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.]