“Where is What’s Worth Watching?” The people ask. “How am I supposed to know what to stream?” “What’s this lazy arsehole doing if not hand-crafting me a bespoke list of offbeat recommendations?”1 Erm, well I had COVID-19. Ever heard of it? Bet you feel pretty bad about all that kvetching now, eh? Also I spent the past month-in-change watching Love is Blind and Married At First Sight Australia, both of which are somewhat beyond the purview of this newsletter.2
Anyway, your presumed petulance aside, What’s Worth Watching is back! Every four weeks (ahem) I’ll share a handful of streaming recommendations beyond the usual: great, underrated stuff that’s hiding in plain sight across Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, and even your free-to-air platforms like BBC iPlayer and ITVx. I’m a man of the people!
This month: a smorgasbord of East Asian cinema, some bleak romantic semi-comedy, classic British folk music, and eggs.
Recommendation round-up
Egg! Egg! A Hardboiled Story (1975, Hans Alfredson) 107 minutes
You say: how did a surreal seventies Swedish sex comedy end up on Netflix? I say: never punch a gift horse in the mouth. This deliriously bonkers delight plays like the darker parts of Monty Python’s Meaning of Life: all dream logic, ludicrous characters, and that period-specific feeling of slight grottiness. Max Von Sydow3 stars as the phildanering, venal heir of an egg fortune — his operation uses every part of the product, including using the leftovers for plastic bum-scratchers. His hen-pecked mute wife and self-proclaimed idiot son struggle for his attentions. Along the way there’s a musical number (the only lyric being “egg”), Oedipal struggles, and a brief sojourn to a swamp.
Border (2018, Ali Abbasi) 104 minutes
I saw Border at the London Film Festival, then recounted the plot to a colleague at the National Theatre on my evening shift afterwards. He was flabbergasted, and would bring it up almost every time we were on shift together after. And this was a man whose landlord was fined for filming a porno on the Tube! Border is a difficult-to-describe film about smuggling and trolls in modern Sweden. It’s full of mythological weirdness, body “horror,” and weird vibes. It’s from the director of this year’s Holy Spider, and it rules.
Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979, Joan Micklin Silver) 92 minutes
Can love bloom, even in Salt Lake City — not only that, but in the hostile environment of a municipal government office? That’s answered pretty definitively in this, a feel bad “rom-com” from the director of Crossing Delancey. John Heard is the heartbroken unreliable narrator, recounting a doomed relationship with a colleague (Mary Beth Hurt), newly estranged from her partner. An uncommonly astute observation of self-destructive relationships; sort of like (500) Days of Summer if it was made by an adult, rather than the director of The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
Review of the month (sponsored by Mr. Tom peanut bars because I enjoy eating a sweet treat that shares my name)
Just so much East Asian cinema (Various)
Okay, let’s go full “dad who went out for cigarettes for two months” on this thing. After two months off, it’s only right I make it up to you kids. Here’s a bumper review of the month for you: a veritable treasure trove of East Asian cinema, all available on the superb Internet Archive. How legitimate are these uploads? Who can say! I am but the messenger! These links fell off the back of a van, etc. This collection comes via the embarrassing movie social platform Letterboxd, where the list is a little easier to parse.
There’s heaps of great stuff on there, including various films by big names like Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai), and Hou Hsiao-Hsien (The Assassin), and Hirokazu Kore-eda (Shoplifters). Here’s some other stuff wot I can vouch for.
Funeral Parade of Roses (1969 Toshio Matsumoto) 105 mins
A looseish adaptation of Oedipus Rex set amongst the Japanese queer underground, Matsumoto’s classic of the Japanese New Wave slams together vérité footage of sixties gay bars, comic book-style freeze frames and a fierce cast of trans women in a rollercoaster ride that apparently influenced A Clockwork Orange.
Rebels of the Neon God (1992, Tsai Ming-liang) 106 mins
Ming-Liang reduced his style to an almost dialogue-and-narrative-free apogee with 2020’s Days. Much more accessible is his debut, which nonetheless features many of his repeated motifs — disaffected folk lost in modern cities, patient observance of life’s natural rhythms, Lee Kang-sheng’s beautiful face — in a more familiar package of rebellious Taiwanese youth.
Gozu (2003, Takashi Miike) 129 mins
Miike is best known in the West for his extreme horror flicks Audition and Ichi the Killer. During the goldrush of such material from Japan and its neighbours, we were lucky enough to be brought Gozu — a film as hostile to English-speaking audiences as to its domestic viewers. A yakuza flick with the dream logic of a Lynch film, it follows Show Aikawa’s gangster as he suffers a nervous breakdown, kills his brother, sees him reborn as a beautiful woman, speaks to ghosts and communes with a cow-headed god. Mad shit.
Taipei Story (1985, Edward Yang) 110 mins
A contemporary of Ming-liang, Yang became internationally known for his superb swansong Yi Yi. Taipei Story is very much a precursor to his eventual masterpiece, tracing the frustrations of the youth in a newly materialistic culture: here, that tension is embodied by the ambitious Tsai Chin and her feckless boyfriend, played by fellow filmmaker Hsiao-Hsien, who hankers for the simplicity of his youth playing baseball.
Best of the rest
The Cassandra Cat (1963, Vojtěch Jasný) If Egg! Egg! has you in the mood for unclassifiable oddities, why not follow it with this Czech New Wave classic about a town coming under the thrall of a shades-wearing cat? (Watch on YouTube)
Meek’s Cutoff (2010, Kelly Reichardt) The director of First Cow and the forthcoming Showing Up applies her slow-paced, humanistic style to this matriarchal Western starring regular collaborator Michelle Williams (Watch on Freevee)
His Girl Friday (1940, Howard Hawks) The prototypical screwball comedy sees Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell trading barbs which bely their not-so-repressed feelings for one another…while they report on a potential miscarriage of justice, no less! (Watch on ITVx)
Travelling for a Living (1966, Derrick Knight) A black-and-white road movie following legendary folk family The Watersons as they tour the British club circuit, record, and make their lives in post-industrial Hull (Watch on BFI Player)
Please read each of these quotes in different, increasingly pathetic whiny voices
Oh also I wrote about the much-maligned Michael Mann film Blackhat and the impossibility of logging off for film mag Bright Wall Dark Room
Bergman regular/old bloke from the start of The Force Awakens