Welcome back to What’s Worth Watching, the newsletter that critics are calling “1 user unsubscribed from this list.” Every month, I recommend some S-tier streaming content that is unlikely to be served up to you by those wily algorithms we nonetheless trust to run everything from our financial institutions to cultural production.
BREAKING: in a, uh, break from tradition, there will be two — count ‘em! — TWO editions of What’s Worth Watching arriving in your inbox this month. There’s the one you’re reading right now, and next week will see the delivery of the First Annual What’s Worth Watching Halloween Stunt Spooktacular, i.e. some recommendations of horror films to watch during this most haunted of months. Without further ado, let’s get this show on the road! Oh and rip the queen or w/e.
Recommendation round up
Light of Day (1987, Paul Schrader) 107 mins
Paul Schrader is known for being one of cinema’s preeminent surveyors of miserable cunts.1 From Taxi Driver through recent fare like First Reformed, the screenwriter and director in his own right has plumbed the depths of isolation and despair. Also, in the mid-eighties, he made a musical drama starring Michael J Fox, Joan Jett, and Gena Rowlands,2 soundtracked by Bruce Springsteen. Light of Day is a little-seen curio in the Schrader back catalogue, usually passed over in favour of showier, more downbeat fare like his Mishima biopic. The man himself has been down on the finished product, but it’s a great coming-of-age which readily accommodates Schrader’s preoccupations with religious guilt and working class angst. Plus the title track slaps.
The Heartbreak Kid (1972, Elaine May) 106 mins
The second feel-bad comedy from May, unjustly-derided inventor of improv comedy3 and director of Ishtar,4 remains largely unseen. It’s never gotten a proper home video or streaming release, because the rights are held by a pharmaceutical company who briefly flirted with funding films in the seventies, and now have no interest in the movie biz. The movie business is weird! Blessedly, some nerd has restored this gem of neurotic, sweaty black comedy and put it online for free.5 Neil Simon’s script centres on Charles Grodin as a spineless nebbish who impulsively marries his girlfriend of a few weeks (Jeannie Berlin)6, only to discover she’s really annoying. He thus spends their honeymoon trying to chat up Cybill Shepherd’s Shiksa Goddess, in an escalating series of set pieces where Grodin awkwardly excuses himself from his wife’s company to woo a woman way out of his league. Wonderfully, painfully funny — unlike the widely-available Farrelly Brothers remake, which just hurts.
New Rose Hotel (1998, Abel Ferrara) 93 mins
Formerly IMDb TV, now Freevee, Amazon’s ad-supported free streaming service7 is chock full of gold...provided you’re prepared to pan a lot of dirt to find them. Chief amongst the treasurers on offer are multiple films by Abel Ferrara, the irascible King of New York City scumbags. You’ve maybe seen (or at least know by reputation) his Bad Lieutenant or Driller Killer — so instead I’ll recommend this, a dreamy and seedy adaptation of a William Gibson short story. Ferrara proves just as adept at predicting the future of big city corruption and crime as depicting its current state, with regular collaborators Christopher Walken and Willem Defoe playing corporate raiders who literally kidnap members of the competition to benefit their employers.8 Asia Argento joins the fun as the call girl they employ to seduce their latest target; it won't be spoiling anything to say it all goes tits up, in true neon-noir fashion. A small-yet-perfectly-formed sci-fi flick.
Review of the month (sponsored by those goats cheese and tomato bakes you get from the bakery at larger Lidls)
The Cruise (1998, Bennett Miller) 76 mins
I have never been on a guided bus tour, although I did seriously consider one of local pizza places, not to mention Kramer’s Reality Tour, the one time I visited New York. I would, sadly, have already missed my chance to have the city’s sights, cultural history and psychic vibrations explained to me by Timothy "Speed" Levitch, the subject of this breezy, brilliant documentary. Levitch has since become something of a cult figure, and upped sticks for Kansas. Presumably he retains the reason for his sobriquet — he speaks in a rapid stream-of-consciousness, presumably little pause given between a thought and its delivery.
Director Miller (who would go on to Oscar success for his based-on-fact dramas Capote, Moneyball, and Foxcatcher) provides a listening ear and patient camera9 in this character study of Levitch, a character who could truly only exist in the city. He provides a philosophical, highly literate commentary of the locations they pass, weaving together political, historical and artistic titbits together in breathless monologues which take in the life and works of Dorothy Parker, Jim Morrison, King Kong, and the former USSR.
In between these sequences of Levitch in his element, mic in hand, he speaks as eloquently, gnomically and floridly about his relationship with the city and his work. I’m admittedly a soft touch for stuff about the city, and in particular the gender rebels, weirdos and art freaks who could afford to live there during its nadir, and the subject may be an acquired taste: but if you are, or can get on, that wavelength, this is a rich and ribald history of New York and its people.
Best of the rest
I Used To Be Famous (2022, Eddie Sternberg) Calling this Mike Leigh’s Music and Lyrics may be overstating the comparison to the latter but, honestly, not by much. Ed Skrein stars as a washed up former boyband frontman who sees a neurodivergent teen drummer as his ticket back into the spotlight; it’s neither as mawkish nor as quotidian as that synopsis may suggest, Skrein playing the desperation of his character without pulling any punches (Watch on Netflix)
The Cardinal and the Corpse (1992, Christopher Petit and Iain Sinclair) Semi-fictionalised documentary on second hand bookshops by the two progenitors of psychgeography, featuring appearances from Alan Moore and Skoob Books, recommended without irony by a 31-year-old North Londoner with a newsletter about pretentious films (Watch on YouTube)
Foxtrot (2017, Samuel Maoz) A ripped-from-the-headlines drama about an IDF cover up of the murder of four Palestinian teenagers, Maoz’s film has as much a sense of the ludicrous bureaucracy that upholds the state as it does righteous anger (Watch on iPlayer)
Barbaric Genius (2011, Paul Duane) A humanistic exploration of the life of John Healy, whose life story — from rough sleeping alcoholic to chess champion to bestselling author — would be utterly unbelievable, were the man himself not so arresting in telling it (Watch on Netflix)
I’d be remiss not to mention the other ancient paragon we lost this month. Jean-Luc Godard may have been an arsehole who made increasingly inscrutable essay films, steeped in philosophical and political allusion, but he was alright for a prick. You already knows The Hits (which is what most of the tributes focussed on), so why not give his gonzo King Lear riff a go;10 or, for a less concentrated dose of expanded cinema, Robert Luxemburg‘s short film exploring his and collaborator Anne-Marie Miéville’s since-deleted appearance on Google Streetview? See you in a couple of weeks!
Some prefer the term “God’s lonely man,” but I don’t think that’s quite as evocative tbqh
Plus a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo appearance by a young Trent Reznor in his New Wave feathered hair era
It’s funny when professional comics are on stage!
It’s funny when professional comics are on screen!
The back story of its being upscaled, in part using AI, is pretty cool if you’re a big dork, like me
May’s daughter, who hopefully didn’t take the casting personally
Again, I implore you to install AdBlockPlus and Pop up blocker to avoid lining Big Daddy Bezos’s pockets any further
In this instance, inexplicably, their target is famed Final Fantasy character designer Yoshitaka Amano; Ryuichi Sakamoto appears briefly as a boardroom exec, too
The Cruise is an early example of how digital cameras revolutionised independent cinema, allowing anyone to make a movie without the expense of specialist lighting and sound equipment, the cost of purchasing and developing film, etc; Sight & Sound had a great article on it if, again you’re a big dork, again, like me
Starring, somewhat inexplicably, Molly Ringwald, Woody Allen, and and Burgess Meredith
Great letter.