Streaming the most staggering woman in rock
Janis: Little Girl Blue
Available now I CAN’T imagine anyone beginning to watch Amy Berg’s Janis: Little Girl Blue and not being instantly moved by the first pictures of Janis Joplin’s face and the first tremulous notes of her voice. Immediately you appreciate the affection the director — Amy Berg — holds for her subject. The film is not really a post mortem, as might have been said of the Amy Winehouse documentary. Death might have burnished Joplin’s legend but one of the great things about this film is that nothing seems inevitable about Joplin’s demise, and nothing undermines, even for a second, her joyfully transcendent singing. Berg aims to tell the most personal story she can by giving the narrative of Joplin’s life over to the family, friends, and bandmates who knew her best. (There is an incredible pile of letters, voiced here by singer and kindred spirit Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power.) The portrait that emerges is one of a loud, talented girl who grew up an outcast in her small Texas town — local college boys cruelly dubbed her Ugliest Man in an annual poll — but five years later Rolling Stone was calling her “the most staggering leading woman in rock.” She developed her pirate queen image as “armour” against a world that would have dismissed her otherwise. It’s already been a good year for ‘rockumentaries’ — also see the brilliant What Happened Miss Simone? — and Janis would have been 73 this year. Time to listen to her again.
Damages
5 seasons, available now NEXT year will mark the 30th anniversary of Fatal Attraction ,a film which despite her wonderful filmography, still features Glenn Close’s key work: she won a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of an unhinged ex-girlfriend. Her involvement in this series, then, tells you that it is no run-of-the-mill series. In Patty Hewes, a lawyer whose presence could firm up the polar ice cap, Close has made one of the finest television roles of recent times her own. Nobody else could take command of the screen with such quiet intensity; no one else can do scheming and predatory half as well. Damages is part legal drama, part cop procedural and thriller, with a head scratching murder mystery thrown in. It portrays its female characters as corporate sharks, something that has mostly only been the case for male characters in much of television history. This was one of the better reviewed shows of the last few years when it ran on US cable network FX.
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
Available now IN 2006 nobody really saw this piece of genius coming. Guillermo del Toro’s earlier films — vampire films and some science fiction — had shown flashes of brilliance and wit but critics’ jaws dropped at this one. Pan’s Labyrinth is quite simply a transcendent work of art. Del Toro’s surreal and fantastical instincts now have an unblinking moral eye on the world. The story takes place in Spain in 1944, five years after the Spanish Civil War, during the early Francoist period. The narrative of the film intertwines this real world with a mythical world centred on an overgrown abandoned labyrinth and a mysterious faun creature, with whom the main character, Ofelia, interacts. Her stepfather, the Falangist Captain Vidal, hunts the Spanish Maquis who fight against the regime in the region, while Ofelia’s pregnant mother grows increasingly ill. It’s been described as a beautiful film about ugliness, and the director summons his fantastical vision with a grim realism.
Bright Young Things (2003)
Available now BEFORE he was just a full-time national treasure and documentarian Stephen Fry tried on many identities: novelist, actor and filmmaker. This screenplay, based on the 1930 novel Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh, marked his debut as director. It satirises the London aristocrats and bohemians in the late 1920s to the early 1940s and though it is fairly brutal about journalism, it’s also very entertaining. There’s probably a reason Fry didn’t direct much, but this isn’t it.