The Upstream: August 2021
10 great movies new to streaming this month.
You’re here! It came true!
Welcome to the first full edition of Marshall and the Movies on Substack. I hope soon enough you’ll get into the rhythm of these and I won’t have to over-explain things at the top of every email … but for today, this is a reminder that the first Monday of every month will feature 10 new movies on popular streaming services. I’ve decided to call this “The Upstream.” Fans of wordplay can probably guess what I’ve dubbed the post you’ll get on the final Monday of every month featuring 10 movies that will be departing from streaming.
But in the meantime, don’t miss a post in between 👇
(If you’ve been forwarded this message, clicked through online, or you’ve gotten here some other way — you can hit “subscribe now” and choose the free emails only! You won’t be charged.)
Black Swan, Hulu
TBD when you’ll be able to read it in full, but I picked up an assignment last month that required me to rank the filmography of Darren Aronofsky. Slight spoilers for anyone who didn’t know me from November 2010 through April 2011 when this movie was literally my entire personality: Black Swan was #1. I remain in such awe of how effortlessly it bridges so many genres — horror, melodrama, backstage story, “prestige” — without ever feeling clunky or overstuffed. It’s just such a masterful work that’s packed with surprises and revelations for those who return to it again. (Also, bébé Sebastian Stan is in this movie.)
Blue Ruin, HBO Max
Ever feel like movies are just getting too bloated these days? Like they’re trying to cater to too many audiences and diluting their core idea down to the lowest common denominator? Then you owe it to yourself to immerse yourself in Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin, about as simple and elemental a thriller as there is. It’s a revenge thriller stripped down to a minimalistic level, an approach that pays dividends in a big way by the end of the film’s brief 90-minute runtime.
Catch Me If You Can, Netflix/Amazon Prime
It’s easy to forget given his recent insistence on screaming roles (and bizarre off-camera behavior) that Leonardo DiCaprio oozed charm like an old Hollywood movie star. After Titanic vaulted him beyond matinee idol to Tiger Beat heartthrob status, I think he’s overshot his mark a bit on trying to convince people that he’s a ~serious~ actor. But he gets to just the right level in Catch Me If You Can right as he was making the jump from boy to leading man. Long before scammer szn captivated America, his character Frank Abagnale, Jr. pulled off grifts in three major industries purely on the basis of his self-confidence. Name another legend, etc.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Amazon Prime
Last summer, I did a big rewatch of the ‘80s high school movies that inspired the self-referentiality of Easy A for the big tenth-anniversary appreciation piece I wrote for Roger Ebert last year. (If you didn’t read it, I’m going to shamelessly plug the link here because it’s easily one of the pieces I’m proudest to have written.) Among the curated selection, the one I found most surprising upon rewatch was Fast Times at Ridgemont High. For a movie released almost four decades ago, it’s pretty forward-thinking about the way it portrays certain characters — especially female ones — and the decisions they make. Of the decade’s teen movies, I find this one strikes the best balance of reflecting a timely moment in youth culture and something timeless about the nature of being young and foolish.
For Your Consideration, HBO Max
They’ve been going on and off streaming recently, but it looks like the Christopher Guest ensemble movies are all back on HBO Max! Since Best in Show seems pretty widely seen, I’m going to throw some shine on the vastly underrated For Your Consideration. This features Catherine O’Hara at her pre-Moira Rose best as a self-serious film actress who begins to goofily unravel her latest project when a drop of Oscar buzz gets introduced into the production. Maybe it’s just my own proximity to and knowledge of the film industry that makes this my personal favorite of the Guest movies, but it really just undoes me every time I watch it.
The Insider, Amazon Prime
Admittedly, this is a movie I haven’t seen in a while, so I can’t speak quite as directly to why The Insider works so well. The streaming availability for this title is infrequent, so make sure to jump on it while you still can. This drama about a whistleblower (Russell Crowe) determined to expose Big Tobacco, and the team at 60 Minutes determined to help him get the truth out, earns its substantial runtime because it frequently plays like a great legal thriller.
La Piscine, Criterion Channel
Billed as the “splash hit” of summer 2021 by Film Forum, where this repertory title is now entering its third month, La Piscine is a perfect wet and wild seasonal watch. If you happened to see A Bigger Splash a few years ago (most notable for a delightfully deranged scene of Ralph Fiennes dancing in the sun to the Rolling Stones), this erotic French thriller is essentially the inspiration for that. This mysterious, brooding work featuring four absurdly attractive actors is a perfect movie to power you through the dog days of summer.
One Hour Photo, HBO Max
If you only know Robin Williams as an affable goofball or avuncular sage … whew, you’re in for a surprise with One Hour Photo. Don’t watch this if you aren’t ready to have Williams’ committed, disturbing performance sully your image of him. This is totally unlike anything he’s ever done. (As an aside, it’s a shame that projects like these didn’t get more love in the later years of his life — I couldn’t shake the impression that many of us needed to be reminded of his talent and versatility when he left us at a bit of a creative nadir.) Consider this the analog predecessor to social media stalker stories as Williams’ Sy Parrish, a photo developer at a big box store, becomes dangerously obsessed with a family whose lives he watches unfold on photo reels.
The Proposal, Peacock (free with ads)
It’s like an answer to a prayer — I was just watching the scene from The Proposal where Sandra Bullock goes HAM dancing to “Get Low” with a confused Betty White looking on. Look, this movie ain’t winning any awards for originality, but sometimes you just need a classic opposites-attract rom-com with some solid one-liners and a few great comic setpieces. Bullock is really one of the best to ever do this, especially giving herself over to physical comedy, and Reynolds can more than hold his own both when she’s chilly and when she’s neurotic.
Something Wild, Amazon Prime
Fans of filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson would be well advised to watch one of his professed favorite films, Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild. I don’t think PTA has quite made anything that resembles it in shape or form, but he has spoken with great admiration of the film as a perfect example of the “gearshift movie” — a film that initially presents itself as one thing only to later reveal itself as something else entirely. What begins as a screwball road trip comedy with a Wall Street yuppie and a mysterious love interest turns on a dime out of nowhere to involve mob entanglements. Don’t question it, just let the film take you along for the ride.
WHAT I WATCHED
The simplest way to do this is just screengrab my diary on Letterboxd. (If you don’t know or use the service, it’s a great way to keep track of what you’re watching and what you want to. To the annoyance of at least one recipient of this newsletter, I don’t use it to rate things or share thoughts about them. You can always ask me, or just wait for it to pop up in a newsletter!)
The main focus was powering my way through the late works of Mike Nichols so I could finally finish Mark Harris’ biography; it’s taken me several months because I have insisted on watching the movies in parallel to see the journey for myself.
I also caught a press screening of Jungle Cruise, which was aggressively fine. Hard to complain too much about the charms of Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, but the whole movie leans way too heavily on CGI effects for my taste. Especially if the filmmakers want people to buy a WWI-era setting, the green-screen of it all really took me out of it. On the other hand, there was this…
By far the most intriguing and unique watch of the week was the silent-era Satanic horror flick Haxan, which I saw in some kind of art studio in the East Village as part of a movie club organized by some local arthouse theater employees. The film was accompanied by a DJ set mixing together an eclectic score of baroque sounds and death metal. Ah, only in New York!
(Also, yeah, I wanted to watch some incredibly juvenile early Adam Sandler comedies before they expired from HBO Max 🤷🏻♂️ what’s your point?)
WHAT I HEARD
Maybe I’ll scrap this for future editions (people generally did not ever click on Spotify links when I included them in my last newsletter, The Distancer) but I’ve taken to cataloging all the strange synapse fires in my brain that make me want to listen to a song out of nowhere. For three months now, I’ve kept track on a week-by-week basis of what randomly gets stuck in my head, what strikes me out of the blue, or just some other form of free association that makes me want to listen.
I hope you’ll marvel in wonder and confusion, as I do, at the oddities of the human brain.
WHAT I WROTE
Last week, I interviewed filmmaker Tom McCarthy for Slant about his new movie Stillwater (starring Matt Damon as an Oklahoma roughneck).
Anyways, I think the movie is definitely worth a watch! Some of it, particularly the storytelling beats, might not hold up on a revisit. But as far as films that try to portray and ~understand~ so-called “flyover country,” this stands apart from a lot of the #Resistance-inspired art of the last four years that is already starting to look really cringeworthy in retrospect.
WHAT I READ
More on Nichols later, but I also happened to finish a book of Fran Lebowitz essays yesterday (The Fran Lebowitz Reader, for anyone interested) that has been keeping me company in transit all summer. Word to the wise: essay collections are perfect for transit reading because sometimes you just need bite-sized pieces of entertainment for quick-ish trips! If you’ve been dragging your heels on watching the Lebowitz series Pretend It’s a City on Netflix, particularly if you have any kind of connection to NYC, please get on that ASAP.
If you’ve been seeing the headlines (or the memes) about Scarlett Johansson’s $50 million lawsuit against Disney but don’t quite know what to make of it, I’d really recommend this piece by Peter LaBuza for IGN. The author has a wealth of knowledge about both film and the law, so it’s informed from both ends.
I didn’t get to talk to Matt Damon for Stillwater (as you might surmise — the publicist did the email equivalent of a polite chuckle when I floated the idea), but a lot of what I’d have wanted to ask is contained in this great New York Times Magazine profile.
That’s it for today! As a reminder, all posts will be available to everyone for the next month. Thursday posts will become subscribers-only in September. Coming up: a look back on the life and work of director Mike Nichols.
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall