I Wake Up Streaming | December 2024
Movies
In this edition of “I Wake Up Streaming,” novelist William Boyle rounds up his top streaming picks for the month of December. The column’s name is a play on the 1941 film I Wake Up Screaming, starring Betty Grable, Victor Mature, and Carole Landis. While the film’s title hits a pleasing note of terror and despair, changing that one letter speaks to the joy of discovering new films and rediscovering old favorites, as well as the panic that comes with being overwhelmed by options.
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point (AMC+)
I’d wanted to see Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point for a while and then my friend Jack Pendarvis texted me and said it was like “Terence Davies meets Ray Romano,” which made me rent it immediately and really sums it up. Here’s the brief synopsis you’ll see most places: “A rambunctious extended family descends upon their small Long Island hometown for the holidays where hijinks, generational squabbles, and family traditions ensue.” That’s accurate, but it also feels like a bland, clichéd description of a film that’s something else altogether. A tone poem. A beautiful patchwork of characters and details. A stunning memory piece, set in 2006, that just feels perfect. A story of moments, of perspectives. A blur of Christmas lights and songs and images. The extraordinary cast—Maria Dizzia, Ben Shenkman, Michael Cera, Gregg Turkington, and too many others to name—seems to be never-ending, characters crowded into this small house, gathered on cold streets with their breath in front of them, huddled in parking lots and graveyards, burrowed into running cars to keep warm. It’s awfully funny to think about folks coming to this and expecting a mere dysfunctional-family-on-Christmas-Eve movie and instead getting this wild, impressionistic swirl. Turkington’s and Cera’s sad-sack, slapstick cops are definite highlights. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point enters the pantheon of the best Long Island movies ever, along with Trees Lounge, Judy Berlin, Trust, The Unbelievable Truth, and The Cathedral.
Victims of Sin (Criterion Channel)
I watched Emilio Fernández’s 1951 film Victims of Sin for the first time a couple of months ago and was blown away. I was recently asked to be on a podcast, Afterimages, to discuss my favorite movie or TV show—old or new—of the year and chose to talk about it, as it’s definitely my top discovery (thanks to Criterion). I loved it even more the second time around. Part noir melodrama and part musical. (Is it wrong to call it a musical? Maybe dance movie is more appropriate.) Ninón Sevilla is a force as Violeta, a dancer who rescues an abandoned baby boy from his gangster father and then raises the boy as her own. Her love for the child comes with an incredible cost—she loses her job and is forced onto the streets until another club owner, Santiago, rival of the boy’s old man, takes her in. One of the things that are so striking about this movie is how the intense darkness is always countered with light. For every dark turn the story takes, Violeta and her son also manage to encounter people willing to help, agents of love and kindness. It’s a gorgeous-looking movie, all shadows and cigarette smoke, and one I’ll return to a lot.
North West Frontier, aka Flame Over India (Tubi)
I’ve been on a J. Lee Thompson kick for much of the year. He was one of those old-school workhorse directors with an insane career, beginning with British kitchen-sink dramas and noirs and war movies in the 1950s, making Hollywood hits like The Guns of Navarone and Cape Fear in the 1960s, and then going all over the place in the seventies and eighties, directing Conquest of the Battle of the Apes and Battle for the Planet of the Apes, making a slasher (Happy Birthday to Me), and becoming one of Charles Bronson’s go-to directors (the pair made seven pictures together). North West Frontier (that’s the British title—in the US, it was released as Flame Over India) was one I’d never heard of before I stumbled across it on Tubi. Man, it’s incredible. In the northern frontier of colonial India, a British army captain and a six-year-old prince and his governess escape on a battered old railway engine, pursued across the vast landscape by rebels intent on killing the prince. It’s essentially Stagecoach on a railway in India. Thrilling, tense, full of unforgettable sequences. Lauren Bacall gives a knockout performance as the governess. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg must love this one—several moments and scenes are echoed in Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Clock Bacall in the opening stretch of the movie—it’s like Lucas had Carrie Fisher study her movements to portray Princess Leia. The railway engine, the “Empress of India,” must be one of the main influences on the Millennium Falcon. And a scene on a crumbling bridge near the end of the picture could be something straight from Raiders.
Promised Land (Tubi, VUDU, The Roku Channel)
1987’s Promised Land, written and directed by Michael Hoffman, was a recent first-time watch, and it really surprised me. Released in 1987, it was the first film to be commissioned by the Sundance Film Festival. It feels like it would’ve fit much more comfortably in the seventies or nineties—it’s jarring, despite the cast (Jason Gedrick, Kiefer Sutherland, Meg Ryan, Tracy Pollan), to think of it as “an eighties movie,” which is how it is (retrospectively, anyhow) marketed. There’s no indication that the title is referencing Bruce Springsteen’s “The Promised Land,” but it feels like it could be given the fact that it tackles similar subject matter. In fact, it predates Sean Penn’s The Indian Runner—an adaptation of Springsteen’s “Highway Patrolman”—by several years and has a bunch in common with it. It’s pretty bleak, sadness and dread boiling under the surface of idyllic small-town life. It does a lot with silences. Many of the reviews on Letterboxd point to Ryan’s character as a classic example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but that’s not right at all. Just because she has dyed hair and is wild? The way I understand it, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl only exists to give a male protagonist’s life greater meaning, to usher him to some sort of epiphany. The opposite is true of Ryan’s Bev, who is a probable con artist capable of violence, pulling Sutherland’s Senator—a timid wannabe—into a whirlwind of impulsive and irrational behavior. She’s much more of a femme fatale than a Manic Pixie Dream Girl and more interesting and complicated for it. Sutherland is good in this, as is the underappreciated Gedrick, who should’ve been a bigger star. Also made me remember how much I loved Tracy Pollan way back when. It’s set in the eighties and trying to say something about the Reagan Administration and the dismantling of the American Dream, but I’m not sure that ever fully comes together. Takes its time in the first two-thirds but then explodes in the last act in a way that’s both satisfying and yet a bit choppy and underdeveloped. The soundtrack could’ve been better and done more to bring it all home. Some stunning shots. Echoes of Hoosiers and The Last Picture Show but ultimately—and quietly—a haunting crime drama about being forever trapped by the place you’re from and wanting to escape and being pulled down and under by forces beyond your control. It’ll stay with me, that’s for sure.
Juror #2 (begins streaming on Max on 12/20)
At age ninety-four, Clint Eastwood continues to bring the heat. The directorial run he’s been on in the last decade has been remarkable—American Sniper, Sully, The 15:17 to Paris, The Mule, Richard Jewell, Cry Macho, and now Juror #2. American Sniper, probably the biggest hit of the bunch, is the least effective, while Juror #2, buried by Warner Brothers, might be, if not the best entry in this late run, the most efficient and well-constructed. The script by Jonathan Abrams is airtight. Nicholas Hoult plays Justin Kemp, a young man with a very pregnant wife at home. He has been called to serve on the jury in a high-profile murder trial and is almost immediately confronted by a realization and a moral dilemma—the accused killer, thought to have bludgeoned his girlfriend on a rainy night, might not be responsible for the crime. I hesitate to say more than that. I’ve seen the film described as a “courtroom drama,” which it sort of is, I guess, but it’s much more of a classic humanist crime drama, the type of small-scale, shifty B-noir that filled screens in the forties and early fifties. I was genuinely surprised by where it went in the end—it stutter-steps away from the direction I thought it was headed in. Some damn good performances, especially by the always-reliable Toni Collette (such a good match for Eastwood) and Chris Messina. Nicholas Hoult delivers, too.
William Boyle is the author of the novels Gravesend, The Lonely Witness, A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, City of Margins, Shoot the Moonlight Out, and Saint of the Narrows Street (coming in February 2025 from Soho Crime). His novella Everything Is Broken was published in Southwest Review Volume 104, numbers 1–4, and he co-edited (with Claudia Piñeiro and Frances Riddle) the noir issue (Volume 108, number 3). His website is williammichaelboyle.com.
Illustration: Jess Rotter
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