I WAKE UP STREAMING

It’s official — I’m superfluous!

With theaters shuttered (temporarily, we hope) due to the coronavirus, and no one going out to the movies, nobody needs to know my opinion of a movie they can stream from the privacy of their own couch.

It’s not like they have to pay to get in!

So my column in Good Times is suspended until further notice. If we, as a town/state/country/planet ever achieve normalcy again, I expect to be back on the job. But who knows how long that will take?

In the meantime, I encourage housebound film fans to boldly go into the archives of the product-delivery service of your choice — Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, You Tube, Viewmaster, whatever — and explore titles from over a century of vibrant cinema.

Silent films, for instance, are astonishingly creative!  Check out anything from about the turn of the last century through the 1920s, back when the pictures were first learning to move, and they were making it all up as they went along. You’ll be amazed at their ingenuity!

Then there are Errol Flynn swashbucklers, Film Noir, MGM musicals, French New Wave, Hitchcock, Fellini, the Marx Brothers; they’re all out there, just waiting to be discovered.

Be adventurous! If something doesn’t grab you in the first 20 minutes, dial up something else. There won’t be a quiz, and there isn’t anywhere else you have to be.

Me, I’ve been catching up on movies I missed the first time around. Last night it was The Greatest Showman, an utterly berserk fantasia on the imagined life if P. T. Barnum, staged like a Hollywood musical.

Famed 19th Century opera diva Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson) sings a power ballad. Keala Settle as the Bearded Lady leads a chorus of Barnum’s circus sideshow attractions in an empowering Millennial-style anthem.

But, hey, in the midst of it all, there’s Hugh Jackman in the top hat and ringmaster’s outfit, singing and dancing up a storm. I’m home alone — I have to have some fun!

Sure, I’d much rather be watching movies the way God intended, on a great big theater screen. And I fervently hope all this enforced home viewing doesn’t signal the end of the neighborhood movie house down the road, by giving viewers one more excuse not to interact with each other in public.

Still, there’s something to be said for watching a move with a cat on your lap — as long as she doesn’t mind the occasional popcorn kernel bouncing off her head.

FEMME NOIR

Mayhem, matriarchy merge in entertaining Blow the Man Down

With movie theaters temporarily closed and everybody cocooning at home, the best way to see a movie right now is curled up on your own sofa. Okay, lots of us have already figured this out — there's no dress code and no assigned seating. Even better, with the rise of so many streaming platforms, there's plenty of new product out there too, just waiting to be discovered.

Just released last week on Amazon Prime, Blow The Man Down is an entertaining New England chowder of black comedy, femme-noir, and mood-making from co-writers and directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy. Set in a small fishing village on the rugged Maine seacoast (is there any other kind?), the story revolves around family legacies, deep, dark secrets, and fish — lots of fish, chopped, sliced, and pan-fried.

As the story begins, most of the denizens of Easter Cove are filling up the parlor of the Connelly sisters after the funeral of their beloved and respected mother, Mary Margaret. Now, responsible older sister, Priscilla (Sophie Lowe), and her more rebellious sibling, Mary Beth (Morgan Saylor) — who's had to postpone her freshman year at college — have to figure out how to maintain the family home and fish market on their own.

After the sisters' private spat away from their guests — Mary Beth is so done with Easter Cove and wants out — the younger sib stomps off to the local bar, just looking for trouble. She finds it. But when the chips are down, it turns out, a girl's best friend is her sister.

Saylor and Lowe: Bundle up

 Life in Easter Cove is beautifully realized — you can almost smell the raw fish, and you might find yourself shivering from the snowy chill. (Better bundle up while you watch.) The mood is heightened by a chorus of grizzled fishermen singing sea shanties (like the title tune) deftly salted into the action. But it's the women who really run things; men are relegated to the (largely ornamental) police force, the bar, and the fishing boats.

This subtle tweaking of gender expectations gives the movie its own lively viewpoint. As the entwined dramas and dueling mysteries play out, one character notes, "Lotta people underestimate young women. That's why they get away with a lot." Women of all ages emerge as a collective force to be reckoned with in this diverting fish story of a movie.
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KIDDING AROUND

Children vs, grown-ups in modern Peter Pan remix Wendy

Benh Zeitlin has very specific ideas about how a movie should look and feel, and what kind of story it tells. His first movie, the dreamy, impressionistic Beasts of the Southern Wild, explored themes of childhood resilience, the power of Nature, adult frailties, and community. All of which ideas resurface in his sophomore effort, Wendy.

As the title might imply, Wendy is the filmmaker's nod to the Peter Pan legend. It's a modern remix of the story of children who refuse to grow up, relocated to an uncharted island off the southern wild of America (it was shot largely in and around Louisiana bayou country), told not from the viewpoint of Peter, but from the little girl who, along with her two brothers, is caught up in his dream of eternal childhood.

Written by Zeitlin and his sister, Eliza Zeitlin, the movie stays grounded as much as possible in everyday reality — the kids' mom runs a diner at a whistle-stop on a freight train route; they hop a slow-moving train to "fly" away — kissed with a dash of magic realism. Their take on familiar Peter Pan tropes is often deftly done, from the fate of Lost Boys who outgrow Peter's tribe, to an eerie, unsettling origin story for Captain Hook.

But trying to shoehorn his unique sensibility into the existing structure of the Pan legend seems to dampen the audacious originality displayed in Zeitlin's earlier film. How well the story works may depend on whether or not you think the idea of never growing up is a good thing.

Young Wendy (Devin France) and her twin brothers, Douglas (Gage Naquin) and James (Gavin Naquin), have grown up in the diner run by their mama (Shay Walker). The train rattles by every night, and when they see a giggling figure scampering over the boxcar roofs one night, luring them to come away, they clamber on board.

He is Peter (Yashua Mack, a native of Antigua with a head of bouncy rasta dreads), who leads them to a mysterious volcanic island far out below the train trestle where he and his tribe of unsupervised children play all day long and never age.
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Having tinkered so shamelessly with the dans macabre between Captain Hook and Peter Pan for my own purposes in Alias Hook, I'm always fascinated to see what others bring to the story. And it strikes me that, in the end, the Zeitlins make the same mistake as plenty of other recent Peter Pan retellers — promoting this half-baked notion that Hook should just let go of his grumpy adult perceptions and embrace the unalloyed joy of spending the rest of eternity playing pirates with a gang of mangy boys.

Hey, wouldn't that be fun?

Here's what my James Hook has to say about that:

It is my fate to be trapped here forever in a nightmare of childish fancy with that infernal, eternal boy.

COMEDY AND CONSEQUENCE

Austen's ferocious wit fuels savvy, stylish Emma

You never think of a Jane Austen novel as excoriating. Hers is a genteel world of flimsy, gossamer gowns, impeccable breeding, and humorous observation of delicate romantic complications, or so we believe.

But her fourth novel, Emma, while set in the same milieu of tasteful gentility, and written with Austen's familiar ironic asperity, also bristles with savage social satire on upper-class idleness and the damage their thoughtless antics inflict on the people in whose lives they meddle.

The new movie adaptation of Emma, combines a savvy script from Eleanor Catton with a scrupulously assembled visual narrative from music video director Autumn de Wilde, in her impressive feature debut.

It's a more overtly comic version of Austen than usual — a pack of boarding school girls march in and out of scenes like a flock of giggling birds; eyes dart from side to side, or pop wide open in elaborate double-takes; baleful servants perform increasing complex choreography in long-suffering silence on the periphery of the action.

Taylor-Joy and Nighy: idle amusement

But when the filmmakers zero in on the machinations of their heroine, Emma Woodhouse (Anya Taylor-Joy), they are unsparing in their critique of her folly.

The rich don't get much more idle than the Woodhouses, landed gentry with a country estate in the small village of Highbury. At 21, Emma has led a privileged life "with very little to vex her,” living with her widower father, Henry (the always welcome Bill Nighy).

Having just seen her former companion married off to an eligible widower to whom Emma had introduced her, Emma decides that arranging matches for others "is the greatest amusement in the world!" Although resistance to Emma's plans is never less than discreet (if utterly futile), we feel just how devastating the consequences can be for those unwillingly caught up in them.

Emma is not always likable in her wrong-headedness. But Taylor-Joy gradually earns our sympathy by giving Emma the grace to feel ashamed of her mistakes and outgrow them — especially after one of her attempted witticisms lands with such cruelty, it's as horrifying as any act of physical violence in Game Of Thrones.

De Wilde directs the well-heeled 1%

 Alexandra Byrne's outstanding costumes, male as well as female, are not only stunning to look at, their intricate layers — and the complicated ritual of getting in and out of them — also mirror the armor of social graces each character must assume every day in polite society. And Kave Quinn's lavish production design conveys just how well-heeled the Highbury 1% really is. Kudos all around for a very smart and stylish production.
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THE LEGEND OF MONDAY NIGHT PIZZA

Pizza Boy to the rescue!

Blame it on Good Times.

When I first met James in his comic book store, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I had already been writing for Good Times for two years. Six months later when we moved in together, we only had one rule as we made up our freestyle new life: every Monday night, I had to do the (dreaded) Film Guide.

The Film Guide was the section in the paper that listed every movie theater in town, what new movies would be opening at each one that week, and all their showtimes. There was no iMDB in those days, so TV and newsprint ads were all I  had to go on when it came to blurbing new titles.

But the gnarly part was getting those showtimes. Way before there were personal computers (certainly not in our house), let alone FAX machines, I had to call each theater manager on the phone and scribble down (usually in pencil) every single showtime for every single movie in the course of the week — daily schedule, weekend schedule, holiday matinees, midnight movies, the works. Then I typed them on a typewriter (look it up, kids) into my master list, three pages of hard copy I delivered by hand to the GT office first thing Tuesday morning, deadline day.

With me on the phone for hours, Mondays were a little hectic around our house, especially at dinner time. One theater manager in particular never decided what he was going to play on any given week, until he knew what everybody else had booked. Some nights, I wouldn't get off the damn phone before 8 pm — by which time, I was In. No. Mood.

The yeast goes on: why mess with a good thing?

But trust my Sweetie to step into the breach! Even though he had not yet discovered the cooking gene within himself, he knew how to bake a frozen pizza. While I was stewing on the phone, he'd be in the kitchen chopping up real food — green onions, red peppers, black olives, mushrooms — and grating extra cheese.

His next move was to pop a tape into the VCR and record Jeopardy — my favorite way to chill — at 7 pm. As soon as I could finally hang up and finish typing, he would assemble his pizza, stick it in the oven, and pop a cork. (Okay, he usually didn't wait around for me for that part!)

Et Voila! Whenever I was finally ready to sit down and eat, we had hot pizza, cold bubbly, and Jeopardy! Pizza, champagne, and Jeopardy was our Monday night ritual for years — even after theaters started faxing their info to GT and I was liberated from the Film Guide. The tradition continued through the rest of our married life, and continues for me to this day. Why mess with a good thing?

It wasn't until years later that we started making our own pizzas from scratch. (Well, almost, thanks to Trader Joe's pizza dough balls.) I wouldn't have remembered how many years, except that I found the top photo above of our very first home-made pizza! It's dated November, 2003! Notice how shiny and silvery the pizza screen is. It's completely black now, untold thousands of pizzas later — and, yes, I still use it!