Classic Pryor performance shows stand-up at its apex
New feature to help you navigate content swamp
This isn’t a news flash, but streaming apps like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu (or rather, Disney’s Hulu) have seized dominance over our viewing patterns, our habits, our taste.
Through painstakingly worked-out algorithms designed to trap us into a sealed dome of same-ish content, these streaming apps try to commodify and commercialize what we want to watch, when we watch it. View one documentary about bees and your Netflix home page will showcase a dozen entry points into other documentaries about animals — which is cool, unless you’re a bee elitist.
So how do we bring back the human in the streaming machine? By going oldschool and handing out suggestions from the brain of a cinephile. That’s what we aim to do with this new feature, “California Streamin’ ”: help you navigate the ever-thickening swamp of content that often feels carelessly heaped onto the channels like a messy toy box.
A whole weird, wacky landscape of film exists beyond the streaming bubble, but you wouldn’t know it from the mediocre, streamlined choices the NetflixAmazon-Disney Cerberus foists upon us. Which is why we’ll use this feature to look beyond Netflix at other exciting streaming options — namely, the newly minted Criterion Channel (whose selection is impeccable), but also free services
like Kanopy (you only need a public library card or a university affiliation to access it) or thrill-seeking ventures like Mubi or FestivalScope.
And we’ll also ask broad questions about streaming itself — how films get organized on the sites, which films are being left out, and what happens to our cultural memory when we allow it to be determined by companies hellbent on limiting consumer choices to the same boring, known products — rather than just expanding our horizons with what’s new on the streaming services.
This week’s picks are all grooved to make you laugh — because, heaven knows, that’s in dire need.
“Richard Pryor: Live in Concert” (1979) on Netflix. If there’s any genre Netflix has done right, it’s the stand-up special. Right now, you can see dozens upon dozens of these (usually) sharply observed dissections of identity and bumbling through life by the likes of Trevor Noah, Hannah Gadsby, Iliza Shlesinger, Ali Wong, Mike Birbiglia and many more. They all stand on the shoulders of stand-up’s greatest giant, Richard Pryor, whose first (and best) stand-up special is up on Netflix.
Here’s the film that literally defined the form: 78 minutes of Pryor covering the subjects of black childhoods, boxing, funerals, heart attacks, deer hunting and — his favorite subject for ridicule — himself. Critics Pauline Kael and Manny Farber were in awe of Pryor’s performance, and Kael went so far as to call this “probably the greatest of all live-performance films.” For all of Pryor’s inventiveness as a Hollywood actor (see Paul Schrader’s “Blue Collar,” or “The Toy”), this remains his greatest hour: He restages the human struggle for power, love, fear and acceptance, offering up his own failures for us to learn from. (Something that Louis C.K. might want to revisit.) “The Complete Short Films of Wallace and Gromit” (1989-2005) on Amazon Prime. As far as models for economic storytelling go, I can’t think of a better representative in the world of animation than British director Nick Park’s four Wallace and Gromit claymation shorts. These half-hour delights hark back to the two-reelers of the silent comedy days: hilarious, elegantly crafted gags strung together like popcorn on Christmas string. If your kid sister or son or grandchild hasn’t seen any of the Wallace and Gromit films, might I suggest “A Close Shave” (1995), the best of the lot, in which the pancake-faced duo have to solve a mysterious sheep-rustling case.
Billy Wilder’s “The Apartment” (1960) on Amazon Prime. Songwriter Kacey Musgraves struggles to find the word that means “happy and sad” at the same time. That word is “The Apartment” — for my money, Wilder’s best film, the most successful merger of his cynicism and romanticism.
As the director put it, “this is about a young fellow ( Jack Lemmon) who gets ahead in a big company by lending his apartment to executives for that grand old American folk ritual: the afternoon shackup.” As I’ve written before, it is a film graced with endless moments for actors to jam within small, tightly timed grooves: Jack squirting his nasal drips across the wide screen, Shirley MacLaine twirling an egg roll with her pinky, both noble losers in the struggle to find someone with whom to share a daily cup of coffee.
In a New York City as memorably antiseptic as Wilder’s, Lemmon and MacLaine are breaths of fresh air. They give NYC its human charm — which it doesn’t lack, of course, but which is simply forgotten in its sardine-packed rush of people going from place to place, in the adulterous-lecherous-opportunist air of the office. The city can be cripplingly lonely. But Baxter and Kubelik are committed to finding a private human connection, to be the exception in a city full of them. It’s lost none of its relevance.
Unfortunately, representation of classical Hollywood is pretty poor across all streaming sites. What we can find, we run with. Amazon has three other Wilder comedies that you can stream: “Some Like It Hot” (1959), “The Fortune Cookie” (1966) and a late-period gem, “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes” (1970).