What to stream this February
Brought to you by the letter C (for criminals, castles, and the Chelsea Hotel)
Welcome to What's Worth Watching, the monthly newsletter which asks, to quote1 the late,2 great Sheila Heti, how should a person be streaming? This month I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time watching what are known in the biz as “short” films, while attending the 2023 London Short Film Festival. Some of them were even very good, but are mostly aren’t available online, which was annoying cos it could’ve been a real two birds, one stone situation. Ah, well. I managed to cram in some more screen time to benefit you again this month. Make it worth my while, eh?
Recommendation round-up
The League of Gentlemen (1960, Basil Dearden)
This sixties crime caper gave the grotesque and fitfully problematic comedy troupe their name, but their association ends there.3 This is British comedy of a rather more well-to-do, if not still occasionally shocking, stripe. Powell and Pressburger regulars Roger Livesey and Richard Attenborough are among the titular gang of bank robbers — each of them military veterans who’ve been dicked over by the establishment in various ways, and set about getting what they’re owed. A rollicking Sunday afternoon yarn that doesn’t pull its punches.
She, A Chinese (2009, Xiaolu Guo)
Get past the cringe John Parish soundtrack — which would’ve been dated if it appeared in a film made a decade prior to its release — and this is a low-key peach. Borrowing the title (sort of) and episodic structure of La Chinoise, this propulsive exploration of shiftless youth in modern China is as loose and digressive as Godard’s film was direct and didactic. Capitalism has essentially won in Sichuan, and Mei (Huang Lu) longs to escape her dead-end provincial home town. The globalisation which contributes to her hardscrabble life may actually give her that chance, via a series of odd jobs, fleeting acquaintances, and shattering traumas which lead her to a fraught existence as an illegal alien London. Novelist Guo has a writer’s skill at specific detail, and a filmmaker’s instinct to withhold, in this thoughtful and thorny drama.
Tunde’s Film (1974, Tunde Ikoli and Maggie Pinhorn)
A fantastically fiery historical document, available for free thanks to the BFI, Tunde’s Film has a big-name backing — original music by Joan Armatrading, funding (apparently) provided by Marty Feldman — but the real star is the eponymous co-director, writer, and lead actor. Ikoli was just 18 when he conceived of this, a neo-realist drama-documentary in which he cast his own friends in scripted arguments over their political situation and staged scraps with thuggish coppers. His aim was “to show people what we really put up with” in pre-gentrification Tower Hamlets, and it does so with a stylish authenticity.
Review of the month (sponsored by the brioche bread pudding slice I had from Spence Bakery the other week)
The Castle (1998, Rob Sitch) 84 minutes
If you’re anything like me, you’re a 6’2”4 film studies graduate who lives in North East London with a scar from a TB jab on your left bicep. And if you’re slightly less like me, but still in the same ballpark, your knowledge of Australian comedy cinema probably begins with Crocodile Dundee and ends with Crocodile Dundee II. So imagine my delight when I watched this, completely of my own volition:5 a properly hilarious, biting, yet cockle-warming comic feature in the Bill Forsyth mould.6
Michael Caton as Darryl, proud patriarch of the Kerrigan family. An accomplished two truck driver, carp fisherman, and haggler over bric-a-brac listed in the local paper, his crowning achievement is his house: a humble bungalow extended several times over by his own hand, positioned between a set of electrical pylons and a busy airport. The Kerrigan’s hard-won blue-collar serenity is disrupted when the airline pulls a terra nullius on them, attempting to force them off the land for a runway expansion.
The portrayal of the family and their foibles is as broad, yet significantly more affectionate, then the comparable Kath & Kim, but it’s in Darryl’s David vs Goliath court battles where the film really hits its comedic and satirical stride. Probably a bit too much effing and jeffing to a be a proper family film, but likely nothing your mum hasn’t heard before down the WI. I’d say it deserves to be far better known outside of Australia, but if it was, maybe the good-quality YouTube rip would get taken down, and I wouldn’t have seen it and you couldn’t take my recommendation on board.
Best of the rest
Song of the Sea (2014, Tomm Moore) Cartoon Saloon’s take on the selkie myth is a visual feast that’ll pluck your heartstrings like an Irish fiddle7; the animation house's reputation as a Western Ghibli is well-deserved (Watch on iPlayer)
The Swimmer (1968, Frank Perry) Burt Lancaster faces up to a lifetime of bad decisions in this imperfect but still engagingly odd adaptation of John Cheever’s short story (Watch on Channel 4)
Chelsea on the Rocks (2018, Abel Ferrara) With new Chelsea hotel doc Dreaming Walls currently in cinemas, why not pair with this rough-and-ready look at the very same iconic shithole, from a legendary New York scumbag filmmaker?8 (Watch on YouTube)
Animal Factory (2000, Steve Buscemi) Buscemi mostly stays behind the camera for this adaptation of real-life wrong ‘un and Reservoir Dogs co-star Eddie Bunker’s novel about a young crim (Edward Furlong) is guided through his first stretch behind bars9 by typically-intense Willem Defoe10 (Watch on Prime Video)
Loosely paraphrase
Still living
The preview image on ITVx nonetheless features the denizens of Royston Vasey, rather than the great and good of post-war British performers
6’3” when I stand up straight
I happened to be sat on a sofa next to an Australian who insisted we watch it, after I mentioned my local indie cinema was screening it as part of their anniversary celebrations, but I reckon it’s still a cracking watch even if it’s not under duress
Forsyth directed the previously-recommended and absolutely flawless Local Hero, which comes on and off Channel 4’s streaming platform with some regularity
Idk how you play the fiddle, someone passed me some sort of percussion instrument during a drunken jam once at The Auld Shillelagh and then took it away very quickly
I say this with the utmost respect, and never-ending regret I missed Ferrara and Willem Defoe’s band playing an after-party at the one edition of the Berlin Film Festival I attended as a student
Some I-hope-obvious content warnings apply for this one
If I write his name one more time I’m worried he’ll appear