Streaming 20:20 (Finale) - Soul, Let Them All Talk, and more...

ICYMI Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

Since it's crunch time to complete viewing before all the awards shows hit we've been surveying the films of 2020 that are already streaming for free (provided you have the services of courses), whether they're great, terrible or anywhere inbetween. Maybe you're looking to get caught up? We've been freezing films at the 20th minute and 20th second just for gimmicky time-stamped streaming roulette kicks. How many of these twenty 2020 pictures have you seen? 

Next up one of my favourites, soul number 102,2010,121,415

SOUL (Pete Docter & Kemp Powers, US)
Disney/Pixar. Original release date: December 25th. Streaming on Disney+

Didn't you love the design of the "Jerries" in Pixar's latest? It's so distinct visually. If only they had taken the genderlessness further and applied it to not just the names but the linework.

There's an implant. They put it in your shit. It's like... okay, It'll come back. It's fine, Lou. It's like 40 grand... 80 grand, whatever.

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How Had I Never Seen... "Monsoon Wedding"?

by Cláudio Alves

Last year, Chloé Zhao won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Nomadland. Unlike Cannes, which only awarded one woman (Jane Campion for The Piano) with the Palme d'Or in its history, Venice has named five female directors as the grand victors of its main competition. One of them, Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding, I hadn't seen.  Since the Criterion Channel has just added Mira Nair's 2001 Venice-winner, it seems like a good time to correct this lacuna. Without further ado, let's delve into the rainy festivities of this Monsoon Wedding…

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Streaming Roulette, Jan: Gremlins, Fairy Tales, and Brothers from Another Planet

After the jump you'll find a listing of everything that's new to streaming this month (January 2021). But first we pick two handfuls of titles and randomly freeze them with the scroll bar. Whatever comes up is what we share. Do these images make you want to see (or rewatch) the movie?

[Voice offscreen]: All right, let's go.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN (1974) on HBOMax
People don't really talk about this in the days of the common false proclamation "everything is available online" but TV from previous decades is much harder to get a hold of than feature films (which have it bad enough). So it's always cool when a streaming service plays one. This telefilm was a big deal in the 1970s winning 9 Emmy awards including Best Actress for Cicely Tyson. In the UK it was released as a feature film and Tyson received a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress (losing to Joanne Woodward in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams)

These are the keys to perfect posture.

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Mae West on Criterion

by Cláudio Alves

When she's good, she's very good. When she's bad, she's better. 

Mae West was one of the great stars of the Pre-Code era, though her reign as one of Hollywood's most popular queens was short-lived and curtailed by the advent of the Hays Code. Like Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz after her, West was a target of William Randolph Hearst's ire. According to legend, the millionaire wanted revenge on West after she had made insulting remarks concerning the acting abilities of Marion Davies, his mistress. Such conspiracies are fun and it's easy to paint Hearst as Old Hollywood's perennial villain, but they're rarely 100% true. Mae West's fall from grace is more complicated than a vendetta from a mogul and a bunch of outraged Catholics. She was one of a kind, a symbol of licentiousness and indecency, a provocateur whose triumph was as amazing as it was temporary... 

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Almost There: Andy Serkis in "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers"

by Cláudio Alves

The particularities of screen acting make it a collaborative effort, even in the most low-fi of situations. What gets left on the cutting room floor, what reactions are chosen by the editor and director, the sound, the makeup, the way a cinematographer lights the performer's eyes, all shape what we see projected on-screen. Still, when it comes to awards, there's a belief that performance is the sole responsibility of the individual in front of the camera.

When the collaborative aspects of screen acting are made inescapable, it's  difficult to collect golden accolades. We see that happening to voice-only performances and motion-capture efforts, in particular. With The Lord of the Rings trilogy new to streaming on Hulu, we have a good opportunity to explore the mo-cap performance that came closest to Oscar glory. I'm talking about the paradigm-shifting work of Andy Serkis as Sméagol/Gollum in 2002's The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers…

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