You Should Be Watching: November 15-21

Posted on by Jacob Neff.

Welcome to You Should Be Watching, my weekly opportunity to introduce you to a variety of great films, gems of the past and present, available for you to stream from Netflix, Amazon Prime, FilmStruck, and anywhere else streams are found.

Just a couple weeks of FilmStruck availability left, so watch while you still can. Thankfully, Kanopy also offers a couple of this week’s featured picks, so you can watch there as well.

STREAMING PICKS OF THE WEEK

8 1/2

  

Year: 1963

Director: Federico Fellini

Genre: Fantasy, Drama

Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Anouk Aimée, Sandra Milo, Rossella Falk, Barbara Steele, Madeleine Lebeau, Caterina Boratto, Eddra Gale, Guido Alberti, Mario Conocchia, Bruno Agostini, Cesarino Miceli Picardi, Jean Rougeul, Mario Pisu, Yvonne Casadei, Ian Dallas, Mino Doro, Nadia Sanders

When the time came for Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini to follow up his 8th feature film, the highly acclaimed La Dolce Vita, he found himself with an extreme case of writer’s block. Rather than fight it, he embraced it and instead put it on film. The end result is one of the most fascinating, surreal, and frankly educational movies that blends reality with fantasy to immerse the viewer into the mind and creative process of a master artist. The main character of 8 ½ is Guido (Marcello Mastroianni), a famous filmmaker suffering from writer’s block, clearly a stand-in for Fellini himself.

The opening dream sequence makes it clear that this film will be nowhere near conventional. The man who is later revealed as Guido finds himself trapped in a car in the midst of a major traffic jam. Everyone else stares at him as he is being choked to death by gas pouring into his vehicle as he tries frantically to escape out the window. This representation of the emotions Guido is enduring are also mashed up into other aspects of the thought process–dreams, memories, hopes, fears, fantasies, regrets, and attempts to make sense of life. And as in a series of dreams, he jumps back and forth through the experiences and emotions of the past and present, from his Roman Catholic upbringing to the complicated feelings of puberty and struggles with lust as he visually and verbally attempts to process it all.

Secrets & Lies

Year: 1996

Director: Mike Leigh

Genre: Drama

Cast: Timothy Spall, Brenda Blethyn, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Phyllis Logan, Claire Rushbrook, Lee Ross, Lesley Manville, Elizabeth Berrington, Michele Austin, Ron Cook, Trevor Laird, Brian Bovell, Emma Amos, Clare Perkins, Elias Perkins McCook, Jane Mitchell, Janice Acquah, Keylee Jade Flanders

Throughout this painful yet touching 1996 British family drama, director Mike Leigh demonstrates an understanding for what makes people tick. He gets their fears and foibles, their hurts and prejudices, their tendencies to hide uncomfortable truths from their loved ones, the struggles of both parents and children to connect, the way bottled up emotions can wreak havoc on a marriage. Quite simply, he gets people.

It doesn’t matter whether that person is an accomplished mixed race optometrist named Hortense Cumberbatch (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) who was adopted at birth and is now seeking her birth parents or whether that person is Hortense’s birth mother Cynthia Rose Purley (Brenda Blethyn), who is emotionally fragile and struggling to connect with the nearly 21-year-old Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook), the only daughter she’s ever known. Or then there’s Maurice, Cynthia’s brother, played by Timothy Spall, who finds himself trying to bear the weight of both Cynthia’s problems and his own frustrations and weariness with continually trying to care for his wife’s needs while simultaneously bear up under the emotional abuse he’s receiving from her due to her strained physical and emotional state. Everyone is going to great effort to keep uncomfortable truths hidden, with the effect that there is an ever present tension that is begging to be released.

The technical qualities of the filmmaking are brilliant, from the contrasts set up in the frame and between characters to the choreography of a tension-filled birthday dinner. And quite simply, it’s beautiful, thought-provoking storytelling and extremely relevant to anyone who might be tempted to go it alone.

Sansho the Bailiff

  

Year: 1954

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi

Genre: Drama

Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyôko Kagawa, Eitarô Shindô, Akitake Kôno, Masao Shimizu, Ken Mitsuda, Kazukimi Okuni, Yôko Kozono, Noriko Tachibana, Ichirô Sugai, Teruko Omi, Chieko Naniwa, Kikue Môri, Ryôsuke Kagawa, Kanji Koshiba, Shinobu Araki, Reiko Kongo, Shôzô Nanbu

Kenji Mizoguchi directs this dark, tragic tale revealing the harsh realities of life in feudal Japan and how often what is lost can never be regained. This story of a family separated and its children sold into slavery to the titular Sansho brings to mind the far more recent film 12 Years A Slave and the thought of how hopeless it must feel to find yourself a victim of betrayal and suddenly a slave with no advocate, no way to prove you are actually a free person. Through the continued enslavement of the children Zushiō and Anju into adulthood, we see how alone a victim of atrocity could have their humanity crushed until they are inhuman themselves.

Mizoguchi’s production design details the contrasts between the comforts and abundance of humanity surrounding the haves and the austerity of the have nots. He also makes dramatic use of the depth of his frame to show distance, background activity or to fill it with a variety of characters and interactions. The returning motif Mizoguchi uses of the mother’s call and song, a symbol of her ongoing lamentation and desperate hope to see her children again is haunting and heartbreaking.

COMING AND GOING

LAST CHANCE (last date to watch)

NETFLIX

November 15
Paddington (2014)

November 18
Girlhood (2014)

November 20
Gates of Heaven (1978)
The Thin Blue Line (1988)

AMAZON PRIME

November 15
Me Before You (2016)

November 19
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Support Your Local Sheriff (1969)

November 20
1984 (1984)
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)
Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
The Great Escape (1963)
Hotel Rwanda (2004)
House of Games (1987)
In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Lenny (1974)
The Magnificent Seven (1960)
Mississippi Burning (1988)
The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
Valkyrie (2008)

November 21
De Palma (2015)

FILMSTRUCK

November 16
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
Let There Be Light (1946)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

November 29
Everything else

HULU

November 30
American Psycho (2000)
Escape from New York (1981)
Get Shorty (1995)
Ghost in the Shell (1995)
Primal Fear (1996)
The Terminator (1984)
They Came Together (2014)
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)

JUST ARRIVED

NETFLIX

BuyBust (2018)
Green Room (2015)
Outlaw King (2018)

AMAZON PRIME

Bernie (2011)
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972)
Fox and His Friends (1975)
The General (1926)
Henri Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (2009)
Journey’s End (2017)
Orchestra Rehearsal (1978)

FILMSTRUCK

The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970)
Body Heat (1981)
Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
Dheepan (2015)
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)
Ride the High Country (1962)
The Wild Bunch (1969)

HULU

Frances Ha (2012)
Sami Blood (2016)
The Wolfpack (2015)

COMING THIS WEEK

NETFLIX

November 15
May The Devil Take You– NETFLIX FILM (2018)
The Crew– NETFLIX FILM (2015)

November 16
Cam– NETFLIX FILM (2018)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs– NETFLIX FILM (2018)
The Princess Switch– NETFLIX FILM (2018)

November 18
The Pixar Story (2007)

AMAZON PRIME

November 16
Coldplay: A Head Full of Dreams (2018)

November 17
McQueen

November 21
Box of Moonlight (1996)

HULU

November 15
Cartel Land (2015)

November 18
Hero (2002)

November 21
Box of Moonlight (1996)

Jacob Neff is a film enthusiast living east of Sacramento. In addition to his contributions as an admin of the Feelin’ Film Facebook group and website, he is an active participant in the Letterboxd community, where his film reviews can be found. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with his latest thoughts and shared content.

You Should Be Watching: July 19-25

Posted on by Jacob Neff.

Welcome to You Should Be Watching, my weekly opportunity to introduce you to a variety of great films, gems of the past and present, available for you to stream from Netflix, Amazon Prime, FilmStruck, and anywhere else streams are found.

This week I’m highlighting a change of pace food-focused indie film from Jon Favreau (expiring soon), a surreal mindbender from Denis Villeneuve, and another all-time classic from Charlie Chaplin.

This month is your last chance to see Finding Dory on Netflix, Gran Torino and The Hurt Locker on Amazon Prime, and classics like His Girl Friday, Rio Bravo, and Taxi Driver on FilmStruck. Now streaming are titles such as Room, Mary and the Witch’s Flower, and The Spectacular Now on Netflix and The Philadelphia Story and the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born on FilmStruck.

 

STREAMING PICKS OF THE WEEK

Chef

Year: 2014

Director: Jon Favreau

Genre: Adventure, Comedy, Drama

Cast: Jon Favreau, Sofía Vergara, Emjay Anthony, John Leguizamo, Scarlett Johansson, Dustin Hoffman, Oliver Platt, Bobby Cannavale, Amy Sedaris, Robert Downey Jr., Russell Peters, Chase Grimm, Will Schutze, Gloria Sandoval, Jose C. Hernandez, Alberto Salas, Alfredo Ortiz

 

When he’s not busy making movies or in a past life, Jon Favreau—who plays main character Carl Casper—seems to have spent a fair amount of time in the kitchen and frequenting food trucks. As writer, director, and lead actor on this picture, his love for the world of food shines through, as does his frustration with artists being told how they have to make their art  and critics–professional and otherwise–putting down the art.

Casper is a head chef at a high-class restaurant in Los Angeles, but he’s fed up with being told how to make his dishes and blows up at a stuffy, influential critic both on Twitter and in person after receiving a scathing review. With his reputation now trashed and unable to make the dishes he knows would be loved, he leaves the restaurant and has to figure out what’s next for him career-wise and what to do about his relationships with his estranged son Percy (Emjay Anthony) and his ex-wife Inez (Sofia Vergara).

In all, Chef is a unique look at the classic middle age crisis but in the modern world of friendly divorces and social media, where emotions run wild, reputations are changed in a moment, and news today is gone tomorrow.

EXPIRING: Last day to watch on Amazon Prime is July 27

 

Enemy

Year: 2013

Director: Denis Villeneuve

Genre: Thriller, Mystery

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mélanie Laurent, Sarah Gadon, Isabella Rossellini, Joshua Peace, Tim Post, Kedar Brown, Megan Mane, Misha Highstead, Alexis Uiga, Darryl Dinn, Kiran Friesen, Loretta Yu, Stephen R. Hart, Paul Stephen

 

Despite it being far more surreal than any of his other films Denis Villeneuve’s (Blade Runner 2049, Arrival) fingerprints can be seen all over Enemy, from pacing to atmospheric score to thematic color design. It is sublimely edited, attention-grabbing throughout, and terrifically haunting in its direction. For what it’s worth, even his use of nudity, while graphic, is limited and more artistic than titillating.

But none of it works without Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance as two radically different characters who look the same, one a professor named Adam Bell, the other a small-time actor named Daniel St. Claire, who Adam stumbles upon after renting one of his movies. Unable to shake the reality that Daniel is a mirror image of himself, Adam becomes obsessed with him. And it only gets stranger and more challenging and confusing from there. It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between dreams, reality, imagination, and symbolism, and why the heck spiders keep appearing. But despite the likelihood that the film will leave you in utter confusion, it’s a fascinating experience with knockout performances, an incredible score, and wonderfully creative visual design.

 

City Lights

  

Year: 1931

Director: Charlie Chaplin

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Cast: Charlie Chaplin, Virginia Cherrill, Florence Lee, Harry Myers, Al Ernest Garcia, Hank Mann, Albert Austin, Eddie Baker, Henry Bergman, Buster Brodie, Jeanne Carpenter, Tom Dempsey, James Donnelly, Ray Erlenborn, Robert Graves, Charles Hammond, Jean Harlow, Joseph Herrick, Austen Jewell, Willie Keeler, Robert Parrish John Rand, W.C. Robinson, Cy Slocum, Tony Stabenau, Mark Strong, Tiny Ward, Stanhope Wheatcroft, Florence Wix

 

A delightful film through and through, full of laughter, awe, and heartwarming goodness, but it also embraces the reality of the hard times. You can’t help but root for Charlie Chaplin’s character The Tramp. He has such a good heart and keeps finding himself a victim of circumstance, for better and worse. Virginia Cherill as his love interest is so cute and  great at playing blind. Their on-screen chemistry is special.

There is a lyrical quality to the film that uses the perfect choreography of movement and wonderful musical score to keep each scene flowing smoothly into the next. Incredible timing is needed to make the interactions work as they need to, but Chaplin is such an expert, he makes it all look easy.

There are diverse settings, and the film is chock full of gags, but one of the highlights is the boxing match. Its choreography is among the most creative of its type. And not only is that entire sequence laugh-out-loud funny, both before and during the match, it’s also thrilling and suspenseful. If you only see one Chaplin film, make it City Lights. It’s a true joy to experience.

 

COMING AND GOING

LAST CHANCE (last date to watch)

NETFLIX

July 29
Assassination (2015)

July 31
Finding Dory (2016)
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)

 

AMAZON PRIME

July 19
Embrace of the Serpent

July 27
Chef

July 30
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)
Wild Bill (1995)

July 31
A Christmas Story (1983)
Gran Torino (2008)
The Hurt Locker (2009)

 

FILMSTRUCK

July 20
Blow-Up (1966)
Rififi (1955)
Thieves’ Highway (1949)

July 27
All the President’s Men (1976)
Ball of Fire (1941)
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
His Girl Friday (1940)
The Killing Fields (1984)
Rio Bravo (1959)

July 28
Night and the City (1950)

July 31
Taxi Driver (1976)

August 3
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927)
Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Marty (1955)
Network (1976)

August 4
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)
The Phantom of Liberty (1974)

August 10
The Decline of Western Civilization (1981)
Dogtooth (2009)
Magnolia (1999)
Nights of Cabiria (1957)
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

 

JUST ARRIVED

NETFLIX

Enemy (2013)
Locke (2013)
Mary and the Witch’s Flower (2017)
Obvious Child (2014)
Room (2015)
The Rover (2014)
The Spectacular Now (2013)
The Stranger (1946)
Under the Skin (2013)

 

AMAZON PRIME

The Doors (1991)
Return to Me (2000)
Walking Tall (1973)

 

FILMSTRUCK

Gaslight (1944)
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
A Star Is Born (1954)
Two Women (1960)

 

HULU

Cold in July (2014)
The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008)

 

COMING THIS WEEK

NETFLIX

July 20
Father of the Year—NETFLIX FILM (2018)

July 22
An Education (2009)

 

AMAZON PRIME

July 24
How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2017)

 

HULU

July 20
Embrace of the Serpent (2015)

July 25
Black Cop (2017)

 

Jacob Neff is a film enthusiast living east of Sacramento. In addition to his contributions as an admin of the Feelin’ Film Facebook group and website, he is an active participant in the Letterboxd community, where his film reviews can be found. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with his latest thoughts and shared content.