By: Henry J. Fromage –
This week was perhaps a little Netflix-heavy, but I also caught up on a long-form Sundance selection now on Max.
137: Anyone But You
Both Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell are on the definite upswing these days, so pairing them in a throwback semi-raunchy romcom made a lot of sense, and sure, why don’t we call it a Shakespeare adaptation while we’re at it? This is no paradigm-shifter, but their charm and chemistry carry the film, and if they wanted to do a few more, I wouldn’t be against it. Three Beers.
138: Good Grief
Dan Levy gets his own Netflix film as a man mourning his sexy dead husband (Luke Evans, in what is starting to feel like a trend for him) by taking a trip to Paris with his equally problem-beset friends (Ruth Negga and Himesh Patel). The cast sells a lifetime friendship immune to hard truth-telling with aplomb, and it’s not as Nancy Meyers as it felt like it might become at points. Three Beers.
139: Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York
This HBO true crime documentary is about a period in the early 1990s when a serial killer (dubbed insensitively the ‘Last Call Killer’ by New York media) stalked gay clubs and bars for his victims. As much a documentary about this time in which there was more freedom and openness than ever for homosexuals, but also a quickly growing cultural backlash that is still sadly reverberating today. Three Beers.
140: Lost in the Night
Mexican arthouse auteur Amat Escalante dropped this Cannes selection on Netflix with little fanfare, but I’m a bit surprised it didn’t get a bit more cachet. A young man investigating the disappearance of his activist mother and her compatriots starts to work for a rich family as he chases down how they may be connected. With shades of Parasite and other Latin American social issues dramas, it has some teeth (even if it loves it some melodrama, too). Two Beers.
141: God Save Texas: Hometown Prison
This feature-length anthology documentary follows Richard Linklater as he delves into the status of his hometown, Huntsville, TX, whose principal industry is the prison system. He interviews inhabitants from various walks of live and connections to the criminal justice system and explores Texas’s notorious relationship with the Death Penalty. As if you’d ever doubt it, he proves a natural and engaging documentary filmmaker as well. Two Beers.
142: God Save Texas: The Price of Oil
The other two installments of this omnibus project are a bit shorter- clocking in at the length of a longer Oscar-nominated documentary short. This one comes from Alex Stapleton, who grew up in Houston’s industry-polluted Fifth Ward, as she examines the effect of the oil industry on her family for temporarily good and mostly ill as it becomes yet another way to disenfranchise the descendants of slaves that make up most of its population. Two Beers.
143: God Save Texas: La Frontera
The last installment of the project comes from Iliana Sosa, who examines the history of Mexican-American relations in her border hometown of El Paso. She calls this ‘nepantia’, or the feeling of being between two worlds, as has often been the case for her family and others living on other side of a border of waxing and waning strictness. Two Beers.
