Yes-People (2020)

  This animated short comes from Iceland and follows a building full of people as they go about their day with all their little interpersonal connections and misfires.  The only word spoken in the film is Yes, hence the title.  It's cute but I struggled to like it.  There just wasn't enough going on for me.  It's currently streaming on Kanopy and is a brisk eight minutes long.

White Eye (2020)

  This was one of last year's crop of Oscar shorts.  

Omer (Daniel Gad) finally finds his stolen bike locked outside of a butcher shop.  The cops are useless, and he can't find anyone willing to cut the bike's lock.  Omer waits around, getting progressively angrier, until the bike's new owner comes out.  Yunes (Dawit Tekelaeb) bought the bike from a guy at the bus station and it's his only means of getting his daughter to kindergarten.  Omer must decide how far he is willing to go to get his bike back when it could mean that Yunes is deported.

If you want to watch a depressing ass story about poverty and bicycles, The Bicycle Thief is streaming on HBO Max.  White Eye is the Reader's Digest version, clocking in at just under half an hour, conveniently also on HBO Max.

99 Homes (2014)

  I didn't like this movie but I found it hard to articulate why to myself.  I think it comes down to the ending, which feels very soft.  I think it needed to be either much more hopeful or much more tragic.

Construction worker Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) lost his home to foreclosure thanks to ruthless real estate broker, Rick Carver (Michael Shannon).  Desperate for cash, Nash takes a job for Carver, working his way up the ladder to become Carver's right-hand man.  What began as a means to an end --getting his family home back-- becomes muddled as Nash's association with Carver's unscrupulous business dealings becomes routine.  

There's nothing really wrong with the film.  I just didn't feel like it stuck the landing.  That's probably why it's streaming for free on Tubi and not one of the premium streamers.  If you like Garfield or Shannon, it's worth watching for their performances and Laura Dern has never turned in poor work.  Otherwise, I'd say keep looking.  There's so much content out there.  No point wasting time on half-measures.

Lost Horizon (1937)

  Woof.  There is a lot of racism packed into this celluloid.

While escaping from incipit war in Manchuria, the plane containing new British Foreign Secretary Bob Conway (Ronald Colman) and four other passengers is hijacked and taken to the Himalayas.  But before they can decide who to eat first (my money was on the annoying paleontologist (Edward Everett Horton)), they are rescued by a mysterious monk (H. B. Warner) and taken to Shangri-La, a magical land of perpetual spring where all ailments are cured and there is peace.  Also where everyone speaks English and there's still a servant class of natives.  Bob finds himself instantly at home, helped by the presence of Sondra (Jane Wyatt) who was rescued as an infant and grew up in the monastery, but his brother, George (John Howard), smells a rat.  George doesn't believe any of the utopia's propaganda and wants to go back to England, where he can continue to live off his older brother's name and fortune.  Bob has to choose between his life as a diplomat and remote seclusion with the woman he loves.

The White Savior narrative is strong with this one.  The film is based on the novel of the same name, written by James Hilton in 1933.  Hilton got the idea from a travelogue written by two priests he found in the British Museum.  It also closely resembles Thomas More's Utopia in its description of how the monastery handles its basic needs.  I didn't read Hilton's book, but I did read the Wikipedia synopsis and while there were a few liberties taken, the sense of it remains the same.  In both versions, the Himalayan oasis of tranquility and goodwill was founded by a Catholic priest and exists to save peak Western culture against the inevitable collapse of society.  

And that's just the most obvious Yikes in this!  There's also the colonialist condescension of the white passengers towards the Asian servants, food, and clothing, George's flat-out racism, and the depiction of the Tibetan porters (played by Indigenous Americans) and Russian Shangri-La resident, Maria (played by Mexican-American actress Margo), as callous, amoral liars.  

Why is this movie still celebrated, you ask?  Well, if you've ever heard the words Shangri-La, you have James Hilton to thank.  He made it up.  It was hugely popular and became the first mass-market paperback.  FDR liked it so much, he named the presidential retreat after it (later renamed Camp David).  Marvel Comics used it as a basis for Iron Fist's K'un L'un and DC turned it into Nanda Parbat.  Movie's still super racist, though.

Lost Horizon was restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and Sony in 1998, after scouring archives for full, unedited prints.  About seven minutes of the film are still lost, but a full soundtrack was found and the missing scenes were added using stills from the production.  It's not perfect, but it's damn good work.  This is the version that is currently streaming on Criterion.  It's an interesting film if you are into restoration, old movies, or Hollywood history.  

The Robe (1953)

  Getting a head start on Easter over here.  

A Roman tribune (Richard Burton) and his slave (Victor Mature) run afoul of the emperor (Michael Rennie) and are sent to the province of Jerusalem to put down a slave uprising.  After crucifying the leader, the tribune experiences untold amounts of guilt, leading him to believe the dead man's robe had been cursed and the only way to save his deteriorating mental health is to find his former slave and burn the robe.  

Honestly, this is one of the worst movies about the Passion I've ever seen.  Burton is playing a drunken sot and looks like he leaned too hard into method acting for it, he has no chemistry with lead actress Jean Simmons, the dialogue is wooden, costumes are generic, action scenes are laughably bad, and the whole thing is almost two and a half hours long when 90 minutes might have been a generous amount of time.  Mature is the only actor treating it seriously and Rennie is the only one having fun with it.  

I thought the timeline was off since I've never heard Caligula mentioned in the same breath as Jesus but it's plausible Burton's tribune spent four years combing the desert for Mature.  Still feels weird, though.

It's streaming on the Criterion Channel though only God knows why.

Jackie (2016)

  If you liked Spencer, you might want to check out the director's previous work here.  

Content warning: gore

Jackie Kennedy (Natalie Portman) agrees to give an interview with a reporter (Billy Crudup) about her experiences in the wake of President Kennedy's (Caspar Phillipson) assassination.  She details the events leading up to the funeral, decisions that would shape the final moments of his presidency and cement an enduring legacy.  

Pablo Larraín has an immense talent in bringing performances out of his lead actresses.  So far it has resulted in a bunch of film festival nominations and awards but no real recognition from the Academy.  He is absolutely one to watch, however.  

Jackie is currently streaming for free on IMDb TV, a service running on Amazon.  A word of caution, however.  IMDb TV is one if the worst free streamers.  They don't warn you about commercial interruption, they don't try to find unobtrusive places to break --it literally cut off in the middle of a word several times-- and all their commercials are for themselves, which seems really dumb considering they are a free service.  If it had been on any other platform, I would have switched.  Jackie is really good and it might be worth it to you, but only you know that.

Sunshine (2007)

  Content warning:  suicide

Okay, so I had tried to watch this a couple of years ago when it was on Hulu but it stressed me out so bad I had to stop.  Space is bad and no one should go there.  Space and the ocean.  Nothing good happens in either one.

The crew of the Icarus II have a giant bomb that they have to deploy into the sun in order to kickstart it and keep Earth from freezing to death.  On course for a slingshot around Mercury, they discover a distress beacon from Icarus I, the previous attempt which had failed with no warning and no word about the crew or the payload.  Physicist Robert Capra (Cillian Murphy) makes the decision to change course and grab the bomb from Icarus I on the assumption that two are better than one.  Everything goes wrong from there.  Cabin fever, sabotage, guilt, suicide, resentment, and the morbid math of "how much oxygen can we have if there are a couple fewer breathers" all combine into 90 of the tensest moments I've ever spent in my life.

This isn't technically a horror movie, though it does have horror elements.  I would classify it as a thriller but it certainly makes a case for the sun being an eldritch horror.  Anyway, you should watch it if you like being terrified of space or if you like Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh, Benedict Wong, Mark Strong, and Hiroyuki Sanada.  Pretty people trapped in space and turning on one another.  Mmmm.  Eat your heart out, Agatha Christie.  

According to my phone, this is currently streaming on Paramount+ but I got it on disc from Netflix.