The Downstream: August 2022
10 great movies to watch before they leave streaming this month.
I don’t want to jinx it, but fall is just around the corner…
Bide the time until the arrival of sweater weather with one of these titles leaving streaming in August!
Birth, HBO Max
Director Jonathan Glazer knows how to capture the eerieness lurking underneath everyday life like no other. Birth documents how the mysterious appearance of a young boy begins to unravel the tranquil existence of Nicole Kidman’s Anna, a widowed woman due to remarry. This 10-year-old child claims to be her deceased husband and can even recall intimate details of their life together. Her vacillation highlights the unknowability of grief and its persistent vagaries, even when it appears vanquished. (Also, while Kidman plays her character with evocative sincerity, the late Anne Heche absolutely tears up the screen with explosions of campy fury. Not to be missed!)
An Education, Hulu
13 years ago, no film cut to the very core of my adolescent angst than Lone Scherfig’s An Education. This coming-of-age story calls BS on the teenage treadmill designed to flatten young people into a résumé for college to prepare for further monotony in the adult world. Through an unconventional romance with an older man, Carey Mulligan’s Jenny learns to spot the inconsistencies in the logic governing her life — and comes to choose her path rather than letting others dictate it for her.
GoodFellas, Netflix
Another recent loss to mourn — well, losses, if we want to include Ray Liotta from earlier this year — is Paul Sorvino. The late actor left such a mark with his thin slicing of garlic with a razor-blade in GoodFellas that I perpetually think of him when I lazily defrost cubes of garlic when I’m cooking. He’s an indelible part of Scorsese’s extensive ensemble, adding character and vitality to this gangster saga that still crackles with life over three decades after its release.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, HBO Max
At least HBO Max was kind to give us some advanced notice that they were yanking the Harry Potter series from the platform, unlike … some other things they’ve yanked for less noble reasons. Anyways, here’s my periodic reminder that Prisoner of Azkaban is the best of the franchise, and no amount of J.K. Rowling tweets or Ezra Miller crimes can ruin it for me. As I said last year in my newsletter The Distancer, “This is the movie that really begins to get into his psychology as he begins to understand why he is, not just who he is. Things stop just happening to him — Harry begins to take agency in his own journey.”
I Am Not Your Negro, Amazon Prime Video
I found my review of Raoul Peck’s searing biographical documentary I Am Not Your Negro from 2017 and liked that I had written this passage: “Peck makes Baldwin’s prose easy to understand but never simple to digest, in part because it maintains a stubborn relevancy to our current moral malaise. From the white denial of racism to the myth of colorblindness, I Am Not Your Negro practically drips with modern applications. There’s an angle and a foothold for just about everyone.”
Mephisto, Criterion Channel
How did so many powerful people across Germany become complicit in Nazi atrocity? István Szabó’s Mephisto comes closest to providing some kind of explanation as it engrosses us in the dilemma of Klaus Maria Brandauer's famed actor Hendrik Höfgen. He doesn’t realize the ways in which he’s living out the Faustian bargain which he dramatizes on stage until it’s almost too late. We know the inevitable end of tacit cooperation with the Third Reich, yet the chilling conclusion of this Oscar-winning drama still lands with resounding effect.
Shaun of the Dead, Amazon Prime Video
Edward Wright’s zom-com Shaun of the Dead is also a bit of a rom-com, if you count the platonic relationship between two male friends as a kind of odd romance in its own way. As Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s odd couple fends off the zombie apocalypse with a few other surviving friends in irreverently comedic fashion, the boiling enmity between them begins to dissipate. Nothing like a little trauma bonding to make you appreciate the ones you’re with!
Starship Troopers, Netflix and HBO Max
Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven’s satirical send-up of jingoistic, borderline fascistic, action films, plays its hand with such a straight face that it was often misinterpreted as an endorsement rather than a critique. A quarter-century after its release, the pointed criticism feels impossible to miss. Depressingly, it seems like the world has caught up with Verhoeven’s imagined future quite faster than expected. The propagandistic media combined with the insatiable capitalistic urge to conquer doesn’t feel confined to the silver screen anymore like it is here.
Tickled, HBO Max
If you’re a true crime aficionado — this ought to have made several of you immediately pause — then just trust me on taking the plunge with Tickled. Dylan Reeve and David Farrier’s documentary is a bizarre, bonkers window into a world wide web of intrigue involving “competitive endurance tickling” and revenge porn. I promise you have no idea what is ahead.
Timecrimes, HBO Max
If you like time travel/loop films that grapple with the thorny nature of free will and individual agency, then Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes is a genre treat for you. After stumbling upon his neighbor’s rickety time travel contraption, protagonist Héctor comes to realize his central role in tying together several befuddling sights and events. It’s thrilling to watch his repeated journeys into the past in search of meaning and stability within the universe’s chaos.
No sleep until Venice.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
After attending @tasteofstreep’s legendary (despite my not hearing about it until this year) Mamma Mia! singalong movie party and having a ball…
…it reminded me that Cher put out an album of ABBA songs recently and that I enjoy it very much.
Also, I found this conversation with Chuck Klosterman about pinpointing the rise of negative fandoms to … 2003? … quite compelling.
I choose not to engage with the frustrating discourse around a certain New York Times article about Bodies x3, instead amplifying another good read from The Grey Lady about the A24 horror-comedy, “‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’ and the Difficulty of Coping IRL.”
As for my feelings about the film overall, they fall more in line with this great Brianna Zigler essay in Paste Magazine: “I’m Tired of Movies Even Loosely Related to Twitter.”
I was as surprised as anyone to find out that I actually kind of liked the Idris Elba vs. lion movie Beast?! I was assigned to review for The Playlist and quite enjoyed digging into how it channels Spielberg in some surprising ways. (It’s the better Idris Elba movie of the month, which is remarkable given that Three Thousand Years of Longing played the Cannes Film Festival and all.)
Subscribers got my long-teased essay about Ryusuke Hamaguchi, which wound up being somewhat of a discursive explainer with (Hama)Guchi Gang member Mark Asch:
Off to Europe at the end of this week but I swear I have some stuff lined up so you barely notice I’m gone. Ciao!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall