Minimizing Max

I’d gotten to the point of writing off the-remains-of-HBO as a vital streaming channel, but recently MAX has seemed worth a look.  Let me start with a re-recommendation of Flow (MC-87), recent winner of the Oscar for best animated feature (review buried in this round-up).  And express gratitude that the channel’s dilution in quality is balanced by its incongruous TNT offerings of live playoff games with my Cleveland Cavaliers and Guardians, which I would not be able to watch otherwise.  The channel’s current strategy of trying to emulate an old-time network in programming a little something for every kind of viewer, and subsuming the prestige aura of HBO, has its compensations but doesn’t make it worth a continuing subscription.
 
In its third season, The White Lotus (MC-77) inherits the mantle of HBO flagship programs, and does not disgrace the heritage.  The show has achieved enough prominence to attract skeptics and haters, but creator Mike White continues to deliver.  I was initially disappointed with the move from Sicily to Thailand, but gradually won over to the new location.  Sure, the show is as formulaic as a luxury hotel chain, with similar types of clientele, and similar points of appeal.  One of the latter is certainly the casting.  This year we have Parker Posey, one-time indie It Girl, reverting to her roots to play a southern matron, with a sketchy financier husband and three grown children.  Also Aimee Lou Wood as the young girlfriend of Walton Goggins (Sex Education meets Justified? Yes, please!).  Carrie Coon highlights the reunion of a trio of old girlfriends.  The sense of place conveys a density of specification, all flavored by Mike White’s wryly jaundiced POV, somehow delivering a popular product with a highly personal touch.  [Update after last two episodes, as much as I can say without spoilers]  First off, Mike White has done it again, pulled off a perfect Rorschach Test of a series.  What you see in it is what you bring to it.  And all the actors I mentioned deliver fantastically to the end.  The last two episodes are like a dare and the payoff, in one long film.  Ep.7 is all prologue and the running out of string; and the lengthy Ep.8 winds it up and ties it all together, all centered on the Buddhist monk’s meditation at the start of the finale.  Are there loose ends and implausibilities? Sure.  Are there endings you saw coming or don’t want to see at all?  Absolutely.  (Oh, no!)  But the tension never lets up, while the laugh-out-loud lines and White’s punk wisdom shine through.  The long-ago weirdo of Chuck and Buck has found a popular formula without betraying his personal strangeness, and I wish him continued success with it.            
 
Hacks (MC-90) deserves continued success as well, and shows no drop-off in its fourth season.  Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder persist in their dance of repulsion and attraction, now as the first female late show host and as her head writer.  Both characters are well-established, and bonded together despite deep-seated differences, now situated in the world of a Hollywood tv studio, instead of Las Vegas or on a stand-up comedy tour.  The stinging repartee and showbiz satire remain.  I had to be lured into this series initially, but now I’m in for the long haul (or for as long a haul as I or it have coming).
 
MAX has new seasons of several apparently-popular series that I have no interest in (Last of Us, Righteous Gemstones), but one which induced me to come back for a second chance was Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal (MC-86).  I rather enjoyed his original series Nathan for You, which was thoroughly prankish, but really couldn’t take The Curse or this latest, which come across as mendacious and mean-spirited, not that I gave either an extended viewing.
 
MAX rotates through a surprising but inconsistent range of older and newer films, of which the recent standout is The Brutalist (MC-90).  Despite ten Oscar noms, I was dubious about Brady Corbet’s film for several reasons, not least the excessive length and insistence on theatrical viewing, but I stuck with it over the course of two evenings.  The film seemed bloated and artificial at times, but did have its compelling elements, even when accomplished actors were shoehorned into clunky dialogue.  The result has scope but a misguided breadth of attack.  Brutalism falls under the “less is more” school of architecture, but this film shows that sometimes “more is less,” too many themes piled on top of each other, just like the architectural project that is its centerpiece.  Oscar winner Adrien Brody plays a Hungarian refugee architect with a Bauhaus background who makes it from concentration camp to America after WWII.  Felicity Jones is his wife who arrives later from the Soviet zone.  Guy Pearce is the despicable plutocrat who becomes Brody’s equivocal patron, rescuing him from menial work only to subject him to insidious new forms of torture. It’s all impressive yet unconvincing, a sort of twisted remake of The Fountainhead.
 
I expected great things from Jesse Armstrong’s follow-up to Succession, the HBO original feature film Mountainhead (MC-66), but was mildly disappointed by this insta-movie, which lands right in the middle of the Trump-Musk hissy fit.  It’s informative and funny, but the underlying message (we are being ruled by idiot savants, with emphasis on idiot) is not exactly news.  Indicatively, the title seems effortful and perhaps a darling that should have been killed.  I get that Armstrong spent some time around tech-bros and was both amused and appalled by the way they talk, the jargon and the presumption.  But taking the Skarsgaard character from the series, multiplying him by four and sequestering the quartet in an ultra-deluxe mountaintop chalet in Utah, is too much to take straight.  But then the four are played by Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef and Corey Michael Smith, so the wittily witless dialogue is delivered faultlessly, with a remote Olympian perspective on the real-world problems of moving fast and breaking things.  Are these Masters of the Universe or Four Stooges?  By now we know.
 
I have little use for Clint Eastwood or courtroom dramas, so I was surprised by how satisfying Juror #2 (MC-72) turned out to be.  The 94-year-old tough-guy director is unexpectedly even-handed in telling the story of a murder trial where one of the jurors has good reason to argue the others into a not-guilty verdict, without divulging how he can be so sure the skeevy guy didn’t do it.  Nicholas Hoult is the sympathetic (?) title character, Toni Collette (whom I have followed ever since Muriel’s Wedding) is the prosecutor, and J.K. Simmons is among the deliberating jurors, along with the rest of a competent cast.  Mixing a 12 Angry Men plot with a Hitchcockian pursued pursuer, the film arrives at something distinctively different from either, in a complex morality tale.
 
Colman Domingo first came to my attention as Bayard Rustin in the Obama-produced biopic Rustin, and now returns with Sing Sing (MC-83), earning Best Actor nominations for both.  Here he plays an inmate sent up the river for a murder he may or may not have committed, who seems to have achieved rehabilitation through deep involvement in a theater arts project with other prisoners (many “graduates” of the program play themselves in this recreation of real events).  Thoughtfully directed by Greg Kwedar, Sing Sing is inspirational and funny without glossing over the grim realities of prison life.  If you’re interested in the theme of this film – how an incarcerated convict can become human, in touch with his feelings again – I would also highly recommend the documentary Daughters (MC-85) on Netflix.
 
In Halina Reijn’s Babygirl (MC-79), Nicole Kidman plays a dominating tech CEO with a hot theatrical husband and two young teen daughters (and no domestic help?!?).  She unleashes her inner kink with an intern at her company (Harris Dickinson), turned on by the chance to be utterly submissive and also to threaten her whole life, professional and domestic.  Wavering between sex comedy and erotic thriller, the film is a dazzling showcase for Kidman; while Dickinson is quite good, his character is hardly filled in.  Fair enough to privilege the woman’s POV, and fair enough to play with genre expectations, but this film lacks a dimension to win me over entirely, though I found it more satisfying than the somewhat-similar Blanchett/Cuaron Disclaimer.
 
Not only have I lost my appetite for the stomach-turning political news, but I’m becoming less likely to consume sociological documentaries.  Amidst a bunch of “reality” junk, MAX still has vestiges of HBO Documentaries.  I would normally have taken an interest in Night is Not Eternal (MC-87), about resistance to authoritarianism in Cuba and China, and Eyes on the Prize III (MC-88), but so far I haven’t been able to bring my attention to bear.
 
With its widely-mocked latest name-change back to HBO Max, this motley streaming channel lost a lot of its appeal for me when the Pacers ended the Cavaliers’ dream season.  Boo-hoo.  [Last minute update: Realizing the mash-up did not work, HBO and Discovery are going their separate ways.]

Net-flix-ations IV

For me, Netflix is like an old flame, where the deep decades-long relationship has cooled into occasional just-friends get-togethers.  I’m critical of how it has changed for the worse, more aware of its flaws than its virtues.  I ended my last go-round with the channel with a complaint about how they had unceremoniously dumped a series by one of my favorite living directors.  But after a season away, I found quite a bit worth watching on the service, picking up where I left off.
 
Hirokasu Kore-eda’s seven-part series Asura (MC-89) follows in the grand tradition of his earlier film Our Little Sister, which in turn drew on The Makioka Sisters and many of Ozu’s domestic dramas.  It follows four sisters: a widow who teaches ikebana, a mother of two teens who suspects her husband of dallying with his secretary, a demure librarian with a persistent suitor, and a brash beauty building up her boxer boyfriend (pow, pow, pow).  A series of events is precipitated when the librarian hires an investigator after seeing their father in the company of another woman and child.  Though based on a novel and tv series from more than forty years ago, and set in that period, this series was written by Kore-eda and is utterly characteristic of his work, with a profound understanding of the sister’s relationships with each other and with their respective partners.  Without surprising plot twists or dramatic incidents, or anything but calculated attention to everyday life, we come to understand this family and the people in it, to care for them and to be amused by their eccentricities and interactions.  Don’t miss this, though you’ll have to search to find it on Netflix.  Only now do I discover there was an earlier series by Kore-eda on the channel, The Makanai, with which I’ll catch up at some point.
 
I’ve been a big fan of Love on the Spectrum (MC-83), from its two Australian series through its three American seasons.  It’s the only dating show I’ve ever watched, and my enjoyment has not diminished.  I repeat my comment on the previous season: “Many types of autistic personality are represented, and I tend to relate to all of them in one way or another.  The show is respectful, funny, and endearing, and even you neurotypicals will enjoy dating anxieties and triumphs that ring a bell across many spectra.”  I can’t claim that you will love this show if you’re not on the spectrum, but I’m betting almost anyone would find it entertaining.
 
Stephen Graham is the creator of the four-part British series Adolescence (MC-91), about a 13-year-old boy accused of killing a classmate.  Besides writing and producing, he plays the boy’s father.  Apparently he recruited his A Thousand Blows co-star Erin Doherty to play the court-appointed therapist interviewing the boy in the standout third episode.  And also his director from Boiling Point, Philip Barantini, who seems to specialize in long one-take scenes.  Each episode is filmed in one sinuous, ever-moving take, a technique that sometime impresses and sometimes distracts.  The first starts with the police breaking into the family home and dragging the boy out of bed and down to the police station for booking.  The second follows two policeman investigating at the boy’s school, and the third has his interview with the therapist, while the fourth looks at the fallout for his parents and sister.  The subject is grim but the treatment is serious, with some exploration of the “manosphere” on social media.  Beyond the technical marvel of its filming, the series is well-acted and thought-provoking, and stands out from the generality of Netflix content.
 
Toxic Town (MC-84) is another British four-part series, in a vein they seem to love, about a true-life group of little people banding together to get theirs back from the powers-that-be (cf. Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office).  It was created by Jack Thorne, also a writer-producer on Adolescence, starring Jodie Whittaker and Aimee Lou Wood as two mothers who meet in the hospital where they both deliver children with birth defects.  Later it emerges there was a cluster of cases in this English Midlands town, caused by corruption around the clean-up of industrial waste after the steel mills shut down, with a group of mothers bringing a class-action suit.  This is the sort of morality play that I appreciate, with diverse people facing difficult choices, repeatedly inviting the viewer to ask, “What would I do in this situation?”
 
After re-watching Luchino Visconti’s classic version not so long ago, I was dubious about the new Netflix six-part series of The Leopard (MC-72).  How bastardized would it be?  The surprising answer is not at all.  Lush and sensual, this period piece about Sicily in the 1860s is also serious and smart (unlike some NFX offerings).  Written and directed by a pair of Englishmen, it’s the product of familiarity and affection rather than appropriation and exploitation, and Sicily’s tourism bureau got their money’s worth from supporting this production.  All the actors speak Italian, unlike Visconti’s set, where Burt Lancaster said his lines in English and Alain Delon in French, and everyone was post-dubbed (I’d be leery of NFX dubbing).  And the acting is quite good, notably Kim Rossi Stuart as the title character, the Prince of Salina, and Benedetta Porcaroli as his daughter, Bourbon aristocrats whose way of life is threatened by Garibaldi and Italian unification.   Like Asura, this series is a hidden treasure amongst Netflix’s international offerings.  And now I’ll have to go back and watch Visconti’s Leopard for the fourth or fifth time, and Senso too.
 
I gave short shrift to two new Netflix series that may have merit, but failed to grab me at first glance – Forever (MC-84) and North of North (MC-77).  Your call.
 
Turning to film, the standout among recent Netflix offerings is I’m Still Here (MC-85), a recent Best Picture nominee that took the Oscar for Best International Feature, with Fernanda Torres nominated for Best Actress.  She’s the subtle heart and soul of the movie, as a mother of five whose husband is disappeared by Brazil’s military junta in 1971.  He was a former congressman returned from exile, and we see the family living an enviable life by the beach in Rio, and herein early scenes director Walter Salles conjures up memories of Alfonso Cuaron’s marvelous Roma.  But men in plain clothes come to take away the father, and then the mother and one of the older daughters.  The girl is released the next day, but the mother is held in isolation for two weeks.  The father is never seen again, though the government denieddenies ever taking him.  It took decades for the truth of his torture and murder to be revealed, with the family left in painful doubt for the duration.  The film is based on the youngest son’s memoir and celebrates the mother’s decision to go to law school at 48 to fight the dictatorship.  Fun fact: in a final sequence from 2014, the elderly mother is played by Torres’ own mother, who was nominated for Best Actress in 1998 for Salles’ Central Station.  This film seems like a cautionary tale for our own political moment – it can happen here, perhaps already is happening.
 
The panache of Pedro Almodóvar does not translate in his English-language adaptation of the Sigrid Nunez novel The Room Next Door (MC-70).  He directs Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton to speak clunky lines in an uninflected manner, perhaps meant to reflect the seriousness with which he is approaching the delicate subject of euthanasia.  Former war correspondent Swinton is dying of cancer and asserts her right to refuse treatment and die on her own terms, enlisting longtime writer friend Moore to keep her company on her final journey, staying in the “room next door” until the day of her choosing.  The film displays many of Almodóvar’s virtues, but is strangely flavorless.  I was drawn in by the subject and the stars, but did not engage in any deep way.
 
The Outrun (MC-72) is most notable for the compelling lead (almost solo) performance of Saoirse Ronan, in this tale of addiction and recovery, as adapted with deep authenticity by director Nora Fingscheidt and Amy Liptrot, from the latter’s memoir of the same name.  The film swings back and forth, in place and time, between the protagonist’s wild, drunken life in London, where she is studying biology, and the Orkney Islands north of Scotland, where she came from, and returns after drying out.  She divides her time between her separated parents, a bipolar father and a mother who escaped into evangelical religion, before going to spend a winter alone on the remotest of the islands.  The contrast between the urban party scene and the desolate, frigid seascape is driven home in alternation, and accented by documentary or animated excursions into the protagonist’s studies.  The elliptical and nonlinear presentation takes a good deal of piecing together by the viewer, but it’s all concentrated in Saoirse Ronan’s face, demeanor, and hair color.  She’s amazing and makes this film well worth the effort it takes to watch, both for grimness and eccentricity.
 
As “Nonno” to my grandchildren, I felt compelled to give a look to Nonnas (MC-57).  It certainly has a weak and cliché-filled script, with every beat predictable, but I sort of appreciated seeing NYC from an ethnic Staten Island perspective, and there were a lot of familiar and welcome faces (e.g. Linda Cardellini and a virtual Sopranos reunion).  Supposedly based on a true story about a guy (Vince Vaughan) who opened a restaurant as a memorial to his mother and grandmother, there is very little reality here (after The Bear and other “hell kitchens,” it’s hard to swallow four seventy-something women cooking for eighty and then dancing around the restaurant) but a few laughs and some comforting truisms about food and family.
 
One piece of generic Netflix programming that appealed to me for personal reasons was Britain and the Blitz (MC-tbd).  Seemingly inspired by Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, this film colorizes old documentary footage effectively, and adds interviews and narration, this time for WWII instead of WWI.  One of the characters illuminating the English homefront in 1940 is a 17-year-old girl.  As it happens, my mother was a 17-year-old girl under the Blitz, so this personalized, on-the-ground approach to the very familiar story of the Battle of Britain worked for me.
 
I’d been thinking of re-watching American Graffiti (MC-97) when it turned up on NFX, but the VHS-quality of the streaming deterred me from watching.
 
Reliable stand-up performers return to NFX with new routines in Mike Birbiglia: The Good Life (MC-tbd) and Sarah Silverman: Postmortem (MC-tbd), both solid but not their very best.  So all this was certainly worth a month’s subscription to Netflix, but I’m ready to pause the channel again.

Cinematic credo

I wanted to add the following to my profile on this page but it didn’t fit, so I’ll just read it into the record here, for anyone who might wonder whether we share compatible tastes:
 
I am a cinephile of a bygone generation, back when film could be construed as the preeminent art form of the mid-20^th century, and not just one of the multitudinous ways we are “amusing ourselves to death.”  I attend to cinema for much more than entertainment, though I’m never averse to being entertained.  I am drawn to domestic dramas, relationship comedies, workplace observations; explorations of nature, history, or community; and films of social conscience, especially with a strong documentary component.
 
As a rule, I don’t care for action or fantasy films, horror or sci-fi, and have limited appetite for crime and punishment, mystery and suspense.  I abhor franchises, most “blockbusters,” anything like a theme park ride, and almost anything based on a comic book or video game.
 
My criteria for what to watch jumps off from the MetaCritic rating (usually >70 for film, >80 for tv), followed in turn by director, performers, setting, story, subject, nationality, and sometimes period.  I’m fine with subtitles, and frequently watch with captioning when the English is accented or otherwise hard-to-hear.  I have no problem with B&W films, vintage or new, and I like to watch old films, sometimes for aesthetic and sometimes for historical or personal reasons.
 
Francois Truffaut remains my all-time favorite filmmaker, with Eric Rohmer a close second.  My favorite active American director is Richard Linklater, but there are plenty of others that I follow avidly.  My taste runs to Brits like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, and lots of foreign language directors – I’d categorize it as high middlebrow.
 
Though I’ve spent uncountable hours of my life watching movies, I have to confess that it’s been almost a decade since I set foot in a theater, so my focus is solely on streaming video, with an occasional DVD from ILL.  So I’m usually talking about films that appeared in theaters six months ago, give or take.  If not six decades ago.
 
My dual aim is to amuse readers and alert them to the best film and television to arrive lately on various streaming channels.  My hope is to guide viewers to programs of quality that might have otherwise escaped their attention.

P.S.  The NYT  just released a poll for "The Best Movies of the 21st Century" and though I've seen all but a small handful, my list would be totally different, so be forewarned that my taste must be quite distant from the generality of viewers.