Six movies, six seasons

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Hulu, TCM.]

Network (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1976). Startlingly prescient, as the fading anchorman of a fourth-network’s nightly news moves from the reporting of events to tirades. “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” shouts Howard Beale (Peter Finch), in an unscripted rage that is soon beyond anyone’s control. I’m not as taken with this movie as I think I’m supposed to be: I find the dialogue, particularly in scenes with William Holden and Faye Dunaway (news vs. entertainment) and Holden and Beatrice Straight (husband vs. wife) labored and artificial. But as prophecy, Network deserves all the stars. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Two more seasons of Nathan for You

Third season (created by Nathan Fielder and Michael Koman, 2015). Unsettling schemes: a soundproof playbox to hold a child (so that parents can have sex in a hotel room while on vacation), a clothing company promoting Holocaust awareness (with ghastly in-store displays), a highwire act with Nathan posing as a man who’ll be honored for raising money for breast-cancer research. With the highwire act and other schemes, Fielder appears to take ample advantage of media willingness to air stories without scrutiny. My favorite bit from this season now looks like a rehearsal for The Rehearsal, with actors studying the gestures and movements of bar patrons and replicating them as a play (all in a dizzying effort to get around a no-smoking-in-bars rule). The increasingly convoluted promotional schemes take on a greater and greater element of Zeno’s paradox: before I can do z , I have to do y ; before I y , I have to do x ; but somehow it all gets done. ★★★★ (HBO)

Fourth season (created by Nathan Fielder and Michael Koman, 2017). The highlight of the season and the series: “Finding Frances,” in which Nathan travels from Los Angeles to Little Rock, Arkansas with William Heath, a “professional Bill Gates impersonator” (no, he isn’t one) to find the woman Heath didn’t marry fifty years earlier. Heath is an enigma: he has the manner of a con artist, a bit of a Robert Durst vibe, and it’s never clear who he is or what he was doing all those years after coming to Hollywood and failing to make it as an actor or singer. As Nathan asks him, “Can you figure out you?” When Heath and an actor playing Frances run through what might happen in a real meeting, the story moves into the strange territory that we now know as The Rehearsal. ★★★★ (HBO)

*

Room at the Top (dir. Jack Clayton, 1958). Joe Lampton (Laurence Harvey), young accountant, leaves a provincial English town to take a job in a less provincial English town and finds diversion in amateur theatricals and musical beds. His intention is to rise, but at what cost? Heather Sears and Simone Signoret play his conquests, Susan and Alice, the one the mill owner’s daughter, the other a wealthy philanderer’s neglected wife. Joe is all about what he wants to do , but I watched wondering what was going to happen to him. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Life at the Top (dir. Ted Kotcheff, 1965). Joe Lampton again (still Laurence Harvey), with a life not really his own, stuck in a loveless marriage to Susan (a markedly different Susan, played by Jean Simmons), under his father-in-law’s thumb at work and in politics. Adulterous liaisons for both partners; Susan with a friend of Joe’s, Joe with a television personality (Honor Blackman). Joe’s intention is to escape, but at what cost? Susan’s mother (Ambrosine Phillpotts) has it right: “You say you want a better life, and then when you step up a peg or two, you hate yourself for it.” ★★★★ (TCM)

*

A Place in the Sun (dir. George Stevens, 1951). From Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. With different leads, the story might be insufferable, but Montgomery Clift’s shiftiness, Elizabeth Taylor’s breathiness, and Shelley Winters’s neediness make for compelling drama — or, well, melodrama. Charlie Chaplin called it “the greatest movie ever made about America,” and by America, I think he meant class. Would pair well with Joe Lampton’s story or Strangers on a Train. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Myrna Loy feature

‌Stamboul Quest (dir. Sam Wood, 1934). It is 1915, and Myrna Loy is a glamorous German spy known as Annemarie, aka Fräulein Doktor, aka Helena Bohlen (based on the real-life Fräulein Doktor, Elsbeth Schragmüller). Annemarie’s mission in Turkey is complicated by a sudden romance with a cheerful American medical student (George Brent). The fun in this movie comes from seeing Loy’s character banter with Brent, banter with her spymaster (Lionel Atwill), and match wits with her Turkish prey (C. Henry Gordon). The luminous opening and closing scenes are good examples of James Wong Howe’s art. ★★★★

*

The Rehearsal (created by Nathan Fielder, 2022). I’ve already written about this series, so I’ll quote myself: “The Rehearsal doesn’t blur the line between what’s fictional and what’s real: it removes the line with an industrial sander and then draws a new line (or lines?) elsewhere. But where?” This series, a pilot with its own story and five episodes with one overarching story, is best watched with no preparation. Headspinning and heartbreaking — or is it just headspinning? ★★★★ (HBO)

*

The American Friend (dir. Wim Wenders, 1977). A loose adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel Ripley’s Game. Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) is an eccentric American, living in Germany, affiliated with an international art-forgery enterprise, moved by a single unfortunate event to conscript an unassuming picture framer, Jonathan Zimmerman (Bruno Ganz), as a hit man for the enterprise. There’s considerable suspense in the long, silent scene of Zimmerman stalking one victim (homage to Jules Dassin’s Rififi?), and considerable comedy in the long, nearly silent scene of Zimmerman and Ripley dispatching a second victim on a train. Another movie that would pair well with Strangers on a Train, with Zimmerman, like Guy Haines, pulled into a deadly scheme by way of a chance encounter. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Two seasons of How To with John Wilson

First season (created by John Wilson, 2020). The title made me curious, and after one sample I was hooked. The ostensible premise of each documentary-style episode is that Wilson is figuring out how to make or do something, but each episode goes off on tangent after tangent before making its way back, somehow, to its start. The tangents are the point, along with visual puns, Wilson’s nebbishy narrration (he’s almost never seen), the willingness of strangers to speak unguardedly to a camera, and one of the most dystopian depictions of New York City I’ve ever seen (rats, rats, and more rats). The first season’s final episode, “How to Cook the Perfect Risotto,” filmed as COVID-19 began to descend on the city, is an extraordinary thing. ★★★★ (HBO)

Second season (created by John Wilson, 2021). More of the same, but the same is a matter of endless variety, and along the way, one might lose track of what Wilson is trying to learn. (I’m still not sure why “How to Remember Your Dreams” required a trip to New York’s all-news radio station WINS 1010.) I especially enjoyed “How to Throw Out Your Batteries,” which opens into a consideration of the many things people are unable to part with. As with Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, plain weirdness turns into an exploration of deep emotion. ★★★★ (HBO)

[No surprise to see that Nathan Fielder is an executive producer.]

*

Only Murders in the Building, second season (created by John Hoffman and Steve Martin, 2022). It’s been many years since I last associated a particular day with a television show, but Only Murders now signifies Tuesday. This second season was not as terrific as the first: too many meta jokes about second seasons, too much schtick to run down the clock, too many loose ends. But I was happy to have guessed the identity of the killer (several episodes back) and to have anticipated the Andrea Martin storyline. The hokey name Glitter Guy and the introduction of a much younger cast member, Charles’s daughter Lucy (Zoe Margaret Colletti), made me remember (fondly) the PBS series Ghostwriter. ★★★ (Hulu)

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