Finding best holiday streaming options
The holiday season gives us new streaming options, plus courtroom drama
There’s no predicting what might hit our sweet spot during this isolating holiday season. It’s confinement vs. escapism. Plus, courtroom drama.
Watching “Schitt’s Creek,” a pre-pandemic Canadian production that has become a binge staple in millions of mid-pandemicU.S. households, you may find something odd happening around the middle of Season 3.
The motel roomwhere much of it takes place starts to remind you, with every new exterior establishing shot, that you’re in lockdown, in late 2020, watching a comedy of confinement. This is getting away fromit all?
I like and occasionally love “Schitt’s Creek,” but it’s nowonder many of the same millions have fallen for “The Queen’s Gambit,” the seven-part streaming phenomenon also onNetflix. It offers so many things our lives right noware not: rangy, globe-trotting, a triumph over adversity.
We’re still in the muddling-through phase. Some citizens are still in the mask-optional phase.
Evoking the image recycled by so many oldwesterns, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of theNational Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in earlyNovember: “The cavalry is coming.”
TheCOVID-19 vaccine race looks promising indeed. As if she hadn’t done enough for us as a nation already, Dolly Parton invested $1 million in the development ofModerna’s vaccine. I seriously love the idea of Parton, a generous, philanthropic, shining star of music, movies and a theme park, becoming the emblem of a corner being turned. She might achieve the impossible: uniting America in, yes, a triumph over adversity.
Meantime: I screen, you screen, we all screen till our eyes scream.
Some of us look backward, not just to stories such as “The Queen’s Gambit” taking us away from 2020 but to TV shows that were huge a few years back and are happily new to a new generation. My 20year-old son, for instance, has fallen hard for “Mad Men.”
“I got into it,” hewrote me the other day, “because I’d finished ‘Billions’ with
Paul Giamatti (highly recommend) andwanted another slow-burn, cutthroat office show. I didn’t get into it because it’s a departure fromtheworkfrom-home rut too many of us are in. But I do appreciate it as a 1960s time capsule … when therewere seemingly no rules in an
office culture.”
Misogyny and day-drinking, it’s a throwback to a time, as he put it, “when something like an office Christmas party might be on the docket.”
There’s no predicting what might hit our sweet spot during this peculiar, isolating holiday season. On
paper, aNetflix adaptation of AugustWilson’s breakthrough play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (Dec. 18) seems an unlikely seasonal winner. Set largely inside a 1927 Chicago recording studio— on stage, it never left that location— director George C. Wolfe’s tightly compressed film is all about
confinement andwaiting.
In harsh and eloquent ways, scored by beautiful dramatic poetry, “Ma Rainey” takes us back nearly a century. It illustrates, through music and feeling and reflection, how Black talent in America has
been forced towork around, and through, a white system of commercial exploitation.
The late Chadwick Boseman finished filming just months before he died. In his superb final performance, he plays the reckless jazz trumpeter Levee (fictional) working with Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (real), portrayed by ViolaDavis. The material isn’t treated somberly, as a self-consciously important American story, though it surely is. With deceptive ease it unwraps like a holiday gift, in which the living honor the deceased.
There are, for the record, other streaming platforms besidesNetflix.
“HowTo with John Wilson,” currently streaming onHBOMax, premiered in October and it’s still the funniest thing around. Wilson follows his endlessly distractable curiosity around his homeland, akaManhattan.
We learn about many oddities: the $8 billion-ayearNewYork City scaffolding industry; memory tricks and exercises; the pre-pandemic Cancun spring break scene (“a mecca of superficial interactions”). Wilson’s voiceovers are delivered with unerring comic timing, suggesting the grandson BobNewhart didn’t know he had.
Forced into digital release by the novel coronavirus— I’m ready for the novelization of the film version of the coronavirus right about now— some huge mainstream enticements have already announced late 2020 streaming dates.
Disney/Pixar’s “Soul” made itsworld premiere in
October at the BFI London Film Festival. It’ll be available Dec. 25 on Disney+.
Over atWarner Bros., studio chiefs have several nerve-wracking options regarding“WonderWoman 1984,” which has been in the can for nearly a year. They can stick with the Dec. 25 theatrical release plan, which seems unlikeliest. They can give theaters a go for a couple ofweeks, where pandemically open for business, and then whisk it ontoHBOMax to drive up subscribers. Or they canwait until deep into next year, as have so may other franchises, from James Bond to the “Fast and Furious” fossil-fuel maniacs.
Such proven global draws remain the stuff that film exhibitors’ dreams are made on. Nowmore than ever, many of us crave watching destructivemayhem on a large canvas.
And yet other, old-fashioned pleasures, such as the courtroom drama genre, may live as long as Bond has. The courtroom drama has, in fact, lived a lot longer already.
Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” (Netflix, nowstreaming) unfolds largely inside a much-better-looking courtroom than the one that housed the real Chicago 7. Even so, Sorkin’s entertaining, balderdash-y version of events operates as a kind of pandemic allegory. The flashbacks of the August 1968 Chicago demonstrations and police/protestor riots delve into dangerous, hotblooded Before Times.
Then it’s lockdown time in court, with its major players playing out a microcosm of American justice and injustice.
But there’s a far better, richer courtroom drama streaming right nowon Amazon Prime.“Mangrove” launches director and co-writer SteveMcQueen’s ambitious fivefilm anthology titled “SmallAxe,” which rolls out inNovember and December, just in time to help save this sorry excuse for a year.
Like “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” “Mangrove” gets its dramatic juice from recent judicial history. In 1970, a group of Black British citizens, whose families came fromTrinidad, Jamaica and elsewhere, were arrested and tried on charges of rioting and assault against members of the London police.
TheMangroveNine case took its name fromthe Notting Hill community restaurant, bar and gathering place, under constant scrutiny and frequent attack by the police.
It’s much more than a courtroom drama: McQueen’s first hour of “Mangrove” revisits theWest
London immigrant landscape in scene after beautifully observed scene, full of music, movement and ideological fervor.
The trial itself, which takes up the second half of “Mangrove,” makes for fascinating viewing. But as we see in the first half, as well as in the entirety of McQueen’s narratively relaxed, atmospherically stunning “Small Axe” film, “Lovers Rock,” sometimes it’s enough to simply hang out with the right actors inhabiting the right scenario.
Like “Ma Rainey,” “Small Axe”— another gift this holiday streaming season— shows what it means to look directly at the new face of a nation.