Kanopy covers multitudes

Many libraries offer free access to Kanopy, a worthwhile streaming service with a surprisingly broad range of offerings, and an interface conducive to finding unexpected gems.  Usually I just incorporate programs I happen to watch on the channel under other headings, but recently it’s earned its own round-up.
 
Just as I was starting to read Robert Macfarlane’s latest book Is a River Alive? (the fourth of his I’ve read aloud with my daughter), I realized that he also wrote the script for River (MC-58), a documentary that had been on my Kanopy watchlist for some time.  Director Jennifer Peedom mixes music, and narration by Willem Defoe, with spectacular aerial footage to give an affirmative answer to the book’s title query, at least till killed by human intervention.  The same contributors previously made Mountain (MC-82), which jumped off from, or should I say climbed up behind, Macfarlane’s footsteps in his first book Mountains of the Mind.  Plenty of majestic mountain imagery, somewhat spoiled by the insane antics of tiny humans in that sublime setting.
 
Jazzy (MC-83) is a companion piece to director Morrisa Maltz’s promising debut feature, The Unknown Country (see here), with a reversal of lead and supporting actresses.  Lily Gladstone appears here late, as the main adult in a film focused closely on two tween girls in South Dakota, the title character being Jasmine Bearkiller Shangreaux.  Her best friend is Syriah Fool Head Means, and we spend a lot of time just hanging out with them, as they discuss their ambivalent feelings about growing up and maybe transferring their affection from stuffed animals to boys.  They are split up when Syriah goes to live with her grandmother on the reservation, and they pine (ridge) for each other.  The film can seem aimless at times, like the girls it portrays up close and personal, but ends up as a convincing rendition of a phase in young girls’ lives.
 
With a similarly intimate, immersive, evanescent style, Raven Jackson’s debut feature All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (MC-87) follows the growing up of a Black girl in rural Mississippi.  The film is more poetic than narrative, with a close-up, associative approach that finds hands as expressive as faces.  It wanders back and forth through decades of time, with several different actresses playing the central character at different ages, but reaches its destination decisively.  Slow and enigmatic, it mixes water and dirt to create a sense of life in crystalline images, however muddy in the telling.  This was one of those films where it helps to have a fellow viewer to turn to and ask, “what’s happening here?”  David Ehrlich of IndieWire, as he often does, offers a perfect summation of this film, “a whispered symphony of sense memories,” and nails it with “vague but vividly rendered.”  I also agree with Justin Chang’s observation that “This is a movie that teaches you how to watch it.”
 
Kanopy offers a lot of series from the BBC and elsewhere, and I happened to take note of Tipping the Velvet (2002, IMDB), an unapologetically lesbian historical drama set in Dickensian times and the realm of music hall entertainers, starring Keeley Hawes and Rachel Sterling, and other familiar faces such as Benedict Cumberbatch and Sally Hawkins early in their careers.  Not quite at the level of Gentleman Jack, this is a groundbreaking three-part series that remains highly watchable.
 
Fish Tank (MC-81) was one of the few films on the NYT list of the 100 best movies of this century that I hadn’t seen, so I filled in that gap.  Andrea Arnold’s film about a very angry 15-year-old girl living in lower-class East London is more miserabilist than similar films by Ken Loach or Mike Leigh or the Dardenne brothers.  This iteration demands our attention but does not solicit our sympathy.  As the girl, Katie Jarvis was hailed for her close-to-the-bone performance, but her subsequent history of few roles and an assault conviction suggests she was just being herself.  She’s certainly put through the ringer in this film, and returns violence for violence with misguided but justifiable spirit.  As usual, you can blame the mother, and also her seemingly-friendly boyfriend, played by a young Michael Fassbinder (alarmingly thin just after his role as Hunger striker Bobby Sands).
 
Programs turn up on Kanopy both before and after appearing on other streaming channels.  For example, multiple-Oscar winner Anora started on Hulu but is now also on Kanopy, while The Old Oak (see my review) streams only here or on the other library-based service Hoopla.  I strongly advise getting a free subscription to one or the other through your participating library, to supplement whatever other streaming channels you receive.  Another Kanopy offering I recommend is the excellent “Exhibition on Screen” series I used to sell on DVD at the Clark Museum Shop (see here to search for that, or other titles).