The Downstream: May 2022
10 great movies to watch before they leave streaming this month.
Well, all my best intentions of having another post out last week got derailed by Southwest Airlines and having to sleep in the Chicago - Midway airport terminal on Friday night! So here is this month’s The Downstream along with a prayer to the heavens for newsletter writing time toall from the sky.
Juno, Hulu
I think a lot of people retrospectively cringe at Diablo Cody’s zany vernacular in Juno, but the dialogue more than just weirdness for its own sake. The odd manner of speaking is like her own version of Sorkinese for people who are not working in high-flying industries and yet still possess remarkable mental acuity. Any number of rewatches later and it’s the wisdom of the writing that stands out, anyways. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve turned to the YouTube clip with the sage advise of J.K. Simmons’ Mac MacGuff:
“Look, in my opinion, the best thing you can do is find a person who loves you for exactly what you are. Good mood, bad mood, ugly, pretty, handsome, what have you, the right person is still going to think the sun shines out your ass. That's the kind of person that's worth sticking with.”
Lady Bird, Netflix (until 6/2)
It’s technically not leaving until June, but this is your warning to get in that latest revisit of Lady Bird before it (likely) moves to a less-frequented streaming service! Discover once again that Greta Gerwig made a perfect movie that continues to reveal new dimensions of its brilliance the more time you spend marveling at it.
Network, HBO Max
Nearly 50 years later, and Network’s prophetic warning for the infotainment era and corporate conglomeration of the news feels like something of an unheeded parable. While most of network anchor Howard Beale’s sermonizing about being “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore” has been elevated to gospel in pop culture, it’s fascinating to revisit the film and remember that the film is not easily reducible to simple maxims. Beale is having a mental breakdown, after all, and every character has some ulterior motive that adds an additional layer of subtext complicating their speechifying.
Seven Beauties, Criterion Channel
A little piece of history: Lina Wertmüller’s Seven Beauties marks the first movie directed by a woman to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Director. I was lucky enough to catch a screening of the film at the Academy Museum last fall knowing little other than its watershed status and was quite gobsmacked by its intensity and verve. This isn’t for the faint of heart, I must warn. But if you’re willing to spend two hours alongside a smooth-talking hustler in fascist Italy who winds up captured by the Nazis, you’ll find it a uniquely compelling character study.
Starship Troopers, Hulu
Paul Verhoeven’s subversive anti-war war film Starship Troopers was taken by many at face value upon its release 25 years ago. It feels impossible now to look at the film and not see either the multiple layers of irony caking the story or the blinking warning lights about how action movies function as thinly veiled propaganda for state violence. It’s a campy delight with a lot to say by way of how Verhoeven says it.
This Means War, Amazon Prime Video
I will forever defend the honor of This Means War, the action comedy where frenemy CIA agents played by Chris Pine and Tom Hardy fight for the hand of Reese Witherspoon. This movie knows exactly what it needs to do and be, and it’s fine to just bask in the glow of three stars shining luminously. It’s pure fun entertainment that will make you pine for studios to start making more rom-coms again!
Top Gun, Netflix
If you’re looking to revisit before taking the highway back to the danger zone, you’ve got a short runway to watch Top Gun before it departs Netflix. I’m not sure if there’s ever been a bigger discrepancy between my feelings for a first movie in a series (this is honestly not very good) and its sequel (I’m counting down the hours).
The Wonders, Criterion Channel
If I had to pick a filmmaker who represents the present and future of Italy’s illustrious national cinema, it would be the empathetic and imaginative Alice Rohrwacher. I find myself thinking back quite often to her beguiling sophomore feature The Wonders, a story of rural beekeepers whose existence begins to shift when a reality TV crew arrives and grows insistent on profiling them. While I interviewed Rohrwacher in 2018 for a different film, I think what she had to say about her uniquely Italian perspective also applies to this film:
“I grew up in a country in which the present and the past coexist at the same time. For example, you can have a gas station right next to a Roman aqueduct. They are side by side. You see the signs of modernity really literally next to the signs of many different eras. Therefore, my gaze was shaped by growing up in such a country in which the temporal closeness of time is never linear. It’s a case in which one literally needs to find their own space in a place which is already quite crowded with a lot of different strata.”
The Wrecking Crew, HBO Max
This documentary is very much by the books, but The Wrecking Crew provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the studio musicians who helped give the sound and texture to some of your favorite songs. Each new revelation of the titular group’s contributions to the history of music left me even more dumbfounded and amazed. If nothing else, it’s a solid soundtrack to underline whatever else you’re doing!
Zoolander, Netflix
If you ever feel bad about loving Ben Stiller’s male model comedy Zoolander … well, first of all, you shouldn’t. But you know who else loves this movie? The Tree of Life director Terrence Malick. The ponderous and philosophical filmmaker apparently is so notorious in his fandom of the movie that Ben Stiller made him an in-character video for Malick’s birthday. Someone desperately needs to release that video, but until then, another watch of this uproarious movie will have to do.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd.
If you’re wondering what’s behind the Clue rewatch, the impetus stems from seeing a group called A Drinking Game NYC that does boozy staged readings of beloved fan favorites. A friend did her birthday party at their rendition of — you guessed it — Clue. It made my first time seeing it since childhood significantly more fun thinking about how it was restaged at Brooklyn’s The Bell House! (Would highly recommend going to one of these if you’re in the area, especially if they’re doing a movie you know by heart.)
The weather ticked up past 90 degrees this weekend in NYC, thus I broke out the summer playlist (even though we are still in meteorological spring and pre-MDW).
I can’t say I’ve been spending too much time taking in the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial, although I do somewhat regret not having more of an angle on something that will clearly be an Emmy-contending Hulu miniseries in a decade or so. I found these analyses from Vox and The Atlantic to be particularly pointed and harrowing about the online blast radius that will reverberate long after any verdict here.
I didn’t publish anything new, but this clip of James Gray that started making the rounds among literate film types over the weekend got me thinking…
…even more specifically about his point around why you can’t quote anything from Aquaman. I then remembered that I answered this for myself two years ago in my Smells Like ‘10s Spirit column on Decider when I traced the continued cultural relevance of Bridesmaids to its GIF-ability and visual-based humor. Quotables are dead, long live quotables!
Have a great week!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall