The Downstream: August 2024
10 great movies to watch before they leave streaming this month.
It’s that time of year in the U.S. when the sun starts setting before 8 P.M. again, something which leads me at least to spend less time out luxuriating in the evenings — and more time at home watching movies. If you feel the same, here are 10 you might want to indulge in before they depart their current streaming homes!
The Birdcage, Amazon Prime Video and Criterion Channel
In an era when most studio comedies are crafted through line-o-rama, a style that just lets the actors riff on a variation of lines to give the editor bountiful options in the final cut, director Mike Nichols’ intentionality and deliberation in The Birdcage stand out as exceptional. As his biographer, Mark Harris, pointed out:
“He kept his eye out for what he called ‘the expensive laugh’ – the joke that came at the cost of believability, consistency, or emotional honesty – and would often rethink a scene if he saw it going in that direction.”
So while this comedy about a gay couple (Robin Williams and Nathan Lane) who put on an elaborate charade to hide the true nature of their family when their son announces his engagement to the daughter of a notoriously homophobic senator is uproarious, it never flies off the rails into outright risible territory. And for that, we have to once again salute the talents of Nichols (whose worked I broke down in an early newsletter linked below):
Can’t Hardly Wait, Criterion Channel
What if The Breakfast Club fused with a high school party movie? That’s essentially the proposition of Can’t Hardly Wait, a gem of the late-nineties teen movie boom that jam-packs every adolescent archetype you can think of into a single space. Shoutout to this movie for turning Jennifer Love Hewitt into perhaps the most perfect teen idol over … and providing a killer soundtrack.
Guarding Tess, Amazon Prime Video
If you’re bummed out with political content playing out on your screens in the news, I can understand that. But don’t let that keep you from missing the absolutely delightful Guarding Tess! Shirley MacLaine makes for one heck of a cantankerous former First Lady, and she certainly drives her security detail (led by Nicolas Cage) off the wall. All the humor is good-natured and fun. It’s a perfect watch for something if you don’t want to turn off your brain but also don’t want to be too upset.
Kate Plays Christine, Criterion Channel
If you want a look at the bleeding edge of documentary cinema, dive into the work of Robert Greene. His filmmaking preoccupation is exploding the binary between fiction and non-fiction because he understands the way artifice can bring about authenticity. “Truth” and “reality” are less things that exist and more concepts he arrives at in a work like Kate Plays Christine. This chronicle of his collaboration with actress Kate Lyn Sheil as they try to understand the curious case of Christine Chubbuck, a Florida news anchor who died by suicide on air, is a construction practically built to fail. In their search for a psychological silver bullet to inform Sheil’s portrayal, they end up highlighting just how knotty it is to truly understand someone who would perform such a jarring act of self-harm. (If you want to learn more about Green’s process and philosophy, I interviewed him for a later movie.)
Le Doulos, Criterion Channel
There’s been somewhat of Jean-Pierre Melville mania going around New York’s repertory theater scene this year (I know one reader who can attest to this). If you want a slice of cinematic history that doesn’t feel stodgy, start digging into his subversive takes on genre films that proved a bolt of inspiration for Quentin Tarantino. A great place to start would be the Le Doulos, which I’m convinced Scorsese was watching around the time of making The Departed. Melville inverts the gangster film, a moralistic invention of the early days of film censorship in America meant to demonstrate how crime doesn’t pay. This thriller about smoking out the informant in the middle of a criminal enterprise reimagines the storytelling conventions for a world where characters make their own morality. For Melville, crime is not the mark of a sick society — in a twisted way, it might be the most honest living one can have.
The LEGO Batman Movie, Netflix
Hear me out: Deadpool wants what The LEGO Batman Movie has. The “merc with the mouth” decries superhero movie tropes only to turn around and lazily embrace them. These animated building blocks, however, affectionately send up the Nolan Batman movies and get in a few jabs at lesser-loved outings with the Caped Crusader. The film recognizes the common skeletal structure of the modern superhero movie from the writers scaling back the narrative’s scope to child-comprehensible (and appropriate) levels. We know the dramatic beats so well that we can predict them. So does The Lego Batman Movie, which has an uproarious, subversive twist at every moment when we catch wise.
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Max
Most of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl consists of teenage filmmaker Greg (Thomas Mann) processing a tumultuous year of friendship with cancer-stricken by re-envisioning it as a film, compartmentalizing it by labeling distinct segments “The Part Where…” With his “business partner” Earl (RJ Cyler), he has plenty of experience turning classics and Criterion Collection titles into amusingly awful short parodies. But, as Greg quickly finds out, sincerity and authenticity are tough qualities to achieve. How can any film really capture the pain of illness and mortality? The paralysis of youthful indecision? The crippling fear of candidly opening yourself up to someone and being completely vulnerable? Greg, in the grand scheme of his personal movie where he is the protagonist but not the hero, successfully grasps the enormity of the issues he has to face. While it can border on twee in moments, it’s a beautiful realization of a kernel of truth at the heart of my beloved Annie Hall: “You’re always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it’s real difficult in life.”
Niagara, Criterion Channel
Despite what this trailer might have you believe, Niagara is very much a Technicolor experience! (At least the version that Criterion has through the ned of the month is.) And I won’t lie, that was a slightly disorienting experience because this is very much a pitch-black noir. Infidelity, criminality, and all other forms of deceit are on the table in Marilyn Monroe’s movie debut where she stuns as a classic femme fatale opposite Joseph Cotten (Citizen Kane). The two play a couple for whom the passion has left the relationship long ago, which foils them nicely opposite another couple at their Niagara Falls motel who have come on a delayed honeymoon. All’s fair in love and wa(te)r(falls).
Viva, Peacock
In Paddy Breathnach’s Viva, aimless Cuban teenager Jesus (Héctor Medina) finds meaning and identity by, ironically, assuming that of another person. On stage in drag as Viva, Jesus finds something that gives him some sense of purpose and happiness. None of this comes to the delight of his ailing father Angel (Jorge Perugorría), long a distant memory for Jesus who reappears out of the blue. Being from an older generation, Angel unsurprisingly holds very rigid ideas about gender roles and grants little fluidity. Yet in their forced time together, much of it painful and unpleasant, Jesus begins to soften his father’s heart. The film demonstrates how what we believe to be true can still move us powerfully. Stirring and sweet, Breathnach offers uplift and hope that feels genuinely earned.
Witness, Amazon Prime Video
It’s still wild to me that Harrison Ford only has a single Oscar nomination, and it’s for Witness. That’s not a knock on this great thriller by Peter Weir, to be clear! Frankly, I’m surprised someone hasn’t tried to turn this into a prestige miniseries since it involves non-mainstream religious practice (the Amish) and crime (a young boy within that community being the sole witness to a murder). Ford’s Detective Captain John Book joins their ranks to see justice served, and it’s tense to the very finish.
I regret to inform you that the mothers of Mothers’ Instinct (Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain) were not mothering. I said skip it, not stream it, for Decider.
Also, on the off-chance you were planning to watch the Chiwetel Ejiofor-directed Rob Peace (which has just been released), allow me to resurface my review for The Playlist from Sundance to advise you against doing that.
Paying subscribers also got me talking about one of the most unconventional delights I’ve seen this summer: Conner O’Malley’s Rap World.
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
Also, I love them.
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.
My how the turn tables … Amelia Dimoldenberg of Chicken Shop Date is the one fielding rather than asking the questions on this episode of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso.
While I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone see Cuckoo, you should read friend of the newsletter Hannah Strong freaking this Vulture ranking of star Dan Stevens’ roles by their “weird British man”-ness.
Quite a headline in the Grey Lady: “What Will It Take for Hollywood to Grow Up?”
A brief programming note, if you’ve made it this far: I’ll be heading out for the Venice Film Festival next week and pre-scheduling some newsletters! Expect a full report when I’m back.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall
Thanks for this Marshall. I'll add Witness, Can't Hardly Wait, and Niagara to my viewing list.