I Wake Up Streaming | July 2023
Movies
Our regular “I Wake Up Streaming” columnist William Boyle is taking the month of July off. Please welcome back guest columnist Jack Pendarvis. 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.
To Catch a Thief (Paramount+)
On my sixtieth birthday, I received an email from Southwest Review, asking if I could take over Bill Boyle’s movie column this month. It was a quick turnaround, but luckily, my wife Theresa and I were watching To Catch a Thief on Paramount+ at the time. I don’t like all the different streaming services. Nowadays, if you want to watch a new show, for example, you have to buy the channel that goes along with it. I don’t want to sound like a man who just turned sixty, but we really did have it figured out in the old days. TV was free. There were commercials that paid for it. Then it magically entered your house, and it might be anything. What fun! But I’m getting off the subject. To Catch a Thief is great because Cary Grant and Grace Kelly are so beautiful to look at. Plus, Hitchcock makes staircases and flowers equally beautiful to look at. And cats and shadows. Wherever he points his camera, there is something beautiful to look at. Tiles. Umbrellas. I don’t think he knows the difference between people and inanimate objects.
Girl Happy (Max)
One day, I am going to write a book about how the Elvis movies are actually good and would everyone please shut up. Note to editor: I purposely ended the previous sentence with a period, suggestive of finality. Now, the Criterion Channel also has a selection of Elvis movies running this month, and they are a fine, tasteful group of films, sure to titillate the priggish dilettante. Most of them are “grounded,” I regret to say, in “reality,” and make a fine showcase for Elvis as a curious artifact from a strange land. But Elvis is not a statue in a museum. He is an alligator on a poorly run alligator farm. You have to get in there with him and wrestle! That is why I suggest heading over to Max (full disclosure, I have some business dealings there at the moment) for a bright, messy taste of Girl Happy. Outlandish candy colors (Elvis makes his first appearance in a dazzling yellow blazer) and a cleverly constructed motel set that would make Jacques Tati weep with envy. Note to editor: yes, that was a sentence fragment. This is a rush job! Now to grab my cellphone and see what’s on Hulu.
Step Brothers (Hulu)
Step Brothers! It’s number 61 on the list I hubristically keep of my 400 top movies. That seems like a pretty high ranking out of all the movies that have ever been made. It’s wedged in there between Sweet Smell of Success and Chungking Express. I’ve said this elsewhere, but Step Brothers is the closest thing this century has ever gotten to a Martin and Lewis movie. I have also pointed out that Will Ferrell, as unlikely as it may seem, is the Dean Martin! But we’re on a deadline, so I don’t feel too bad about repeating myself. Also, the place where I said it (my blog) is a virtual wasteland, uninhabited and forlorn. There’s an interview I always think about, in which Marion Cotillard said she had watched Step Brothers ten times (and this was back in 2017! I bet she watched it fifty more times during the pandemic) and always cried at the end. The director of Step Brothers went on to make a series of movies to teach us a little something about ourselves as a society, but that’s okay. Sometimes you just get in one of those moods!
The Moon-Spinners; The Skeleton Dance (Disney+)
Returning to my old-man complaints, I have no idea why I’m still paying for Disney+. I got it in 2021 so I could watch Get Back. We almost never use it. I think I put The Moon-Spinners on my watchlist the very same day I downloaded the app. Those were such innocent times. Now, thanks to Southwest Review, I am going to watch it. Although you can’t discern as much with your human eye, some minutes have passed between the composition of this sentence and the one preceding it. Precious minutes! The clock ticks ever onward, and the movie column hangs in the balance. An AI should have written Bill’s movie column this month. So, I started The Moon-Spinners and here’s Hayley Mills and her aunt (I assume; it’s always an aunt in these movies) on a crowded bus in Crete, and, of course, a poor local fisherman is letting his big dead fish dangle in Hayley Mills’s face. Now, much humor may be had from the close quarters of mass transit (see Godard’s Soigne ta droite, with its tribute to the Jolly “Fats” Weehawkin Airlines segment of Jerry Lewis’s Smorgasbord), but it wasn’t much fun to see the British tourists complaining about the smelly poor people, and I thought to myself, well, is this why I’ve been paying for Disney+ for two years without using it? Is this what it all comes down to, now that I have reached the twilight of my years? Noticing that the classic animated short “The Skeleton Dance” had been recently added to the channel, I turned to it for solace, or perhaps for confirmation of the inevitability of death. It begins with a memorable owl, leading me to recall that Walt Disney stomped an owl to death as a boy, an act which haunted him for the rest of his life. I’m not making that up. Philip Glass included the incident in an opera. I’m not making that up, either. Anyway, a skeleton flips another skeleton on his head and uses him as a pogo stick, but then the first skeleton takes a turn being the pogo stick, so it balances out. I cannot, however, sanction the use of a cat as a cello.
Airport ’77 (Netflix)
Look, I love Airport 1975, but I’m never worried about the people and their airplane disaster dilemma, because Gloria Swanson is onboard, playing herself. What are they going to do, kill off Gloria Swanson? I think not! In Airport ’77, Olivia de Havilland does not play herself. She does a lot of emoting! She often stares heavenward, willing herself to glow somehow, her eyes glistening with secrets that only Olivia de Havilland knows. I hate to give anything away about this movie. You know from the minute they’re loading the world’s most expensive wine and some Rembrandts onto the plane that some bad shit is going to go down. So that’s not a spoiler. Pay special attention to the scene in which Christopher Lee “helps” Jack Lemmon. You’ll be thinking, hmm, maybe Lee Grant was right after all. I can say no more. Olivia de Havilland drinks champagne on the rocks in this movie. Skeevy old lovebird Joseph Cotten sends one over, and she’s like (I may paraphrase slightly), “Champagne on the rocks, my favorite drink!” I was suspicious! But I found a New York Times article that hailed champagne on the rocks as a happening new trend of 2016, pioneered, the New York Times would have you believe, by Bill Murray. “Think of it as a looser, T-shirt-and-halter-top Champagne,” the New York Times advises us, regarding the kind of champagne one drinks on the rocks. That’s Olivia de Havilland all over: T-shirts and halter tops. And with that summery image, I bid you a fond farewell, joining you in the hope of Bill Boyle’s safe return.
Jack Pendarvis has written two novels, three story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a nonfiction book about cigarette lighters. His novel-in-progress Sour Blueberries is currently being serialized on Substack, to be followed by the murder mystery Salty Beans.
Illustration: Jess Rotter
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