30x30: Coronavirus Week 13
Shut in as we are for the foreseeable future, there will likely never be a better time to hit some of the outstanding streaming possibilities at our fingertips, and fortunately enough, there has never been more available from which to choose.
1 13th (2016): I can think of no better or more prescient film to watch during this incredibly difficult period of time, with the George Floyd demonstrations taking place in many of our nation's cities, and our sitting president threatening to call the military in to quell the protesters' outrage.
In fact, it should be required viewing for every white person in the country -- be they MAGA or liberal socialist -- to get a better understanding of just what the struggle has been for black people since they were ripped out of their native land and brought here by slave ships more than 400 years ago.
You want some statistics the film helpfully points out? How about even though the U.S. has but 5% of the world's population, we house 25% of the world's total incarcerated people? Or the fact that we've gone from having roughly 300,000 prisoners in 1972 to 2.3 million now. Or most damning of all: 1 in 17 white men will spend at least some time incarcerated in their lifetimes; for black men, it's 1 in 3.
DuVernay meticulously lays out the history of the 13th Amendment, in prohibiting slavery, seemingly a supreme victory for civil rights. That it was, but for the provision that still allowed incarceration for criminal acts. This little clause allowed white lawmakers in the South a grand loophole: They started arresting many of these newly freed black men, for "crimes" as petty as loitering, and locking them up for years at a stretch, where they were ... forced to perform free labor for many of the same landowners and institutions they had before the amendment's ratification.
Using an array of historians, sociologists, and activists (including the redoubtable Angela Davis) -- along with a smaller contingent of counter-pointers (let's just say Grover Norquist doesn't come across terribly well) -- DuVernay's film continues to document the history of suffering of the black population through Jim Crow, the landmark Civil Rights Act, and the subsequent "war on drugs" initially popularized as a metaphor for Richard Nixon, made all too real and manifest by Ronald Reagan (and continued through the Clinton years, passing brutal anti-crime legislation the former president now admits was a straight-up mistake). All of which leading to the point in time in those halcyon days at the dawn of the Trump campaign, where the candidate kept intoning about "the good ol' days" to his delirious rally throngs, when anyone protesting against the white politician would be beaten to a pulp, or shot. What comes through, seeing this tremendously shameful legacy of oppression and decimation laid out so clearly, is how little has changed, fundamentally, in the years since public lynchings were routine.
There might not be as much rope being used, but the public execution of innocent black people continues unabated. If you have questions as to why there is so much outrage and fury behind the Black Lives Matter movement, this film will most certainly provide you with comprehensive answers.
Genre: Documentary
Score: 9.2
Streaming Source: Netflix
Streaming Worthiness: 10
2 Please Give (2010): Things certainly happen in Nicole Holofcener's film about making peace with ourselves in a morally bankrupt universe, but most of the real action happens between characters' temples.
The setup is vintage Holofcener, who has made a career out of finding the rough edges in human relationships and putting them under the tight observation of an obsessive detective. We meet with a melange of New York-based characters, more or less at once: There's Kate (Catherine Keener), a shrewd furniture appraiser, who works hand-in-hand with her husband, Alex (Oliver Platt), as they anxiously watch over their teen daughter, Abby (Sarah Steele), who's enduring various miserable permutations of teen self-loathing and embarrassment.
Then we have Rebecca (Rebecca Hall), a mammogram radiologist, and her acerbic sister, Mary (Amanda Peet), who works at a spa. The sisters' boorish elderly grandmother, Andra (Ann Morgan Guilbert), lives in the apartment next door to Kate and Alex, one they have already bought with the plan to expand their existing space into a huge single apartment when she passes.
It's a smart monetary move, as most of their operations have been to this point -- their business revolves around going to the apartments of the newly departed, buying their old vintage furniture from grieving relatives, and then selling the pieces at their store at a huge profit -- but Kate is enduring a sort of moral crisis. She knows what she's doing is shady at best, and exploitive at worst, and that guilt gnaws away at her in ways she struggles to fathom. She gives money to homeless people she meets on the street (to Abby's embarrassment), tries her hand at volunteering for the elderly, and wants very much for Alex to agree with her that what they do is immoral, all to little avail.
Alex, meanwhile, gets involved with Mary, for a brief, emotionless fling, for reasons he can't explain, as the sweetly virtuous Rebecca deals as the emotional fulcrum for both her sister and grandmother. There are a variety of emotional loops and attempts at making sense of things, but Holofcener isn't particularly interested in pat resolutions for her characters. She pointedly ends things on an enigmatic note, suggesting the characters' conundrums have been settled, when we know for a fact they are far from out of the woods. As always, it is her crackling dialogue -- dinner scenes are a particular treat -- as characters reveal more about themselves than they intend to, that powers her material. Her films generally leave a bittersweet taste in one's mouth, as if to suggest nothing is ever entirely solved, as much as Hollywood would want us to believe otherwise.
Genre: Drama/New York/Emotional Gyrations
Score: 7.3
Streaming Source: Criterion Channel
Streaming Worthiness: 8
3 The Vast of Night (2019): It's not an uncommon conceit, in the Age of Irony, to utilize an old, archaic piece of media and camp it up by playing it arrow-straight, but thankfully, that is not the approach taken by Andrew Patterson. For this Twilight Zone-esque take, about an alien visit in a small New Mexico town in the '50s, he avoids irony in favor of taking the source code and infusing it with more arthouse convention.
The film, which stars the charming Jake Horowitz as a local DJ, and Sierra McCormick as a young but capable switchboard operator, who together discover an alien communication code floating on the radio waves on a night the rest of the town is at a high school basketball game, has a kind of vibe all its own.
The opening scene with a swirling tracking shot as it follows the irascible Everett (Horowitz), firing off rapid bon mots at all comers as he navigates through the radio set-up of the basketball game and walks his young friend to her night job at the switchboard is a blast, almost Coens-esque in its uncanny dialogue spin and character embellishment. After that blazing start, the film does eventually settle down into a somewhat less inspired aliens-above-us drama, albeit with unusually long monologues from the characters and long static shots that go well past expectations. Still, it's a strong screenplay, and I would expect to see something else soon from Patterson -- and I don't just mean a postcard.
Genre: Sci-Fi/'50s Nostalgia/New Mexico/UFOs
Score: 6.9
Streaming Source: Amazon Prime
Streaming Worthiness: 8
4 Uncut Gems (2019): I have had mixed feelings about the Safdie brothers in the past, whose last film, Good Time, won a lot of interest and acclaim but left me kind of cold, but this effort, about a New York diamond merchant named Howard (Adam Sandler), who comes across what he believes to be an extremely valuable prize, is absolutely riveting.
Every so often, Sandler will step away from his frat buddies and try something dramatic just to remind us how good he can be when he puts his mind to it. He's brilliant here, playing Howard, as one critic put it, like a middle-aged Al Pacino, all bluster and biliousness that belay his desperation.
On a constant look-out for an adrenaline rush, Howard is addicted to gambling, falling into bad debt with some cousin of his (Eric Bogosian), who has hired muscle to put the clamps on him. It's one of those pressure-cooker films, where the steam builds more and more intensely as Howard gets in and out of trouble through his ability to constantly shift the playing board. There's a scene about midway through, with various aggrieved characters coalescing at once in his office, as he's trying to have a speakerphone conversation with his doctor, that's so stressful, you will want to avert your eyes and remind yourself of the pause button.
Genre: Suspense/Drama/Gambling/Hoops
Score: 8.6
Streaming Source: Netflix
Streaming Worthiness: 9
5 I Am Not Your Negro (2016): A timely and vital cinematic essay that uses some of the last writings of the brilliant James Baldwin to spur a frank discussion of America's race problem.
At the time of his death, the great Harlem author was at work on a book about three of his friends killed in service to their people: MLK, Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. The film utilizes snippets of Baldwin's many public speeches and guest appearances on talk shows, overlaid by the reading of some of his profound ideas on race by Samuel L. Jackson, and intercut with photos and video clips of various racial clashes, from the desegregation battles of Southern schools in the '50s to more modern riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, in order to craft its argument.
The effect is powerfully depressing and illuminating, as Baldwin explains with almost eerie eloquence the difference between the way white people view their relationships to minorities, and how they are actually viewed by those minorities, it is "The difference between what we'd like to be, and what we actually are."
Genre: Documentary/Racial Politics/History/Literature
Score: 8.8
Streaming Source: Amazon Prime
Streaming Worthiness: 10