Yes, I know, this is going out on the last day of July. But admit it: we were done with July a long time ago and we’re all ready to move forward.
And of course we are. July had all that fuss about mask mandates and vaccine passports and what the fall would look like in the wake of the Delta variant and a last-minute health crisis for Bob Odenkirk, who it turns out literally everyone loves and respects as much as I do; August has… all of those, yes, but Odenkirk is okay and baseball is coming back to town, and also my birthday’s in there somewhere. So you know what? I’m doubling down on August.
Top streaming pick
When movie theatres reopened a couple of weeks ago, a lot of people told me F9 would mark their first trip back to the megaplex. A lot of other people said they still weren’t ready to sit in the dark for two and a half hours to watch any movie, which is totally cool; I’m only willing to attend press screenings if masking and distancing are mandatory, for reasons mentioned above. Enjoying a movie where people do preposterous things with motor vehicles at ludicrous speeds requires one to fully detach from one’s surroundings, and if you’re getting nervous when someone coughs a couple of rows behind you, I completely understand.
At least F9 is now available to watch at home, so if you’ve been desperate to catch up to the latest adventures of Team Toretto, you can do that right now on the VOD platform of your choice. And it’s a lot of fun, as these movies go; it’s overlong and ridiculous, but at this point it’s what people expect, and director Justin Lin – who helmed the third, fourth, fifth and sixth instalments of the franchise, and understands that all anyone really wants from these movies is glorious, immaculately choreographed mayhem – is happy to deliver.
I’m inclined to protect most of the movie’s surprises, because if you’re still reading this you probably haven’t seen F9, but I think it’s safe to say that Vin Diesel’s Dom continues to stomp and growl his way through every scene, the movies still don’t really care about Michelle Rodriguez’s Letty or Jordana Brewster’s Mia, and Sung Kang’s immensely charming Han is back from the dead (again). John Cena is the new bad guy, Charlize Theron is back to scowl at everybody, and Helen Mirren pops in for a scene or two as Queenie, just because.
And yes, it’s true: Chris Bridges’s Tej and Tyrese Gibson’s Roman really do ride a Pontiac Fiero into low orbit. It’s the Torettoverse. These things happen. And on some level, we need them to.
F9 is available as a premium rental on all VOD platforms, including Apple TV, Cineplex and Google Play.
Buried treasure on Netflix Canada
The 2021 Fantasia Film Festival gets underway Thursday, so I’d suggest you get ready for that with something I discovered at last year’s edition of the festival: The Block Island Sound, a very effective creeper from writer/directors Kevin and Matthew McManus about eerie goings-on in a fishing community.
Something is happening on Block Island: the fish are dying, the birds are confused and crashing into things, and a fisherman (Neville Archambault) is sliding into madness. His son Harry (Chris Sheffield) and Harry’s conspiracy-minded pal Dale (Jim Cummings, the writer/director/star of Thunder Road and The Wolf Of Snow Hollow) are trying to understand why all of this is happening, and eventually Harry’s sister Audry (Michaela McManus) joins the effort to find a logical explanation. They eventually find an explanation, but… well, it’s not exactly logical.
You might have seen the McManuses’ names on American Vandal and Cobra Kai, but this is nothing like those projects; it’s contemporary Lovecraft, is what it is, a story about ordinary people forced to grapple with a revelation that challenges everything they believe to be true, and left to wonder whether they have the strength to push forward. It’s a cerebral picture more than a gory one, but in my experience, that’s where the most vivid horror lurks. Give it a look, and then gird yourself for whatever this year’s festival has to throw at you.
The Block Island Sound is available to stream on Netflix Canada.
Double Feature by Heather Ross
If you know who Del Close was, you’ll be excited to hear that there’s a new documentary about him. (If you don’t, he was effectively the godfather of improvisational comedy, and his long-form improv concept, called the Harold, was the rock upon which the Second City built its church.) Heather Ross’s For Madmen Only: The Stories Of Del Close is a celebration of his life and work, as remembered by his friends, colleagues and partners. And since it just debuted on the Hot Docs At Home platform, I thought I should invite Heather to program this week’s marquee. And she chose two documentaries “with an adventurous, hybrid style of their own creation.”
Heather chose Waltz With Bashir, Ari Folman’s hallucinatory 2008 hybrid doc about his experiences as an Israeli soldier in Lebanon in the early 80s, and A Love Song For Latasha, Sophia Nahli Allison’s elegant, shattering Netflix short about the death of a South Central teenager in 1992.
“Waltz With Bashir uses graphic novel-style animation to delve into a repressed wartime memory,” Heather writes, while “A Love Song For Latasha uses dreamlike visuals to bring a young woman killed in a racist incident back to life. Both stretch the boundaries of what non-fiction filmmaking can be.”
Waltz With Bashir is available to stream on the Criterion Channel;
A Love Song For Latasha is available to stream on Netflix Canada.
For Madmen Only: The Stories Of Del Close is now available to stream at Hot Docs At Home and coming to VOD platforms August 10.
Last chance to stream
This will be mildly controversial to some, but you know that last Jurassic World movie? It was pretty good! I went into Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom expecting more of the same bland competence that Colin Trevorrow brought to Jurassic World a few years earlier, and was very pleasantly surprised to find that this one dares to venture beyond the closed environment of the infamous monster park – mainly because it’s destroyed in a volcanic eruption about halfway through the picture.
J.A. Bayona, who made The Orphanage and The Impossible, is the director this time around, and he’s crafted a story that opens up the franchise and roots around inside it, wondering what it would be like to live in a world where cloned dinosaurs have been a thing for a couple of decades. Yes, he brings back Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard because that’s how sequels work, but he finds ways to make them more integral to the story this time around – and if you decide that Rafe Spall’s morally flexible lawyer is the same guy he played in The F Word, just slightly older and a little more disillusioned, that’s a lot of fun.
Most importantly, it’s got dinosaurs. Some of them are scary. Some of them are jerks. All of them are a delight to watch, especially when involved in elaborate chases and suspense sequences. If you passed up on this because ugh, another Jurassic World movie, you might want to reconsider. Bayona knows what he’s doing.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is available to stream on Netflix Canada through August 31.
If you like this, you might like that
Disney’s Jungle Cruise movie is… not as good as it could have been, you know? Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt are having a good time and all, but the whole venture gets ground down by the weight of a mythology it really doesn’t need. The filmmakers should have relied less on the elaborate Pirates Of The Caribbean machinery and looked a little closer at Romancing The Stone, a consistently entertaining odd-couple adventure that paired Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas as a nervous romance writer who journeys to Cartagena to save her sister from kidnappers, and the mercenary American she enlists to help her along the way. It hits a lot of the same points, but with one key difference: screenwriter Diane Thomas and director Robert Zemeckis don’t have to worry about alienating fans of a theme-park ride, and are free to do whatever the hell they want.
And that turned out to be to be a licence to make a movie for grown-ups, playing the friction between Douglas’s cocky swashbuckler and Turner’s repressed bookworm for sexual tension as well as comedy; Thomas is riffing on The African Queen – a key point of inspiration for Jungle Cruise as well – but making her characters earn their attraction rather than just decide they’re a great match from the start. And by setting the story in the present day rather than rolling it back to the early 20th century, this movie lets Turner’s Joan Wilder drive the plot at every turn instead of tricking the men around her into going along with a given plan, and Joan’s success as an author actually works in her favour throughout the story. (Danny DeVito and Zack Norman are a constant delight as the squabbling sort-of villains, too.)
There’s also the pure joy of watching Zemeckis at peak ingenuity, setting up modest but thrilling action scenes and relying on his cast to sell the movie’s biggest moments rather than heaping unnecessary digital effects on every scene. Yes, the crocodile looks a little fakey. No, it doesn’t matter. Just enjoy the ride.
Romancing The Stone is available to stream on Disney+. Don’t bother with the sequel.
Jungle Cruise is available to stream on Disney+ for an additional $34.99 Premier Access fee.
Play us out
And that’s how we end July. If you want more stuff to read, there’s this week’s What To Watch page, along with my longer reviews of The Green Knight and Jungle Cruise and Rad’s review of Stillwater. I also had a very fast chat about slow cinema with Green Knight co-stars Dev Patel and Joel Edgerton; you can find that here, complete with video!) And don’t forget to check out our August lookaheads for Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ and Crave; you’re sure to find something to enjoy.
And if I can offer a non-NOW link, you might want to listen to Friday’s episode of The Big Story podcast, which is literally my Ted talk: Jordan Heath-Rawlings had me on to talk about my love for Ted Lasso, and what Jason Sudeikis’s radically empathetic show might say about a new direction for television. I think you might enjoy that. I certainly did. See y’all next week.
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.