I Wake Up Streaming | August 2022
Movies
In this edition of “I Wake Up Streaming,” novelist William Boyle rounds up his top streaming picks for the month of August. 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.
Thief (Prime Video)
We lost the great James Caan a few weeks ago. The first movie I saw him in was The Godfather, which I watched when I was very young. He became—along with Pacino, DeNiro, Keitel, Duvall, and Hackman—one of my favorite actors as I fell headlong into a life of loving movies. He was always an incredible and indelible presence, full of energy and longing and regret, those eyes of his doing so much work. His best performance is in Michael Mann’s Thief, a neon noir that’s stripped to the bone and gorgeous and has inspired decades of knockoffs and wannabes. Caan plays Frank, a safecracker whose expertise is diamond heists. Against his better judgment, he teams up with a gangster for a big score and the operation goes to shit. Everything about the movie works, but it’s Caan who anchors and centers the proceedings. It’s difficult—downright impossible—to imagine anyone else in the role. One of the things I admire most about Thief is how Mann and Caan allow so much to remain under the surface. The backstory is in the ways Caan moves, the things he doesn’t say as much as the things he says. There’s a rhythm to his speech and his performance that’s full of magnetism and wisdom. The diner scene—Frank and Tuesday Weld’s Jessie on a dysfunctional date—emphasizes his battle-worn humanity. In a career full of memorable scenes, it’s Caan at his absolute knockout best. All heart and mileage. Three other Caan movies—Flesh and Bone, Rollerball, and Comes a Horseman—are also on Prime, so make it a quadruple feature to celebrate the life and career and range of one of our finest actors.
Stay Hungry (Tubi)
We also lost Bob Rafelson recently, the director of two undisputed masterpieces—The King of Marvin Gardens and Five Easy Pieces—and many other ambitious movies that edge up against greatness. One of the latter is Stay Hungry from 1976, based on Charles Gaines’s novel. It’s a shaggy, messy, wonderful movie about a rich kid from Alabama, Craig Blake (Jeff Bridges), who is on the verge of getting sucked up into the machinations of corporate greed. When the dishonest businessman he’s affiliated with asks him to buy a local gym so it can be demolished as part of a development project, Craig instead gets drawn into life in the gym, where he befriends bodybuilder Joe Santo (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his sometimes girlfriend Mary Tate Farnsworth (Sally Field). Craig wants out of the deal and instead inserts himself into Joe and Mary Tate’s lives, treating them at first as the sort of authentic humans he hasn’t known in his country club life and then as objects of great curiosity, carnival acts. Helena Kallianiotes steals the scenes she’s in. Rafelson’s steady hand guides the ship, allowing it to jump genres and shift gears effortlessly. It’s funny and dark and strange and unexpected all at once, a hangout movie to rival Rancho Deluxe. Not the best place to start with Rafelson—watch The King of Marvin Gardens (Prime Video, Tubi) and Five Easy Pieces (HBO Max) first—but it’s wild and rewarding.
Two Lovers (Hulu)
On August 15 I’ll be talking to my pal Scott Adlerberg as part of his Reel Talks series in Bryant Park in New York City. The subject of our conversation will be Brooklyn in Film. So I’ve been thinking a lot about my favorite Brooklyn movies, some of which I’ve written about in this column. When I think about iconic Brooklyn directors, two jump to mind immediately: Spike Lee and James Gray. Lee has certainly made some of my favorite Brooklyn movies (Do the Right Thing, Crooklyn, and He Got Game, none of which is currently streaming), but it’s Gray who’s had the bigger impact on me personally. Seeing Little Odessa when it came out in 1994 was a game-changer for me, a movie that seemed to see Brooklyn the way I saw Brooklyn. The streets looked the way I knew them to look. There was a darkness, a melancholy, that felt accurate. And, of course, all of it was anchored by a haunting crime story. But, if I were to make a proper list of my favorite Brooklyn movies, as much as I love Little Odessa, I’d have to put Gray’s underrated 2008 masterpiece, Two Lovers, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Vinessa Shaw, at the top. Based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1848 short story “White Nights,” it’s set in the same neighborhood as Little Odessa, Brighton Beach, and it follows Phoenix’s Leonard Kraditor, recently returned home after a heartbreak and suicide attempt, to live with his parents and work in their dry-cleaning business. Leonard’s father has his potential business partner, Michael Cohen, over to dinner one night, and Cohen has brought along his daughter Sandra (the dazzling Shaw), making it clear that the two men are trying to hook up their children. Unexpectedly, Leonard and Sandra hit it off and begin dating. Not long after, Leonard meets a new resident of his parents’ apartment building, Michelle (played with haunting and halting elegance by Paltrow), who is living in an apartment that her married boyfriend rents for her because it’s near to where his folks live. Michelle is gorgeous but a wreck, trapped in a toxic relationship, full of yearning. Leonard falls for her, recognizing a sort of damaged soulmate. What develops from there is not a paint-by-numbers love triangle but something more complicated and heartbreaking. These are three characters searching for purchase, unmoored in the world, looking for connection and understanding and hope. It’s beautiful. As for why it’d top my list of favorite Brooklyn movies, my reaction also has a great deal to do with how Brooklyn is shot here, the way Gray captures something that almost no one else I can think of has captured fully. There’s a feeling that passes through the screen into the hearts and minds of viewers, a ragged beauty, a melancholy, all sidewalks and shadows. This is a Brooklyn I recognize, I know, and I love.
Strawberry Mansion (Mubi)
I was excited about this movie from the first time I read a review out of Sundance. I like Kentucker Audley, and I expected—judging by what I’d read—that this would very much be up my alley. It’s fair to say my expectations were surpassed. It popped up on Mubi a few weeks back, but I was unable to watch because I was in the middle of a long road trip out west. I finally settled in and watched it a few days ago and was blown away by what Audley and Albert Birney pulled off here. There are echoes of Richard Brautigan (tonally, this reminded me very much of his masterpiece, In Watermelon Sugar), Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude is an obvious point of reference), Richard Matheson (Somewhere in Time came to mind more than once), and Charlie Kaufman (especially Synecdoche, New York and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), but it’s really its own beautiful thing. Audley plays James Preble, a dream auditor who collects taxes on the unconscious mind of the population. When he’s summoned to the house of Arabella “Bella” Isadora (Penny Fuller), an eccentric and kindly older woman, he discovers that she still records her dreams the old way, on VHS cassettes, instead of on data sticks as the government has decreed. He is resigned to do his job the right way, going through all the tapes, and estimating what she owes in back taxes. Bella is more than happy to have his company and invites him to stay in her house. He’s reluctant at first but then says okay, holing up in the guest room with Bella’s pet turtle, Sugar Baby. As Preble begins investigating Bella’s dreams, he discovers two things: 1) her dreams are greener and more alive and more imaginative than any other dreams he’s encountered, which basically play out like commercials for various products; and 2) he’s falling for young Bella (played by the stunning Grace Glowicki, who masterfully portrays a free spirit full of wonder and hope). I won’t ruin the rest of the story, though I will say I found the movie enchanting and moving from beginning to end. The set design, the practical effects, Dan Deacon’s score, the performances, the writing—just a remarkable achievement. Though the movie premiered at Sundance last year, I think it’s officially a 2022 release—if that’s the case, it’ll certainly be at the top of my list of favorites at the end of the year.
William Boyle is the author of the novels Gravesend, The Lonely Witness, A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, City of Margins, and Shoot the Moonlight Out, all available from Pegasus Crime. His novella Everything Is Broken was published in Southwest Review Volume 104, numbers 1–4. His website is williammichaelboyle.com.
More Movies