Happy Christmas in July! As the thermostat continues to rise, cool out at home with one of these solid ten streaming picks before they depart their current platform.
American Gigolo, HBO Max
If you’re planning to watch the upcoming Jon Bernthal show premiering on Showtime in September (if you haven’t seen the incredibly steamy trailer … be warned it’s NSFW), it’s probably good to see the original American Gigolo property as well. The series is a contemporary reimagining of Paul Schrader’s 1980 erotic thriller, not a direct sequel, so it doesn’t appear to be homework. Nonetheless, I think it couldn’t hurt to have the film as a frame of reference, especially to foil Bernthal against the materialist, maximalist ethos of Richard Gere’s man of the night. I wasn’t totally enamored with the film, admittedly, but I’m glad I have it as a baseline to think about what’s changed in four decades of masculine preening and female pleasuring.
Arrival, Amazon Prime Video (through 7/27) and Paramount+
I rewatched this for the third time last year in preparation for Dune and, man, Arrival still hits. (It takes real talent to make linguistics lecture into edge-of-your-seat entertainment!) It’s so rare to have a sci-fi film that maintains a cautious yet hopeful optimism for our contact with otherworldly beings. Though I actually saw it at a film festival prior to release — and got a speeding ticket trying to make it to my screening — Arrival feels inseparable from its opening just days after the 2016 presidential election. The film’s insistence that communication and empathy can break through seemingly insurmountable borders served as a true balm then, and that power remains intact still.
Bacurau, Criterion Channel
“We always talk that it’s the best and cheapest special effect in [the] film,” stated Bacurau co-director Kleber Mendonça Filho in my 2020 interview with him. That effect? It’s not VFX but five little words: “A few years from now.” This satirical shoot-’em-up revenge story about a Brazilian village defending itself from a mercenary invasion feels like a story out of time, set in the future but echoing the past and certainly resembling our present. The film makes for a raucous, rabble-rousing call for solidarity that waves a political banner without ever feeling overly polemical.
Collateral, HBO Max
I caught Collateral for the first time in at least a decade during a Memorial Day series at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, and I just have to say: WOW! Here’s a gripping, pulse-pounding thriller with a simple setup — a Los Angeles taxi driver picks up a hitman and becomes an accessory to a night from hell — executed with expert precision by director Michael Mann. It’s a shame Tom Cruise now operates in overdrive to remind moviegoers that they love him as a hero because he makes for a ruthless, terrifying villain here.
Cyrus, Hulu
I miss Jonah Hill the comedian. (Don’t Look Up, a film whose cringe moments overwhelmingly outweighed any laughter he brought, does not count.) While he’s perhaps best known for over-the-top characters in films like Superbad and The Wolf of Wall Street, Hill has the real range to do more subdued work as well. In the Duplass Brothers’ mumblecore flick Cyrus, he’s outstanding as the potential stepson from hell wreaking quiet chaos in the life of his mom’s new flame played by John C. Reilly. This is a film with the good kind of cringe — intentionally and methodically built awkwardness crafted by people who know how awkward they want to make any given moment.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Criterion Channel
I watched this old-school movie musical in preparation for the upcoming Marilyn Monroe moment likely to hit with the release of Netflix’s Blonde in September. But I came away from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes loving … Jane Russell the most? Her thinly veiled sexual voraciousness, especially in the presence of the U.S. men’s Olympic gymnastics team, is a pinnacle of cinematic horniness. The humor and the musical numbers are pretty solid throughout as well! Good watch.
Groundhog Day, Amazon Prime Video
Sure, the weather couldn’t be further from the blustery winter in Punxsutawney, PA, but the time is always right for Groundhog Day. The gold standard for time loop movies still holds up all these decades later and now feels all too real after early COVID-era quarantines that forced us to essentially live the same day again and again. Harold Ramis’ existential comedy has any number of religions and philosophies clamoring to claim the film validates the tenets of their belief, and it’s not hard to see why. Groundhog Day, with hilarity and heart, challenges us to swim upstream against the world’s cruel sea of sameness with radical empathy and attentiveness.
Tenet, HBO Max
If you threw up your hands during your first watch of Tenet and said you’d have to unlock it later, be advised that your window to do so on HBO Max is rapidly dwindling. I’ve watched the film twice now and even read the screenplay to try to get my head around Christopher Nolan’s most recent thriller. While I do find the setup a bit convoluted, the thematic meat of the film is worth digging into. I think Tenet is ultimately a film about the need to fight against the tyranny of algorithms that have the possibility of constructing alternate realities. In a world where we can easily shrug off cataclysmic climate with “lol nothing matters,” Nolan implores us that everything does — and we cannot get complacent to simply let events unfold as if we have no agency in their occurrence.
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Hulu
Two things can be true: Walk the Line is a great movie … and Walk Hard is an outstanding comedy that lampoons its cliched developments with remarkable acuity. Jake Kasdan’s satire understands the real purpose of parody: take the form of something familiar and then use the subversion of those well-known beats to paint a picture of a larger issue within the subgenre. It’s frankly gobsmacking (and speaks to Hollywood’s limited imagination) that nearly 15 years after Walk Hard, we’re still getting Wikipedia page biopics that seem oblivious to the fact that this comedy called their game many years ago.
We Own the Night, Hulu
I know I just stumped for this in the Cannes newsletter, but allow me to once again bang the drum for James Gray’s We Own the Night. This deliberative drama about the blood ties we cannot sever in the name of rugged individualism — especially when those connections intersect with the pseudo-familial institution of law enforcement — rings with complicated, compelling emotionality. Joaquin Phoenix and (surprisingly) Mark Wahlberg are at their subdued best here as brothers on either side of the law.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd.
Since Top Gun Maverick keeps chugging along at the box office, it’s still timely to share these two great podcast conversations that attempt to grapple with complex feelings about the thrilling blockbuster. These are both great reminders that it’s possible to hold conflicting thoughts in one’s head about a movie: you can enjoy it and disagree with it.
Still trying to decode Jordan Peele’s Nope? I’d read: Alissa Wilkinson at Vox and Sam Adams at Slate.
Also, if you haven’t read it yet, the bombshell Rolling Stone report on how a bot army fueled the Snyder Cut mania is even more frightening than you could imagine.
Many things in the works but nothing new to share — stay tuned! — so enjoy this #longread of mine from 2020 on how memes were the currency that fueled the breakout success of Jordan Peele’s Get Out!
(Apologies to subscribers who were anticipating a second Ryusuke Hamaguchi post … I do still intend to publish, but I didn’t have the time/mental space to revisit Drive My Car with the intentionality I’d hoped.)
Something special is coming later this week, and it will be free for ALL as opposed to just paid subscriber content!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall