San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
California Streamin’
Jonathan Rosenbaum is one of America’s most essential, intelligent critics and thinkers on film. I’ve felt his influence most palpably by watching the entries on his list of 1,000 essential films. It has stunning range, something for everyone — from canonized classics (Elia Kazan’s “East of Eden,” on Netflix) to heartwarming pop pleasers (Albert Brooks’ “Defending Your Life”) to absurdities begging to be rediscovered (George Axelrod’s demented 1966 comedy “Lord Love a Duck,” on YouTube; just Google “daddy cashmere sweaters scene” and curse my name later).
This week’s California Streamin’ will highlight some of the streamable films from Rosenbaum’s personal canon. I’ll watch random films from this partsyllabus, partdiary, partaltfilmhistory not only to fill in major gaps in my knowledge, but also to constantly renew my love and awe of this bottomless art called film.
‘Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday’
Each of Jacques Tati’s six masterpieces is available to watch on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy (I’ll talk about the latter streaming service in a future article). This 1953 comedy is the perfect film to watch on a lazy Sunday morning, as it’s one of the most serene, buoyant films ever made.
Here, we are introduced to his beloved creation, Monsieur Hulot (played by Tati), a herkyjerky, lovable, bumbling everyman who barely talks and creates all sorts of accidental mischief during one summer at a French seaside resort.
No director has had a more profound effect on the way I imagine my place in the world and my relation to people in bustling big cities than Jacques Tati. No other director pushes you more to see beyond the obvious, to feel and hear life’s delightful pulse.
Where to stream it: Criterion Channel or Kanopy
‘A.I.’
In my eyes (and Rosenbaum’s), this underrated 2001 scifi fantasy is Steven Spielberg’s finest hour. As Rosenbaum says, it’s a “profound meditation on the difference between the human and mechanical.” Set in the 2100s after much of the world’s population has been wiped out by climate change, a robot Pinocchio (Haley Joel Osment) embarks on an odyssey to find the Blue Fairy (Meryl Streep) who can make him human.
Originally started by Stanley Kubrick in the late 1970s and developed by him over two decades, Kubrick later gave it to Spielberg with the hunch that the ’Berg would give it the proper emotional punch that Kubrick couldn’t. Kubrick’s hunch was right: It’s a mindbogglingly successful melding of two towering auteurs: Spielberg’s knack for earnest, soaring sentiment that can either cloy or soar, and Kubrick’s sobering but cleareyed assessment of humanity’s flaws.
Don’t be surprised to find yourself bawling by the end. It will make you remember lost loved ones in your life.
Where to stream it: Netflix
‘Dead Man’
Jim Jarmusch’s 1995, lateblooming acid Western is a freaky, hard look at the American West that landed with a disheartening thud when it was released in the States in 1995; Rosenbaum was one of its only champions. But in the subsequent years, it has grown a steady, loyal, welldeserved following.
Johnny Depp is a meek accountant in granny glasses named William Blake. He meets a Native American drifter literally named Nobody (Gary Farmer, of the Cayuga Nation) who thinks Depp is the reincarnation of the poet Blake. Together, Nobody and Blake are pursued by Robert Mitchum, bounty hunters and the looming specter of Death. Theirs is a journey into the heart of a bewitching West poisoned by colonizers and a violence that Jarmusch saps of its typically bloody American allure (deaths are either comically botched or suddenly horrifying).
There are narrative filmmakers who claim and are claimed to be making “poetic” movies. Then, there are filmmakers like Jarmusch, whose movies are actually integrating the mechanics of verse into film: the repetitions, the looping dreaminess, the images that flow one after the other in a gradual stoking of mystery. And the film features a hauntingly abstract, guitarheavy score by Neil Young.
Where to stream it: Criterion Channel