Wilder, Bogdanovich, Demme, Ramsay, Aster

30x30: Coronavirus Edition Week 5 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

Sunset Blvd. (1950): One of the more insightfully scathing examinations of the relentless maw of Hollywood, Billy Wilder’s film, a well-cooked L.A. noir about an

aging, past-her-prime actress (brilliantly played by Gloria Swanson), and the hard-luck writer (William Holden) she turns into a kept man, captures the brutal essence of a profession in which even the few who make it fight to stay relevant well past their prime. Holden plays Joe Gillis, a writer (and our narrator) hitting a long cold streak that leaves him nearly out of options. Fleeing a couple of guys trying to repossess his car, he happens by the dilapidated mansion of former silent-screen starlet Norma Desmond (Swanson), who lives there alone, wrapped up in faded glory with her butler, Max (Erich von Stroheim). Desmond is convinced the scrawl of a script about the Biblical Salome she has written in longhand is her ticket back to the top, so she keeps Gillis on board to edit it into something she can send to her old director, Cecil B. DeMille (playing himself). With no better prospects, Gillis accepts the benevolence of Norma, eventually allowing her to love him, though his feelings for her are far closer to pity than romance. Steering through the gorgeously shot black and white milieu (the excellent cinematography is by John F. Seitz), Wilder captures the tragic essence of a world in which you’re utterly forgotten by 50. With a crackling script by Wilder, among others, and a bevy of former silent stars in tow (including Hedda Hopper and Buster Keaton), it rings true even as it makes big grabs for sharp-tongued glory (“I am big,” sneers Norma, “it’s the pictures that got small.”) The result is as if Jim Thompson wrote a novel based on Grey Gardens. There’s an infamous narrative trick near the end, and one of the more famous closing lines in cinematic history, yet it still has the chutzpah to knock you off your feet, even when you know what’s coming.

Genre: Drama/Old Hollywood/The cruelty of fame

Score: 8.9 Streaming Source: Criterion Channel

Streaming Worthiness: 10

2 You Were Never Really Here (2018): It’s not often that the first element of a film you want to talk about is the sound design, but Lynne Ramsay’s violent art-house thriller makes such a delicious point of amplifying its sound effects, attention must be paid. The film fittingly opens with the aftermath of a violent spectacle involving a bearded hit man named Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), his bloodied weapon of choice (a claw hammer), and the various objects left by his victim that require proper disposal. The splash of water in the sink, the ripping of a piece of tape, the sound of a ziplock being sealed echoes in the space of Ramsay’s gorgeous, inventive imagery. The plot involves a Travis Bickle-like rescue of a young girl (Ekaterina Samsonov) from a brothel, and the Gloria Swanson and William Holden star in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. (1950). subsequent death and carnage that comes as a result, but for the most part, it’s best to pass over the somewhat thin plot, and enjoy the extraordinary filmmaking itself. As always, it seems, the character work of Phoenix is exemplary. Joe slumps heavily around, a kind of nondescript slob — dude wears carpenter jeans, for goodness’ sake — but all of this belies his intense focus and viciousness (when asked if he’s brutal in his methodology, Joe shrugs “I can be.”). In attitude, the film is not so different from a John Wick episode, except Ramsay isn’t so interested in the stylized violence unto itself — often enough, what we witness, as in the opening, is the immediate aftermath of the bloody carnage Joe and his hammer have wrought rather than the acts themselves — but in powerfully evocative visual and auditory detail that takes what is a pretty standard sub-genre, and infuses it with unsettling substance. She consistently counters your assumptions, turning just enough of the delicate tumblers of the mechanism to keep the key from fitting perfectly in the lock.

Genre: Drama/Action, of an unsettling nature/Inferred violence

Score: 6.9 Streaming Source: Amazon Prime

Streaming Worthiness: 7.5

3 Stop Making Sense (1984): Jonathan Demme’s commanding concert doc of the Talking Heads, at the peak of their powers in the mid’80s, is almost completely cut-and-dried. We begin with David Byrne’s sneaker-clad feet walking onto a barren stage in front of an audience, and end with the full-band’s uproarious encore some 90 minutes later. There are no backstage scenes or cut-in interviews with the group. No context, other than the band’s

musical oeuvre, on full-blast. Throughout the opening set, a new member is introduced after each song until the band, their back-up singers, percussionist, extra keyboardist and rhythm guitarist are all united, making a glorious visual and auditory cacophony of funky, syncopated beats, and Byrne’s art-house antics. Byrne, front and center, is a musician by trade but a performance artist at heart. It is his driving and peculiar aesthetic that powers the band. Watching him stumble around stage as if besotted during “Psycho Killer,” dance with a living room lamp in “This Must Be the Place,” or performing a signature seizure dance in “Once in a Lifetime,” he creates a precise spectacle, adding visual flourish to his more esoteric lyrics and concepts. Demme, not far removed from Byrne’s artistic vision himself, captures every tic and physical flourish in the band, eschewing regular wide shots in favor of far more intimate close-ups of the members, joyously producing their communal sound. The band broke up somewhat acrimoniously in 1991 — apparently Byrne, who describes himself as displaying Asperger’s-like tendencies, wasn’t terribly easy to work with — but here, in their heyday, Demme captures them at their wellgrooved best, when their infectious beats and enthusiasm were overwhelmingly infectious.

Genre: Documentary/Live Music/Quirky art-school rock

Score: 7.6 Streaming Source: Amazon Prime

Streaming Worthiness: 8.5

4 What’s Up, Doc? (1972): I’m not sure how Peter Bogdanovich got a license to take his film crew and run wild all up and (mostly) down the streets of San Francisco (legend has it he didn’t bother to get one), but that’s exactly

what it appears to have happened in his uproarious screwball comedy, and rarely has pandemonium been so gleefully recorded as a result. The story involves four mistaken bags, and many different parties all chasing after one another. But the central mechanism follows the haplessly out-of-sorts Professor Howard Bannister (Ryan O’Neal), as he is accosted and further befuddled by the beguiling agent of chaos, Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand), who takes a shine to him and proceeds to thoroughly throw his life into turmoil, especially with his fiancee, Eunice Burns (Madeline Khan, in her screen debut). Just how much does this movie throw at you at once? Take one scene on spec: We have a woman screaming, a TV exploding, the phone ringing, someone pounding on the door, a hotel curtain catching on fire, a man crashing through the plate glass window into the room after being tripped by a woman draped in a towel hanging off the ledge outside on the 20th floor. Watching this as a young kid, I remember the sweet idea that you could be saved from a dull, droning life by a cute firecracker who finds you irresistible, and then sends you hurtling down a different path, leaving a trail of flailing bodies, broken glass, and explosive fires in your wake. The whole thing culminates in the piece de resistance, a completely insane car chase involving many vehicles, a delivery bike, a Chinese dragon, and one of the better visual gags in comedy history before dumping everyone and everything into the San Francisco Bay. Critics are posting on Twitter, talking about the films that feel like straight comfort food to them. If you can watch this madcap gagspree and not feel cheered up, there may be no hope for you.

Genre: Comedy/Car Chases/ Chaos/Babs

Score: 7.9 Streaming Source: Criterion Channel

Streaming Worthiness: 8.5

5 Midsommar (2019): Ari Aster’s psychotropic horror treatise takes as its primary source of anxiety the ever-shifting power dynamics between people, both romantically, and in communities, and what it has to say is anything but reassuring. Viewing Aster’s films is a bit like walking into an art installation — quite literally, as he populates his frame with stunning compositions and art-focused mise en scene, as with the beautifully designed wooden structures of a curious Swedish compound, or the exquisite murals and art displayed on the building’s walls (a huge shout-out to his production designer, Henrik Svensson, and the art directing crew) — but, as with his previous film, Hereditary, behind all the sumptuous, hand-crafted beauty, there is a cruel, brutal core of humanity’s continued savagery. If art represents the best sort of impulses of humankind, in Aster’s hands, it becomes yet another facade, hiding — or in this case, exemplifying — our instinct for vicious barbarity. Notably, much of the art in the compound, either textile or ceramic, features depictions of the ordeals to come for the four outsiders who arrive just in time for the summer festival, albeit artfully represented, something that is hardly unnoticed by the travelers, who seem to take it, and the compound’s peculiarities in general, well in stride until it’s too late.

Genre: Horror/Psychological Drama/Cults/Swedes Being Swedish

Score: 8.8 Streaming Source: Amazon Prime

Streaming Worthiness: 9.1

Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal create chaos on the streets of San Francisco in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 romantic comedy What’s Up, Doc?, a film that pays homage to the ’30s screwball films of Howard Hawks and Bugs Bunny.