Well, Ontario is reopening. Movie theatres are up and running again for the first time since last fall. The other day, NOW’s Radheyan Simonpillai and I attended our first press screening in almost 11 months: a showing of an upcoming release arranged for us in the private theatre at the Shangri-La Hotel. (Honestly? After 400-odd nights of watching movies from a sectional, my biggest takeaway was how nice it felt to have armrests again.)
Assuming the reopening doesn’t trigger a new wave of COVID cases, we’ll all be rethinking our relationship to home viewing in the weeks to come: are you comfortable going to screenings with more than a handful of people whom you trust to be just as respectful of health and safety protocols as you are? I don’t know that I am, and I’m going to stick to home viewing for the next couple of weeks, to see if case counts do indeed stay low. Which means I will continue to be neck-deep in streamable entertainment, which works out nicely for those of you reading this.
Top streaming pick
I hate to admit it, but I missed out on Ted Lasso when it first arrived. The show debuted late last August, and I was swamped with TIFF stuff and unable to watch it until well after the festival had ended. But damn if Jason Sudeikis’s sly take on the fish-out-of-water sitcom – in which he stars as the eponymous Kansas football coach hired to manage an English premier league team despite knowing nothing about their version of football – didn’t grab me right away. It was exactly what I needed as the world seemed to be coming apart.
In an era of antiheroes and tormented families, Ted Lasso is a balm. It starts from a cynical premise, which is that the unprepared Ted has been hired by team owner Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) as part of an elaborate scheme to destroy the team from within, but it refuses to be cynical itself. Instead, it’s a show about the appeal of kindness and decency, with Ted’s open heart defining and changing every relationship he forges. Anger is repurposed into a more constructive energy, mistakes are accepted and forgiven and adversaries are made into allies. Sudeikis and Brendan Hunt, who co-stars as Ted’s taciturn bosom buddy Coach Beard, have crafted a narrative that plays as loose, charming fun but is meticulously constructed to keep revealing new layers in every one of its characters – except perhaps for Rebecca’s ex-husband Rupert (Anthony Head), who’s an awful person full stop – and show us how Ted’s outreach lets them grow and change.
It is also very, very funny, mining endless comedy from the mismatched character arcs of Ted, Rebecca, Beard, influencer Keeley (Juno Temple), facilitator Higgins (Jeremy Swift), anxious kit man Nathan (Nick Mohammed), idiot ace Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) and, perhaps most effectively of all, aging legend Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein, who – like Sudeikis and Hunt – is also a writer on the show). It’s a testament to the space the show gives those characters that all but one of the show’s regulars was nominated for an Emmy earlier this week. The sole exception was Dunster, whose character is far less prominent in the second half of the season.
I cannot recommend Ted Lasso any more enthusiastically than this: at the end of the third episode, I turned to Kate and actually said out loud, “I think I love this show.” And I did, and I do, and you will too.
The first season of Ted Lasso is available to stream on Apple TV+. The second season premieres Friday, July 23.
Buried treasure on Netflix Canada
If you’re still hesitating on Ted Lasso because you can only picture Jason Sudeikis as a broad comic performer – which, fair, he did spend most of the last decade making those Horrible Bosses movies and We’re The Millers and Going The Distance and so on – I would like to direct you to the movie that established his dramatic bona fides: Kodachrome, a 2018 road picture that gives him the chance to show his range, and play some notes you might not have expected.
Kodachrome casts Sudeikis as Matt, a big-city executive who needs to reconnect with his humanity. Driving to Kansas with his estranged father (Ed Harris), a renowned photographer nearing the end of his life, is the catalyst for that. It also helps that his father is travelling with a nurse (Elizabeth Olsen) who seems like a very nice person. And yes, this is a big bunch of clichés. But the movie knows it: as I wrote in 2018, Jonathan Tropper’s script uses familiar dynamics as shortcuts to the real meat of the story, which is the way Matt’s perspective changes over the course of the trip. The journey really is the point of this movie, not the destination.
And while Olsen and Harris are both very good in their supporting roles, it’s Sudeikis’s film; Mark Raso’s direction subtly encourages us to pay attention to what he’s doing in every scene, and how he’s just transparent enough as Matt to show us the emotions the character is trying to hide. Sudeikis does something similar at certain points in Ted Lasso, in fact, though the context is entirely different here. And in both cases, the actor is good enough to sell it without ever pushing too hard.
Kodachrome is available to stream on Netflix Canada.
Double Feature by Kristian Bruun
One of the only good things about the pandemic has been the surge in eclectic outdoor and drive-in screenings. This Tuesday, for example, Ontario Place is holding a free screening of Shane Belcourt’s 2019 drama Red Rover, presented by the Canadian Film Fest in partnership with Toronto’s DriveInTO program. It’s a lovely little picture, starring Orphan Black’s Kristian Bruun as a heartbroken geologist who puts himself up for a one-way mission to Mars, and The Expanse’s Cara Gee as the singer who almost immediately complicates that decision. (Meghan Heffern, Morgan David Jones, Sugith Varughese and Anna Hopkins are in there too.) Anyway, this was the perfect excuse to ask Kristian to arrange this week’s marquee, and here’s what he offered.
“I just finished hiking the Stawamus Chief in Squamish, B.C., this morning, and the hike inspired me to give people a Choose Their Own Adventure Double Feature. Much like hiking the Chief, this double feature can go many ways, but the thread holding it together is the director: Dutch master Paul Verhoeven. I’ve gone down the rabbit hole recently with his films that I enjoyed at WAY TOO YOUNG an age in the late 80s and 90s. While many of his movies were deemed schlocky and cheesy - and indeed are loaded with nutty Dutch edam – in hindsight, as an adult, they are chock full of biting social commentary, 80s/90s American hyper-violence with an anti-war sentiment and casual (and very dated/problematic) Euro sexuality: all the things this teenage boy in the 90s loved.
“You have a choice of his following films: RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls and Starship Troopers.
“He has MANY great films before and after this era (both in Dutch and English) that I am eager to discover next, but this small list encapsulates an era of my film education that had a huge impact on my taste of summer blockbusters and thrillers. Do you want the colourful bloodlust double bill of RoboCop and Total Recall? Or maybe you want to throw in a steamy film like Basic Instinct or Showgirls (which went from panned, to drinking game, to cult status) to balance it out? Perhaps Starship Troopers, for a taste of on-the-nose anti-war propaganda meets sci-fi space adventure – doing what Avatar was attempting in an arguably more entertaining and successful way.
“Please note: These films should be enjoyed with a large pinch of salt. On the surface they are dated and they can be problematic, but you won’t find a better skewering of post-Reagan America. Verhoeven’s bold eye created films that attracted the very people he was commenting on - and they ate it up. ‘See you at the party, Richter!’ ”
RoboCop is streaming for free on Hoopla, and also available on the MGM and SuperChannel channels on Amazon Prime Video Canada;
Total Recall is available on Crave with a Starz subscription and on the SuperChannel channel on Amazon Prime Video Canada;
Basic Instinct is available on the SuperChannel channel on Amazon Prime Video Canada;
Showgirls is available to rent or buy on Cineplex and Starship Troopers is available on Netflix, Crave with a Starz subscription and on the Starz channel on Amazon Prime Video Canada.
And all the films are available on your favourite VOD platform, except for Showgirls for some reason. And you can get tickets for Tuesday night’s Red Rover screening here.
If you like this, you might like that
Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy constitutes one of the more ambitious horror projects in a while, with director/co-writer Leigh Janiak turning R.L. Stine’s YA horror franchise into three feature films telling a single story spanning over three centuries. They’re fine – I wrote about them at length on the NOW website in a piece that went up earlier today – but if you really want to see what Janiak can do, check out her first feature, Honeymoon.
Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway star as Brooklyn newlyweds Bea and Paul, who we meet on their way to her family’s lakeside cottage. But their bliss turns into a paranoid nightmare when something inexplicable happens to Bea, and she starts acting like a different person.
Both actors are terrific, moving through confusion and anguish as the situation worsens, and Janiak and co-writer Phil Graziadei (with whom she’d co-write the Fear Street movies as well) keep the focus tight on their leads, letting us see the depth of their connection and the pain of its loss. It’s a far more intimate type of horror than they explore in Fear Street, along the same lines of David Cronenberg’s aching remake of The Fly. The horror isn’t in what happens, exactly, but in our gradual understanding that the worst thing has already happened. Everything else is just fallout.
Honeymoon is available to stream for free on Hoopla, and also available on most VOD platforms.
Play us out
And that’s it for another week. If you need more recommendations, NOW’s weekly review digest awaits. I also wrote a longer review of A Quiet Place Part II, which landed in theatres, on VOD and on Amazon Prime Video Canada all at once this week. Now that Never Have I Ever’s second season has dropped on Netflix you might also want to read Rad’s interview with Maitreyi Ramakrishnan. And I made a list of the best episodes of Kim’s Convenience last weekend that I think turned out pretty well.
Oh, and if you’re still on the fence about going back to the megaplex, check out the latest episode of the NOW What podcast, where Glenn Sumi, Rad and I talk about our own expectations and reservations; it’s available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or at the bottom of this page. However you’re feeling, we’re probably feeling it too. Movie critics are a bunch of weird empaths.
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.