Tag: Amazon

Shiva Baby (2020)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon
Length: 95 minutes
Synopsis: Impressive psychological dramedy about young adulthood
Recommendation rating: 4/5

What I like about it: fascinating, often funny, great direction
What I don’t like about it: can be unpleasant, slow to build

Review:
A young Jewish woman caters a shiva with three unwelcome guests – her sugar daddy, her successful ex and a crying baby. Debuting writer-director Emma Seligman is a genius and the baby is used to incredible effect, their crying punctuating heavy moments for the lead character, and my favourite directing touch in this is how the baby isn’t shown and it becomes noticeable that the main character is avoiding looking at them, until she does and we get a radiant two-second insert of the little darling before she has a complete meltdown. Amazingly well-made.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): a baby screams most of the way through the movie, sex work, eating disorder

Holiday (1938)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon
Length: 95 minutes
Synopsis: Charming classic romcom
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: fast-paced ‘screwball’ dialogue, that Grant/Hepburn chemistry
What I don’t like about it: it’s not much more than a transient Sunday afternoon movie

Review:
Cary Grant plays a free-wheeling young man who meets a snooty heiress and enters into a hasty engagement. She is captivated by his charm but believes she can change him by getting him a job with daddy as an executive, a fate worse than death for fun-loving Grant. Luckily, the heiress has a sister, Katharine Hepburn, who likes him just the way he is.

Content notes (may contain spoilers):

Love and Mercy (2014)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon
Length: 2 hours
Synopsis: Biopic of Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: well-acted and directed
What I don’t like about it: sometimes Hallmark-y, people either know the story or don’t really care

Review:
The lead role is played by two actors: Paul Dano plays Brian in the 60s and John Cusack in the 80s. The two narratives play out with relative ease, the first involving the recording of Pet Sounds and the failed recording of Smile, the second involving the tail-end of Brian’s involvement with Dr. Landy (played with villainous relish by noted ham Paul Giamatti) and the beginning of his relationship with Melinda (Elizabeth Banks). Both lead actors are very good at playing autistic and scenes thoughtfully depict sensory pleasure and pain.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): drugs, psychiatric abuse

Keanu (2016)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon
Length: 100 minutes
Synopsis: Friends get into an adventure over an adorable kitten
Recommendation rating: 5/5

What I like about it: hilarious, cute, better than it has to be, rewatchable
What I don’t like about it: nah it’s pretty great entertainment

Review:
One of my favourite comedies, this follows a stoner (Jordan Peele) who finds a kitten while grieving a breakup and ropes in his friend (Keegan-Michael Key), a mature straight-laced family man, when the kitten is stolen. The ensuing adventure leads them to pretend to be gangsters to wonderful comedic effect. I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t enjoy this movie.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): drugs, some violence, peril for the kitten but no harm

Snowpiercer (2013)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Rent on BFI or Amazon
Length: two hours
Synopsis: The Communist Manifesto on wheels
Recommendation rating: 4/5

What I like about it: metaphor, action
What I don’t like about it: not fun

Review:
I gained a lot of appreciation for this in retrospect after watching Parasite and deciding I liked this one more. The metaphor works better – a train, constantly in motion and “unable” to stop, moves around a world ravaged by climate change. At the back of the train are some overworked and underfed people living in darkness and squalor, a revolution ensues and one of the proletariat fights his way through increasing luxury to the front of the train. There (spoilers for capitalism) he learns that the train is actually fuelled by human bodies and stops it in disgust, taking his chances in the frozen wasteland. And all of that, unlike Parasite, in an action film that I could show to pretty much anybody.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence

The Offer (2022)

Where to find it: Paramount+ on Amazon Prime
Length: Ten 1-hour episodes
Synopsis: Tall tales about the making of The Godfather
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: the acting, sometimes the writing
What I don’t like about it: ten hours?! it’s not fuckin’ Shoah…

Review:
It must be hard to justify having your own streaming service when your only bankable franchises are Star Trek and Spongebob Squarepants, so Paramount turn to making movies about Paramount making movies. Godfather producer Al Ruddy has been telling his version of events surrounding the making of that film and, like any Hollywood producer, he doesn’t let the truth ruin a good yarn. All the more lurid elements of his story – Frank Sinatra having Mickey Cohen try to kill him, Joe Colombo having him over for homemade dinner on the eve of his public shooting, his debt to Joe Gallo being called off last-minute by Gallo’s murder – involve people too dead to sue for defamation, while those still living are kept conveniently unaware of these elements by the selectively-truthful Ruddy.

The acting steals the show in this one with Miles Teller channelling Tony Curtis in the lead role to great effect. The actors get lost in their impressions of real-life counterparts; their Coppola, Pacino, Brando and Robert Evans are all remarkable and really help to generate interest in this ultimately uninteresting series. The writing is sometimes good, especially when taking advantage of parallels between scenes in The Godfather and circumstances supposedly involved in making it, and sometimes risibly overwrought “we don’t make movies, we make magic!” stuff.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): drugs, violence

Heels (2021)

Where to find it: StarzPlay on Amazon
Length: Eight 1-hour episodes
Synopsis: This show works itself into a shoot, brother
Recommendation rating: 2/5

What I like about it: very occasionally funny, interesting or well-written
What I don’t like about it: inconsistent, nonsensical, unpleasant

Review:
Whether or not you enjoy professional wrestling, you will loathe this hacky drama’s attempts to gain cheap heat. Taking itself way too seriously and having an outdated view of wrestling that makes its present-day setting uncanny, none of it really connects with the audience like it continually promises the promotion at the heart of the show can, telling us how good they are because they don’t know how to show it. It has no idea what it wants to be – this show is supposed to be realistic but episode two features a barfight in which a 5’2″ woman incapacitates an uncooperative 6’4″ attacker via headscissors takedown – and drops too many smark terms and historical references to be successful with the mainstream. It’s amazing how much this show’s flaws overlap with those of All Elite Wrestling, maybe they’ll share a fandom.

Producer Mike O’Malley’s cameos are pretty good and the show has one cool sequence: a camera-choreographed fight in a petrol station that is cinematic and extra “fake”, just how I like my wrestling.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): sex, sexism, violence, injury

Shakes the Clown (1991)

Where to find it: Rent on Amazon
Length: 87 minutes
Synopsis: “The Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies”
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: the punky DIY vibe, the core analogy, Tom Kenny
What I don’t like about it: it’s very unpleasant and falls just short of being much good

Review:
The bitter tone pervading most of this movie comes from writer-director-star Bobcat Goldthwait’s jaded experiences on the stand-up comedy circuit. In this low-budget debut film, he dials up the absurdism by making them into actual clowns but keeping their cliques and status obsession. They all desperately want to host a TV show and get jealous of one another’s bookings at children’s parties. The core analogy works very well, lampooning comics taking their art too seriously and viewing their audience as children, among other targets, in the premise alone. They drink their days away fighting amongst themselves in a cliquey clown bar, only uniting to ridicule and beat up mimes (here playing the part of prop comics, I assume). The plot does not work as well as the premise, feeling formulaic and obligatory. Bobcat’s lifelong friend Tom Kenny is a highlight as the villain of the piece.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): alcoholism, urine, violence

Vicious Fun (2020)

Where to find it: Amazon Prime
Length: 100 minutes
Synopsis: Slasher comedy
Recommendation rating: 2/5

What I like about it: competently made on a low budget, hammy acting
What I don’t like about it: grim, formulaic comedy

Review:
This film finds a horror movie fanatic stumbling upon a support group for serial killers and then having to evade them all movie. It was moderately preferable to sitting in silence.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): murder, vomit, gore

The Larry Sanders Show (1992)

Where to find it: Amazon, I guess
Length: Six seasons of half-hour episodes
Synopsis: Sitcom set around a fictional talk show
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: the characters, the humour, the realism, Rip Torn hamming it up
What I don’t like about it: many of the jokes are problematic, more are just dated

Review:
This early comedy success for HBO was foundational to the boom of single-camera sitcoms in the late 90s and early 2000s – shows like Arrested Development, The Office, Extras. It finds a lot of comedy in the duplicity of its characters; avoidant and neurotic host Larry, desperate sidekick Hank and producer Artie, whose sweet and complex nature and variance in tone steal the show in my opinion. You have to be willing to overlook some very mean-spirited jokes and the occasional slur to find the funny stuff though.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): mean jokes and slurs, addiction