What to stream this September
PTSD, group therapy, drug addiction...and that's just Iron Chef Japan!!!!
Welcome, mould-scrapers, jumper-wearers, and candle-lighters, to the warming glow of What’s Worth Watching, the monthly newsletter that makes sure you’re not wasting the 0.0586 kilowatts per hour (on average) it costs to have your streaming device of choice switched on. In this issue, as in the four that preceded it, I’ll be recommending some off-the-beaten path films and TV that have managed to sneak onto the likes of Netflix, Prime Video, but also onto free-to-air on demand services like iPlayer and All4. As usual, I’ll do it all with the conceited air of a pretentious film snob, as if I didn’t spend my Bank Holiday Monday marathoning half a season of Dated and Related.
Recommendation round-up
Dead Presidents (1995, The Hughes Brothers) 119 mins
Albert and Ellen Hughes followed their comparatively compact Menace II Society with this bleak, bombastic, Black epic. It’s a hell of a victory lap — their Mean Streets, Deer Hunter and Heat all rolled into one. Larenz Tate, Chris Tucker,1 and Freddy Rodriguez star as three friends from the Bronx shipped off to Vietnam. Rather than returning as heroes, they have the experience of innumerable veterans: down and (strung) out. That sets the wheels in motion for a daring armoured truck heist,. Michael Henry Brown’s script deftly skips between registers — from comedy to horror to thriller — without tripping up once, and the Brothers stage countless indelible images with their superb ensemble (Keith David! A terrifying Bokeem Woodbine!). A rare gem from an era when directors other than Spike Lee were given a sizeable budget to smuggle radical politics into mainstream genre fare.2
Toomorrow (1970, Val Guest) 95 mins
Grease and Xanadu got all the play when Olivia Newton-John sadly passed away this August just gone, but for the true connoisseurs of cheese, her (widely unseen) early screen role is the only way to go. By cheese I do mean properly old and mouldy; this acquired taste, swinging sixties sci-fi was conceived by Monkees producer Don Kirshner to launch his next manufactured musical behemoth, which went somewhat awry when he forgot to pay anyone and the film was only ever shown at British army bases. The only thing stranger than the behind the scenes story is, well, Toomorrow itself. The titular band are identified as the one example of human creation that may be worth a damn, so spirit them off to their home planet to promote universal peace.3 Guest directed the Quatermass films and went on to do a load of sex comedies, and this is somehow pitched right between those tones. Primo trash!
The Task (2017, Leigh Ledare) 118 mins
Photographer Ledare’s fascinating, frustrating, often uncomfortable film, somewhere between a staged documentary and a social experiment, was made for exhibition but works tremendously in-and-of-itself. A diverse group of Chicagoans are gathered in a room, under conditions comparable to group therapy, albeit without the sort of direction therapists provide.4 So they search for the “task” of their group themselves, which throws up all sorts of fraught conversations on identity politics, clarity of feeling and communication, hierarchies, privilege, the ethics of their being filmed, and who gets a voice. A unique document of psychology on individual and group levels, of how sociological and cultural issues play out IRL, and how everything has the potential to both divide and unite.
Watch on Vimeo (password: doublebind)
Review of the month (sponsored by the scallops I had at The Verdant Seafood Bar in Falmouth)
Her Smell (2018, Alex Ross Perry) 135 mins
Alex Ross Perry is, I dare say, one of the best filmmakers working in the US today. That’s not really reflected by his standing in the UK, where his strikingly individual work barely gets a release. His Listen Up Philip managed to make famously amiable Jason Schwartzman convincingly horrible, as a narcissistic novelist whose toxic personality isolates (and protects?) him from the world; Golden Exits, similarly improbably, is a gripping adult drama about a bunch of hipsters who consider, but ultimately refrain, from cheating on one another.5
Her Smell, his latest, was a big swing — and he knocked it out of the park. Elisabeth Moss stars as fucked-up grunge frontwoman Becky Something, in five distinct stages of her life: at the height of her fame (and drug intake (and general toxicity)), backstage at a gig; struggling to record the follow-up to her band’s successful breakthrough; and then, without wishing to spoil anything or suggest an identikit Walk Hard biopic structure, the fallout of her self-serving, chaotic and chemically enhanced lifestyle on those around her.
It’s a phenomenal tight-rope walk, hinging on making some pretty extreme emotional incidents come off as believable without being hammy; of convincingly depicting the antics of a fictional rock band without lapses into cliche; and of keeping Becky a relatable, multidimensional human character, given how unrepentantly cruel and grim much of her behaviour is in Her Smell’s first act.
Really it’s Moss’s show, following up her past Perry collaborations in Philip and horror chamber piece Queen of Earth with a truly mesmerising performance, convincingly inhabiting the same character at several distinct periods (and ages!) of her life. She’s ably supported by a stacked ensemble, including Dan Stevens, Agyness Deyn, Gayle Rankin, Amber Heard, and a revelatory-slimy Eric Stoltz as her suspect svengali. I can’t think of a film that’s so vividly, claustrophobically, intensely captured the volatile creative and personal lives of a musician before — and that includes Glitter!
Best of the rest
Benediction (2022, Terence Davies) The Tsai Ming-liang of the Mersey continues his run of literary biopics with this metaphysical, light-of-touch, heavy-of-emotion and catty-of-tongue life story of gay war poet Siegfried Sassoon, played with immense depth and quiet anger by Jack Lowden (as a young man) and Peter Capaldi (as a significantly bitter older man) (Watch on Netflix)
Down Among The Big Boys (1993, Charles Gormley) Billy Connolly headlines this made-for-TV BBC drama as a charismatic thief, whose latest take may be spoilt by the impending marriage of his daughter to a Glasgow copper (Douglas Henshall) (Watch on iPlayer)
The Assistant (2019, Kitty Green) Approaching the #MeToo movement at a somewhat oblique angle, Ozark’s Julia Garner stars as the secretary to a Weinstein-esque monster whose abuses, as in real life, happen out of site; but the focus is on her tedious day-to-day, like She Said in the style of Jeanne Dielman (Watch on All4)
Iron Chef Japan (1993-1997, Various Legends) The original — and the best — iteration of the OTT cooking competition is now up on Amazon’s free-to-air channel, and highly recommended for those who find Masterchef a bit too nicey-nicey, or wish Paul Hollywood would wear more shiny capes and quote Rimbaud instead of cheating on his wife (Watch on FreeVee)6
Bronx, New York, Novembre 2019 (2021, Kelly Reichardt) The director of First Cow has a new feature out later this year, with Michelle Williams as a struggling painter; as research, she made this quiet, unobtrusive documentary short of artist Michelle Segre at work (Watch on YouTube)
Apologies for the tardiness of this issue, I was busy eating (and, in fairness, drinking as well) my way round Falmouth for my holidays. I realise that many of you rely on the regularity of this newsletter as a sort of temporal lodestar, like the Lunar Cycles or DiCaprio girlfriends. I can only apologise for any confusion, hurt or emotional pain endured as a result of my carelessness. I cannot swear it won’t happen again, but please tell everyone you know to subscribe thanks xoxo
A revelation when his shtick is directed the right way — I not only understand the words that are coming out of his mouth, but am convinced and even moved by them!
This was around the same time as Bill Duke’s untouchable Deep Cover, which I’d include on here if you could watch it anywhere free
Think Slaughterhouse-Five starring Herman’s Hermits
There are “consultants” present, who sometimes intervene but often claim to be offering objective observations; this is all based on an approach developed by the Tavistock Clinic in the fifties, about which you can learn more on Ledare’s website
You didn’t hear it from me, but this one’s been on YouTube for years without getting copyright struck
I guess Amazon’s free stuff (that you don’t even need a Prime account to watch) is called FreeVee now? You can watch all of Bosch if you don’t mind the ads and all
Great newsletter!