Hi there! I’ve spent the last few days watching in disgust as my city treats unhoused people like an infestation, and don’t feel much like writing about movies at all. (I live just a little bit north of Trinity Bellwoods and Alexandra Park, and I hate knowing what it means when I hear news choppers overhead early in the morning.)
But a streaming newsletter you have been promised, so a streaming newsletter I am writing. Hopefully there’ll be something in here to distract you from the whole city-sliding-into-corporate-fascism thing for a couple of hours. Let’s get to it!
Top streaming pick
Cousins is the latest title from Ava DuVernay’s ARRAY Releasing label, which is building its brand on small, powerful, personal works like Merawi Gerima’s Residue and Kathleen Hepburn and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’s The Body Remembers When The World Broke Open. And this New Zealand drama from directors Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace-Smith is in good standing there: it’s simple and heartfelt, but it contains a whole world in its framing.
Cousins stretches over half a century, telling the story of a splintered family – and a culture under assault – from the perspective of three Maori cousins, Mata, Makareta and Missy. They’re separated in their youth when Mata’s white father sends her to an orphanage, removing her from her people and her land; Makareta and Missy will spend most of their lives looking for her. Gardiner and Grace-Smith (who adapted her mother Patricia Grace’s 1992 novel, and plays Makareta as an adult) set their story against the larger narrative of the Maori people fighting to reassert the heritage and self-worth that was taken from them by colonialism.
The film never stresses that theme because it doesn’t have to; Cousins carries that struggle in every frame. Sometimes it’s more overt, with a white person completely erasing a Maori child’s identity with a few strokes of a pen; other times, it’s just floating around in the way a person is regarded by those of different status. The movie sees everything, and makes sure that we do too, while never losing its focus on the women at its centre.
Cousins is available to stream on Netflix Canada.
Buried treasure on Netflix Canada
I was surprised to find Saturday Night Fever among the tiles the other day; it felt like John Badham’s 1977 drama just evaporated into the cultural unconscious a decade or so ago, reduced to the soundtrack and that iconic image of John Travolta posing on the dance floor. But it’s a whole movie, and its cultural impact belies its original intention, which was to turn a New York magazine article by the journalist Nik Cohn into a kitchen-sink character study of a working-class Brooklyn kid who uses disco as an escape from his otherwise joyless life.
Of course, when Badham cast Travolta as his fictional antihero Tony Manero, the actor’s magnetism changed the chemistry of the film; it’s almost impossible to believe that someone as commanding (and as eerily handsome) as this guy could have no prospects. But Travolta sells it, showing us how Tony’s peacocking is the false bravado that helps him fit into his environment, which can charitably be described as “vintage Italian-American stereotype.” But it’s that same need to belong that draws Tony into increasingly ugly situations with his friends.
Tony meets Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), a gifted dancer who agrees to be his partner in an upcoming competition, and the two of them get close even though she’s not interested in sleeping with him. (It’s the 70s; everybody’s sleeping with everybody.) And again, Travolta’s a revelation here, fine-tuning his swagger for the camera as Stephanie challenges Tony to be a better dancer, a better listener, a better person. But this is a melodrama, and Tony’s family and friends keep tangling him up in their business, leading to a series of confrontations and hard choices.
It doesn’t sound like the movie you thought it was, does it? That’s why I’m recommending it! Saturday Night Fever is often described in the same breath as Grease, the musical Travolta made immediately afterward, but Badham’s film has more in common with grimy verité dramas like Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico. Give it a look. Let it surprise you.
Saturday Night Fever is available to stream on Netflix Canada.
Double Feature by Meredith Vuchnich
Tracey Deer’s Beans was one of the best films I saw at TIFF last year, and I was delighted to see it triumph at the Canadian Screen Awards earlier this spring, winning both best first feature and best picture in a genuine upset. It’s finally in theatres, and co-writer and executive producer Meredith Vuchnich stepped up to offer you some suggestions for stuff to stream this week.
“I’m dying to see Summer Of Soul,” she says. “Questlove’s award-winning doc about the largely forgotten 1969 Harlem Culture Festival featuring many giants of Black American culture, including Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Reverend Jesse Jackson and even Mahalia Jackson singing with Mavis Staples. I also understand that the film is about much more than the music and I’m coming for all of it.
“I first saw the Roots live around 1995 and Questlove had a giant, magnetic presence that filled the small club. Since then, he’s become a major figure in American music and now has directed the documentary some people are calling ‘the best concert film ever made.’ I can’t wait to see what he did with that long-forgotten footage. If I didn’t have a writing deadline, I’d watch it right now.
Meredith would also like you to consider a show she calls a “frothy pleasure,” the Starz series Run The World. “Sex And The City In Harlem is the elevator pitch for this charming, funny show, but RTW is more about female friendship and empowerment than dating, touching on bigger themes while keeping its charismatic tone. The direction has so much style, the writing is smart and surprising, and the characters are fully realized by talented, skilled and beautiful actors. Special shoutout to Bresha Webb, who owns every onscreen moment as Renee. Also, the women’s costumes are outstanding; SATC’s legendary costumer Patricia Field consults. Addictive.”
And finally, entirely unprompted, Meredith would like to offer a shout-out to the second season of Ted Lasso, which just started up yesterday: “Ted Lasso is back! Ted Lasso is back! Ted Lasso is back!”
Summer Of Soul is streaming on Disney+.
Run The World is streaming on Crave with a Starz subscription, and also on Starz On Prime Video.
The new season of Ted Lasso just premiered on Apple TV+, and it’s wonderful. Tracey Deer will hopefully be available to program a double feature when Beans hits VOD.
Last chance to stream
The Criterion Channel is clearing out a lot of great stuff at the end of this month – and also Mike Nichols’s endlessly perplexing Wolf – but I wanted to draw your attention to a quartet of Guy Maddin films that are leaving the service July 31.
Archangel, Careful, Dracula: Pages From A Virgin’s Diary and The Forbidden Room span Maddin’s career from 1990 to 2015, tracking the ebb and flow of his vision over that time as he moved from film to digital – and started collaborating with Evan and Galen Johnson. The first two, made in the early 90s, riff on early talkies and German mountaineering cinema to tell stories of lost souls in foreign lands, while Dracula is Maddin’s 2002 adaptation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s take on Bram Stoker’s vampire novel, shot cinematically for the CBC. (It’s quite striking.) And The Forbidden Room is a glorious fugue state of nested narratives, with an international cast – including Karine Vanasse, Charlotte Rampling, Udo Kier, Ariane Labed and Roy Dupuis – appearing in grotty re-creations of half-remembered images from 20s and 30s genre cinema. There’s nothing else like it, except for everything else Maddin has done. That’s sort of the point.
If you’d like to delve further into Maddin’s cabinet of curiosities, the Channel has around a dozen of his short films, as well as his recent Vertigo experiment The Green Fog, in its Directed By Guy Maddin gallery. None of those is expiring, though, so focus on the features above.
Check out Criterion Channel’s complete list of titles going offline July 31.
If you like this, you might like that
July is a good month for female-fronted action. Netflix just dropped Gunpowder Milkshake, which casts Karen Gillan as an assassin mowing down goons by the dozen to protect a little girl and reconnect with her equally lethal mom; Amazon Prime Video Canada has Jolt, a slightly grubbier actioner where Kate Beckinsale plays Lindy, a woman plagued by a cortisol imbalance that turns the slightest angry impulse into immediate, violent rage – a condition that hampers her socially and professionally, but certainly comes in handy when she’s told her new beau (Jai Courtney) has been murdered and decides to go after the crime lord she holds responsible.
It’s not a classic or anything, but it scratches a very specific B-movie itch: after almost 20 years of terrible Underworld movies, Beckinsale finally gets to employ her fight training in the service of a character with a little more humanity – and a lot more presence – than the one-note Selene, and director Tanya Wexler, who made the 2011 period dramedy Hysteria, gives her plenty of fun actors to play against, including Stanley Tucci as Lindy’s very pragmatic therapist and Bobby Cannavale and Laverne Cox as the cops who keep getting in the way of her quest for revenge.
One thing I straight-up loved about this movie is that while it’s set in New York City, it was shot in Prague and London, and the resulting disconnect– combined with the whole “Kate Beckinsale is basically playing the Hulk” thing – gives the whole affair an almost charmingly preposterous texture. There’s a scene by the waterfront shot on the south bank of the Thames, a car chase that sure seems to take a lap around Heathrow airport, and plenty of place names and street details that just don’t add up. These movies aren’t supposed to be taking place in the real world, anyway; it’s nice when one just comes out and admits it.
Jolt is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video Canada.
Gunpowder Milkshake is available on Netflix Canada.
Play us out
And that’s another newsletter done and dusted. I hope you get to do something pleasurable this weekend, whether movies are involved or not; it’s been a really stressful week, and you deserve a breather. Here’s this week’s NOW what to watch page, and here’s my interview with Alex Wolff, who’s on screen this week in Pig and Old. I also did a podcast with Gaia director Jaco Bouwer about the eerie synchronicity between his South African eco-horror movie and our current environmental turmoil. Pandemic, plague, climate collapse… you name it, Gaia saw it coming. Weird how that happens.
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.