Time to Binge Watch

As the last award nominee DVDs trickle in and PBS is on summer break, it is time to try some Amazon Prime binge watching. Up first, Justified via FX. Then after so much violence, time to look for something more upbeat for the next list.

Justified (Season Two) – 2011 (3.1). This entertaining crime series manages to improve in the second year as we become more familiar with the continuing characters, wave goodbye to some old ones and meet new folks. The romance between the Deputy US Marshall and his ex-wife heats up and the turf battle between two old time local crime families becomes central to the story arc. People are shot to death so often that it seems nobody bothers much with investigating the circumstances. The Eastern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce must not be happy with this series because it seems to indicate all the residents of that area are either crooks or law enforcement or sometimes both. The second season ended with a couple central characters meeting their maker, but I expect some new ones will come along in season three.

Justified (Season Three) – 2012 (3.0). The pregnant ex-wife is not around this season, replaced in bed by a female bartender. With one local crime family almost totally annihilated, the other, led by nemesis Boyd Crowder is challenged by an outside mob wanting to fill the void and gain complete dominance. The criminal father of the Marshall aligns with Crowder. Characters come and go, but the bad ones usually end up on the receiving end of a bullet, often at the hands of other bad ones. Sadly a beloved State Trooper goes down and the two contending gangs go on, but it is surprisingly enjoyable to laugh when smart ass crooks meet their end. Bring on the fourth year.

Justified (Season Four) – 2013 (3.0). The female bartender turned out to be a con artist. The baby arrival is getting closer. Crooked old Dad gets even nastier and deserves what he gets. Bad guys come and go quickly, but a few stay round like Boyd who has now hooked up with Ava, the widow of his brother and the two are aligned in crime. The Black community up one holler are centrally involved even as they guard their privacy and some real hillbillies and the local stuffed shirts all play roles. The Detroit mob continues to try to take over in Harlan County and is quite interested in finding a hiding witness who could finger the kingpin. As enjoyable as last year, but reportedly season five takes a dip before a strong finish in six.

Justified (Season Six) – 2015 (3.0). Now Sam Elliott shows up so we know the end is near as Ava and Boyd are destined to prove to be star crossed lovers even as they plot to steal 10 mil from old Sam. The other desperadoes including crooked cops meet their maker and the series finale ends on a wistful note with a four year later afterward. Here is a farewell song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjvD3Y6IiVw .

Justified (Season Five) – 2014 (2.9)). Detroit almost destroys itself, Harlan tries getting into Mexican heroin, Ava fights to survive in prison, Florida cousins come to Harlan to take over the crime business bringing a troubled teenage boy and his hot sister who is really his Mom, and the boy has a social worker who is briefly a love interest for the Deputy. Near the end of the season Mary Steenburgen turns up as an old gangster widow, a sign the series needs to wind it down.

Pick of the Litter– 2018 (2.9). In this affecting documentary, five predictably cute puppies bred by Guide Dogs for the Blind to be trained as possible helper dogs are followed through the various stages of their upbringing by foster parents and ultimately by professional trainers as they encounter various assessments to see if they can continue the process or need to be “career changed”. We also meet a couple of prospective blind recipients waiting for a dog. This is a thoroughly likable movie.

Ben Is Back – 2018 (2.8). Julia Roberts does a good job of portraying the mother of a teen age son struggling to recover from addiction to drugs, as she smothers him with love while trying to be realistic about what is actually happening in his life. The boy has unexpectedly shown up on Christmas Eve, supposedly with permission to leave his treatment facility. We do not see any of the backstory even by flashbacks, as the whole movie takes place on one night. But we still get exposed to the dynamics between mother and son and between the other characters such as his sister, stepfather, younger half siblings, other addicts, a counselor and families of addicts. This film was not written to be preachy or to give a full biography, and some have criticized it for half way through turning from a dram to more of a thriller, but it chose what it wanted to do and did a pretty good job of it.

The Captain – 2018 (2.8). Based on a true story, this German drama tells of a young German soldier in the last couple weeks of WWII who is running on his own, perhaps as one of the many deserters, and comes into the uniform of a Captain. He soon acquires other probable deserters who say they were separated from their units and want to be attached to him. The young man then embarks on an impostor scheme claiming to be a personal emissary sent by Hitler to assess the situation behind the lines. As other officers try to follow protocol, the impostor is able to dupe them into letting him escalate the violent way in which he treats prisoners. Probing the mentality on the losing side as a war is ending is always a fascinating subject, but this particular story is so unique it misses some of the bigger points it might have been trying to score.

Mary Queen of Scots – 2018 (2.7). Slow starting and a bit confusing regarding the quickly introduced male characters, this movie eventually settles in to tell the story of the contest between Mary, niece of Henry VIII and a young Catholic widow of the heir to the French Throne, and Elizabeth I of England, her first cousin once removed. The film portrays two strong women who were constantly ill advised and undermined by their male advisers and implies that if allowed they might have achieved an agreement to bring their domains together peacefully. The movie takes a few historical liberties, such as casting black actors to play roles that were in fact white persons and a penultimate scene where the two Queens meet face to face for which there is no confirmation in the historical record.

Oscar and Cannes

More Oscar nominees and some Cannes favorites are included in this list, but only Capernaum is good, while two others are marginally effective and several are not good at all. When the Oscar best picture nominee list was doubled to ten, it only confirmed how slim the pickings have become. Gleaning past Cannes awards shows the films that win there are usually somewhat exotic and a bit experimental which too often results in a pretentious mishmash

Capernaum – 2018 (3.3). This is a powerful Oscar nominee and Cannes Jury winning Lebanese movie about the problems of poverty and immigration, intimately presented through the story of a 12 year old Lebanese boy who sues his parents for having given birth to him. The back story is told through flashbacks from the trial. The acting by the boy and by a young half Ethiopian boy less than two years old is remarkable and a credit to the female director.

Justified(Season One) - 2010 (3.0) This action and crime series based in current times manages to make violence and killing satisfying when the Deputy US Marshall dispatches of bad people in justified shootings. But his shootings can prompt institutional concerns, such as those in the opening episode when he is transferred from the Miami office to his old roots in Harlan County, Kentucky, where he finds crime and corruption involving people he grew up around, including his own father. Because he is good looking and charming he attracts female attention, including from a young widow who killed her own crime involved husband in yet another justified shooting, and also from the ex-wife of the Marshall, in spite of her re-marriage. Some of the bad guys are really dumb and some are quite sharp, but they all are prone to double crossing and sometimes conveniently dispatch of each other. The adult comic book tone makes the series enjoyable. There are about six seasons, so it will be interesting to see how it progresses.

Call the Midwife (Season Eight) – 2018 (2.9). The dominant issue in this season set in the early 60s is illegal abortion and the problems driving women to seek them, the problems by botched ones and the problem of addressing the underlying laws. The character comings and goings and developments seem secondary. The series is likely to continue through the 60s at least.

First Man – 2018 (2.9). Neil Armstrong is portrayed in this movie as a sensitive man grieving over the death of his two year old daughter while at the same time dedicating himself to his job as a test pilot, astronaut and ultimately the first man to walk on the moon. The contrast between the inner challenges and strength of Armstrong and the outer magnitude of the challenge of navigating space to land and walk on the moon is well captured by the script, cinematography, acting and direction. This should probably be seen in Imax for the scale of the enterprise.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? – 2018 (2.8). Based on the true story of a female biographer, well played by Melissa McCarthy, whose career hits a low point where she cannot meet her NYC living expenses in the early 1990s, this drama efficiently catches the sarcastic wit of the woman and the joyful decadence of her gay English friend as she stumbles across the idea of faking letters from famous deceased writers and selling them to dealers. Eventually the fraud comes to the attention of the FBI who quickly turns her accomplice into a witness and gets her to plead guilty. Since the victims were questionable dealers and presumably wealthy collectors, the movie is ultimately concerned only with the individual at the center of it.

Dheepan– 2015 (2.8). Dheepan is a Tamil warrior who has given up on the revolution and become a refugee. In order to get out of the refugee camp he obtains a family passport of deceased persons and pretends with a Tamil woman and a nine year old orphan girl that they are the family shown in the passport. They end up on the outskirts of Paris in a high rise housing project where Dheepan serves as the handyman and his pretend wife becomes caregiver to a disabled older resident. The French director wanted to make a movie about a culture and language he did not understand and in the course of the film to have it change genres, which endeared him to Cannes. The film is very good dealing with the refugee pretend family struggling to get along with each other and with their new place of living, but it suffers when the genre changes near the end to get the family trapped in the middle of some sort of gang warfare in the housing complex.

The Unforgotten (Season Three) – 2018 (2.8). The mystery miniseries continues a third season with solid cast and production values and tight scripting, this time looking for the killer of a teenage girl whose body was found buried under a roadway that was being updated. Four suspects are interlinked as the detectives use their techniques to figure out who the victim was nad who did it. The process and conclusion take their toll on the lady DCI who is getting pretty burned out after 30 years. But the series is set for a fourth year.

Eternity and a Day-1998 (2.7). In this deliberate and longish contemporary Greek drama an old poet with terminal illness spends what he expects to be his last day wandering his port city together with an eight year old solo Albanian refugee boy, looking back on his life and work and reflecting on how his failures in finding the right balance. The DVD includes an intro from a film professor who gives good input on what to watch for in the movie, most notably the long continuous shots including all the surroundings of the scene, as contrasted with the Hollywood style of many short scenes edited together.

If Beale Street Could Talk – 2018 (2.6). The first movie adaptation of a James Baldwin book , this lesser known work is the story of a young couple who grew up as close neighbors in Harlem. Both families were intact, but while hers was happy and loving, his had many frictions. In the early 1970s, the couple get pregnant and he is unexpectedly arrested for a crime he apparently did not commit, which sucks him into the horrors of the criminal justice system. Slow paced and not enough focused on the facts of the criminal case, the movie is more evocative than effective.

L'Enfant -2005 (2.6). In a depressed French industrial city in the early 2000s, a petty thief has just fathered a son with a naive young girl out on her own. His criminality culminates in him selling the infant on the black market without the consent of the mother which causes her to collapse and need hospitalization. He ends up in debt to the black marketers and confessing to a crime to protect his young accomplice, then going to jail where his baby mama visits him. Maybe one has to know the actual time and place to feel sympathy.

Les Miserables -2018 (2.6). This miniseries telling of the story seems like a Cliffs Notes movie version, hitting the main points but with emotion assumed and over portrayed. Brit production values are slightly marginal. There does not seem to be much reason for this series having been made.

Operation Finale – 2018 (2.5). In the early 1960s Israeli intelligence operatives executed a mission to capture Nazi fugitive Adolph Eichmann in Argentina and return him to Israel to stand trial for war crimes. This movie tells a version of that story based on a book written by one of the intelligence agents. Because the view is so from the inside, the script tries to introduce us to the agents and their personal dynamics at the expense of the Eichmann side of the story, who he was and how he came to be and to escape and what his network and plans were in Argentina and whether argentina was somehow complicit in hiding him. We also get no treatment of the legal issues of the rendition and trial in a country that did not even exist when the war crimes were committed. As a caper film, the movie leaves out most of the elements, though it does indulge the dynamics of interrogation of Eichmann by one of the agents, probably the author of the book.

Uncle Boonme Who Can Recall His PastLives – 2010 (2.5). This Thai movie was a favorite at Cannes. A dying man is visited by the sister of his wife who died 19 years earlier and by a young man who is to help care for him. He is also visited by the ghost of his deceased wife and by their son who disappeared several years ago and someway became a part monkey man. There are also workers on the farm of the dying man and a scene of a Princess seduced by a catfish. A DVD interview with the filmmaker shows the film to have biographical touches to his rural roots and lots of experiments with homage to various styles of film making. Maybe being Thai or French helps trying to understand and appreciate this mishmash.

Boy Erased– 2018 (2.4). The son of a Baptist preacher was forced by his parents to attend a gay conversion therapy program and wrote a book about it as an indictment of the program and a testament to the power of parental love to overcome the ignorance behind such programs. This is the movie version, which unfortunately drags and in which we get no feeling of depth for any characters, though we do know all along son loves his parents, we see the mom grow from her love and we learn at the end that the father may do the same. We can see that the conversion program is nutty, but that aspect of the movie is a rather tepid critique.

Vice– 2018 (2.4). If a biopic of the notorious VP Dick Cheney overlaid with political commentary by some unknown working man while the movie seems to jump around unevenly in what exactly it is covering at any given time, which is also poorly paced and for some reason thinks it is occasionally funny sounds like a losing bet, it is.

The Tree of Life – 2011 (2.2).The DVD for this Terence Malick ordeal suggests for best sound quality to turn sound up to loud. A good suggestion to coping with the length of this pretentiously incomprehensible conglomeration is to also set the DVD player to three or four power fast forward. You won't miss much in spite of the fact Cannes liked it.