You can still escape to concerts, games, museums and more — on screen
John Beifuss
Memphis Commercial Appeal USA TODAY NETWORK – TENN.
Movie theaters, closed. Concerts, canceled. Sports, suspended. Schools, shuttered.
But you can still watch movies, at home. And some of them can take you to those places you miss.
So here are some recommendations: movies you can stream or rent to help you escape self-quarantine and visit those social spaces that — for the time being, at least — are more or less forbidden in real if not reel life.
Concerts: The clubs and music halls are closed and the tours are canceled, but the arguable greatest concert movie of all time, director Jonathan Demme’s 1984 “Stop Making Sense” — you can find it on Amazon Prime Video, Tubi, The Criterion Channel, Vudu, Google Play, DVD and Blu-ray — plays on. Shot over four nights at a Los Angeles theater, the film showcases Talking Heads at the height of the band’s imaginative power, with leader David Byrne, a spastic scarecrow, introducing the galvanic jerks, kinetic pantomime and ritualized role-playing that wowed viewers anew during his recent “Saturday Night Live” performance. Another milestone of punky funky perfection is the 1987 Prince concert documentary “Sign ‘O’ the Times”; its surprise and relatively sudden availability on Prime Video is cause for celebration because the movie — with an apocalyptic title song that continues to resonate — never has been released on DVD much less Blu-ray in the U.S.
Disneyland: Shot by writer-director Randy Moore and his cast with small, inconspicuous cameras but without permission at Disneyland and Walt Disney World, the 2013 independent psychological horror movie “Escape From Tomorrow” is especially timely: The story imagines that an infectious virus is sweeping the park, causing a father (Roy Abramsohn) to have weird hallucinations — or are they hallucinations? — in which amusement rides lead to sinister laboratories and costumed “princesses” are revealed to be prostitutes. (Prime, Vudu, Filmbuff, DVD, Blu-ray)
Hotels: Speaking of Disney World, the tourist destination looms like a teasing, unavailable Shangri-la throughout director Sean Baker’s 2017 “The Florida Project,” one of the best movies of the past several years. Depicting a community with about as much social distancing as a school of fish, the film follows the mostly unsupervised free-range urchins who live at a low-rent Florida motel as they dart in and out of rooms, harass the guests and manager (Willem Dafoe), and otherwise transform a three-story coral-pink home for transients and tourists into an improvised it-takes-a-village day care center. (Prime, Vudu, Google Play, itunes, DVD, Blu-ray)
Shopping: Director Frank Tashlin’s work with Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny in the Warner Bros. animation department proved invaluable when he collaborated with live-action cartoon Jerry Lewis on several projects — none more loaded with escalating slapstick mayhem than 1963’s “Who’s Minding the Store?,” in which the future commander in the French Legion of Honor (one of France’s highest cultural tributes) plays a department store clerk whose unfortunate
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customers include a lady wrestler, a dowager with a small dog (Chihuahua, meet vacuum cleaner), and a gun-toting big game hunter played by Nancy “Miss Jane Hathaway” Kulp. (Caveat emptor: The laughs come with a sales tax in the form of a sexist a-man-must-be-kingof-his-castle message. Sigh.) (Prime, Vudu, Google Play, itunes, DVD, Bluray)
Vacationing: Elvis Presley’s seventh film in five years and one of his biggest box office hits, 1961’s “Blue Hawaii,” directed by Norman Taurog, was the first in a series of Elvis travelogues that would find the King traveling to Acapulco, the World’s Fair, Las Vegas, a mythical Arab kingdom (“Harum Scarum”) and Hawaii again (“Girls! Girls! Girls!”) and again (“Paradise, Hawaiian Style”). With Elvis as a surfing tour guide in a land of grass-skirt singalongs and leifestooned luaus, the infectious fun is as far from pandemic panic as one could wish. Enhancing the aura of exotic escapism is a soundtrack that includes the romantic classic “Can’t Help Falling in Love” along with the irresistibly bouncy “Rock-a-hula Baby,” co-written by Dolores Fuller, the angora sweater-shedding star of Ed Wood’s “Glen or Glenda” (you may remember Fuller as played by Sarah Jessica Parker in Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood” biopic.) (Prime, Vudu, Google Play, itunes, DVD, Blu-ray)
Air travel: The idea of hurtling through space inside a cramped projectile with a bunch of strangers is a nailbiter even when you’re not afraid your fellow passengers are spraying you with dangerous microbes while noshing their honey-roasted peanuts. So it’s no surprise air travel has inspired a flight squad formation’s worth of popular thrillers, from “The High and the Mighty” (1964) to “Airport” (1970) to “Snakes on a Plane” (2006). But if laughter is the best medicine, why not skip the suspense and revisit 1980’s “Airplane!,” the Mad magazine-esque scattergun spoof that — among its other consequences — forever altered the course of Leslie Nielsen’s career, transforming the journeyman actor from square-jawed man of action to deadpan comedy star. (Prime, Showtime, Pop, Vudu, itunes, DVD, Blu-ray)
Restaurants: “Big Night” (1996) won’t just make you hungry, it’ll make you hungry to eat out again in a convivial, crowded restaurant. Co-director Stanley Tucci (his directorial cohort was Campbell Scott) stars as an Italian immigrant restaurateur on the 1950s Jersey Shore who concocts an elaborate feast of timpano pasta and other delights when he and his brother (Tony Shalhoub) are told that the famous singer Louis Prima intends to stop by for a meal. Of course, slices of jealousy, regret, misunderstanding, humble pie and
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❚ actorly ham are served up before the “big night” is over — and all the while, viewers will be licking their chops with delight. (Prime, Vudu, itunes, DVD)
Basketball: It may be months before fans get to see Penny in action again on the University of Memphis sidelines. Those who can’t wait for another sight of the Bluff City-born all-star may want to check out director William Friedkin’s “Blue Chips” (1994), in which Anfernee Hardaway and Orlando Magic teammate Shaquille O’neal add their authentic hoops hops to a fictional drama about a college coach (Nick Nolte) under pressure to break the rules to win recruits. (Prime, Tubi, Vudu, Google Play, DVD)
School: There seem to be almost as many movies about high schools, colleges and even elementary schools — not to mention vampire schools, schools for witches and warlocks, schools for mutants, and so on — as there are students in Shelby County. A smart and funny recent addition to the raunchy Rrated subset of high school movies is “Booksmart” (Hulu, Vudu, itunes, DVD, Blu-ray), perhaps the most female-centric of its ilk ever attempted: This coming-of-age story about a pair of
GO college-bound overachieving misfit best friends (Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein) who are determined to party hearty on their last day of school was produced, written and directed (Olivia Wilde) by women. Equally funny if less escapist (just look at the title) is director Alexander Payne’s 1999 adaptation of a Tom Perrotta novel, “Election”(prime, Showtime, Vudu, itunes, DVD, Blu-ray), now regarded as a modern classic, thanks in large part to the role-she-wasborn-to-play casting of Reese Witherspoon as ambitious would-be student body president Tracy Flick.
And, finally, an anti-escapist category:
Isolation: Being stuck inside a house with only a family member may protect a person from outside infection, but it’s not always conducive to mental wellbeing. This frightening truth is served up like a dead rat on a silver platter in director Robert Aldrich’s grandes dames Grand Guignol “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”(prime, Vudu, Google Play, DVD, Blu-ray), a 1962 shocker in which Hollywood sisters Bette Davis (in pasty face and baby doll curls) and Joan Crawford (in a wheelchair) enact a sinister and sororal psychodrama. Meanwhile, the master of the solo crack-up remains Roman Polanski, who has directed two famous movies about the dangers of too much “me time”: 1965’s “Repulsion”(prime, Vudu, itunes, DVD, Blu-ray), with Catherine Deneuve almost literally climbing up the cracking walls, and 1976’s “The Tenant”(prime, Hulu, Epix, The Criterion Channel, Vudu, itunes, DVD, Blu-ray), starring Polanski himself as an expat Pole in Paris who finds society as distressing as solitude.