There’s something therapeutic about addressing and adjusting your expectations for your life based on how you felt about things in the past and how you now feel about those same things. Films and visual media are actually great for this sort of thing — the same river twice and so on. I’ve found a surprising amount of goofy liberation in Mad Max rip-offs — there are hundreds of them, all working in a specific post-apocalyptic milieu, more often than not made with as much thrift and mercenary ingenuity as could be wrangled at the time. But because they’re all set after a societal collapse/implosion/nuclear whoopsie, they are freeing from a lot of the anxiety-laden pandemic aspic we’re currently swimming in. You can expect to see a few of these popping up here in the next few weeks. And there’s always our previous 22 weeks of streaming possibilities: March 26, April 2, April 9, April 16, April 23, April 30, May 7, May 14, May 21, May 28, June 4, June 11, June 18, June 25, July 2, July 9, July 16, July 23, July 30, Aug. 6, Aug. 13, Aug. 20.
Purpose is good, and this is mine. Read on for this week’s round-up of recommended streaming titles.
The Garden Left Behind via Video on Demand
Deeply resonant to anyone who has spent time as a New Yorker — and just as directly a shot of immediacy to the heart of any human being for whom transphobic violence has somehow remained abstract — this film from director Flavio Alves won the New Directors competition at last year’s Nashville Film Festival. The Garden Left Behind is vibrant and visceral, and packed with sincere and affecting performances. There are moments that are going to sneak up on the coldest of hearts and supercharge their empathic response. Tina (Carlie Guevara) does ride-share driving for a living, handling household expenses for herself and her grandmother (the deeply charming Miriam Cruz) and saving money to complete her gender-confirmation surgery. She’s got a bunch of friends who liven up both the neighborhood and her life, helping her get confident enough to find her political voice. She’s got a thing with a guy that has some potential, and she has a supportive counselor (Ed Asner, putting his heart into it). But even in New York City, it’s a stressful world that just never lets up, and that’s something anyone in 2020 can relate to. Alves’ film works in The Real, and never pulls any punches or dips into whimsy.
Atlantics on Netflix
A hit across the 2019 film festival circuit (including in Nashville back in October), Atlantics is a singular film that manages to find the sweet spot between socially conscious exposé and EC Comics cosmic revenge-scape. It is concerned with the social and emotional life of Ada (Mame Bineta Sane), a young woman in Senegal facing an upcoming wedding to a rich cipher while her world slowly unwinds as her true love is lost at sea. Writer-director Mati Diop has made something really special with this film, which calls to mind the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta and John Carpenter’s The Fog, which is really an amazing achievement when you stop to think about it. Her camera (lit by Portrait of a Lady on Fire cinematographer Claire Mathon) finds the textures of seaside uncertainty, urban sprawl, and lace and loss in a way that allows anyone anywhere to find the universal in this story. There’s a moment that calls to mind that moment in Beloved where Baby Suggs leads the women together, fixing their voices on a reconciliation with the suffering of the world, and it hits you like a collapsing building.
Now Apocalypse
Now Apocalypse on Amazon Prime and Starz
When Starz canceled this horny, hyper-2019 sci-fi series from Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin, The Living End) and Karley Sciortino after only one season, I mourned its passing in the way I mourned Sense8 and have since mourned Lodge 49. There’s just nothing else like it out there, and little to compare it to — maybe Araki’s 2010 epic Kaboom in structure, but at heart this is Stranger Things on amyl nitrate if its performance of Midwestern America decided to head out west and shake its creature-hunting moneymaker for an indifferent industry of predators and aliens. (Note: A lot of internet conspiracy theories seem to have tuned into this show and taken sloppy notes, eschewing the libidinous joy and fictitious nature of the material.) Neon like the idea of a sexy VHS memory, economically relatable to social strata where hotness or freaktitude can open a lot of forbidden doors, and always ready to get off because an orgasm is the one hope that an oppressive society can’t take away, Now Apocalypse is one of the defining works of the late 2010s. Steeped in pansexual everything and an attitude toward drugs of yes please, more drugs, and thank you, this show may honestly serve as the last will and testament of how people had any fun at all while everything collapsed. Security guard/pothead Uly (Avan Jogia), actor/occasional sex worker Carly (Kelli Berglund) and research scientist Severine (arthouse icon Roxane Mesquida) are our leads, and they have mumblecore aesthetics and Bret Easton Ellis vocabularies, and I adore them. But it’s Beau Mirchoff as Ford who steals the whole show — he’s a deeply sensitive himbo working through his emotional issues in a way that you never see straight male characters do. It’s one of the most auspicious performances on TV, and I’ve not wanted a Zoom reunion for a TV show out of this pandemic (note: the Happy Endings Zoom reunion was amazing and essential) more than this one. You can knock the whole season out in five hours, and it’s an exponentially more pleasant way to spend an afternoon than doom-scrolling. It manages to sublimate all the random apocalyptic energies that we’ve all been steeping in like a tea made of unease.
The Adjuster
The Adjuster via The Criterion Channel
Nobody finds the humor in kink quite like Atom Egoyan. The Canadian-Armenian director has been making films for more than 30 years, and while he’s never let himself be limited by genre, he specializes in ferreting out unexpected resonance in the wildest and weirdest of places. Noah (Casey Jones himself, Elias Koteas) is an insurance adjuster whose M.O. is to help itemize the chaos and catastrophe that the universe unleashes on the lives of his clients, and then help them turn new corners and find new paths through life ... with his gentleman parts. This is one of those art films that it is impossible to take a neutral stance on. Either it gets into your brain and randomly flips a few switches on the circuit board of your consciousness, or you’re going to wonder what the point of all this bureaucratic sexuality is. Egoyan’s wife, the legendary Arsinée Khanjian, almost steals the whole film as a porn censor who keeps bringing her work home. But if you’ve never seen Koteas get Canadian weird with it, buckle up.
