By the time you receive this, the heat wave will have broken. But as I write this newsletter it’s a gross and sticky Friday the 13th, and I’m struggling to see my screen through the humidity collecting in my contacts. Forgive any typos, obviously.
Let’s watch something nice.
Top streaming pick
You know what’s a really fun movie? Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar, that’s a really fun movie. Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo’s antic, absurdist comedy about two Midwestern BFFs whose impulsive Florida getaway lands them smack in the middle of a Bond-level revenge plot is positively filled with good-natured foolishness, as its naive heroes fumble through some moderate self-actualization and also fall into a love triangle with the lovelorn henchman (Jamie Dornan) of a supervillain (Wiig again, styled like a zombie Vera Farmiga) bent on unleashing a plague on the peninsula.
There are musical numbers and talking animals and absolutely pointless digressions that are just there because writer/stars Wiig and Mumolo and director Josh Greenbaum are out to entertain themselves and hopefully everyone else. Like the similarly freewheeling Step Brothers and The Other Guys, this is a movie that’s ridiculous on its face, and it knows it, and that’s fine. I’d say it has “future cult classic” written all over it, but honestly, that’s already happened. If you haven’t caught up to it yet, go on. Treat yourself.
Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar is available to stream on Crave, and available for rental and purchase on all VOD platforms.
Double Feature by Thirza Cuthand
With the Fantasia festival rolling along online, I turned to Saskatchewan filmmaker Thirza Cuthand to lay out this week’s marquee. Her short film kwêskosîw (She Whistles) deftly applies horror-movie mechanics to the topic of Canada’s missing and murdered Indigenous women, starring Sera-Lys McArthur and Aidan Devine in a tense two-hander. It’s screening in the Born Of Woman program at the Fantasia genre festival Tuesday, August 17, at 9:30 pm and Thursday, August 19, at 9 am.
Thirza’s movie might be dark, but her choices for the double feature are positively life-affirming.
First, she picked one of my favourite new TV shows, the UK import We Are Lady Parts. “This TV show about a Muslim Riot Grrrl band is the kind of show I wish I’d seen when I was a little queer punk teenager,” Thirza writes. “I’m really into TV and films about women and their career aspirations. I think it’s such a refreshing change from just being about romance. (Even though there is romance in this series.)”
And after you’ve blasted through that show, she suggests something a little more meditative: In The Mood For Love, Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 drama about a man (Tony Leung) and a woman (Maggie Cheung) as neighbours in 1962 Hong Kong who realize their spouses are having an affair, and develop a strange, intimate connection as a result.
“Wong’s masterpiece is so vivid and languid,” Thirza writes. “I really love this sense of longing he creates in this work. When I was first doing the lockdown thing I binged a lot of his films, and this one still stands out in my memory as a lush viewing experience.”
We Are Lady Parts is available to stream on the Global TV app with a cable subscription to Showcase, and on the STACKTV channel at Amazon Prime Video Canada.
In The Mood For Love is available to stream on the Criterion Channel.
Kwêskosîw (She Whistles) screens in Fantasia’s Born Of Woman program Tuesday at 9:30 pm and Thursday at 9 am. Tickets are available here.
Last chance to stream
Every month around this time, the Criterion Channel sends out an email announcing the titles leaving its streaming service, and I scramble to make sure I’m not about to let some lost classic vanish into the ether before I can see it. This month, I’m passing that warning along to you: if you haven’t seen Todd Haynes’s Safe, put that at the very top of your to-do list.
Made in 1995, Safe is a chilly drama starring Julianne Moore as Carol White, an unremarkable Los Angeles woman whose comfortable life is derailed when she develops a devastating immune disorder. Or maybe it’s an environmental illness. Or maybe it’s entirely psychosomatic. Whatever the cause, the symptoms are real, and Carol’s attempts to find an effective treatment lead to increasingly desperate measures, alienating her husband (Xander Berkeley) and ultimately risking everything to make the suffering stop.
Moore’s performance – and Alex Nepomniaschy’s merciless cinematography, which isolates Carol in physical spaces well before she’s literally isolating herself to avoid any exposures – makes watching Safe almost unbearably tense. Haynes has made a horror movie disguised as a conventional character study – he did something similar with Dark Waters a couple of years back, actually – and a quarter-century after its release, it’s now possible to see the seeds of Safe in dozens of other genre works, most recently Leigh Whannell’s reworking of The Invisible Man. And of course the film now seems perfectly suited to our current reality of airborne threats, queasy anxiety and rampant misinformation. Like Cuarón’s Children Of Men, Safe casts its speculative gaze in exactly the right direction.
And because it’s on the Criterion Channel, you also get access to the supplements produced for the label’s 2014 special edition Blu-ray: a conversation with Haynes and Moore about the making of the movie and the working relationship that’s evolved through subsequent collaborations, an interview with producer Christine Vachon, and Haynes’s 1978 short film The Suicide. There’s also the audio commentary Haynes, Moore and Vachon recorded in 2001 for the film’s original DVD release. You’ve got a couple of weeks to get through it all.
Safe is available to stream on the Criterion Channel through August 31.
If you like this, you might like that
The reviews for the Aretha Franklin biopic Respect aren’t the strongest, with critics (including our own Radheyan Simonpillai) taking issue with its schematic box-ticking approach, which reduces Franklin’s complex life to its greatest hits. Vikram Murthi at The AV Club came right out and said it: it’s an unintentional Walk Hard, the masterful 2007 parody of every superficial musical biopic ever made, but mostly James Mangold’s Johnny Cash/June Carter story Walk The Line. So why not just watch Walk Hard again?
Because Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is a damn delight. Written by producer Judd Apatow and director Jake Kasdan, it stars John C. Reilly as the eponymous (and fictional) country legend, whose elevation from humble beginnings and personal tragedy to preposterous, decadent superstardom before his eventual recovery and comeback is the urtext of every Behind The Music episode. Reilly’s bright-eyed, well-meaning idiot rises, falls, rises again and falls even more spectacularly, all while performing a soundtrack of brilliant pastiche numbers that run the gamut from Johnny Cash and Ray Charles to the Beach Boys and the Beatles, climaxing with a magnificently awful disco cover of David Bowie’s Starman that I had as my ringtone for far longer than I would care to admit.
As good as Reilly is in the lead, his co-stars might be even better: Kirsten Wiig is Dewey’s hapless first love, Jenna Fischer is the singer who steals his heart, and Tim Meadows is the loyal sideman who tries his best to keep Dewey on the straight and narrow while indulging in every debauchery possible. Also Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Justin Long and Jason Schwartzman turn up as the Beatles, because why wouldn’t they.
And that’s just a sliver of the massive cast, every last one of them having an absolute ball. That’s the best thing about Walk Hard: like Barb & Star, it’s a comedy that celebrates its clichéd elements with a yes-and enthusiasm, piling one silly idea on top of another until all we can do is laugh, and maybe sing along to the soundtrack afterward.
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is available to stream for free at CTV.ca, and available to rent or buy on most VOD platforms.
Play us out
What else is there? Well, there’s always the latest instalment of NOW’s What To Watch digest, which is especially ambitious this week with reviews of Brand New Cherry Flavor, CODA, Free Guy, Nine Days, Respect and Marvel’s What If…? And here are my full-length reviews of Brand New Cherry Flavor and Free Guy, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.
Elsewhere on the site I wrote about Cineplex’s new CineClub program, which is technically a subscription service but really just an elaborate discount program. (Still, as discount programs go, it has its merits.) And I did this week’s 40 At 40, which looks back at why putting Jessica Chastain on our 2011 TIFF cover was one of the easiest decisions we ever made.
Oh, and before I go, some news: the NOW streaming newsletter is going to look a little different in the very near future. We’re still figuring out the specifics, but if you have any thoughts on what you’d like to see in Newsletter 2.0, I’d love to hear them! Consider the contacts below your suggestion box. I’m open to just about anything, unless it’s an oral history of the Transformers saga. No one needs that.
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.