Year-end round-up

Between the period when critics issue Top Tens and the period when annual awards are handed out, I’ll be doing my best to catch up with the best films of 2023, from streaming channels or on DVD, and adding them to this post.

With Barbie (MC-80, Max), the question is whether Mattel has coopted Greta Gerwig or rather the reverse?  And the answer is that it doesn’t really matter, since the brainy result is so effective and entertaining, confirming Gerwig as an auteur to be followed, wherever her career may take her.  Starting with a hilarious parody of the start of 2001, this film takes its wild and wonderful way from Barbieland to La-La-Land and back again.  As “Stereotypical” Barbie and Ken, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling are outstanding, but all the other Barbies and Kens are pretty good as well, peopled by various celebrities and even some graduates of Sex Education.  Boldly pink, meticulously detailed, and comically lavish, the décor and costumes are delightfully over the top, along with music & dance routines to match.  It’s all giddy fun, the quintessence of pop art, with some serious points to make about feminism and the patriarchy.  So, is it a commercial for Mattel or a witty deconstruction?  Who cares, since the movie grossed a billion bucks, and worked out for all involved?  But I am highly unlikely to watch any more of the toy-branded blockbusters inevitably coming our way (unless Scorsese decides to direct one, ha-ha).

Instead the greatest filmmaker of my generation delivers a 3½ hour epic that mixes Western, gangster, historical, and romantic genres in the powerful but overstuffed Killers of the Flower Moon (MC-89, Apple+).  Scorsese’s adaptation of the David Grann true-crime bestseller shifts the focus from the birth of the FBI to the oil-rich Osage people, and their systematic murder by predatory white men, right around the time of the Tulsa Race Massacre in the same state.  Indigenous people are given a voice in this telling, though subsequently sidelined in a tale of crime and punishment that revolves around the white villains, with Robert DeNiro as the most duplicitously evil of the crime bosses he has portrayed for Scorsese (with more than a hint of contemporary political relevance), and Leonardo DiCaprio as the most dimwitted of his henchmen, somewhat offset by his love for his Osage wife, despite his involvement in the murder of her family members.  Lily Gladstone caught my eye in Certain Women, and her profound presence here has earned well-deserved Best Actress nominations.  As if to sum up his distinguished career at eighty, Scorsese flourishes all his strengths except concision, and packs recollection of so many of his films into this valedictory that it feels like a career retrospective in one big film.  So many good things, yet so protracted I wished it were a series (like Deadwood) rather than a single film.  Let’s hope it’s not the last masterpiece from the maestro.

For another glowing performance from Lily Gladstone, track down The Unknown Country (MC-82, Mubi).  She is the lodestone that holds together the heterogeneous elements of Morrisa Maltz’s debut feature.  After the death of the grandmother she’s been caring for, Gladstone hops in her old Cadillac and heads out on a roadtrip to recapture her ancestor’s early life.  She drives from Minnesota through the Dakotas to a cousin’s wedding on the Lakota reservation, and then follows grandma’s own wanderlust down to Texas.  That quest anchors disparate semi-documentary scenes amidst grand and degraded landscapes, finding humanity in unexpected corners of Trumpland, as heard on the car radio.  With echoes of Nomadland and Terrence Malick, Maltz mixes lush and hardscrabble imagery with Gladstone’s watchful depth, in this all-over-the-map but deeply-felt film.

 

Oppenheimer (MC-89, Peacock) is all that, and deserving of the many awards it will accumulate, an important story boldly and brilliantly told.  Cillian Murphy is uncanny (as different from Tommy Shelby as humanly possible) impersonating the title character, the brilliant physicist and “father of the atomic bomb.”  Oppy despaired of how his child was used and abused, only to lose his security clearance to a McCarthy-era kangaroo court.  A sterling supporting cast contributes a constellation of shining performances, too many to enumerate.  I might have wished that writer-director Christopher Nolan was not so given to bending and fracturing time, but hey, that’s his brand, and uncertainty of position in time and space was one of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s principles, along with Heisenberg himself in a cameo.  My comprehension was aided by watching documentaries, Day After Trinity before and the dvd bonus To End All War after, to keep up with and confirm Nolan’s veracity in the telling.  I don’t need to tell you what the film is about, but just to add that it is dazzling, engrossing, and truthful.  Let the laurels be bestowed.

In style and setting, The Holdovers (MC-82, Peacock) is a 1970s throwback that revisits two of director Alexander Payne’s great early films, Election for its high school setting and Sideways for cranky star Paul Giamatti.  Here the school is a New England prep (filmed partly at Deerfield Academy, where co-lead Dominic Sessa was discovered), and Giamatti is a cantankerous old teacher of ancient history.  He’s flunked the son of a major donor and hence been assigned the duty of watching over the students whose parents have abandoned them over the Christmas holiday.  His charges are soon reduced to one troubled boy, watched over by the school’s Black cafeteria manager (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, deserving of her supporting actress nominations), whose son recently graduated from the school but, lacking money for a college deferment, was killed in Vietnam.  The three eventually take off for a revelatory holiday roadtrip to Boston.  Working from David Hemingson’s semi-autobiographical script, Payne is somewhat less sardonic and more sentimental than usual, conspiring to produce a new breed of "Christmas classic," with a pleasant mix of wit and heart.

With American Fiction (MC-82, MGM+), Cord Jefferson debuted as director and won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.  Oscar-nominated Jeffrey Wright is the film’s center of gravity (and levity) as a college professor who writes erudite novels based on Greek classics.  Angry at his publisher’s demand to write Black, he composes a satiric ghetto novel that meets unexpected success.  Meanwhile, he has returned from the distant West Coast to his well-educated and well-to-do family, and their homes in Boston and on the South Shore.  With mother, brother, and sister (all well-portrayed), he seethes with barely repressed anger (derived from his father, whose prior suicide overshadows all) in a quietly comic manner.  A welcoming neighbor lady might soften his rough edges, but he’s just too abrasive.  A movie deal leads to the film we are watching, which is given three different endings in a meta twist that definitely worked for me, preposterously funny, clinching the film’s theme of the twists and turns of blaxploitation.

In Fallen Leaves (MC-86, Mubi), the accomplished Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki deploys a minimalist style reminiscent of Bresson or Fassbinder, but overflowing with humor and humanity.  This understated rom-com about two deadpan characters leading dreary lives is spare and constrained in its 81 minutes, but potent in its nonstop cinephile allusions and precisely-chosen pop songs, which serve to universalize the poignancy of this unlikely pairing.  She’s a lonely fortysomething moving between various menial jobs, he’s a drunk of similar age working in railroad yards or construction sites.  They meet in passing, then connect but lose touch, meet again but have a falling out, before a crisis brings them together again.  Though the underclass social milieu may be compared to a Loach or Dardenne film, the whole is infused with a wry wit that shines through, even when the woman turns on the radio and it’s always playing news from the war in Ukraine, of particular interest since Russia also borders Finland (no trace of that country’s high happiness quotient here).  If you ever sample the Mubi channel, don’t miss this film. 

Another worthwhile film from my brief stint back on Mubi was Full Time (MC-83), a social realist story in an action film style, mundane but jacked up, about a stressed-to-the-max single mother with two young children commuting from a distance to her job as head chambermaid at a ritzy Paris hotel during a rolling series of transit strikes.  Eric Gravel’s film also plays against type in starring Laure Calamy, who is more familiar in romantic comedy roles, but the desperation that draws laughs there is effectively distraught here.  The film hurtles through a transformative week of her life, demonstrating all the hurdles she must surmount to make a living and a life for her kids, a mission that may seem impossible. 

 
I certainly appreciated the authenticity and genuine feeling of Past Lives (MC-94, Kanopy), a rendering of real life that resonates through many lives.  First-time writer-director Celine Song tells her own story of emigrating from Korea to Canada at 12, then to New York at 24, but with the titular flourish of in-yun, a Korean concept of reincarnation where people are connected from one life to the next.  So at 36, the central character so wonderfully incarnated by Greta Lee confronts the past she left behind, when her childhood boyfriend (now the soulful Teo Yoo) comes impulsively from Seoul to NYC, where she lives with her writer-husband (John Magaro).  For a couple days of walks and talks around Dumbo and the East Village, they explore their might-have-beens and never-weres, in meticulously written and shot scenes of buried feelings and bruising disappointments among well-intentioned people.  I was involved with these characters and settings throughout, but in the end I liked the film without swooning over it.

Judy Blume is having a moment in her mid-80s, in the news because her YA books are being banned again, with a good new documentary on Amazon, and after fifty years an excellent adaptation of Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret (MC-84, Starz) by writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig.  As a follow-up to her striking debut, The Edge of Seventeen, this might have been called The Edge of Twelve, about a sixth-grader negotiating a move from NYC to NJ in 1970, and meeting a new group of friends eagerly anticipating breasts, menstruation, and first kisses.  Abby Ryder Fortson is outstanding as Margaret, charming and believable, and matched by Rachel McAdams as her mother and Kathy Bates as grandmother.  Besides physical maturation, Margaret is on a quest for religion, since her parents’ mixed marriage led to family ruptures and an agnostic upbringing.  It’s all funny and truthful, and rivals Pen15 as an exploration of the tween girl experience.  I expected modest entertainment, but got one of the best and most enjoyable films of the year, just a missing scene or two from perfection.

Sofia Coppola delivers another of her bird-in-a-gilded-cage films in Priscilla (MC-79, Max), adapted sympathetically from Priscilla Presley’s memoir Elvis and Me.  It’s an effective counterpoint to the previous year’s Elvis, without a note of his music.  Instead the focus is on the title character, wonderfully embodied by Cailee Spaeny, from the 14-year-old ninth-grader he (played with some plausibility by the towering Jacob Elordi) met and groomed while still a soldier in Germany, to when he later brought her over to Graceland in semi-chaste intimacy bordering on captivity, finally marrying her and fathering her child, until she ultimately awakes from the drugged dream of their relationship.  Clearly the story is told from her perspective but - as is Coppola’s wont - through surfaces and styles rather than interiority.  We see Priscilla/Cailee go from adorable little teen to pompadour-ed arm-candy doll to 70s mad housewife letting her hair down.  We don’t know what she’s thinking, but we do know how her look is changing, which is emblematic of her life and times. 

I seem to preface my response to any Wes Anderson film with the proviso that I’m no fan (except for Fantastic Mr. Fox and French Express) and Asteroid City (MC-75, AMZ) is no exception, another all-star piece of whimsy most notable for the cast list.  He must be able to lure A-listers, in addition to his regulars like Jason Schwartzman and Tilda Swinton, by promising them only a day or two of shooting on a stage set in Spain.  So, as usual it’s a very mixed bag of bits.  Some incongruous jokes land, and some do not, but nothing much holds together, in this story of a young people’s science fair in 1955 at a remote desert town, famous for the ancient asteroid that hit there and the more recent testing of atomic bombs, presented as a play within a play.  It moves fast, with clipped dialogue and rapid set changes, but the hypertrophic invention sometimes drags as the viewer tries to keep up.  I didn’t hate the movie, but can offer no recommendation.

By now the Oscars have been awarded – with the anticipated and deserving sweep by Oppenheimer – and there are still some nominees I have yet to see, so I will be catching up with them as I can, including two that arrive on Hulu in March that will provide the finishing touch to my long composite review of recent offerings on that streaming channel. 

Of Paramount importance

Taking a two-month special offer for Paramount+ (i.e. Showtime) in particular to see the new Kelly Reichardt film Showing Up (MC-85), which was rather disappointing but I did catch some other worthwhile viewing on the channel.  Despite a friend’s recommendation, the Metacritic rating, my admiration for Michelle Williams, and for some of Reichardt’s earlier films (most notably First Cow), I could find no point of connection with this one.  If this story of self-involved artists in Portland OR is supposed to be comical, it was lost on me.  If it was supposed to be serious, I didn’t get the point.  Was it deadpan satire, or homegrown low-key drama?  Beats me.  I was relieved when it ended, though none the wiser.  [Streaming pro tip: many of these Showtime movies turned up later on the free library service Kanopy.]
 
Nicole Holofcener started in the film business working on Woody Allen films, her stepfather being his producer.  And after six features of her own and uncountable television episodes, she remains a sort of female Woody Allen, without the personal baggage.  I’ve liked all her films, but You Hurt My Feelings (MC-80) particularly drives home the comparison, dissecting the anxieties and impostures of well-off Manhattan intellectuals, or wannabes.  An author and writing instructor (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) overhears her psychotherapist husband (Tobias Menzies) disparaging the manuscript of her second book, which he has praised to her face.  He has his own professional woes, as his patients complain that he does nothing to help them.  Her sister and brother-in-law have comparable midlife questions about the worth of their work.  For each, self-esteem is extreme but fragile.  For us, their troubles are amusingly slight, but familiar, authentic, and understandable.
 
Three recent independents caught my eye while on the channel, all well worth viewing. For Montana Story (MC-73), Haley Lu Richardson was the draw for me, but Owen Teague matched her nicely, playing siblings who were once exceptionally close, as they would have to be growing up on such a remote ranch.  But they’ve had no contact for seven years, until their bullying father has a stroke, and each returns for differing reasons to the magnificent landscape they’ve left behind.  The writer-director pair Scott McGehee and David Siegel deliver an intimate family drama under the Big Sky, well worth seeing.
 
Eliza Scanlen is excellent as The Starling Girl (MC-78), a devout but deviating 17-year-old in a fundamentalist community in Kentucky.  She falls for a charismatic young pastor (Lewis Pullman, from Lessons in Chemistry), with predictable but still wrenching results.  I caught a whiff of The Scarlet Letter in writer-director Laurel Parmet’s tale, and with the film’s tremendous specificity and immediacy, I was thoroughly won over by her debut feature.
 
Savannah Leaf goes from volleyball Olympian in 2012 to writer-director with Earth Mama (MC-84), an Olympian sort of debut itself.  This is an empathic, up-close-and-personal portrait of a young Black woman, very pregnant and with two children in foster care, while she is in recovery and going through the hoops necessary to recover them.  There’s no father around, nor parents, but there is a sisterhood, with cautionary and redemptive influences.  As the central character, Tia Nomore is absolutely riveting, and the film does its best to see the world through her eyes and walk in her shoes, to question her choices but to wonder what any other person might do in her place.  Intensely immersive, this is a film that represents the unrepresented.  Born in Britain but growing up in the Bay Area, where the film in set, Leaf cites Ken Loach as an influence, and that shows to good effect.
 
Having just reread the book with great delight, I was glad for another chance to see Mansfield Park (1999, MC-71).  I had very fond memories of Frances O’Connor in the lead, but this time around I was struck by her difference from the Fanny Price of the book, much more like Jane Austen herself than her meek, pious heroine.  The insertion of anachronistic sex and politics did not bother me as much as the transformation of Fanny into a lively character in the vein of Austen’s Emma or Elizabeth.  Embeth Davidtz and the rest of the cast were closer to the characters in the book.  Patricia Rozema’s adaptation and direction made for an interesting study in transformation, if not in fidelity to the text.
 
If you liked Catastrophe or Fleabag – and really, how could you not? – then I’d advise you to check out Colin from Accounts (MC-83), an 8-episode half-hour series from real-life Aussie couple Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer.  Their evident chemistry powers the show, as he plays a forty-something owner of a brew pub, and she’s a just-turning-thirty medical intern.  “Colin” is their name for the dog that occasions their odd-couple meet-cute.  There’s a lively assortment of coworkers and exes who surround and comment on their developing relationship.  The out-there comedy deepens not just into romance but drama as well.
 
Back in the day, I enjoyed several Thomas Mallon books and have since read his essays when I come across them.  I hadn’t read his novel Fellow Travelers (MC-76), but the association (and a favorable review or two) led me to sample an episode.  The decades-spanning political backdrop and the chemistry of the two male lovers, in the performances of Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey, led me to watch all eight episodes of Ron Nyswaner’s well-made show, which plays as a companion piece to “Angels in America.”  Apart from the occasional graphic sex sequences (a Showtime staple), the series provides a telling look at the persecuted gay subculture of DC (and later SF) from the days of McCarthy and Cohn to the Reagan years, the historical record woven through a long, fraught relationship between a married diplomat and a spiritually-tormented activist.  I wasn’t entirely sold on the time-hopping approach of the series (not sure whether it follows or departs from the original novel), but as a whole the show hangs together and sustains interest in an impressive manner (unlike most Showtime series).
 
The Curse (MC-76) has been getting a lot of attention, but I wrote it off halfway through the first episode as just too dragged out to sit through, then went back to give it another chance.  Still no go for me, and the end of my interest in Paramount+ for now, but if you should sample the channel sometime, do not miss Couples Therapy, in my view the best Showtime series ever.

[P.S.  I should note that the five films at the top of this review were subsequently available for streaming on Kanopy.]

Netflix redux

After a month off, there was plenty to bring me back to Netflix for another couple of months at year’s end, starting with the sixth and final season of The Crown (MC-78).  While the series has lost some of the surprise and depth that had me considering a place among my all-time favorites, it remains a solidly satisfying show.  But where it once vied with Succession as an incisive and informative excursion into the realms of insane privilege, it’s gone a bit soft, less scathing satire than domestic melodrama, more tabloid recapitulation than historical perspective.  On the other hand, the production values are still jaw-dropping, and the acting excellent across the board, led by the three Elizabeths – Claire Foy, Olivia Colman, and Imelda Staunton – who get to share one scene at the end.  In this last season, they are joined by Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana, who manages to make me interested in her story, in a way I assuredly was not at the time.  But that, and the subsequent story of Prince William and Kate, and the relative lack of interest in the audiences between the Queen and PM Blair, drain away some of the more trenchant historical perspective (and wit) of earlier seasons.  Nonetheless, as the focus returns to Elizabeth at last, in the magnificent portrayal by Imelda Staunton, the series concludes on a somber high note.
 
With Rustin (MC-68), the Obamas remain quality producers of Netflix programs, with a film designed to recover the accomplishments of Bayard Rustin as a key figure in the civil rights movement, principally as the main organizer of the pivotal 1963 March on Washington.  As a “commie fag” he was pushed to the background of that event, and its subsequent history.  In fact, he was a Quaker, union man, and indefatigable community organizer, recognized by another when Barack bestowed a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom on him, before offering this memorial. Colman Domingo is outstanding in the title role, with Jeffrey Wright, Chris Rock, and several alumni of The Wire playing other movement leaders.  Director George C. Wolfe follows Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom with another fine effort.  Perhaps a few rough edges are smoothed over, and the treatment of MLK’s iconic speech a little hokey, but this is a worthy portrait of an admirable human being.  Complementarily, I also recommend the documentary Brother Outsider: The Live of Bayard Rustin (2003, Kanopy).
 
I wonder what drew the Obamas to Leave the World Behind (MC-68), which hardly seems worthy of the Higher Ground brand.  Barack must have liked the novel it was based on.  They attracted a quality cast, to be sure, with Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali.  And writer-director Sam Esmail earned some credit for Mr. Robot.  The film surely has its moments, but the whole is scattershot, overlong, and unresolved.  Roberts channels her inner Karen, and Hawke is a soulful weakling; they and their two teens rent a super-deluxe Airbnb on Long Island, amidst some unknown disruption of all electronic communications.  The owner of the house (Ali) arrives unexpectedly with his daughter (a surprisingly good Myha’la), and the dimensions of the disaster ramify, with oil tankers and airliners crashing onto the beach.  In this isolated setting, without communication, they all struggle to figure out what is going on, and the two families interact uneasily.  Is this the end of the world, and who is behind it all?  Don’t expect to get the answer, just various thrills and chills, with a bit of sardonic humor for seasoning.
 
May December (MC-85) is a film I can’t pretend to have understood, after reading reviews that talked about its comic or satiric aspects, which did not really register on me at all.  Todd Haynes’ film is enigmatic and compelling, but I never found the key to its tone and meaning.  Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman deliver strong performances that are equally destabilizing.  Moore is the matriarch of a well-to-do Savannah family, who has invited Portman, an actress preparing to play her in a film, to visit and research the role of the 36-year-old woman who had an affair with a 13-year-old boy, and became tabloid fodder when she had his child in prison.  Now the pair are long-married, with twins graduating from high school, as is a grandson from her previous marriage.  But nothing is quite as it seems, for any of the characters.  I got the Persona-like aspect of shifting identities between the two women, and watched with interest, even when I didn’t really get the whole story.  The film itself has a shifting identity, and my response was equally shifty, but I’m not inclined to watch again to figure it all out.
 
With Maestro (MC-77) Bradley Cooper makes a very good film that might have bitten off more than it can chew, trying to span thirty years and more in the life of a many-faceted character.  Cooper writes, directs, and stars as Leonard Bernstein in this lively and scrupulous biopic.  Carey Mulligan almost steals the show as Bernstein’s wife Felicia.  Scene by scene, the settings and characters are strongly evoked, by both the main and supporting players, but I was left with some uncertainty what it all added up to.  After a retrospective intro, the film races headlong through Lenny’s life from his conducting debut at 25 through the many manifestations of his brilliant career, while tracing the vicissitudes of his life with Felicia and their three children, balanced by his numerous affairs with men.  Cooper effectively channels Bernstein’s passionate creative energy, while Mulligan beautifully captures Felicia’s soulfulness, and the location scenes at Tanglewood give the film a nice local flavor.
 
It Ain’t Over (MC-79) is a remarkable sports documentary, in that it could win my admiration for a New York Yankee.  As I was growing up, the Yanks would outdistance my hometown Indians every year, except 1954 when Cleveland won 111 games only to be swept by the New York Giants in the World Series.  Through all those years the hated Yanks were backstopped by a stubby, goofy-looking fireplug named Lawrence Berra, but universally known as Yogi, winner of 3 MVPs and 10 WS rings, which he later added to as manager.  This film is a family affair, produced by his granddaughter and featuring sons and nieces, as well as home movies of the beloved grandparents, married 65 years.  Sean Mullin directs, but the driving force of the progeny’s project is to refurbish the rather clownish image Yogi retains in popular culture, not only to reinforce (convincingly) the prowess and acumen of his baseball career but moreover his wisdom, humor, and love as paterfamilias.  This doc made me respond to Berra as a real paesano, roughly my father’s age and likewise the son of an immigrant bricklayer, growing up on Dago Hill in the Midwest and humbly transcending to stardom.
 
Radical Wolfe (MC-65) is a well-put-together survey of the life and work of Tom Wolfe, based on a profile by Michael Lewis, who is one of several talking heads who offer commentary, but do not overshadow Wolfe himself, in decades of television talk show appearances.  There’s a rich visual archive to keep the story moving.  I was a big fan of Wolfe from the origins of so-called New Journalism through Bonfire of the Vanities, but thereafter his Southern reactionary manners became more apparent, and he feuded with my man Updike, so my interest cooled.  But much of this documentary was quite evocative for me.
 

Before pausing my Netflix subscription again, I caught one more highly-recommendable show, the second season of Love on the Spectrum (MC-83), following upon the two original seasons from Australia, which altogether rank with my favorite tv of the past several years.  “Reality” dating shows are ubiquitous on the tube, but I was never tempted to watch any until this one, about a cohort with whom I identify.  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.  In this season, I particularly relished that some of the dates took place at sites familiar to me, like the Crane Estate in Ipswich or Lincoln Park Conservatory in Chicago, reinforcing the feeling that these characters are just where I have been.
 
(Several Netflix comedy specials are covered below in the previous post).

Comedy's special

Can you even call them stand-up comedians anymore?  More like solo stage performers revealing and reveling in their authentic traumas and joys, kinks and quirks, delving deep with faux spontaneity.  There is plenty of daily political humor on tv, but these days most comedy specials seem very personal, and polished to a sheen.  Self-revelation, apparently uncensored, is decidedly the mode of comedy these days.
 
Until the just-released show Mike Birbiglia: The Old Man & the Pool, I’d never watched any of his stand-up-sit-down-lie-down-roll-around routines (NFX), even though I enjoyed his two feature films, Sleepwalk with Me and Don’t Think Twice.  After watching the new show, I remedied the lapse immediately by watching his three previous Netflix specials.  Humor is relative, of course, but I find Birbiglia consistently hilarious (and extremely skilled), so I’ll be recommending him to anyone who will listen. 
 
After Colbert introduced the forthcoming host of the show that follows his, I checked out two Taylor Tomlinson routines (NFX), Quarter-Life Crisis and Look at You.  Both are adept and funny, with the latter being significantly more raunchy and edgy, as a good Christian girl gets naughtier and naughtier.
 
Looking forward to his return to stand-up, I jumped all over the new release Trevor Noah: Where Was I (NFX), but honestly went 25 minutes with barely a smile, let alone a laugh.  But after that, he performed more the way I’ve enjoyed in the past, with great impersonations and sound effects.  The show was taped at the Fox Theater in Detroit, an insanely large and ornate old movie theater, restored to its original 1920’s “glamour,” a garish mélange of various orientalist motifs.  Trevor is lost on that huge stage, and the direction is by the numbers, but he remains a funny and talented guy.
 
Watched back-to-back, Gary Gulman: Born on 3^rd Base (MAX) couldn’t be more different, filmed in an intimate venue and infinitely more personal (and political) in approach, which had me laughing and admiring throughout.  Along with his previous routine on Max, The Great Depresh, I strongly recommend his work, appreciating that he considers his ideal audience to be librarians.
 
A New Yorker profile led me to Leo Reich: Literally Who Cares!? (MAX), but couldn’t make me care too much about the Gen-Z queer perspective on life.  Nonetheless he’s a buoyant performer who sells his act effectively.
 
Looking for gender balance, and seeing Beth Stelling: If You Didn’t Want Me Then (NFX) head someone’s list of the best comedy of the year, I gave it a chance.  I appreciated her taping in her hometown of Dayton OH and telling very personal stories, but it was a little raw for me, even though I’m no prude.  Definitely derived some chuckles from the set, however.
 
Among older comics, Jim Gaffigan: Dark Pale (AMZ) is amusing enough, even though it starts with death and diarrhea jokes and otherwise does not break new ground.
 
As far as I’m concerned Birbiglia and Gulman are the names to remember for non-celebrity stand-up routines, both current and past.  Not that there aren’t other great ones out there, but these have caught my eye lately.

C.C. Rider

While toggling other channels on and off, I’m going to ride my Criterion Channel charter subscription into the sunset of my streaming days.  It’s one place I can always find something worth watching.  Here’s my latest see-see diary of the channel’s offerings.  (See also.)
 
Criterion’s streaming premieres are always high quality, and few could be better than The Blue Caftan (MC-83), a Moroccan feature by Maryam Touzani that is as beautiful and sensual as the title garment.  The film is a chamber piece starring three handsome and accomplished actors, a husband and wife who run a small tailoring shop making traditional dresses with exquisite handiwork, and the apprentice they take on.  The husband is a master craftsman and the wife runs the shop commandingly, but she is ill so they need the help.  The developing triangle seems obvious at first, but its quiet progress is full of surprises, though the ending comes across as foreordained.  Intimate and immersive, full of the sights and sounds of an unfamiliar culture, honest and deep about personal relations, unfolding with the splendor of the fabrics so lovingly portrayed, this film is a treasurable raiment.
 
Another outstanding new film is Afire (MC-82), a Golden Bear winner from the great German director Christian Petzold.  Out of partiality, I am perhaps too quick to identify a film I like as Rohmer-esque, so I was happy to see an interview in which Petzold made explicit this film’s dependence on Rohmer (and Chekhov).  Four young-ish singles meet adventitiously at a vacation home on the Baltic seaside: a dickish writer, an ingratiating photographer, a mysterious smiling beauty (Petzold regular Paula Beer), and a hunky lifeguard (excuse me – “rescue swimmer”).  Who will sleep with whom?  Who’s the killjoy?  What’s going on beneath the surface?  What’s happening as a nearby wildfire encroaches?  All these questions float in the air like ash, as the story veers from comedy into melodrama into ???  Not an ideal beach vacation, but a trip well worth taking.
 
The Eight Mountains (MC-78) is based on a popular Italian novel of the same name, and directed by the Belgian couple Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch.  Two boys meet during a summer in the Italian Alps, one a city boy from Turin and the other the only child left in a nearly-abandoned mountain village.  After bonding in the magnificent landscape, they meet only once as teenagers, but then fifteen years later, after the death of the city boy’s estranged father, he returns from Nepal to rebuild a remote ruined stone hut left by the father, who in effect had adopted the other boy.  The young men re-bond in the process of construction, despite their differences.  The mountain scenery is spectacular, though widescreen is avoided to focus on the personal (compare to another notable Criterion film, Godland), and the story takes abrupt transitions in stride.  Slow and lengthy, the film requires patience but offers rewards.
 
Joyland (MC-82) is an intense and intimate family drama set in Lahore.  This debut feature by Saim Sadiq focuses on the gentle sad-eyed younger brother, who is a disappointment to the rigid family patriarch, for not having a job while his wife works and for failing to provide a male heir, while his older brother has four daughters, all living in the same house.  The younger brother finally gets a job, but can’t reveal that it’s as back-up dancer to a trans female performer, with whom he develops a deepening relationship.  A well-acted film with many humorous elements, it’s a scathing look at patriarchy and misogyny, tragically suppressing both the wife and the trans lover.  Immersed in an extended Pakistani family, with an ironic title referencing an amusement park adjacent to the action, this film is continuously surprising and revelatory.
 
Rare is the month when one of Criterion’s new or featured collections does not offer novel viewing pleasure, sometimes quite unexpected.  For example, a Linda Darnell collection did not set my heart to racing, but I took a look at Forever Amber (1947), a film from the year of my birth that I’d heard of only because the source bestseller was infamously condemned by the Legion of Decency.  The English Civil War and the Restoration of Charles II (George Sanders) is an era not commonly depicted in film, so that’s a point of interest.  In the same way as Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face, Darnell brazenly uses her sexual allure to rise in status and wealth, but after the implementation of the Production Code, Otto Preminger was required to elide the exact nature of her appeal, as she rises to be the king’s consort.  But otherwise, Preminger brings a lot of his trademark realism to the proceedings.
 
That was enough to lead me to another pulpy Darnell/Preminger film Fallen Angel (1945), where she is a sultry waitress and Dana Andrews is a drifting huckster who falls hard for her.  I followed up with her breakthrough film Star Dust (1940), when as a 17-year-old she portrays a character much like herself, an ingenue from Texas who longs for Hollywood and attracts a talent agent, who then shies away when he finds out how young she actually is.  Apparently, Darnell in a career slump at the age of 41, was watching this film on late-night tv when she fell asleep and died in a fire.
 
Another oldie collection that caught my eye was “Pre-Code Divas.”  I’d seen all the Stanwycks (reviewed here) but was happy to sample several other naughty early talkies.  Since they’ll all be disappearing at the end of this month, and are of more historical than aesthetic interest, I offer only brief comments.  No Man of Her Own (1932) is the only pairing of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, years before they became a Hollywood power couple.  He’s a shifty card sharp and she’s a small-town librarian itching for excitement, and inevitably sparks fly.  Three on a Match (1932) follows three women from grade school to adulthood, when one of them goes over to the dark side, abandoning her marriage and young son for drink and sex, while the other two try to rescue her.  Joan Blondell stars, with Ann Dvorak as the bad one, and Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart in early roles.  For Safe in Hell (1931), Dorothy Mackaill plays a New Orleans prostitute who flees a murder rap by escaping to Tortuga, from which there is no extradition, but plenty of danger from predatory men.  Each of these films is interesting as a time capsule, with the kind of seedy glamour that (leaving aside Noir-ish femmes fatales) wouldn’t be seen again till the Seventies, when bad girls came back into fashion, though in the Thirties they were reliably punished in the end.
 
Among more recent revivals, I was happy to catch up with Entre Nous (1983), a film by Diane Kurys starring Isabelle Huppert and Miou-Miou.  I had no recollection of seeing it back in the day, but was quite impressed with this story based on the lives of her parents.  Huppert is an interned Jewish woman in 1942, saved by a French guard who falls for her.  Ten years later, she meets another mother at her daughter’s school, and they develop an intense relationship, part business and part romantic, which overshadows their marriages.  Edifying and engrossing.
 
I had pleasant memories of Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), which were confirmed on re-viewing.  Kathleen Turner is excellent as the title character, who faints on stage when named the queen of her 25^th reunion and wakes up as a high school senior, where she’s going with her unsatisfactory husband-to-be, Nicholas Cage in an overly-mannered but effectively-annoying performance.  The whole remains funny and touching, with several stars-to-be in subsidiary roles.
 
Documentaries are another strength of Criterion.  Day After Trinity (1981) made excellent background viewing for Oppenheimer and The Reagan Show (2017, MC-66), composed entirely of archival footage from the first presidency predominantly staged for tv, is highly but subtly revealing about how American politics got from there to here.
 
Some of these Criterion films disappear with their collection after a period of months – though many return to the channel in another curated collection – so I can’t vouch that you will find all the films commented on at all times.  My next deep dive will be into a new Ozu collection, many I’ve seen multiple times, but some I’m never seen anywhere else.  That’s Criterion for you, the gold standard when it comes to streaming channels.
 
The free library service Kanopy is another channel where you can discover old or new films unavailable elsewhere (with some overlap with Criterion).  Following a couple of retrospective threads, I was happy to find two films I wanted to see again.
 
I forget the impulse that led me to look for Rob Roy (1995), but I was glad to revisit it.  I remembered it as better than Braveheart and it remains so, with Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange generating some old-fashioned Highland heat.
 
Upon reviewing, Oscar-winner Cinema Paradiso (1988, MC-80) wasn’t heavenly, but more purgatorial than infernal.  Smarmy and manipulative at times, forced or flat-footed, derivative or self-important, it still has its charms for anyone susceptible to the magic of movies, with a clever and profound ending that redeems the sappiness of the whole.  This time around, I was avidly aware of specifically Sicilian local color.

And on Kanopy, I found a more recent film I’d been searching to stream for a while now – My Donkey, My Lover, and I (MC-72), a charming trifle about a comically infatuated woman (Laure Calamy from Call My Agent!) in pursuit of her married lover, on a donkey trek through the Cévennes following the path of R.L. Stevenson.  This mixture of rom-com and travelogue is attractive if lightweight, with the donkey emerging as wise confidante to the desperate woman.  It won’t change your life, but will make two hours pass pleasantly.

One more golden oldie had been on my watchlist for years, for forgotten reasons, so when I stumbled upon Tomorrow is Forever (1946, AMZ), I was happy to see this sub-Sirkian melodrama starring Claudette Colbert and Orson Welles, where the latter enlists in WWI and leaves his new bride behind.  In the war he is crippled and defaced, and unwillingly healed by a humane German doctor.  Meanwhile Colbert has his son and remarries her boss at the munition plant.  Twenty years later, Welles returns with a new identity, as a noted Austrian chemist at the plant, and with a 7-year-old girl in tow, daughter of the good doctor who has been murdered by the Nazis.  It’s Natalie Wood in her first credited (and creditable) role!  Ah, that’s why it was on my list, from when I was on a Natalie kick.  Glad to see it, and to immerse in its period flavor.
 

Tasting the Apple

Back on AppleTV+ for another taste of their offerings, I follow up on my previous surveys here and here and here.  It’s definitely a channel worth sampling from time to time, though hardly capacious enough to maintain a year-round subscription.

Ted Lasso (MC-73) may have become a bit bloated by the third season, its half-hour episodes effectively doubling in duration, but retained many of its charms (see earlier reviews here and here).  By now the show was predictably unpredictable, and somewhat insufferable in its incessant would-be life-lessons, but still with a score of appealing characters, and a steady stream of witty pop cultural references.  The on-pitch action was certainly more impressive with a bigger budget.  But the show concluded with curtain call after curtain call, which outlasted my ovation and detracted from my retrospective enjoyment.  I won’t review plot developments or character resolutions, but just exemplify my equivocations in one scene.  In the penultimate episode, Ted’s mother shows up unexpectedly and she’s played by the mother from Freaks & Geeks, of blessed memory.  But she’s too much for Ted, and at dinner in the pub, he flees her presence to go pretend to take a turn at pinball; Mae the pub owner sees him frozen there and goes over to recite an entire Philip Larkin poem without acknowledging its source, which would have been all right if she had just quoted the famous first line, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” but as an appropriation just goes on too long (like a concluding bit filched from The Sound of Music).  High-spirited and good-spirited as it remained, I was not sorry to see it end.  Some spin-off series seems inevitable, but won’t be a much-watch for me, my English football enthusiasm having turned to Welcome to Wrexham.

I was looking forward to the second season of Swagger (MC-79), as I said after the first, and it did not disappoint.  Creator Reggie Rock Bythewood could easily have called this series Love & Basketball, if his talented wife Gina Prince-Bythewood hadn’t already made a great film of that name.  But maybe he’d reverse the terms, since Swagger’s most distinctive feature is the authentic and immersive quality of its on-court action, which is not at all to depreciate its Friday Night Lights model as a family and community drama.  Most of the characters return from the first season, having leapt from 8^th grade to senior year, winning several championships in the interval and now at a lily-white prep school vying for a national high school championship.  Again the show is resolutely topical, about issues involving young athletes such as college recruitment and endorsements (this my first encounter with NIL revenue for amateurs – “Name Image Likeness”), as well as tokenism, mass incarceration, social media, and various forms of abuse.  Earnest but not sappy, offering life lessons without hammering them home, continuously engaging, this show is a hidden treasure.  I urge you to discover it, if you’re any kind of hoops fan, or even if you’re not.  
 
As my approach to bookselling has narrowed, I no longer pay attention to bestseller lists, so when Brie Larson (whom I’ve looked for since Short Term 12, not to mention her Oscar-winning turn in Room) led me to the Apple adaptation of Lessons in Chemistry (MC-68), I had no idea of how popular the novel was till I saw its 240,000 ratings on Amazon.  I suspect people invested in the book may have had more quibbles with this 8-part series than I did.  My only negative observation is how alarmingly thin Brie Larson has become (how does she play a Marvel superheroine with those twig limbs?  I don’t know, being a dedicated avoider of the MCU).  Here she plays a brilliant, unnervingly candid chemist, derailed from a Ph.D. by her adviser’s sexual assault.  She winds up as a lab tech, who develops a close working and eventually romantic relationship with the research institute’s star chemist.  After several surprise developments, she finds a new career as the host of a television cooking show.  Larson’s committed authenticity surmounts any questions of plausibility in the twists and turns of the story, which delve into sexist and racial attitudes from the Fifties, nicely articulated in a manner reminiscent of Mad Men.  The series’ concluding episode removed any reservations I may have had about its diffuse approach, by resolving the various strands convincingly.  My rating would be substantially higher than Metacritic’s average.
 
Turning to films, Flora and Son (MC-76) is John Carney’s third attempt to recapture the magic of Once, and one more tale of Irish music (and relationship) making comes close.  This time the players are a divorced young mother and her delinquent teen son.  Eve Hewson makes her troublesome character appealing, and so does Joseph Gordon-Levitt as her online SoCal guitar teacher, who literally steps through her laptop screen for a romantic duet.  Meanwhile music provides an avenue of connection with her grumpy son.  Once more, melody brings people together in unexpected harmony.
 
Two canny conmen confront each other in The Pigeon Tunnel (MC-79), Errol Morris behind the camera and David Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) in front, sparring around the elusive truth of the latter’s life, as a spy and bestselling novelist, but particularly as the son of another conman.  Derived from Cornwell’s memoir of the same title, and based on a recollection of his sketchy father, the metaphor is driven home by dramatization and repeated imagery, to complement the “interrotron” interviews with Cornwall in a library of mirrors, piecing together shards of truth and make-believe.  The beguiling web-weaving includes illustrative clips from film & tv adaptations of le Carré novels.
 
I was induced to give Fingernails (MC-63) a look by the presence of Jessie Buckley, along with Jeremy Allen White and Riz Ahmed, but nothing could induce me to watch to the end of this inert treatment of a ridiculous premise.
 
Before letting Apple lapse, I’ll be starting the third season of Slow Horses in December (my rec for first two here) and hoping for an early streaming release date for Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. 
 
HBO has been demoted to Max by media villain David Zaslav and is no longer a good streaming channel (let alone essential - you can always watch John Oliver on YouTube), so it’s only worth a postscript here.  It’s unlikely that HBO documentaries will sustain their former quality and range, most reduced to celebrations of celebrity.  Case in point: Albert Brooks: Defending My Life (MC-72), which could have been another My Dinner with Andre, as Brooks and director Rob Reiner, friends for sixty years, talk over his career at an empty restaurant table.  There are many enjoyable tv & movie clips and the occasional personal revelation, but a surfeit of encomia from other comedians.  I’m a fan myself, and happy to revisit his success, but it would have been better to let the man – and the work – speak for himself.  And a roast would be more fun than repeated toasts.
 
Alexandra Pelosi may derive some celebrity from her mother, but she continues to carve out a good career with highly personal documentaries.  In The Insurrectionist Next Door (MC-tbd), she visits and directly confronts convicted J6-ers to find out what was on their minds when they stormed the Capitol and how they feel about Trump now.  The film is amusing and instructive, if ultimately dispiriting.
 
On the upside, HBO is now running a second season of Julia (MC-76), which pairs interestingly with Lessons in Chemistry in chronicling the development of cooking shows on early tv.  It also pairs with Happy Valley to demonstrate Sarah Lancashire’s range.  The first season took me by surprise, but the second seems more wobbly, unsure in its focus and purpose, but still engaging and amusing.  By the fourth episode, when the second season of The French Chef goes into production, the show seemed to regain its mojo and now I look forward to the rest.
 
One further postscript: PBS seems determined to correct my impression that their documentaries are losing some luster.  On POV, they just released Aurora’s Sunrise (MC-79), a multi-layered film about the Armenian genocide of a century ago, but with an upsetting contemporary relevance.  It’s the story of a teenager who remarkably survived the massacres to make her way to America, where she became a celebrity and starred in a lavish Hollywood film that spread word of the catastrophe.  The film recreates the story through beautiful, if horrific, animation, while intercutting surviving footage from the epic silent film and interviews with the refugee in old age.  It makes an edifying double feature with Atom Egoyan’s Ararat (reviewed here).
 

MUBI dipping

Through inadvertence I wound up with an additional month of the subscription channel MUBI, a distant third behind Criterion and Kanopy as a place to find offbeat, classic, and international fare.  MUBI doesn’t have the monthly churn of curated collections that Criterion has, but they are currently offering an Almodovar retrospective, for example.  I started my survey here, but I don’t expect MUBI to be a regular in my rotation of channels.
 
They did have one new offering that I’d been seeking for years, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004, MC-86).  Thom Andersen’s long documentary essay on the portrayal of the city in Hollywood movies is intelligent, provocative, and entertaining.  From well-known films like Chinatown, Double Indemnity, and Blade Runner to oddities like Kiss Me Deadly or a Laurel & Hardy short, he uses clips to illustrate the history of the city and its architecture, and the attendant mythmaking.  With a strong if not altogether convincing point of view, it’s a highly illuminating anthology about urban development.
 
Mubi also had a recent French film that I was happy to discover, Other People’s Children (MC-80).  Writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski has clearly been to school on the films of Rohmer and Truffaut, so she’s swell in my book.  Virginie Efira is a striking actress, previously unknown to me but apparently a major star in France, and I can certainly see why, luminous and radiant being words that come to mind.  She’s a 40ish middle school teacher, veteran of several relationships but looking for another, hearing her biological clock tick.  (Her gynecologist is played by Frederick Wiseman in an eponymous cameo, hilarious if you recognize him.)  Meeting a likely candidate at guitar class, she soon encounters his 4-year-old daughter and after a rocky start develops a close relationship with the child.  Meanwhile she advocates for a troubled favorite student, and follows her younger sister through an unexpected pregnancy.  This film is full of life as it is lived, given a special glow by subtle and big-hearted creativity.
 
In search of more Virginie Efira, I watched Sybil (2019, MC-59), though both the title character and Justine Triet’s film are a bit of a mess, and less than the sum of their parts.  She’s a therapist who wants to suspend her practice and return to the writing career she abandoned after publishing one book.  She reluctantly takes on one desperate new client, an actress played by Adele Exarchopoulos, who’s making her first film while pregnant from her leading man, who happens to be married to the director.  Her story becomes grist for the therapist’s book, and they become so enmeshed that the shrink has to accompany the actress on location, to the volcanic island of Stromboli.  A bunch of other stuff is going on, comic or melodramatic, but not much of it makes sense.
 
I found several other Efira films over on Kanopy, including In Bed with Victoria (2016, MC-58), also directed by Justine Triet, and also rather muddled, but not entirely lacking in interest.  Here she’s a single lawyer with two young daughters, and a trainwreck in both her professional and romantic lives.  Her travails are neither comic nor dramatic enough to hold the film together, and her character is similarly mixed.  But Efira remains a pleasure to watch.
 
On the upside, in An Impossible Love (2018, IMDB), adapted by Catherine Corsini from Christine Angot’s autobiographical novel of the same name, Efira credibly ages over forty years, from ingenue to grandmother.  The story is narrated by her grown daughter, and tells of their relationship over the years, from the romance that produced her through each of their tangled relationships with the mostly-absent father in question.  It’s an absorbing and provocative story, impeccably handled all round.
 
Best of all was The Sense of Wonder (2015, IMDB), which seems to be a Kanopy exclusive, but well worth seeking out.  Eric Besnard was not a filmmaker I’d even heard of before, but he certainly charmed me at first look, with Virginie Efira at her most delectable and a lovely setting on an organic pear farm in a beautiful region.  She’s a young widow with two growing children, and the bank threatening her home and livelihood.  She has a chance encounter with a mysterious stranger, who is something of an autistic savant (Benjamin Lavernhe rather more believable than Dustin Hoffman was in Rain Man).  We know where this is going, but we have a beautiful time getting there, full of wondrous imagery.  (Kanopy may well be free with your local library card.)
 
Back to recent Mubi offerings, Pacifiction (MC-75) attracted my attention with a slew of French film awards.  Directed by Albert Serra, it’s set in picturesque widescreen Tahiti and centered on the French colonial administrator played by Benoit Magimel, in a parable of paradise under imperial control.  The film is languorously paced, enigmatically dramatized, and overlong at 164 minutes, but intrigue and setting kept me watching all the way.
 
Everybody Loves Jeanne (Mubi), except maybe herself, as she sinks into depression in this pleasant enough French rom-com.  Jeanne (Blanche Gardin) has just lost her mother to suicide and her innovative do-good business to mishap and bankruptcy.  She is bedeviled by an inner voice of anxiety and self-reproach, crudely but amusingly animated by writer-director Celine Devaux.  In Lisbon to sell her mother’s flat to stave off financial ruin, Jeanne’s immobilized except for a couple of flirtations that may lead her up from the depths.
 
Passages (MC-79) is a new Mubi production from director Ira Sachs, about an unconventional love triangle.  In what seems like a scathing self-portrait, Franz Rogowski plays an arrogant, self-obsessed film director – married to Ben Whishaw – who falls into a relationship with a woman (Adele Exarchopoulos), heedlessly doing damage all round.  The sex is graphic but the motivations are mystifying, as everyone suffers from the director’s whims and confusion.  Hard to see the appeal, of the main character or of the film.  Not altogether bad, but not good either.
 
On Mubi there are numerous films well worth seeing that I have already seen, so my round-up is skewed.  The service is worth dipping into from time to time, but not retaining on a continuous basis.
 

Back to Netflix

After six months without Netflix, I’d built up a substantial list of shows to watch, which warranted resuming subscription for a month or two.  After my previous drop-by, here’s the new stuff I found worth watching. 
 
Starting with a trio of stand-up comedy specials:  Hannah Gadsby: Something Special (MC-tbd) lives up to its subtitle, as she ventures from unpacking trauma and difference (autism and queerness) to recording wedded bliss (having married her producer), without losing her biting wit and superb timing.  John Mulaney: Baby J (MC-74) takes a darker turn, telling the tale, soberly if not somberly, of his rehab stint after an intervention by his friends (mostly other comedians); he shows off his finely-honed impressions and self-banter while delighting the audience in Boston and at home.  Mae Martin: Sap (MC-75) follows up on their excellent Netflix series Feel Good with a well-done, piquantly-androgynous set of comic reflections – or campfire “snowglobes” – as a poster child for gender fluidity.
 
So many of my favorite half-hour shows from 2022 have returned as good or better this year, and Netflix has two of them:
 
Never Have I Ever (MC-81) completes its four-year run with high school graduation, and does so with honors, confirming my initial enthusiasm.  The finale is more about fan-service than revelation, but I consider myself well-serviced, like Devi and her friends at Sherman Oaks H.S.  For me, one word sums up this semi-autobiographical series from Mindy Kaling – endearing.  I binged the 10-episode final season in two nights, gratified but not overstuffed, amused if not surprised.  It’s all sprightly, intelligent, and well-portrayed.
 
Almost exactly the same could be said about Heartstopper (MC-81), whose first season I wrote up here.  All the characters at a British secondary school have returned for another year, continuing to explore romantic and gender questions.  Though even sweeter and considerably less raunchy than Sex Education or Never Have I Ever, this high school series represents Ron DeSanctimonious’ worst woke nightmare, a festival of LGBTQ+ antics and anguish.  This season expands to ten episodes, which allows more room to introduce parents, and to spread a school trip to Paris over several eps.  Across the board, the performers are charming and truthful, funny and insightful.  Don’t miss this, if you’re looking for warmth and humor.
 
Another returning favorite kept me on Netflix for an extra month: the fourth and final season of Sex Education (MC-78).  At first I thought the actors were getting a bit too old for their characters - and the premise a little too stale - to sustain the verve and tartness of earlier seasons (see here and here), but they were all still good company.  And by the time the series ended - in an absolute orgy of acceptance, forgiveness, and love - all my reservations were retracted. and this positively therapeutic show cemented a place among my all-time favorites.  Funny, touching, and wise, as well as fully woke, this series finale sticks the landing, gratifying and instructing, neatly resolving the stories of a score of engaging characters.  Don’t let the title or the graphic antics put you off, this show reveals a lot of heart, body and soul.
 
I was well-prepared for Cunk on Earth (MC-82), having watched Cunk on Britain via YouTube.  So I was aware of Diane Morgan’s longtime Borat-like portrayal of Philomena Cunk, the aggressively ignorant presenter for a BBC-like mockumentary series, interviewing real British academics who are in on the joke and advised to respond to her as a naïve child, sometimes playing along but sometimes simply dumbfounded.  Having done British history, here she takes on the story of civilization from cave painting to social media, presenting real history in a comically clueless manner.  Charlie Booker is the showrunner, which led me to give his Black Mirror another try, only to find nothing of interest.
 
Similarly, a prodigious haul of Emmy nominations led me to sample Beef (MC-86).  I watched half of the episodes while stationary cycling, but couldn’t be bothered to watch the rest.  I appreciate the ethnic focus on Asian-Americans as much as anyone, but the SoCal lifestyle does not engage me at all, and I couldn’t connect with any of these characters or their situations.
 
Love at First Sight (MC-55, NFX) is the generic title of a generic rom-com that is raised to a measure of authenticity by the performance of Haley Lu Richardson (a favorite of mine since Columbus, and if you want to see a really good film, watch that).  This film leaves out the first part of the title of the source novel, The Statistical Probability of …, but weaves the theme of statistics throughout a story about a chance meeting on a plane from New York to London, where an NYU student will attend the wedding of her divorced father (Rob Delaney) and a Yale graduate student in statistics (Ben Hardy) is returning for his mother’s memorial service, happening on the same day.  This involves a lot of hectic transportation around picture-postcard London, and a lot of un-statistical coincidence.  It’s all attractive and humorous, and presumably predicated on Netflix’s success with Emily in Paris, which I have no intention of watching.  This is all about Ms. Richardson for me.
 
Netflix usually bankrolls a few high-quality films per year, to give some prestige to their firehose of “content,” but they’re a long way from the broad availability of their DVD-by-mail days.  That said, Metacritic’s list of the top movies on Netflix still retains a lot of great films, but just a few I hadn’t seen already.  Here are #38, #22, and #11 in order.  
 
Andrea Riseborough deserved her unexpected Oscar nod for best actress in To Leslie (MC-84), in a performance that was both heartfelt and cringeworthy, all-out and nuanced at the same time.  The film was worth a look for that alone, but turned out to have other virtues as well.  Like a Texas dive-bar country-music song brought to life, it tells of a woman down on her luck, homeless and dissipated, after winning a lottery and then blowing the money on drugs and booze, abandoning her teen son in the process.  Marc Maron plays a motel manager who has been there and done that, and gives her a job and place to stay, as well as some hard-earned wisdom, on the long and difficult road to recovery.  Experienced tv director Michael Morris makes his feature film debut, creating a sense of place and community with minimal means.
 
Happy as Lazzaro (MC-87) had been on my list to watch for some years, but I finally got around to it after seeing an intriguing short by filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher.  Needn’t have bothered, since the film’s magic-realist approach did not resonate with me, even when the subject was Italian peasants, of considerable interest to me these days.  In a fragmented viewing, I never engaged with characters or story, despite the obvious care that went into the production.

Cousins (MC-91) is a lovely film from New Zealand, dense with life, following the destinies of three Maori girls from childhood to the death of one of them, each played at different ages by three different actress, all excellent and extremely well-matched.  That is essential since the story moves back and forth in time, allowing the viewer never to lose the thread of the individual and collective stories in a hundred minutes of free-flowing transitions.  One of the girls is taken away from the family, after her mother dies and her father goes back to England, and is adopted from her “home for desolate girls” by a wicked old bag.  Another flees an arranged marriage, and becomes a lawyer fighting for indigenous rights and looking for her long-lost cousin.  The third stays in the community and becomes a matriarch.  This is a film I never would have caught up with if not for the well-deserved Metacritic rating.
 
Acquired at Sundance, Fair Play (MC-74) puts a female twist on The Wolves of Wall Street, but as an unpleasant tale about unpleasant people it lacks the glossy-trashy bite and wit of, say, Succession.  Nonetheless, I watched Chloe Domont’s debut feature till the disorienting conclusion, a testament to the acting chops of Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich, both new to me.  They play a would-be power couple of horny hedge-fund financial analysts, disrupted when she is promoted ahead of him, leading to ugly fights and uglier sex.  This makes for characters you wouldn’t want to know in an environment you wouldn’t want to enter, and yet somehow you can’t look away.
 
Turning to documentaries, the highlight for me was Bill Russell: Legend (MC-81).  Sam Pollard follows up his excellent MLK/FBI with another winner, about one of the biggest winners of all time, a big man completely worthy of 200 minutes of celebration.  Winner of 2 NCAA championships, an Olympic gold medal, and 11(!) NBA rings, he is sometimes forgotten in the GOAT controversy between Michael and LeBron, but this program refreshes his claim, as many of today’s stars testify to his transcendent greatness.  It’s a real trip to watch all that 1950s hoops footage, especially when Russell in the NBA went from only-black-on-the-court to leader of the all-black championship Celtics.  This at a time when the Red Sox were the last team in MLB to have a black player, which in truth was more reflective of Boston racial attitudes, as Russell found out when he moved his family into a white neighborhood.  Always his own man, literally standing tall, he became even more of a civil rights activist, as this documentary makes clear.
 
I was similar engaged with Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song (MC-70), about a song that has a claim to be the GOAT, based on the way it has permeated the culture in being reinterpreted by countless different performers, many represented in this film.  Not bad for a song his record company refused to release.  In parallel, the film tells the story of Cohen’s life from Montreal beginnings to late career renaissance, after years in a Buddhist monastery and a fleecing by his business manager.  I think it was the 2006 documentary Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man that ignited my latter-day obsession with the singer-songwriter, but this film makes a nice bookend to it.
 
Mostly, my musical tastes froze back in the Seventies, so I am always up for a film that revives some of my old favorites, and Travelin’ Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall fills the bill.  It weaves a history of the band around footage from a London concert on the very day the Beatles broke up, making CCR officially the most popular rock band in the world.  John Fogerty and company can still get me moving, not dancing but pedaling a stationary bike.
 
One technical note:  Netflix had been a reliable streaming service since inception (while Amazon Prime and HBO had various glitches that have been remedied) but now it’s the most problematic, not just slow to load and buffer, but prone to freeze and require re-booting of Roku device (and not just on mine).  So I’m more than content to pause my subscription (Netflix now offers a one-month pause in lieu of cancelling and then resubscribing – not as good as Hulu’s choice of 1-12 weeks), and come back in a month for the final season of The Crown and new list of other viewing, on which I will report.

This & that

This is a potpourri of recent films, that is a sampling of documentaries, and the other thing is a tv update.
 
Theater Camp (MC-70, Hulu) is a delightful trifle starring childhood friends Ben Platt and Molly Gordon (both co-wrote and she co-directed), in a mockumentary loosely based on their own experiences .  Gordon recently shone as The Bear’s girlfriend (and Ayo Edebiri also shows up here, though underused), and all the performing kids are just terrific, energetic and genuinely talented.  Fast-moving and funny, the film makes a serious case for the camp as a place where all kinds of misfit children come together to find a home homier than home.  Whatever the film’s flaws or gaps, they’re overwhelmed by its fleet gusto and warm feeling.
 
I enjoyed Emily (MC-75, Kanopy) for Emma Mackey’s portrayal of the wildest Bronte, especially seen back-to-back with her Maeve in Sex Education.  And I appreciated Frances O’Connor’s feel for the period - having turned writer-director after starring in Mansfield Park (1999) - and her passionate projection into the lives of the characters.  While not averse to imaginative leaps, such as a plot redolent of The Scarlet Letter, I was thrown out of the film by a few egregious falsehoods, persnickety English major that I am.  Still – the moors, the Victorian mores, the period clothes and settings, the ecstasies and agonies of love and creation – it all works well.  But it might have been better if it had been bit more scrupulous as a biopic, or somewhat wilder as an appropriation of the past by the present (on the order of Dickinson).  Instead, it’s somewhere in the muddled middle.
 
A Thousand and One (MC-81, AMZ) won a big prize at Sundance this year, and was certainly worth watching, if not a revelation.  The feature debut of writer-director A.V. Rockwell has a lot to recommend it, starting with the lead performance by Teyana Taylor, as an ex-con single mother trying to raise a son in Harlem, in the years around the turn of the millennium.  A tangled tale, with a strong sense of time and place, and sympathy for the trials of the underclass, it somehow ends up as less than the sum of its parts, but certainly a promising start to a Black woman’s directorial career.
 
Recently I was lamenting the paucity of new documentaries on PBS, but that seems to be turning around (Biden funding after Trump beggaring?), starting with two offered on American Experience, dealing with long-ago efforts to put the task of racial balance on the backs of schoolchildren, North as well as South.  The Harvest: Integrating Mississippi’s Schools (PBS) is a personal memoir of being in the first class to belatedly desegregate the schools in the rigidly segregated town of Leland, incorporating the testimony of many classmates and teachers.  The Busing Battleground (PBS) recovers the “the decades-long road to school desegregation” in Boston, almost as horrific as it was in the Deep South.  Both are well-made and well-balanced films with continuing relevance.
 
Though racism is the “American dilemma,” Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (MC-87, PBS) shows that the sins of segregation are by no means unique to this country.  What race is in the U.S. has been overshadowed by religious hatred through much of history, all going back to the initial inherited trait of tribalism – us vs. them.  This potent 5-part series recounts just how awful The Troubles were, while Ireland’s subsequent history demonstrates that such ingrained antagonisms are neither inevitable nor eternal.  It’s a timely reminder of the evils of sectarianism and partisanship.
 
Bad Axe (MC-82, Hulu) is an intimate family portrait with a wider resonance, historically and politically.  At the beginning of the Covid shutdown, filmmaker David Siev returns to his hometown, the small rural Michigan town of the title.  His Cambodian refugee father and Mexican-American mother run a popular family restaurant, and in the stress of the pandemic the eldest sister returns from Ann Arbor to take charge, and the younger sister postpones her post-college life to pitch in.  This is a home movie in every sense, compiled from a rich family archive and a prying camera eye on domestic and social stresses.  There are kitchen scenes that recall The Bear, and ugly confrontations between BLM protestors and masked neo-Nazi armed militia.  The filming can be helter-skelter, but the material is effectively edited to tell the story of America in 2020, and the rending of our social fabric, from a very particular but emblematic perspective.  This makes an authentic exploration of family as “haven in a heartless world.”
 
I paused my Hulu subscription after the superb finale of Reservation Dogs and will return once the extremely-promising second season of Welcome to Wrexham is complete, but I renew my recommendation for both, even if Hulu is raising its rates (easily combatted by toggling subscription on and off).
 
The third season of Starstruck (MC-83, HBO), composed like the first two of six swift episodes that add up to a feature-length rom-com, confirms the piquant appeal of show creator and star Rose Matafeo.  Her on-again, off-again affair with the action movie star played by Nikesh Patel seems to break off for good in the opening montage, but fate seems determined to bring them together again.  How they figure out their future, together or apart, transpires against the backdrop of a comic company of friends in London.  Not sure how this series could continue, but I will certainly give a look to whatever Ms. Matafeo does next.  (As good as this show is, I take this occasion to lament the banalization of HBO into MAX, which is no longer worthy of continuous subscription.)