NOW Streaming: What to watch this weekend
Welcome to the second edition of NOW Streaming, a weekly newsletter where I point to stuff and tell you to watch it. I’m Norm Wilner, senior film writer for NOW Magazine, and as it happens this week marks the 13th anniversary of my joining the paper under the worst circumstances one could ever imagine. Life, huh.
It’s Valentine’s Day on Sunday, and given the whole general everything, I expect a lot of us will be sitting around staring at the wall, thinking about how we didn’t value Valentine’s Day 2020 enough. My only response to this is that Valentine’s Day, like all greeting-card holidays, only matters if you own a greeting-card company. The real holiday is February 15, when drugstore chocolate goes on sale and those ridiculous truffle boxes finally seem like a good idea. Change things up this year, watch Saint Maud.
Top streaming pick:
The Photograph
But if you must watch something romantic for Valentine’s Day, allow me to point you in the direction of The Photograph, a proper adult romance from Stella Meghie that presents LaKeith Stanfield (currently starring in Shaka King’s brilliant Judas And The Black Messiah) and Issa Rae as bona fide big-screen movie stars, firing sparks at one another as two New Yorkers who find each other thanks to a decades-old photograph and a few twists of fate. Meghie, the Toronto-raised director whose previous credits include Jean Of The Joneses, Everything, Everything and The Weekend, establishes her stars’ chemistry and just gets out of the way: when I saw the movie this time last year, I was pleasantly surprised by Meghie’s willingness to treat the audience like adults, taking her time with the storytelling and just enjoying the moments where her characters truly see each other and forge a connection. We talked about that in an interview, and about a few other things besides, but honestly? Just watch her movie. You’ll get it.
The Photograph is available to rent or purchase on digital and on demand, and on Crave with a Movies + HBO subscription.
Buried treasure on Netflix Canada:
The Great Canadian Baking Show returns for a fourth season on CBC Sunday night, with new hosts Ann Pornel (who was kind enough to suggest a double feature for this very newsletter last week) and Alan Shane Lewis. But before you watch that, allow me to point to another baking show that’s just dropped on Netflix: Nadiya Bakes, a new BBC series presented by Nadiya Hussain, the 2015 winner of The Great British Bake-Off who’s become a charming, charismatic TV personality in the UK. In each episode, Hussain walks us through a quartet of themed recipes: one show focuses on savoury bakes like chicken and peppercorn pies and pepperoni pull-aparts, while another goes into indulgent desserts, like a frozen blueberry and banana cheesecake or a jam roly poly (which Canadians will recognize as a warm jelly roll). My favourite, obviously, is the one where she makes a plum, peach and blueberry cobbler with a sugary chocolate topping, and a physics-defying chocolate and caramel flan made in a Bundt pan. It’s all rendered in bright, saturated colours in the English summertime – and every episode breaks the fourth wall to show us the crew following COVID protocols while Nadiya works. It’s the ideal distraction from this miserable winter cold, even if you’re not a baker yourself.
Season 1 of Nadiya Bakes is now streaming on Netflix.
Double Feature by Enuka Okuma
This week’s double-feature comes from Enuka Okuma, an actor you might have seen in Rookie Blue, Slasher and How To Get Away With Murder. She also turns up in Scott Abramovitch’s sweet, odd little comedy Eat Wheaties!, which screened at the Whistler Film Festival in December, and she joins the cast of Workin’ Moms in its new season, which premieres on CBC and CBC Gem Tuesday (February 16). And she would like you to appreciate some actors.
Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened
Her first choice is Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened: “The theatre geek in me was pleasantly surprised last Friday night when I chose to finally watch this film from my Netflix list,” she says. “A documentary about the original cast members of Sondheim and Prince’s 1981 Broadway musical Merrily We Roll Along, the play was a flop and affected the cast for years to come. They were young people playing middle-aged characters back then, but when the doc was made in 2016, the actors were actually middle-aged, now reflecting on the rollercoaster ride of their experience. The film, about aging, regret, stardom, fear, hope, survival, disillusion, is so moving and so much more than it appears to be on the surface. Fun to see a young Jason Alexander in the cast and, if you look closely, a young Giancarlo Esposito too!”
Normal People
Next is Normal People: “Normal. Mother-effing. People. The saga of Marianne and Connell’s tumultuous, are-they-or-aren’t-they ‘situation’ had me livid and shouting at my screen one moment, gasping and petrified to breathe in the next. Who knew waiting for popsicles could be so bloody tense? Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal created such an intimate space and vulnerable offering that watching this limited series felt damn near voyeuristic. Couldn’t binge it. Cuz I didn’t want it to end. Drew it out. So, so good.”
Enuka really got into this and offered some additional picks – and hey, it’s a long weekend, so here you go.
Pretend It’s A City
“I’d love to say I knew about Fran Lebowitz before Martin Scorsese’s limited docuseries featuring the author and humorist, but you know what? I didn’t. What’s great about that though, is Fran wouldn’t care. There is so much Fran doesn’t care about. There’s a lot she does care about too and Fran offers her biting, sardonic sense of humor about all of it – New York, history, celebrity, children, money, herself - for seven glorious episodes that will leave you in stitches.”
I Know This Much Is True
“The first time I was hit by the Mack truck of an actor otherwise known as Mark Ruffalo was in 2000’s You Can Count On Me (hey, bonus suggestion!) which I subsequently went on to own on VHS, DVD and digital. With the limited series I Know This Much Is True, you get not one, but two genius Ruffalos, as twin brothers battling society and each with his own personal demons. My pithy little description does nothing to convey the magnitude of story in this gem, masterfully guided by director Derek Cianfrance. It is not for the faint of heart. It’s dark, bleak, heart-wrenching but honest, and I defy anyone to come away from viewing this one unchanged.”
Elite
“Can’t believe I’m outing myself with this one, but damn if this wasn’t the best guilty pleasure of the pandemic! I’m telling you, Elite came to play: High school setting? Hot 20-something actors? Familiar themes of love, betrayal and outsiders trying to fit in? Check, check, just keep on checking. Maybe it was vicariously traipsing Spain in the summer or soaking up the gorgeous interiors of the Spanish elite, or perhaps it was the surprisingly solid acting and murderous plot intrigue that kept me coming back for three binged seasons. Starting out in teen dramas myself, I may have a certain soft spot for the genre, but Elite takes things next level tackling AIDS, culture clash, gay love and classism with grace and maturity. Oh, and it’s raunchy AF.”
Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, Pretend It’s A City and Elite are streaming on Netflix; Normal People is streaming on CBC; I Know This Much Is True is streaming on Crave with an HBO+Movies subscription.
Last chance to stream it
Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk doesn’t have the intimate grandeur that made his previous film, Moonlight, land like a supernova two years earlier; its style is more realistic, its dramatic sensibility more reserved. But with a couple years’ distance, Jenkins’s 2018 adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel feels more and more like a classic on its own terms: a complex portrait of Harlem lovers torn apart by racism and indifference, and the shock waves that reverberate through their families. Stephan James and KiKi Layne are the lovers, with Colman Domingo, Aunjanue Ellis, Brian Tyree Henry, Michael Beach and an Oscar-winning Regina King as their people, every last character worthy of his or her own movie. I said it was pretty great when it opened, but now I think I might have underrated it. And you can catch it on Amazon Prime Video for another seven days.
If Beale Street Could Talk is streaming at Amazon Prime Video until February 20.
If you like this, you might like that
With Shaka King’s Judas And The Black Messiah arriving on premium VOD this weekend – just days after the Toronto Film Critics Association gave Daniel Kaluuya its best supporting actor prize for his riveting turn as Fred Hampton – it feels like this is the perfect time to steer you towards MLK/FBI, which similarly uses America’s past to inform its present. Sam Pollard’s excellent documentary about J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign of sustained harassment against Martin Luther King, Jr. builds its case simply and steadily, showing us how Hoover’s vile disinformation tactics are still in use today, deployed against any person or movement perceived as a threat to the white power structure. Here’s my TIFF review, if you’re curious.
MLK/FBI is available to rent on Apple TV andother digital and on-demand platforms.
Play us out
And that’s the newsletter! If you’re still looking for more, by all means check out this week’s What To Watch page, and there’s always further reviews, interviews and commentary to be found on the NOW Movies & TV section – including my chat with Saint Maud writer/director Rose Glass, a podcast with Toronto Black Film Festival founder Fabienne Colas, and culture editor Radheyan Simonpillai’s interview with Dominique Fishback, who stars alongside LaKeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya in Judas And The Black Messiah.
Stay home, watch movies, wear a mask if you go out. I’ll see you next week.