Pick of the week: “Lost in America” (Netflix) — Albert Brooks fan rejoice, as Netflix is now streaming all the comedies he wrote and directed. Maybe give a miss to “The Muse,” but there are some comic masterpieces here, including “Defending Your Life,” “Modern Romance” and this 1985 gem starring Brooks and Julie Hagerty as an upwardly mobile couple who decide to “drop out” of society, only to find life out of the rat race isn’t so comfortable. Even in a top-of-the-line RV.
(Photo courtesy of City Pages)
It was somewhere in the fourth hour of my five-hour drive up to Minneapolis that I wondered to myself whether my apparently lifelong devotion to “Mystery Science Theater 3000” was worth it.
I was driving from my home in Madison up to the State Theatre in Minneapolis for the live broadcast of the Rifftrax Live “Mystery Science Theater 3000 Reunion” show on June 28. In the ‘90s, this would have been a no-brainer. It’s fair to say I was obsessed with the show – had just about every episode on videotape, MST3K Info Club card in my wallet. Many a Saturday night was built around takeout Chinese and a new episode of “MST3K.”
But that was then. Now I’ve got a career, a wife, kids. I watch and write about the DVDs from time to time, and have headed to the local movie theater for a Rifftrax simulcast event from time to time, which is a lot of fun. But it’s not essential to me in the way it was 20 years ago.
And yet still, I went to Minneapolis. And I’m so glad I did. The event will be rebroadcast in theaters on Tuesday, July 12, and if “Mystery Science Theater 3000” has meant anything at all to you over the years, I highly recommend you go.
One is vagabond by choice. The other is a vagabond by necessity. Their paths cross in veteran French director Nicole Garcia’s empathetic but at times unfocused “Going Away.”
The 2013 film, largely overlooked in the United States and only now available on DVD from Cohen Media, mixes Dardennes Brothers-style economic realism with big melodramatic revelations. The fit can be awkward at times, but also strikes emotional sparks against a lush south of France backdrop.
Pick of the week: “Spotlight“ — My full review is here. Last year’s Best Picture winner was something of an underdog, fitting for a complex, cool-headed but quietly furious drama about a team of Boston Globe reporters who painstakingly unearth a conspiracy of silence around priest abuse in the Catholic Church. Writer-director Tom McCarthy avoids Hollywood melodrama, instead showing us the relentless legwork that went into reporting the story, making things such as searching through archives and interviewing witnesses the stuff of high drama, and heroism.
We’ve seen tons of movies about young Americans going to France. “Valley of Love” flips the script, giving us old French people coming to America.
Pick of the Week: “The Trials of Muhammad Ali” (Netflix): My full review is here. Netflix dropped this excellent documentary by UW-Madison graduate Bill Siegel about a month ago, but wisely picked it back up after the death of Ali. It’s a terrific look inside Ali’s struggles in the 1960s against the Vietnam War and for civil rights, a fight that got him banned from boxing and made him a pariah for many white Americans. While he is being rightfully lionized, this film is an important reminder of how much of the country turned its back on him and what he stood for.
What would Griffin Mill think of today’s Hollywood? In Robert Altman’s 1992 satire “The Player,” Mill (Tim Robbins) is the boy-king of an compromised Hollywood, ruthlessly steamrolling the desperate pitches of screenwriters, plucking a few that he can turn into acceptable multiplex pablum.
Today, original movie pitches seem almost quaint; it’s all about reboots and remakes, putting a CGI gloss on something familiar. Or better yet, make every movie conform to a larger brand, like products on an assembly line, each feeding back to the same rapacious beast. The studio comes up with the idea now, and hires hungry writers and an unproven director to get it done. Of all the pitches we hear in “The Player,” Buck Henry’s idea for “The Graduate 2” might get through. But Mill would be sacked — probably by the studio’s Chinese owners — if he let anything remotely original get made, sappy happy ending or no.
Pick of the week: “Jurassic Park“ — Perhaps getting ready to release “Jurassic World” later this summer, Netflix has posted both “Jurassic Park” and the sequels, “The Lost World” and “Jurassic Park III,” on June 1. Especially when compared next to the bloated and unfocused “Jurassic World,” Steven Spielberg’s original “Park” is a perfectly-balanced summer movie, with just the right amounts of humor, horror, thrills and wonder. “Lost World” seemed like more of the same upon first viewing, but has some dynamite suspense sequences. And “III” is a fun and occasionally clever B-movie that follows in the same big footsteps.
Tom Hiddleston. Idris Elba. Jamie Bell. Maybe even Daniel Craig. Whoever ends up being the next James Bond, one thing is for sure — 007 fans will have to endure months of speculation and unconfirmed reports about who’s meeting with Barbara Broccoli to take over the role.
Now, keep in mind, that Craig has never actually said he’s not doing 007 any more — he’s made some noise about the fact that he’s sick of the role, but those comments usually come right after a bruising film shoot. And he’s not exactly known for being straight with the press in the past.
Netflix giveth, and Netflix taketh away. The start of a new month means more movies arriving on the streaming service, and more leaving for reasons that defy logic. (Seriously, “The Station Agent” just went up May 1 and now it’s going away June 1. What’s up with that?)
Anyway, the “Gone in an Instant” column aims to help you navigate Netflix’s byzantine ways and give you one last chance to catch some great movies before they vanish. Here’s five you should try and cram in while you still can:
Madison Movie 