With the cancellation of film festivals
new methods of release are being explored.
For example, starting tomorrow April 16 CBC will start showing and
streaming some titles from the HotDocs lineup. Check this out at:
The International Documentary Film
Festival is also making available hundreds of titles online.
With Netflix’s “Tiger King” all the
rage, it added a new 40-minute episode “Tiger King and I” of interviews with
associates of “Joe Exotic”. A sample of the ongoing commentary:
https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/tiger-king-nielsen-viewership-data-stranger-things-1234573602/
Here are reviews of other streaming
choices:
Money Heist (Spain, Netflix,
four seasons, 2017- April 2020, about 30 hours of episodes)
My good friend, ace journalist and
author Andrew Cohen, put me on to this amazing Spanish series which began in
2017. It’s smart, sexy, stylish, and
fast-paced. The Spanish title is “Las
Casa de Papel” which translates literally as “The House of Paper”. It involves a very unusual gang of eight men
and women who take over Spain’s royal mint, holding many hostages, while
running the presses to obtain billions in untraceable euros. Their code names are the names of cities. The
gang dresses everyone in their bright red jumpsuits and Salvador Dali
facemasks, the better to confuse the authorities. (Occasional narration is by a
trigger-happy gal “Tokyo”.) The on-site
leader is a smirking psychopath ‘Berlin” who has a terminal condition. But the real criminal/kidnap mastermind is
off-site, a young bearded “professor” (usual attire jacket and tie), who looks
to me like he could be a leader of the left-wing popular movement “Podemos”
(there’s a later riff about “resistance”). Anyway he starts playing a game with
the lead female police agent Raquel, who has taken out a restraining order
against her abusive ex-husband. She
knows him as a cider-maker “Salva” …and then their relationship gets much
closer.
I was hooked
enough to watch the first 13 episodes of “season 1”. (Apparently the original Spanish TV series
had 15, or 18, 2017 episodes, and Netflix then recut them over several
seasons.) Things get increasingly wild
and crazy as the hostage situation approaches 60 hours, and that includes
sexual hook-ups more improbable than the occasional bursts of violence. The
demented aspects are part of what makes you keep watching.
How to Fix a Drug Scandal (U.S., Netflix
2020, four episodes)
As if the American “war on drugs” wasn’t
enough of a mess, this docuseries explores the criminal actions of several
chemists at drug testing laboratories in Massachusetts who tampered with
evidence in many thousands of drug cases.
One became a drug addict on the job. Prosecutorial misconduct added to
the miscarriage of justice pursued by defense attorneys.
Directed by Gavin Hood, and based on
Thomas Mitchell’s book The Spy Who Tried
to Stop a War: Katherine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion,
Keira Knightley stars as Ms. Gun, a young analyst with Britain’s Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) who is charged with violating the Official
Secrets Act after leaking a secret NSA memorandum prior to the 2003 invasion of
Iraq that exposed underhanded efforts to influence Security Council members.
The whistleblower case also exposed UK government efforts to cover up the
illegality of military operations. (In
my view Blair and Bush are the real war criminals in all this.) Also with Ralph Fiennes as Ms. Gun’s legal
counsel.
Hunters (US
2020, first season, Amazon Prime Video, 10 episodes)
In terms of alternate reality I prefer
HBO’s The Plot Against America (set
in 1940-42), but I did get into this series (set during the 1970s Carter
presidency) enough to watch all 10 episodes.
And it is true that after the Second World War a number of former Nazis
did come to America, including doctors, and scientists who worked on the space
program. Al Pacino stars as Holocaust
survivor and head Nazi-hunter Meyer Offerman.
Logan Lerman is Jonah Heidelbaum, who joins Meyer’s Jewish Nazi hunter
crew (although one member wears a Catholic nun’s habit?) after his grandmother
is killed. Another narrative element
includes a “Fourth Reich” conspiracy involving a viral weapon of mass
destruction in New York City (yikes!). There’s
lots of action and lethal violence, occasional awful fictionalized flashbacks
to Auschwitz, with the widening hunter-killer scenarios leading up to a real
humdinger of a last episode that offers deadly crazy revelations and reactions.
Whew!
Freud (Austria/Germany
2020, Netflix, 8 episodes)
Thinking of psycho-sexual disorders,
this series fictionalizing the life of the young Dr. Freud in Vienna gets
stranger as it goes along—hypnosis, hysteria, cocaine use, the occult and
crazed mediums, feuds, sex, intrigues, regression, suppression, madness and
murder, bloody satanic rituals … need I say more?
Elephant
and In
the Footsteps of Elephant (U.S. 2020, Disney+, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_(2020_film)
)
This latest Disneynature documentary
centres on a small elephant herd led by a 50-year old matriarch on its 1,000-mile
migration from the Okavango Delta in flood stage, across the Kalahari desert to
the Zambezi river near Victoria Falls and back again. Within that, with its dramas of elephant
society and survival, the storyline focuses on a 40-year old female and her
one-year old calf. These three main
elephant characters are given names. The
narration by Meghan Markle (“Duchess of Sussex”) can be annoyingly cutesy and
anthropomorphic. This isn’t the
authoritative voice of David Attenborough in the outstanding BBC Earth docs.
Nonetheless there’s some amazing photography capturing the lives of
elephants. I actually liked better the
story behind the arduous and protracted filming process which is explored in the
excellent companion feature-length documentary In the Footsteps of Elephant. That film includes information on the
“Elephants Without Borders” sanctuary that rescues orphan calves. [In addition, on the Okavango delta I
recommend the 2018 National Geographic film Into
the Okavango which is also streaming on Disney+.]
Dolphin Reef and
Diving
with Dolphins (U.S. 2020, Disney + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_Reef_(film)
)
Who doesn’t love dolphins? This is another Disneynature production
released at the same time as Elephant. The story narrated by Natalie Portman also
has an anthropomorphic element focused on two pairs—a bottlenose dolphin and
its calf; a humpback whale and its calf.
Action includes other whales, rival dolphin pods, sharks, and all manner
of wondrous sea creatures and corals, which are threatened by humans and
climate change. The undersea
cinematography is amazing. Again I
highly recommend the companion 79-minute making-of documentary Diving with Dolphins which is narrated
by Celine Cousteau, the granddaughter of Jacques Cousteau.
Ikiru (Japan
1952, Kanopy)
Don’t forget about the titles available
on this platform free with a public library card. This early work by Japanese master Akira
Kurosawa, released in my birth year, centres on a long-serving civil servant
who after a cancer diagnosis decides to challenge the suffocating bureaucracy
around him in order to leave a meaningful legacy. “Ikiru” is Japanese for “to live”.
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