland, who delivers a sensitive performance, along with singer Andra Day as his wife and Anjanue Ellis-Taylor as his mother.  While watching I wondered who made the paintings for the film, and only later realized that the film was made in order to tell the backstory of the paintings.  It works either way, because the film carries enough dramatic weight on its own, so that it’s not merely a gloss on the paintings but a layered story of its own, about coming to terms with an abusive, crack-smoking father.  This movie is much more than an act of self-promotion, and I would have been happy to show it at the Clark.

 

As usual with Hulu’s interface, you need to dig deep to discover that they cycle through a lot of worthwhile older films from month to month.  This time through, I gave Sideways (MC-94) another look.  Always impressed with Alexander Payne, his recent The Holdovers and repeat viewing of his early classic Election sent me back to re-evaluate this midcareer peak, which I remember liking less than many.  Lo and behold, my opinion twenty years ago, in the very first month of Cinema Salon, is exactly what I thought this time around, so here is that old link.
 
Seeking to squeeze the last ounce of value out of an extra month on Hulu, I gave a chance to Eileen (MC-72).  I was ambivalent about director William Oldroyd’s previous film, Lady Macbeth, but I predicted great things for Thomasin McKenzie after Leave No Trace.  The setting in the near North Shore of Boston in the winter of 1964 was also interesting, but the actors’ accents are studied and variable rather than convincing.  McKenzie as the title character plays the drab 24-year-old daughter of a dissolute former police chief, who works in a juvenile prison where Anne Hathaway arrives as a psychologist with a Harvard Ph.D.  She’s absurdly glamorous, but we may be viewing her through the eyes of the smitten Eileen.  For a while I assumed this film was headed in the direction of Carol, but then there’s a genuinely shocking twist, and then another, and it becomes a different sort of film altogether, which left me dangling and feeling somewhat cheated.
 
The new Hulu tv series A Thousand Blows (MC-78) is reminiscent of Steven Knight’s previous series Peaky Blinders, but with a healthy dose of Harlots added.  Two Jamaican immigrants to 1880s London fall in with a female ring of thieves intent on moving up from pickpocketing and smash-and-grab to a major jewel heist.  Boxing is the corollary side-story, so prepare for some brutal bare-knuckle bouts.  Despite anachronisms and unlikelihoods, the world-building is dense enough to deliver a Dickensian sense of historical plausibility.  Erin Doherty is the leader of the gang, and Stephen Graham is her protector and suitor, an East End pub proprietor and muscle-bound boxer (suffering from ’roid rage avant la lettre).  Malachi Kirby is the Jamaican boxer with big West End dreams.  With multiple story lines, I wondered how they would wind up the series in six episodes, and the answer is they didn’t, just teasing a second half to come.  I may be back for it, or I may have seen enough.  We’ll see.
 
Gotta be suspicious of a tv series that began as a podcast, but the presence of Michelle Williams was enough (along with the FX label) for me to sample Dying for Sex (MC-82) before my month of Hulu expired.  And it greatly exceeded expectation.  As Molly, Williams is as soulful and funny as one would expect, embodying a woman with Stage 4 breast cancer who is determined find out who she is and what she likes before dying.  Surprisingly, Jenny Slate is equally soulful and funny, as the friend who accompanies her every step of the way; she plays Nikki Boyer, the originating podcast co-host and now writer and producer for the show.  The eight half-hour episodes are as much about friendship as sex and death (and oh yes, childhood sexual abuse), and pretty frank about all of them.  Sissy Spacek as Molly’s mother is a bonus, as is Rob Delaney as the “neighbor guy” with whom she explores her kinks (which also seals the comparison with Catastrophe, high praise as far as I’m concerned).  The supporting cast is notably fine as well, with Esco Jouley earning a shoutout as the palliative care death doula.  The series adeptly walks a fine line between raunchy humor and seriousness, with an almost documentary feel for life and death at Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC, as well as some outré sexual practices.  Watch it if you want to have truthful fun with some touchy subjects.
 
Just as I was thinking that we were past the era of Peak TV and that film had regained its primacy in quality viewing, I was blown away in quick succession (pun intended) by three great series, including this one and two whose reviews will soon appear in round-ups here, Wolf Hall: The Mirror & the Light and season three of The White Lotus.
 
I guess all this was enough to justify an extra month’s subscription, but now I’ll pause Hulu, probably till the return of Welcome to Wrexham in a month or two.