Hulu-ciné-shins IV

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 99^th 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.