NOW Streaming: What to watch this weekend
Staring Down Summer
The patios are opening up in Little Italy, and it’s getting tougher to think up reasons to stay indoors. Sure, you can (and should) rewatch all of AppleTV+’s Ted Lasso in advance of the show returning next month for a second season, but that’s five hours you’ll spend in front of a screen rather than being outside. Even if you’re still uncertain about mingling with people – lord knows I’m still masking and distancing in public – we’re now in our second week of “it’s officially okay to step out and just walk around without a reason,” and I strongly recommend you do that if you have the chance. Let’s be optimists for a change.
I started writing this week’s newsletter in a torrential downfall, and over the course of the day the rain let up, the clouds parted and the sun came out. I choose to see this as a metaphor for… well, everything, I guess; keep your head down and do the job, and eventually the storm will pass. And then everything will smell like mud, apparently.
Here’s some stuff to watch while you wait for things to dry off.
Top streaming pick
I keep meaning to write about the remarkable range of programming on the Hot Docs At Home platform; in addition to the dozen or so first-run documentaries available to rent at any given moment, there’s a much larger library available for Hot Docs members with their $4.99 monthly subscription. For example, the Ross brothers’ Contemporary Color, which captures the 2015 Barclays Center celebration orchestrated by David Byrne and featuring St. Vincent, tUnE-yArDs and Nelly Furtado performing alongside high-school colour guards, just popped back up on the service, and it’s a wonder.
Another film that’s been up for a bit is His Name Is Ray, a documentary from Transformer director Michael Del Monte that made its world premiere on the service earlier this spring. It’s an intimate, sometimes painfully honest portrait of a man on the periphery of Toronto’s social net, occupying a space that most people would prefer not to acknowledge even exists.
Del Monte first noticed Ray panhandling on Lake Shore, being ignored or avoided by drivers and pedestrians alike; his documentary, shot over eight months, is an attempt to make Ray visible again, seeing him as a human being rather than an unfortunate reality of an increasingly stratified society.
Ray tells his own story, and it’s not a happy one – his issues with substance abuse pulled him further and further away from his life as a Coast Guard sailor in the Maritimes, and now the lakefront where he spends all his time serves as a harsh reminder of the man he used to be.
There’s no judgment here, even when Ray makes the worst choices possible; this is just what survival looks like. The cycle of addiction, and the constant collision of hope and despair, are depicted with a clear eye and an empathic lens. Del Monte always puts Ray’s humanity at the forefront of the documentary – and in doing so, illustrates the ways in which Toronto fails to care for its least fortunate residents, both on the micro and macro levels.
His Name Is Ray is streaming free for members at Hot Docs At Home through June 24.
Buried treasure on Netflix Canada
I apologize for the conceptual whiplash of swinging from a gravely serious documentary to a knowingly preposterous action movie, but that’s just the way these newsletters can go sometimes. I keep meaning to do a themed edition, but there’s just so much stuff to shoehorn in from one week to the next that it seems almost impossible. (Next week I’m going to try to do an all-Pride newsletter, though.)
Anyway, here we are, and this week’s pick is Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado... which should probably go in the “If You Like This, You’ll Probably Like That” section, since stars Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek are reunited a quarter-century later in The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, which lands in drive-ins around Ontario today. And it is really weird to see them together in the context of an unapologetically Eurotrashy action cartoon, when they made such an impression in Rodriguez’s earlier Latin American action cartoon – which was a remake of and sequel to his 1993 no-budget breakout El Mariachi that scales up the concept on every level.
It’s a very simple story, with Banderas as its hero, a nameless mariachi who arrives in a small border town in search of revenge and redemption, in that specific order. Hayek is Carolina, a local bookseller who nurses him back to health after he’s injured in a firefight; together, they prepare for a showdown with the local crime lord. It’s as generic as it gets, but that’s the point: Rodriguez isn’t just remaking his own movie but dozens of spaghetti Westerns before it, throwing in appearances from Steve Buscemi and Quentin Tarantino for a little 90s Pulp Fiction cred. (Cheech Marin is also around, making his first appearance as a member of Rodriguez’s rep company.)
But all you really need to know about Desperado is that the good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, they shoot at each other a lot and Rodriguez gets to have a lot of fun demonstrating what he can do with a bigger budget and a more polished stunt team. He’s also acutely aware of how preposterously attractive Banderas and Hayek are, and has a lot of fun with their chemistry; that’s another reason why it’s so frustrating to see them fail to crackle when reunited in The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, even though they’re playing former lovers. Better to content yourself with watching them in their prime, and perhaps to note the odd trivia point that Joaquim de Almeida, who plays Desperado’s evil Bucho, also turned up as a villain in The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard. Talk about a small world… or a shallow casting pool, I guess.
Desperado is available to stream on Netflix Canada.
Double Feature by Julian Richings
Julian Richings is an actor so prolific that I could cite a dozen credits and still not do justice to his resumé. He pops up in everything from Cube and The Witch to Man Of Steel and Chaos Walking; he played a reclusive rock legend in Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo and actual, literal Death in the cult TV series Supernatural; and in my favourite bit of casting he played A.A. Milne, the creator of Winnie-the-Pooh, in a Canadian Heritage Minute.
This month, he stars in two very different horror movies: the splattery actioner Spare Parts and the more subtle Anything For Jackson, in which he co-stars with Sheila McCarthy as a couple willing to do literally anything to reconnect with their lost grandchild. So it felt like the perfect time to offer him the marquee.
Julian chose to program a very recent release and a movie approaching its 50th anniversary. “My two features contrast sharply,” he writes with typical understatement, choosing Anders Thomas Jensen’s absurd Danish action drama Riders Of Justice and Hal Ashby’s 1973 character piece The Last Detail.
Riders Of Justice, Julian writes, “is the result of the subliminal influence of movie covers. Flicking through hundreds of titles, this one stood out. Firstly, the Danish title – Retfaerdighedens Ryttere – was gloriously captivating, if elusive, to this English speaker. Then there were the five interesting people staring out at me enigmatically. And in the middle was a familiar, confident presence. Kind of trustworthy, kind of familiar. But different. Wait a minute. Holy shit: it's Mads Mikkelsen, a favourite presence onscreen and on set. (I've had the pleasure of working with him in Canada at various times.) But he's looking very... different.
“And he's working in his native Danish, in a film directed by Anders Thomas Jensen! I was in. Critical faculties on hold, beaming as I watched. So my opinion is biased, but I enjoyed it immensely. It's a shoot 'em up revenge flick, pretty standard in its story arc, sort of Scando-Hollywood, but as a result packed with quirky twists, big characters and a ferocious ensemble glee. Mads, performing in his native tongue, doesn't actually say a lot. He does a lot though! And he's magnificently deadpan throughout, his charismatic presence counterpointing the glorious waves of theatrical mayhem.”
The Last Detail is also a story of men dealing with their problems in unusual ways, but beyond that they couldn’t be more different. Julian explains: “Another great actor is at the heart of this beautiful film – a beautiful film that, strangely and appropriately, holds the record for the amount of profanity used. I saw Jack Nicholson's performance when the film was released and was stunned. It was a defining moment for me. He gained more attention for his subsequent roles in Chinatown and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, but this is the role – and the film - I'll always remember.
“But his is only one of a trio of incredible performances. Nicholson and Otis Young play two low-ranking navy lifers assigned to shore patrol. They have to escort an 18-year-old (Randy Quaid) to an eight-year sentence in naval prison for stealing $40 from a charity box. All three actors work beautifully together, slowly exposing the fragility beneath their harsh exteriors. Behind the uniforms, machismo and the banter are souls that are adrift and yearn for human intimacy. It's billed as a comedy-drama – a strange category, to my mind – but it has plenty of raucous joy and humour as our sailors swagger drunk and defiant across a freezing landscape to prison.”
Riders Of Justice is available for rental or purchase on VOD platforms like Apple TV, Cineplex and Google Play.
The Last Detail is available to stream on The Criterion Channel, and also on VOD platforms.
And you can find Spare Parts on Apple TV and Anything For Jackson on Apple TV and Google Play, too.
Last chance to stream
I admit it, a movie that takes place almost entirely inside a New York brownstone seems like a weird recommendation to make after we’ve all spent a year or more sitting at home. But David Fincher’s Panic Room makes isolation and claustrophobia feel fresh again!
It’s also just a rock-solid nail-biter of a movie, casting Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart as a recently displaced mother and daughter and pitting them against a trio of heavies (Forest Whitaker, Dwight Yoakam and Jared Leto) who break into the house expecting to find it empty. Foster and Stewart lock themselves in the eponymous emergency refuge, which would be fine… except that the thing the villains want is locked in there with them. Screenwriter David Koepp is channelling about a dozen Alfred Hitchcock movies, and Fincher gives cinematographers Conrad Hall and Darius Khondji licence to be as flamboyant as they like; it’s a thriller with real stakes and the occasional burst of shocking violence, but it’s also the kind of movie that allows us to enjoy the virtuosity at work.
The actors don’t condescend to the material, either: Foster rips right into the anguish and ferocity of a mother determined to protect her daughter from an unknown menace, Whitaker strikes an intriguing balance between menace and empathy, Stewart is already showing flashes of the versatile, unpredictable actor she’ll grow up to be and Yoakam and Leto have a thing going between them as to who can be more irritating. (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say Leto wins.)
So go ahead! Spend two hours watching one of the most gifted technical filmmakers of his age work the levers of a pure suspense machine. And maybe enjoy the irony of watching characters prepared to do almost anything not to leave their house.
Panic Room is available to stream on Crave with a Starz subscription through June 30.
If you like this, you might like that
Apple TV’s new series Physical, which dropped its first three episodes yesterday, stars Rose Byrne as a self-destructive Southern California housewife in the early 80s who discovers aerobics and reinvents herself as a fitness icon. It’s nice to see Byrne – who most recently played Gloria Steinem to Cate Blanchett’s Phyllis Schlafly in the FX series Mrs. America – get a show of her own, and a role that puts her at the centre of a narrative rather than a secondary role. She’s an invaluable supporting player, but she’s more than capable of holding the screen herself.
By way of example, allow me to point you to The Meddler, a 2015 comedy from writer/director Lorene Scafaria (Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World) about a woman whose comfortable equilibrium is thrown out of whack when her newly widowed mother arrives from New York City. Byrne plays the daughter, Lori; Susan Sarandon plays her mother Marnie, one of those force-of-nature types who would happily describe herself as “a real character,” and who other people would describe as a bit much.
Marnie’s not a bad person, but she doesn’t respect Lori’s boundaries, giving Byrne plenty of opportunities to play exasperation and frustration for slow-burn comedy. And Scafaria, who based the script on her relationship with her own mother, goes for character rather than caricature, letting the comedy come from the conflict of personalities. (It also helps that she fills the supporting cast with playful performers like Cecily Strong, Jerrod Carmichael, Michael McKean and J.K. Simmons; as with Seeking A Friend…, every role is cast perfectly.) Watch how Byrne holds it all together, though, even as Scafaria shifts the focus onto Sarandon’s deliberately outsized performance; we’re drawn to Lori in every scene, her frowns and eye twitches steering the movie as much as the camera angles and musical score. You come away with an even greater appreciation for Byrne’s invisible versatility. The woman can do anything.
The Meddler is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video Canada and Tubi; it’s also available on most VOD services. Physical is available to stream on Apple TV+.
Play us out
And that gets us to the end of another newsletter. I hope you’re finding these useful, or at least able to leverage my recommendations as a jumping-off point for your own discoveries. Have you seen anything you liked? Is there something you keep hoping I’d bring up – a genre I’ve overlooked, or a director I should reconsider? I write these things in a vacuum, feel free to make suggestions.
Beyond that, there’s always the NOW website, where you’ll find this week’s streaming recommendations and more news about the summer’s drive-ins and outdoor film festivals; we’ve also done a couple of episodes of the NOW What podcast about movies and television – one looking forward to the stuff coming up this summer, and another looking back at the entertainment that’s tried to confront or incorporate the pandemic over the last year.
But seriously: Ted Lasso. Think about it.
Email me at normw@nowtoronto.com if you’re so inclined, or hit me up on Twitter at @normwilner. And keep an eye on nowtoronto.com/movies for content throughout the week, of course.
We took you up on the Lasso recommendation after the NOW years best list came out, and we were very. very. grateful!