weekend watchlist: an unclassifiable exploration of the need for human connection
plus working-class sci-fi, politics and propaganda via Hollywood, and more
Don’t spend hours scrolling the menus at Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other movie services. I point you to the best new films and hidden gems to stream.
Movies included here may be available on services other than those mentioned, and in other regions, too. JustWatch and Reelgood are great for finding which films are on what streamers; you can customize each site so that it shows you only those services you have access to.
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Late again! Sorry again! My megacold is lingering… and even though I’ve had four negative tests — three rapid LFTs and one lab PCR — I’m now wondering whether I was, in fact, infected with the coronavirus. (I did get pinged by the NHS app to say that I’d been in close proximity to someone who was infected, on the day of the Ambulance press screening, so the timing checks out.) So now I’m gonna start stressing about long COVID…
both sides of the pond
I’ve been thinking a lot about human connection lately — a pandemic with hot-and-cold running stay-at-home orders will do that — so high on my rewatch list is Werner Herzog’s marvelously unclassifiable Family Romance, LLC. I first saw this at 2019’s London Film Festival, and was looking forward to the conversation that would ensue when it got a general release, but then it ended up going straight to streaming in our first pandemic summer of 2020. It’s even more worth your time now that everything about how we interact has changed.
Blurring the line between drama and documentary, this is the tale of Ishii Yuichi, a real person who runs a real service company in Tokyo that hires out staffers and freelancers, himself included, for situations in which someone is in need of a simulation of human authenticity. One big ongoing job for Yuichi? Pretending to be the long-estranged father of a 12-year-old girl.
Is any of what we see “real,” and what does that even mean when all stories are about engaging our empathy and emotions? Family Romance, LLC. is an existential cinematic rabbit hole as only Herzog can deliver. (Read my review.)
US: streaming on Mubi; also available for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime and Apple TV
UK: available for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime and Apple TV
In case you missed it:
where to stream (almost) every Oscar nominee
US
new on Netflix
The 2012 Oscar Best Picture Argo has just landed (again, probably) on Netflix, and it’s sure to be a hoot ’n’ a half now that we’re in the middle of yet another global geopolitical conflict driven by imperialism and propaganda (slava Ukraini). Director and star Ben Affleck’s black comedy about Hollywood and politics, based on the true story about a fake movie production crafted to extract American and Canadian diplomats during the 1979–80 Iran hostage crisis, is simply fantastic: very funny, hugely suspenseful, enormously intelligent, and beautifully presented in every possible way. Western hypocrisy gets a big smack, as it well deserves, but the “theater of the absurd” it embraces — and despairs of — it universally human. (Read my review.)
streaming on Netflix; also available for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime and Apple TV
Hulu hidden gem
You probably missed it in the US — the film played in only 13 cinemas in late 2017 and early 2018 — but God’s Own Country felt to me then like a real step up for British independent filmmaking, even given how the field has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. As exhausted as I am about movies about men who are overgrown children who need a kick in the ass, this one redeems itself in part thanks to the performance of the lovely Josh O’Connor, then an up-and-comer but since seen as 1980s-era Prince Charles in Netflix’s The Crown and currently starring in period romance Mothering Sunday, which just expanded into wide release in the US this weekend. This is a wonderful portrait of life in a harsh, lonely place — the farmlands of Yorkshire — and of romance — genuinely incidentally, a gay romance — as a prompt for personal growth and changing traditions. (Read my review.)
streaming on Hulu; also available for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime and Apple TV
UK
Prime hidden gem
I despair of much of what passes for science fiction on the big screen, which is part of why the low-budget indie perfection of 2018’s Prospect is such a treat. A teen girl and her dad land on a remote moon on a strange hunt for alien gems that might lift them out of interstellar poverty, but their mission quickly goes wrong. This is smart, gritty-stylish, and — so rare! — working-class sci-fi that is actually about ideas, and about building a future world that is authentic and lived-in. Bonus! It Guy of the moment Pedro “The Mandalorian” Pascal costars. (Read my review.)
streaming on Prime, free for members; also available for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime and Apple TV
iPlayer hidden gem
It’s the rare movie that’s better than the book it’s based on, but Sam Raimi’s understated 1998 crime-drama masterpiece A Simple Plan is one of them. The massively underappreciated Bill Paxton stars as a decent, ordinary man who discovers a bagful of stolen cash and is utterly warped by it. Yet Paxton never lets his down-to-earth character grow beyond his nice, sweet ordinariness into something we can no longer identify with. That was always Paxton’s forte and the secret of his onscreen uniqueness, and the fact that we lost him, too soon, in 2017, barely into his 60s, remains a tragedy for all the work we never got from him. (Read my review.)
streaming on BBC iPlayer, and available for over a year; not available anywhere else in the UK, so don’t miss this chance to catch it
find lots more movies to stream at Flick Filosopher
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