A 12-week pause on my Hulu
subscription ended conveniently just as the fourth seasons of two of my very
favorite series became available for bingeing.
I get rather exercised telling people how great Welcome to Wrexham
(MC-77) is,
and here I’ll just add more hyperbole to my initial recommendation. Like the
Welsh town and football club it celebrates, this documentary series just keeps getting better
and better. You don’t really need to
know anything about soccer - or about the ins-and-outs of promotion and
relegation in the English Football League - to enjoy this show. All you need is some appreciation of the role
of sport in community development, social and economic and dare-I-say-spiritual. This show is funny, exciting, and inspiring
in its depth and breadth. Don’t get me
wrong, the soccer is involving even to the uninitiated, but that’s only the
beginning of the story. And the
series has found its perfect format in eight
40-minute episodes; further seasons will keep me coming
back to Hulu to follow the
inexorable rise of this team and this show. (Help, I can't control this rogue underlining!)
The third season of The
Bear (MC-83) was
a bit of a comedown from the very strong second (scroll down here for my
rec), but the fourth gets Carmy out of the freezer and back in touch with his
friends, confirming that Christopher Storer and his team know what they’re
doing and where they’re going, perhaps more than Carmy and his team. They’re both in the business of offering the
public sensuous experiences of taste and feeling, art and delight, along with
the occasional pratfall. Just
looking at online viewer comments, I’m amazed at how divisive this show has
become, probably because it aspires to be a work of art and not just an
entertainment. I’m still fully on board,
and eager for the just-announced fifth season.
Not every character or episode is going to appeal to everyone (though
it’s hard to imagine Syd- or Claire Bear- or Sugar-haters), but each of them has
dimension and complexity, and something to say.
Like the Christmas dinner of season two, this season’s wedding episode
is an extended gathering of all the Bears that demonstrates what an organic
whole this series is, even with a star-studded string of cameos. Hulu has a variety of strengths, but as far
as tv series go, its FX division has inherited the mark of quality once held by
HBO or AMC. Aside from that, Hulu’s
weekly “Top 15” rarely has anything that I would deign to watch, so be prepared
to search for the many hidden gems on the channel.
Such Brave Girls (MC-73) is deep in the
tradition of British cringe comedy, but with the bright new voice of show
creator and star Kat Sadler. She’s a
deeply-troubled young woman in a family of toxic narcissists, her sister played
by real-life sister Lizzie Davidson and desperate mother by Louise Brealy, each
disastrously attached to sketchy men.
The humor is raunchy and pointed, the characters are broad but relatable,
and two seasons of six episodes do not overstay their welcome, but the
award-winning show would have to add a new storyline or dimension to bring me
back for a third.
The Order (MC-75) is a near-miss. For most of the film’s length, it’s a
truthful account of a 1980s white supremacist uprising in the Northwest, which
echoes down to our current moment, but in the end director Justin Kurzel succumbs
to action movie tropes and loses the opportunity to make a significant
statement. Admittedly the action scenes
are well-done, and the rugged landscape is depicted impressively. Jude Law is cast against type as a grizzled
FBI veteran; Tye Sheridan is the young cop who joins him on the mission to
track down baby-faced killer Nicholas Hoult and his gang of neo-Nazis itching
for a fight. Jurnee Smollett leads the
FBI team, ironically just about the only non-white face to be seen. What motivates these knuckleheads to violent
hate against distant Blacks, immigrants, and Jews? Must be irrational fear of the Other, and
yearning for a return to some imaginary lost Order. MAWA.
Hulu offers a surprising selection of outstanding foreign films, and Seed of the Sacred Fig (MC-84) is an excellent example. After a brief flourishing of Iranian cinema decades ago, many of their directors were consigned to exile, imprisonment, or silence. But some still get their films made, however surreptitiously. I was previously unfamiliar with director Mohammad Rasoulof and daunted by this film’s runtime of almost three hours, but once started it carried me along and absorbed my attention. It was made clandestinely, and the tension seeps into the very effective performances of a family of four, the father aspiring to become a judge in the regime of the mullahs, the mother aspiring to a well-off existence, the two girls of college and high school age aspiring to liberation and inspired by the ”Women, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022, of which the film includes documentary cellphone footage. Under shooting constraints, Rasoulof turns to isolated domestic thriller, which morphs into political allegory. The allegory may be specifically Iranian but has decided relevance to current American politics.
Ernest Cole: Lost and
Found (MC-82) tells
the story of a young photographer who documented apartheid and was banished
from South Africa, and thereafter led a tragic life in exile, photographing
Harlem and the Jim Crow South before becoming homeless as well as stateless,
and then dying young of cancer. Raoul
Peck directed the great James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro,
and here makes use of a cache of sixty thousand of Cole’s provocative and
evocative photographs, which were recently and mysteriously found in a Swedish
bank vault, accompanied by Cole’s own words as read by Lakeith Stanfield. It’s a troubling yet inspiring resurrection
of the sad history and fine eye of a forgotten artist.
Ocean with David
Attenborough (MC-93) may
seem superfluous after decades of Planet Earth documentaries, but it’s a
brilliant summation of his career concern for the survival of the natural world
in the context of human intervention, and even manages to confront
environmental catastrophe with an element of redemption, along with the reliably
dazzling photography, in a parting message released on his 99th
birthday. This film moves effectively
from wonder to horror to hope.
I’m not here to tell you it’s
a great movie, but I did enjoy re-seeing Working Girl (MC-73). In many ways, it’s as dated as a Hollywood film
from the 30s or 50s, but Mike Nichols’ direction is fresh and Melanie Griffith
carries the film with her innate appeal.
Though not exactly my type, she wins me over here (and elsewhere) as an
example of movie royalty, passing the torch along from her mother Tippi Hedren
to her daughter Dakota Johnson. Here she’s
a Staten Island secretary with big, big hair and ambition to match, who fills
in for her downtown Manhattan M&A boss Sigourney Weaver and teams up with
Harrison Ford for a big merger deal and some incidental hanky-panky. Retrograde it may be, but this film has its
moments.
Re-watched alongside The
Godfather films, Barry Levinson’s Bugsy (MC-80) plays almost as a romantic comedy, given that it
famously led to marriage and four children for Warren Beatty and Annette
Bening. Though the film nods to the fact
that Bugsy Siegel was a brutal thug and Virginia Hill a vicious mob moll,
there’s a veneer of Hollywood glamour over the proceedings, in this origin
story of organized crime’s makeover of Las Vegas. From Clyde to McCabe to John Reed to Bulworth
and all the stops along the way, Beatty plays someone very like his own persona,
a charmer who can coax money or sex out of anyone, without ever really
understanding himself. So much for Reagan-Bush
era films, but it was nice to see these cycle through Hulu, now that we’re no
longer in the era of universal DVD rental availability.
You may have noticed that
I’ve given up any attempt to come up with fresh clever headings for these
channel-by-channel round-ups, the better for specific channel subscribers to
thread back through my previous coverage of it.
At this point, I’m going into another extended pause to Hulu, but I
still consider it one of the very best streaming channels, if you know how to
approach it.
Hulu offers a surprising selection of outstanding foreign films, and Seed of the Sacred Fig (MC-84) is an excellent example. After a brief flourishing of Iranian cinema decades ago, many of their directors were consigned to exile, imprisonment, or silence. But some still get their films made, however surreptitiously. I was previously unfamiliar with director Mohammad Rasoulof and daunted by this film’s runtime of almost three hours, but once started it carried me along and absorbed my attention. It was made clandestinely, and the tension seeps into the very effective performances of a family of four, the father aspiring to become a judge in the regime of the mullahs, the mother aspiring to a well-off existence, the two girls of college and high school age aspiring to liberation and inspired by the ”Women, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022, of which the film includes documentary cellphone footage. Under shooting constraints, Rasoulof turns to isolated domestic thriller, which morphs into political allegory. The allegory may be specifically Iranian but has decided relevance to current American politics.
