Spanning the globe from your living room sofa
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.
1 Tampopo (1985): Movies centered around food tend to be difficult watches for animal-friendly viewers, and, I’m afraid in this regard Jûzô Itami’s affable Western-esque film about a widow enlisting the aid of a friendly trucker to improve her failing Ramen shop in Tokyo, is not an exception. If, however, you’re a happy carnivore (as most of them seem to be), there is a veritable array of visual and sensory delights to embrace. The sweetfaced widow, Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), yearns to make something of deeper value than she has been able to do on her own, and the trucker, Gorô (Tsutomu Yamazaki), along with his young partner (Ken Watanabe), happen to be serious aficionados in the art
of the Ramen bowl. Eventually, Gorô brings in a full, if offbeat, team of advisers for her, including Sensei (Yoshi Katô), the master of broth, whom Gorô knows from a homeless encampment; Shohei (Kinzô Sakura), who advises her on the craft of noodles; and Pisuken (Rikiya Yasouka), a contractor who specializes in fixing up old cafes and bars. The team assembled, Tampopo is rigorously put through her paces, en route to finally crafting a fine bowl. Her story serves as the throughline for Itami’s film, but he happily goes on other whimsical tangents at various points, offering up short food-related vignettes that explore via a gag-punchline formula, different aspects of the act of consumption. In one, an elderly woman stalks the aisles of a grocery, manhandling peaches and squishing containers of brie, and poking her fingers in pastries, until she catches the eye of the shopkeep, who storms after her; in another, a man rushes home to be by the side of his dying wife, in order to command her to get off her deathbed and make the family dinner, which she does and collapses right after she serves the dish. These pieces connect in a delightfully ramshackle sort of way, a bit like the segues in
Slacker, and transitioning with circle wipes. It works like thematic collage, linking aspects of food, and consuming as both art, survival, and a purpose in one’s life. I can’t say it did much for me from a culinary perspective (save, perhaps, those glorious, springy noodles), but if you have any predilection toward Ramen, it will doubtlessly leave you famished and yearning for a bowl.
Genre: Drama/Comedy/Food Porn/Western
Score: 6.4
Streaming Source: Criterion Channel
Streaming Worthiness: 7.6 for carnivores; 5.1 for vegetarians/vegans
2 The Lighthouse (2019): Horror is always deeply seated in myth, from our earliest beginnings, those things that terrified us became manifest and canonized, as a way to explain them — or at least acknowledge their existence. No modern filmmaker seems to understand this better than Robert Eggers, whose debut feature, The Witch, used actual language from existing folk myths and incorporated it into truly terrifying work. His new film uses a similar device, but while The Witch remained rooted in the realism of the New England countryside, this film is much more interested in the wild, chaotic lands inside our skulls. Willem Dafoe is the aging, half-mad Scottish wickie, manning the light, and Robert Pattinson is the younger apprentice, dealing with the drudgery of the day’s work for what is meant to be a fourweek stint. We have two men alone on a desolate and isolated rocky island that may or may not be haunted with the spirits of long-dead sailors. Working as a kind of companion piece to his first film, Eggers creates a similar atmosphere of dread, while using several thematically linked tropes — substitute the desolate woods for the desolate ocean; and raving seagulls in place of a jet-black billy goat. It’s like a half-mad sea shanty come to horrible life and twisting on itself in swirl of frothing currents. Because Eggers is constantly re-establishing what we are meant to consider real, and what is left in the buggered minds of these two drunken sots, we are on much softer ground than in his previous effort, the distinction between the surface of a pine forest, and the sand, I suppose, which makes the film less immediately unnerving, but no less impressive.
Genre: Horror/Mystery/ Seagull revenge
Score: 7.8
Streaming Source: Amazon Prime
Streaming Worthiness: 8.2
3 The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017): Now, here we have a filmmaker in Yorgos Lanthimos, whose supreme, Kubrickian control over tone allows him to pursue audacious concepts other filmmakers wouldn’t dare to tread (think Dogtooth, or The Lobster). Unfortunately, even his wondrous vision can get crossed up it would seem, and the film — sort of a riff on Euripides — suffers from some particularly ill-conceived notions. Dr. Murphy (Colin Farrell), a renowned cardiac surgeon, has surrounded himself with wonderful things, no more so than his loving wife (Nicole Kidman), and wonderful kids (Raffey Cassidy and Sunny Suljic), but when he befriends the enigmatic Martin (Barry Keoghan), the son of a former patient who died on the operating table, things start to take a bad turn. To make things “even” between them, Martin informs him that the other members of his family will wither and die, following partial paralysis, a loss of appetite, and bleeding from the eyes, until he chooses one to go in order for the others to survive. The concept is haunting, but is undermined by Lanthimos’ decision to play out the dialogue in an overtly mannered, almost comedic manner (it’s as if the conversations have been slightly sped up, even through their decidedly deadpan style). We’re never sure quite what to feel about Dr. Murphy — it turns out, at the time of Martin’s father’s operation, he had a serious drinking problem, which may have led to the patient’s demise — but, somehow, sympathy never really comes up. It’s an awfully loaded gun to turn into some sort of peculiar Dr. Seuss contraption, and severely limits the film’s effectiveness.
Genre: Mystery/Creepy/ Avant-Garde Theater
Score: 6.4
Streaming Source: Netflix
Streaming Worthiness: 7.0
4 Gorky Park (1983): Soviet-era paranoia powers this mystery story from Michael Apted, set in early ’80s Moscow, where Militia Investigator (detective) Arkady Renko (William Hurt) gets embroiled in a murder investigation that begins with three young people found with their faces cut off in the brush of the titular park near the heart of the city and ends at a sable farm outside of Stockholm. Along the way, Aradky runs afoul of the KGB, lead by smug director Pribluda (Rikki Fulton), meets the beautiful Irina (Joanna Pacula), a woman who knew all three of the victims; makes friends with Kirwill (the late Brian Dennehy, R.I.P.), a New York detective whose brother was among those killed; and doggedly pursues an American furrier named Jack Osborne (Lee Marvin), who seems thoroughly mixed up in the affair. Apted gets much mileage out of the brutal winter backdrop (meant to be Russian, though the film was actually shot in Helsinki), and the backbiting between bureaucratic departments. He also peppers the film with inventive camera work and keeps the pace at an even keel. As Hurt plays him, Aradky is a man very aware of his lack of power and control within the confines of the stifling Soviet system — he also spends much of the film getting whupped on by various nefarious agents and thugs — but remains, as he puts it, “patient,” until he finally sees an opportunity. It makes for an intriguing character, and one for which Hurt, well established by that point as a thinking person’s leading man, is well cast, and the particular emphasis on character detail adds necessary layers to a film that otherwise plays out like the pop-fiction potboiler it’s based upon. One ongoing distraction, however, is the way the film approaches the accents of its characters: Essentially, everyone speaks in unaccented English, except Pacula, who’s Polish, and the various Brits Apted has brought onboard to the cast. Such that in several scenes we have to rely on Aradky announcing “an American!” for us to realize there’s meant to be a foreign character on board. It’s a confusing decision, one that reduces the film’s effectiveness. Still, it’s appreciable that the screenplay (from the detective novel by Martin Cruz Smith) uses a Soviet detective as its protagonist, instead of the burly Kirwill, a maneuver that pays big dividends by the film’s end, which includes a closing shot I found most agreeable.
Genre: Mystery/Soviet Thriller
Score: 6.2
Streaming Source: AP
Streaming Worthiness: 6.4
5 Logan Lucky (2017): No modern filmmaker better understands the allure of a carefully plotted caper film better than Steven Soderbergh, who made his studio bones with the Oceans films. Here, using a plucky, idiosyncratic screenplay by Jules Asner, and an absolute monster of a cast including Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Riley Keough, Daniel Craig and Hilary Swank, Soderbergh seems to relish in depicting a caper movie about as far removed from the swanky climbs of Vegas and Monaco high rollers as possible. The setting is West Virginia, in other words, where brothers Jimmy (Tatum) and Clyde (Driver), along with sister Mellie (Keough) ignore the family curse of bad luck and plan an incredibly elaborate heist of the Charlotte Motor Speedway, using the safe-busting talents of Joe Bang (Craig) to do the job. Problem is, Bang is actually already in prison, and the timing of the caper is of the essence. Echoing his
Ocean’s-style storytelling, Soderbergh gleefully leads us through the intricacies of the brothers’ plan, but, as if we were a bunch of rubes, only lets us know the significance of their seemingly incongruent and peculiar actions after the fact, so we get the delicious appreciation of experiencing what happens before we come to understand exactly why it does. You get the sense the cast — many of whom sound as if Tim Blake Nelson were their dialect coach — were having just as much fun as the filmmakers on this one. With just the proper amount of sugar and salt, this is one well-seasoned concoction that is at least three times as much fun as it probably should have been. Among its other appreciable accomplishments, in one touching scene, it actually makes “Take Me Home, Country Roads” seem sort of listenable.
Genre: Caper/Comedy/Appalachian Charm
Score: 6.9 Streaming Source: Amazon Prime
Streaming Worthiness: 7.6