This week: a hard-to-find suspense classic on TV and a disappointing romcom.
Here’s my remembrance of the late director Michael Apted, whose 9 Seven Up movies constitute the greatest documentary series in the history of cinema. Got to see him in person at the 2019 Mill Valley Film Festival.
ON VIDEO
I was disappointed in Sofia Coppola’s inoffensive but tired romantic comedy On the Rocks, a waste of Coppola’s talent and Bill Murray’s. I’ve often said that I could watch Bill Murray read the phone book, but this IS like Bill Murray reading the phone book. AppleTV.
And some more current films:
- Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: searing, with an electric performance. Netflix.
- The Personal History of David Copperfield: Dickins alive, at last. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
- Another Round: Humanity buzzed. Amazon.
- Mank: biting the hand. Netflix.
- One Night in Miami: four icons share one pivotal moment. Amazon.
- My Psychedelic Love Story: Errol Morris and the unreliable narrator. HBO.
- Martin Eden: Jack London in an art film (link goes live soon). Laemmle.
- The Mystery of D. B. Cooper: the hijacking that keeps on giving. HBO.
- Belushi: more texture to the story that you already know. Showtime.
- Ammonite: When the slow burn is a dud. Amazon.
- The Prom: airy confection. Netflix.
ON TV
Don’t miss the gripping and hard-to-find Witness to Murder, which I wrote about in depth yesterday, on Turner Classic Movies tomorrow night and Sunday morning.
And on January 18, TCM airs Pedro Almodovar’s 1988 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, eighty-eight minutes of non-stop hilarity. Women on the Verge is not as profound as Almodovar’s later work, but it is a masterpiece of madcap comedy.
Carmen Maura plays Pepa, a voice-over actress who has been dumped by her voice-over actor boyfriend, Ivan. Pepa has a gal pal who has discovered that her new squeeze is a Shiite terrorist. Ivan has a lunatic wife (who is armed and bewigged), a bespectacled son (a very young Antonio Banderas) and a new feminist attorney girlfriend. Everyone converges in Pepa’s apartment, on the streets of Madrid and on the way to a flight to Stockholm. Along the way, there is a mambo-loving Mad Hatter of a cabbie and some barbiturate-spiked gazpacho. Comic mayhem ensues.
Almodovar had made several outrageously raucous movies before, but Women on the Verge was the art house hit that first brought him to the attention of American audiences. Today he is one of our very best film makers. His Talk To Her (2002), Bad Education (2004) and Broken Embraces (2009) each made the top four on my lists of the years’ best films.
Actress Rossy de Palma, a very good sport in a key supporting role, sports one of the greatest noses in cinema.
