Recently Watched: Home Video Edition

Managed to feed the movie beast pretty well over the last few days.

I started Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, beginning with the absorbing activist drama, Mangrove. McQueen has released five films in this anthology, the medium of which we still call television, for some reason. There’s been a lot of drama lately (on Film Twitter, for example) about the horror of Warner Bros. 2021 release schedule, in which their biggest films will be released in theaters and HBO Max on the same day. Some are up in arms about how this is an utter betrayal of filmmakers, I think because they expected their films to only be in theaters at first? and they’re concerned that this might finally bring about the long-rumored Death of Cinema? And probably something about a lot of money?

But would Steve McQueen get to drop five movies into theaters in a month, like, ever? The Rise of Streaming has certainly created a content glut on the one hand; on the other it appears that fans have perhaps never had such a diversity of serious film options available in the history of the moving image. Theatrical has been dominated by thunderous, shiny, shitty blockbusters for a long time, but never as much as in the last 20 years. I love (and miss) going to the movies as much as anyone, but I would defenestrate that release window entirely, forever, if it meant more and more artists actually get to make movies.

I also watched Barbra Streisand’s The Prince of Tides, which the Criterion Collection put out earlier this year. This studio melodrama is a good example of the kind of adult-focussed movies that rarely make it to theaters anymore, even without a pandemic. It’s not an art film; it has many flaws from a cineaste perspective. But it also does a lot of things very well, particularly in the performances, and it’s an incredibly rare bird, too: a movie produced and directed by, and co-starring, a major female star. You can count on one hand, with fingers left over, the number of times that has ever happened.

The Assistant, written and directed by Kitty Green, is a subtle but quietly devastating drama about how the crimes of a Weinstein-type boss implicate everyone around them, and the hell of working in that environment. It has a 1.8/5 audience score on Google—check out the darkly funny and broadly illiterate one-star reviews! The central performance by Julia Garner is a master class in economy and control. I was riveted.

And, of course, I watched some horror. The best among them was one of the cleverest meta-horror satires I’ve seen, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), which manages to successfully spoof both the slasher genre and the found footage genre (in a way), in a very low budget package. I finally watched the 2019 Child’s Play remake, after listening to my YouTube-educated 8 year-old talk about it nonstop (though he’s never seen it). It’s a winking, but surprisingly funny and clever take on Chucky with some good performances and the creepiest implementation of Alexa ever.

Finally, I watched Clive Barker’s classic Hellraiser. I don’t think I had seen it, but I forget a lot of things. Not a fan of this one, which isn’t scary in 2020, but it sure is gross. I like gross, don’t get me wrong, but I may not be the right audience for the S&M-from-hell stuff.