Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
From Capra to the mountain top
30x30: Coronavirus Edition Week 4
Shut in as we are for the foreseeable future, there will likely never be a better time to hit some of the outstanding streaming possibilities at our fingertips, and fortunately enough, there has never been more available from which to choose.
In order to provide the most utility, we’ll take the original 30x30 concept and tweak it a bit: We’ll focus on a variety of genres from week to week to keep our bases covered — everything from westerns to sci-fi, indie dramas, art house oddities, and, yes, musicals. Also, every movie I list here is available in streaming format (listed), so consider anything higher than 5.0 as potentially worth your investment if you have to rent it. Set your mood and make your pick: Eventually, there will be something for nearly everyone. 1.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939): At a skinny 6 feet, 2 inches, Jimmy Stewart rises above his other co-stars like a magnificent flamingo in Frank Capra’s legendary David (“without a slingshot”) v. Political Machine Goliath drama, but his character might as well be 7-feet-tall for the way in which he stands out among his jaded peers. Appointed as a last-second vacancy stooge by the bludgeoning businessman Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold) and his corrupt governor (Guy Kibbee) of his (decidedly unnamed) state, Mr. Smith arrives in D.C. a wideeyed innocent but emerges later from a falsified scandal designed to shut him up and successfully appeals to the better nature of his scoundrel of a co-senator (Claude Rains, inexplicably sporting his usual British accent) after a heroic filibuster stand in the Capitol. Powered by one of Stewart’s best performances (he lost the Oscar that year to Robert Donat for Goodbye, Mr. Chips) and a carefully manicured script from Sidney Buchman (not only do we never learn Smith’s state, we never even find out his political party), Capra’s sentimentalist patriotism is tempered by the stake of corruption that has overtaken the political process to the point where, during the climactic showdown on the Senate floor, every other statesman in the joint exits the chambers, leaving Senator Smith and the President of the Senate (Harry Carey) alone with their thoughts. Doubtless, the redoubtable Mr. Smith would make even less sense of the current state of affairs in our current governmental houses of power, which makes the film that much more poignant. As awful and cavalier as the other Senators are, at least this President gives the man a fair shot to at last be heard on the floor. If this happened today, Mr. Smith would probably be gutted and left to bleed out on the carpet. With a nice turn by Jean Arthur as the initially cynical aide to Smith, who eventually comes around to his vision of the way the world should be.
Genre: Earnest Drama/Love Story Score: 7.8
Streaming Source: Criterion Channel
Streaming Worthiness: 9.6 2.
The Endless (2017): A curious puzzle of a film about a pair of brothers (Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, who also co-directed), who escaped a decade ago from a SoCal cult, only to return in order for the younger brother (Moorhead) to gain a sense of closure. Once back, they snap back into the seemingly idyllic lifestyle of the easy-going cult members, but there remains a dark secret to the group, leading to a series of strange goings-on, and a penchant for circular symbolics, oddly repeating patterns, and strange photographs emanating from the sky. Benson and Moorhead, who also wrote the film, are working from a peculiar, but genuinely interesting conceit, and they also allow a surprising amount of warmth and humor in the otherwise macabre setting. For a film with a familiar setup, in a subgenre of mystery stories that rarely produces much in the way of satisfying storytelling, it is surprisingly effective. It likely won’t blow your doors off, but it’s also not trying to: It’s one indie that sticks to its conceit and walks us all the way through its resolution.
Genre: Mystery/Suspense/SciFi/Cults
Score: 6.1 Streaming Source: Netflix Streaming Worthiness: 6.4 3. Light of My Life (2019): There are only a smattering of possible outcomes in Casey Affleck’s moody suspense drama, about a father (Affleck) and daughter, Rag (Anna Pniowsky), living in the wilderness in the longterm aftermath of a plague (!) that wiped out most of the women on the planet. Despite the obvious tight narrative crawl space with which he’s working, the film is vibrant and affecting, mostly because it’s not trying to be a survival thriller (say, A Quiet Place) that hinges on plot turns, or a known enemy. Instead, it’s a study of intimacy between a parent and child: The film opens with a long, mostly static shot of the two of them ensconced in their tent at night, the father telling his daughter a sweetly rambling story retelling Noah’s ark as a means of placating her (the particulars of which the precocious 11-year-old declares is “unlikely”) — a scene that largely sets up the throughline of the story all the way to its enigmatic ending. In between, it plays a bit like Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, but with considerably higher stakes. As the pair make their way through what looks like the tall pines and gloriously deep woods of the Pacific Northwest, eventually en route to a house the father remembers from his childhood, they encounter various versions of the surviving men, from affably innocent, to religiously centered, to craven, violent opportunists, but it’s not there to condemn the gender. Affleck, who also directed and wrote the screenplay, explores the limits of the parent-child bond (he has a pair of kids himself) in a way that feels genuine and deeply felt. For all the obvious reasons, it’s difficult to encourage people to watch a dystopian plague film right now, but this one really resonates with a soothing emotional richness. Genre: Suspense/Father-Daughter/Deep Woods Score: 7.3 Streaming Source: Amazon
Prime Streaming Worthiness: 7.0 4.
Under the Silver Lake (2018): It is entirely appropriate that David Robert
Mitchell’s convoluted grind of a pseudo-thriller climaxes with our protagonist, the beleaguered, manic Sam (Andrew Garfield), having spent most of the picture following the obscure bread crumbs laid out by a reclusive, song-writing illuminati (Jeremy Bobb), finds him at last, sitting at his piano in his empty mansion. There, crowing in perverse glee, he monologues to Sam about his part in all of our childhoods, while playing a wide medley of pop hits — everything from “Earth Angel” to “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” (a particularly painful revelation for Sam, a huge Cobain fan) — all of which he claims to have written. Mitchell fairly stuffs the film with portents, symbols, and runes, some real, some imagined. Squirrels mysteriously fall dead at Sam’s feet, a parrot in his courtyard keeps calling out something he can’t decipher, a dog killer stalks the neighborhood, and graffiti strewn about the area calls out to him. Films are always encoded with symbolic meaning, utilizing visual language to instill emotion and establish significance for the audience (think of Spielberg’s girl with the red coat in Schindler’s List or James Dean’s red windbreaker in Rebel Without a Cause), Mitchell’s film gives us so many options, almost everything can be read symbolically, which perfectly captures the paranoia his character feels and the pointlessness of trying to make sense of it at all. Genre: Mystery/Suspense/Deconstruction Score: 8.5 Streaming Source: Amazon Prime
Streaming Worthiness: 9.0 5. Meru (2015): Whereas conceptually, it’s possible to kind of understand what drives the psyche of the serious alpinist, this documentary from Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, displays it in no uncertain terms. It follows the years-long exploits of a team of three world-class climbers — Conrad Anker, Renan Ozturk, and filmmaker Jimmy Chin — as they attempt, more than once, to climb the nearly impassible Shark Fin on Mt. Meru in the Himalayas, a climbing feat never before attained due to the extremely technical and grinding nature of the route. The film is blessed with an absolute killer narrative — one that gets enhanced as the men suffer individual hardships after their first failed attempt leaves them an agonizing 100 meters short of the summit — but the real strength of the piece is the incredibly intimate and thrilling footage Chin and Ozturk gather even as they’re reaching the end of their physical strength in the waning days of the climbs. I suspect it will either drive you to immediately plan for your next base camp, or it will thoroughly seal-off any thoughts you might have had about giving alpine climbing a whirl, but in either case, it’s a knock-out. Genre: Documentary/Mountain Climbing Score: 8.8 Streaming Source: Amazon Prime Streaming Worthiness: 9.1