Here’s a new set of shelter-in-place recommendations to stream or watch on TV.
ON VIDEO
The surprising fierceness underlying Mr. Rogers’ gentle affect is the subject of the emotionally satisfying fictional narrative A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and the even better biodoc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Streaming Won’t You Be My Neighbor? is included with subscriptions to HBO and DirecTV, and the stream can be purchased for $14.99 from all major streaming platforms. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is available to stream from all the usual outlets; I paid Amazon $2.99. Have a box of Kleenex handy.
2014’s best Hollywood movie was the marvelously entertaining Gone Girl, Rosamund Pike shines in David Fincher’s gripping study of psychopathy. It’s now available to stream on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Redbox.
ON TV
On April 1, Turner Classic Movies will present a host of films from the great Akira Kurosawa. Since we tend to think first of Kurusawa’s historic samurai classics, I am recommending his noir-stained contemporary crime films Drunken Angel, Stray Dog and High and Low. TCM is presenting them with seven other Kurosawa films. Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune team up in all three of these decidedly non-samurai stories.
- Drunken Angel (1948) was Kurusawa’s first major film and his first with Mifune, two years before their first samurai masterpiece Rashomon. Mifune plays a young Yazuka hood, who works with some very bad people, so there are some double crosses and a suitable dark ending.
- In the police procedural Stray Dog (1949), Mifune plays a detective tracking down a gun that was used in a crime. The trail leads through Tokyo’s gritty underworld during a heat wave and even into a sold-out pro baseball game.
- My favorite of these three is the 1963 neo-noir pressure cooker High and Low, with Mifune as the CEO of a major shoe manufacturer. In an attempt to kidnap his son, the crooks accidentally grab his chauffeur’s son. The CEO still wants to ransom the kid, but the price is ruinous, and all of this is happening as the CEO is being targeted himself for corporate backstabbing.
REMEMBRANCE
The prolific actor Stuart Whitman has died. Strikingly manly and relatable, Whitman also had the gift of imbuing strong-and-silent characters with emotional texture. Indeed, he was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for a 1961 film that I haven’t seen – The Mark, in which he played a guy seeking a normal life after being imprisoned for attempted child molestation. I remember Whitman for his performances in The Longest Day and the offbeat Convicts 4. He would not wish to be remembered for the giant carnivorous rabbit chiller Night of the Lepus.
