We’ve rolled into step one of Ontario’s reopening, which means I am on the verge of finally realizing my months-long ambition to buy new shoelaces at Dollarama. I honestly can’t tell if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that I’m genuinely looking forward to doing that, but that’s what the pandemic has done for you, I guess.
How are you holding up? What thing are you most hoping to do now that our options have expanded? “Go out for ice cream” is also on my list, along with “try at least one new takeout place” and “slow down the rewatch of the first season of Ted Lasso so you don’t burn through the whole thing in a weekend.” It’s a show to be savoured, after all, and there’s more than a month before the second season gets here.
But now that we’re being encouraged to get out and do stuff – assuming one of those things is “getting vaccinated,” which is kind of crucial to the whole not-being-back-in-lockdown-before-Canada Day of it all – I thought this week’s newsletter should offer some more modest recommendations. No point in writing about an eight-hour series when the last thing anyone wants to do is spend a weekend this beautiful indoors.
So: movies only! Mostly short ones! Get some walking in! You’re welcome.
Top streaming pick
I saw Holler at TIFF last fall, when it was screening in the Industry Selects program. It wasn’t accessible to the public, so there didn’t seem much point in writing about it at the time. But if I had been in a position to do so, I would have framed it as an ideal companion piece to Nomadland, or maybe a mirror image: where Chloé Zhao’s eventual Oscar-winner tells the story of an older woman working her way through rural America to avoid dealing with her past, Nicole Riegel’s first feature follows a young woman in rural America who’s similarly committed to forward motion.
Her name is Ruth (Jessica Barden, whom you might recognize from the buzzy Netflix series The End Of The F***ing World or Carly Stone’s millennial drama The New Romantic), and she’s a bright kid who’s grown up in a dying Ohio industrial town. Her mother (Pamela Adlon) is trying to kick an opioid addiction in prison; her older brother (Gus Halper) keeps the family afloat with piecework. The two of them sometimes raid buildings for scrap metal that brings a few bucks at the junkyard, but it’s dangerous and not always legal. They do it anyway. It’s the only option, short of packing up and leaving.
This sort of story isn’t exactly new – Clio Barnard’s brilliant Yorkshire drama The Selfish Giant sprang forth from a similar premise – but Holler has a tone and perspective all its own. Specifically, it’s Riegel’s; the writer/director is telling her own story, expanding on her 2016 short of the same name. And in Barden – who comes from Yorkshire herself, oddly enough – Riegel has a star who can show us just how hard it is to keep going when everything in the world is weighing down on her.
Holler is available to stream on IFC Films Unlimited on Amazon Prime Video Canada, and to rent on Apple TV.
Buried treasure on Netflix Canada
One of the best things about the Friends reunion – maybe the only good thing, honestly – was the conversation it generated about the work the six stars did after the show wrapped, and the creative chances its success allowed them to take. And though it was largely agreed that Jennifer Aniston seemed to try the hardest to separate herself from her TV character, I didn’t see Friends With Money mentioned all that much. Which is weird, because Nicole Holofcener’s 2006 study of four Los Angeles women living in varying levels of comfort is one of the best things she’s ever done. And the movie is one of Holofcener’s best, which is really saying something given that the writer/director has been making small, seriocomic studies of people in crisis for 25 years now.
Aniston plays Olivia, a teacher turned housecleaner sleepwalking through her life, much to the consternation of her married friends – who are played by Frances McDormand, Catherine Keener and Joan Cusack. (Holofcener, it must be noted, is an absolute ace at casting; the movie also boasts Jason Isaacs, Simon McBurney, Scott Caan and a pre-Modern Family Ty Burrell.)
Each of Olivia’s friends has her own problems, of course, which will inevitably intersect with someone else’s over the course of the movie. Some of them are petty, some of them are more substantial, and all of them are played for comedy and drama precisely as needed. Holofcener is a master of tonal control, shifting from absurd obsessions to genuine heartbreak in a couple of lines of dialogue, and I’d argue that Aniston, having done similar pivots just as gracefully a number of times on Friends, is as ideal a screen avatar for the filmmaker as Holofcener’s actual muse Keener. They’re both great in this; so is everyone else, really. And maybe it’s okay that no one seems to remember Friends With Money; now there’s this great new movie you can watch.
Friends With Money is available to stream on Netflix Canada.
Double Feature by Natalie Brown
“There are few silver linings in a pandemic and perpetual provincial lockdowns,” writes actor Natalie Brown, “but not standing in line at the LCBO and instead perusing pop-ups and supporting neighbourhood bottle shops, sampling small-batch ciders, micro brews and natural wines from local producers is one. The other is not having to wait hours in rush lines or travel great distances to far-flung festivals in hopes of seeing a handful of future favourite films, or waiting months – sometimes years – for smaller, independent titles to become widely available. Case in point: Thunderbird, filmed 2017, premiered at Whistler Film Festival in 2019, now finally available to watch on Vimeo in Canada and Amazon Prime in the U.S. and UK.”
When I reached out to Natalie about programming this week’s double feature, she gave me one tied to a new movie in which she appears: Randall Okita’s See For Me, which is screening in the Tribeca film festival this week. (Unfortunately, it’s only available in the U.S... though if you have access to a VPN, you might be able to get around the geoblocking.)
“See For Me stars visually impaired actor Skyler Davenport, and is a contemporary take on the Audrey Hepburn classic Wait Until Dark, my second recommendation,” she writes. “The two films offer up not only incredible performances – by Davenport and Kim Coates in the former, and Hepburn and Alan Arkin as a cool sociopathic villain in the latter – but unique perspectives on filmmaking, feminism and representation.
“Both deliver unexpected takes on a home invasion thriller, each lead character subverting expectations and overcoming challenges navigating their respective worlds with visual impairment: Hepburn’s convincing, Academy Award-nominated portrayal, and Skyler bringing their very much real, lived experience. Skyler’s Sophie wants independence from her overprotective mother (🙋🏻♀️) whereas Hepburn’s Suzy wants nothing more than to be able to ‘pick out her husband’s necktie or bake a soufflé.’”
“It’s easy to compare how far we’ve come since 1967, but it’s also important to note how imperative it is for filmmakers to take the time to cast people who can authentically tell their own stories and experience themselves on screen.”
See For Me is available to watch through June 23 on the Tribeca At Home platform, assuming you can convince the site you’re in the U.S.
Wait Until Dark is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Cineplex, Google Play and other VOD services.
And Thunderbird is available to rent or buy on Vimeo On Demand.
Last chance to stream
Have you seen Booksmart? You should see Booksmart. Olivia Wilde’s first feature hits the same sweet spot of chaotic comedy and sensitive coming-of-age picture that Greg Mottola’s Superbad did a decade earlier, with Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein finding a perfect rhythm as best friends trying to pack four years of partying into the last day and night of high school.
It’s a tale as old as time (see also: Richard Linklater’s Dazed And Confused and the dozens of other, lesser indie pictures cranked out in the wake of that movie’s cult success in the 90s), but writers Emily Halpern, Sarah Haskins, Susanna Fogel and Katie Silberman are careful to fuse Booksmart’s farcical structure with credible character beats, relatable anxieties and genuine feeling. Dever and Feldstein have a great dynamic as the headstrong Amy and the more hesitant Molly, who feel like two sides of the same weird person; their codependency is complementary, somehow, and it’s a lot of fun to watch them recalibrate that balance as they flail from one situation to another.
Booksmart builds on Superbad’s most important innovation, which was making its world just as weird and confounding to the audience as it is to its inexperienced protagonists, and Wilde surrounds her leads with reliable comic actors – like Will Forte, Lisa Kudrow, Jessica Williams, Molly Gordon, Wilde’s then-husband Jason Sudeikis and the invaluable Billie Lourd – who subtly destabilize their scenes at every turn.
But it’s Dever and Feldstein’s show, and they own it. The pair are so good together that I want to see an entire Booksmart multiverse, with Amy and Molly randomly manifesting in other genres: action, horror, historical romance, chamber drama, Knives Out-style ensemble thing, you name it. The possibilities are endless, just like their potential.
Booksmart is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video Canada through June 19.
If you like this, you might like that
Without a doubt, the week’s biggest release is In The Heights, Jon M. Chu’s splashy adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s breakout musical. And once you’ve spent two and a half hours with what feels like the entire population of Washington Heights, you might find yourself itching for another musical about scrappy, spirited young people banding together to affirm their identity through song.
How about 80s Ireland? That’s the setting of Sing Street, the 2016 autobiographical dramedy from Once writer/director John Carney that tells the story of a Dublin kid (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) who announces he’s starting a band in order to impress a girl (Lucy Boynton, later of Bohemian Rhapsody and Apostle)… meaning he now has to learn an instrument, find other musicians and write original songs. But as it turns out, he’s got a flair for the New Romantic pastiche.
There’s a lightness to Sing Street that led me to underrate it the first time around, when it was one of several movies I powered through over a weekend at the TIFF Next Wave festival. But I’ve come back to it more than once in the years since – even grabbing the UK Blu-ray when I was last in London – for its sheer charm, for its gifted cast (which also includes Jack Reynor, Maria Doyle Kennedy and Aidan Gillen) and for the alchemical thing that Carney can capture better than anyone else: the electricity of creation, when a bunch of people stand in a room and somehow conjure a song out of thin air. “Drive It Like You Stole It?” Kind of a banger.
Sing Street is currently streaming for free on Tubi. It’s also available to rent or buy on most VOD services.
Play us out
And that’s it for another week. As always, if you’re looking for more reading I’m happy to direct you to NOW’s weekly review roundup; if you’ve got cable or a STACK TV subscription, please make time to watch We Are Lady Parts, a fantastic new UK comedy that premiered this week and is one of the best things I’ve seen all year. And of course you should check out NOW’s Hot Summer Guide, which offers a slew of movie and television recommendations for the coming months among all the other stuff. There’s even ice cream. Which reminds me, I have something to tick off my list.