NOW Streaming: What to watch this weekend
February 27, 2021: The Number Four
Traditionally in movie sequels, the fourth one is where the franchise goes to space: Critters did it, Hellraiser did it and I think Leprechaun tried it as well. (Yes, I know, it took 10 Friday the 13ths to launch Jason into space, but that series was always a little slow on trends.)
This week’s issue of NOW Streaming is indeed the fourth one, but we will not go into space. Not entirely, anyway. I hear that Apple series about the space race is good.
Anyhow.
This week’s film and television coverage at NOW has been mostly about previews, with our monthly look-aheads for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Crave, Disney+ and CBC Gem all going live in the last few days. But we did other stuff too! I caught up with Lee Isaac Chung about his terrific new drama Minari, and chatted with Justin Roiland, Thomas Middleditch and Sean Giambrone about voicing a family of aliens on Roiland and Mike McMahan’s animated comedy Solar Opposites, which just premiered in Canada via the new Disney+’s mature-content Star tier. And my colleague Rad looked at some new developments at the Indigenous Screen Office that aim to steer Canada’s Indigenous media in a more authentic direction.
Top streaming pick
The Golden Globes are happening this weekend, but as I have repeatedly argued, the Golden Globes are dumb and you shouldn’t pay any attention to them. Instead of sitting through a long, weird evening of people trying really hard not to bring up the fact that Tom Hanks was sick with COVID-19 at last year’s gala and no one had any idea what that meant, why not spend Sunday evening watching something as far removed from Los Angeles scenesters as possible?
So here’s my suggestion: Some Kind Of Heaven, a new documentary by Lance Oppenheim about the largest retirement community in America. Located in central Florida, The Villages is exactly what you’d expect that sort of place to be: sprawling, conservative, predominantly white, and very weird. Oppenheim is in his early 20s, and his approach when he shot the movie, and his approach to telling this story is similar to another recent standout doc, the Ross brothers’ Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets: once again, we’re watching real people perform versions of their own lives, structured into a narrative that tells full stories in under an hour and a half.
Darren Aronofsky is on board here as an executive producer, and I can absolutely see the man who made Requiem For A Dream or The Wrestler respond to the heightened aesthetic of The Villages, and its isolated, slightly desperate America. But on the most basic level, Some Kind Of Heaven is about a disparate group of people who – despite their demographic commonalities – are all very different people. Some are single and happy; some are married and lonely. One guy lives in his van on the outskirts of the place, insisting he has it all figured out. And maybe he does. When you’re closer to the end than you are to the beginning – or even the middle – you might as well do what you want.
Some Kind Of Heaven is available to rent on the Fox Theatre and Hot Docs At Home virtual cinema platforms.
Buried treasure on Netflix Canada
Get in, losers, we’re going to space after all. Because Prospect is on Netflix, and given how quiet people have been about it since it played the 2018 Toronto After Dark film festival, I’m thinking you’ve all missed out. See, The Mandalorian wasn’t Pedro Pascal’s first sci-fi Western; that distinction belongs to Zeek Earl and Christopher Caldwell’s sparsely plotted but richly imagined thriller, which stars Jay Duplass and Sophie Thatcher as a father and daughter who travel the galaxy mining valuable gems from the surface of hostile worlds. A trip to a dangerous moon leads to a meeting with a stranger (Pascal, naturally); stuff happens, people die and alliances are forged in blood and trust. I love unlikely mashups, and writer/directors Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell have created a nifty proposition, putting the brain of a 40s frontier picture into a futuristic body. It’s a little like Firefly, a little like Shane, and not at all what it looks like at the outset. Y’all might enjoy it.
Prospect is available to stream at Netflix Canada, as you may have guessed.
Double Feature by Shatara Michelle Ford
I wrote about Shatara Michelle Ford’s powerful first feature Test Pattern in last week’s newsletter. An intimate drama about a young couple dealing with a shared trauma that exposes the flaws in their relationship, it features solid work from Brittany S. Hall and Will Brill and a measured, unnerving aesthetic that burrows under your skin and stays there. It’s still available to stream via the Revue Cinema, and you should do that, but I also asked Shatara to play programmer this week, and here are the other movies she’d like you to watch: Charles Burnett’s Killer Of Sheep, and John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy.
“I love American films from the late 60s/early 70s, as I feel they revealed so much about the socio-political upheaval of the moment – so much change, complexities and dissolution,” she says. “What's also great about this period was that it was a great time of experimentation within narrative cinema. Burnett's vignettes in Killer Of Sheep serve a central theme, but are loosely connected and meandering but serving a larger thesis of alienation and displacement. As for Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy, again the alienation and displacement, but also this other element of psychological trauma expressed so well with piercing flashbacks. In both films, class strife is palpable.”
Killer Of Sheep is available to rent from Milestone Films; Midnight Cowboy is available for rental and purchase on Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube and Cineplex.
Last chance to stream
The Criterion Channel is clearing out about 70 movies at the end of this month, and given the general quality of their curation you could throw a dart at your laptop and find something worthwhile. (Please don’t throw a dart at your laptop.) I’m going to recommend The Prison In Twelve Landscapes, Brett Story’s 2016 documentary that explores the American prison system from a dozen different perspectives, each one illustrating or illuminating a new angle on the modern penitentiary. It sounds grim, but it’s not; instead, it’s a collection of deeply human stories, of people who refuse to be destroyed by a system that exists to do nothing else. And you should see it.
The Prison In Twelve Landscapes is available to stream on The Criterion Channel through Sunday (February 28).
If you like this, you might like that
As I wrote in this week’s NOW review digest, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari is the week’s biggest and best new release – a beautiful, semi-autobiographical look at a family of Korean immigrants trying to put down roots in Oklahoma in Reagan’s America. If you rent it from digital TIFF Bell Lightbox, my conversation with Chung from last month’s Secret Movie Club screening is included as a bonus. And if you watch that, you’ll hear me mention Yi Yi, the late Edward Yang’s three-hour masterpiece about a year in the life of a Taiwanese family. Minari doesn’t tell the same story as Yang’s film (which was released in some markets in 2000 as A One And A Two), but the two movies feel like spiritual cousins, both rich in character and weaving the flow of life – and death – into complex, intimate narratives with universal resonance. Watch them both. They’ll enrich your soul.
Yi Yi is available to stream on the Criterion Channel and Hollywood Suite Go.
Post-credit sequence
So that’s the newsletter! I hope you’re enjoying this. I’ve been doing this for a month and I think I’m getting the hang of it, and I have at least one very cool double-feature coming up in March that you definitely don’t want to miss.
And if anyone was worried, the new projector is chugging along nicely even though it came with a horrible motion-smoothing mode enabled and I almost burst a blood vessel in my eye trying to turn it off. Which reminds me: please turn off motion smoothing on your television. It rots your mind.
Stay home, watch movies, wear a mask if you go out. I’ll see you next week.