In this edition of “I Wake Up Streaming,” novelist William Boyle rounds up his top streaming picks for the month of June. 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.
Nonnas (Netflix)
I wept my way through this. It’s based on a true story about an Italian American guy from Brooklyn, Joe Scaravella, who hires some real-life nonnas to cook in the restaurant he buys on Staten Island on a whim, searching for meaning in his life after the death of his mother. He’s thinking about his mom’s and nonna’s recipes, trying to reconnect with the feeling of satisfaction he remembers from being with them and eating their food. Vince Vaughn plays Joe (I’ve seen reviews criticizing his casting, but Vaughn is Italian on his mother’s side, which I guess a lot of folks don’t know). The nonnas he eventually hires are played by Susan Sarandon (also part Italian, a fact that’s lost on many), Brenda Vaccaro, Talia Shire, and Lorraine Bracco, a powerhouse lineup. (Never mind that the characters they play, excepting Vaccaro’s, aren’t actually nonnas, ha.) Linda Cardellini, who I’ve loved since her genius turn as Lindsay Weir on Freaks and Geeks, is Olivia, Joe’s former high school flame, now a widow—they reconnect via Vaccaro’s Antonella, her neighbor and friend. Joe Manganiello and Drea de Matteo play Scaravella’s best pals, helping him with his venture, even as they doubt his chances of success, putting everything—including their own livelihoods—on the line for his dream. The film is directed by Stephen Chbosky, writer of the great 1999 novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower—he also wrote and directed the 2012 film version and has since directed 2017’s Wonder (based on the hit YA novel by R. J. Palacio) and 2021’s Dear Evan Hansen (haven’t seen it, don’t know anything about it). Besides being a fan of The Perks of Being a Wallflower (both book and film), I don’t know much about Chbosky other than that he’s from Pittsburgh. On the surface, he doesn’t seem like the ideal director to tell a New York story, but he does a very solid job with it. Anyhow, in case you’re wondering, despite my Scottish handle, I’m Italian on my mom’s side and grew up only with the Italian side of my family. My dad split when I was an infant and my mom got remarried a few years later to an Italian guy from the neighborhood, Mike, so I grew up not only with her big Italian family but also my stepdad’s. It was Mike’s mom I called Nonna. My mom’s mom, the person I was closest to in the world, I simply called Grandma. “Nonna” is a word that refers to any Italian grandma, but for me growing up, it seemed to be a specific choice—some nonnas you called Grandma, some you called Nonna, some Nana or Nanny or maybe Nana G or Nana C (using the first initial of their last name), or maybe something else altogether, something cutesy or gibberishy. I ain’t an expert, pal—I can only tell you my own experience. All this to say, I enjoyed Nonnas very much. It’s sentimental, heartfelt, and lovely. Mostly, it made me think of my grandma. I thought of cooking with her and sitting at the kitchen table with her. Watching her as she breaded chicken cutlets or emptied pasta into a strainer over the sink, as she made spiedini, as she put that big yellow cutting board with the boomerang shapes on it on her kitchen table and made struffoli at Christmastime, as she opened an Entenmann’s crumb cake or cut baker’s twine with a paring knife from a box of pastries or cookies bought at Villabate Alba. I thought of her hands as she dealt cards to me during intense games of Rummy 500, as she sipped coffee, as she fogged her glasses and cleaned them with the sleeve of her sweater. A ton of memories like that flooded in while I watched. Flashes of moments. Sensory things. The smell of sauce on the stove. That dish soap she used. The smell of scrapings from a scratch-off ticket. Lead from a golf pencil that she used to write notes and reminders on pads cribbed from the doctor’s office my mother managed. The feeling of the glass pane over the checkered tablecloth on the kitchen table under my elbows. So much has gone since she passed away several years ago. It’s hard to review a film like this because my response is so clearly emotional—I’m thinking less about the film and more about my grandma. Thinking about how much I miss her every day. Thankfully, I’m not really tasked with writing a proper review here—I can simply unspool these memories and tell you that your mileage may vary. Though Nonnas hits every beat you’d expect, it feels right, and the cast is killer top to bottom. Great details make it sing with life. There are echoes of perennial favorites Big Night (the great Campbell Scott even shows up in a cameo as a famed food critic) and Raymond De Felitta’s vastly underrated Two Family House (one of the great Staten Island movies ever made, starring Michael Rispoli, who has a supporting role here). Nonnas is a sweet, simple little movie. It also feels exactly like the kind of movie I would’ve loved to watch with my grandma.
At Close Range (Tubi), After Dark, My Sweet (Tubi), and Glengarry Glen Ross (Prime Video, Peacock)
Director James Foley passed away on May 6 at the age of seventy-one. Headlines surrounding his death tended to focus in on one of his best films, his 1992 adaptation of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, but also his 2017 and 2018 films Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed (sequels to Fifty Shades of Grey), his work on the TV show House of Cards, and the early videos he directed for Madonna (including “True Blue,” “Papa Don’t Preach,” “Live to Tell,” and “Dress You Up”). In addition, Foley directed the 1987 film Who’s That Girl, a screwball rom-com starring Madonna and Griffin Dunne, an episode of Twin Peaks, as well as an episode of Hannibal and a couple of episodes of Billions. There are other films—Perfect Stranger (2007), Confidence (2003), The Corruptor (1999), Fear and The Chamber (both 1996), Two Bits (1995), Reckless (1984, his first)—but the three that had the biggest impact on me and the three upon which his legacy is built are At Close Range (1985), After Dark, My Sweet (1990), and the aforementioned Glengarry Glen Ross, a perfect three-picture run if only Who’s That Girl wasn’t wedged in there in ’87. Foley was born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in 1953. Bay Ridge is a couple of neighborhoods away from where I grew up and it’s where I went to high school—I didn’t know until recently that Foley was born there and that he (like me) attended a SUNY school (he went to Buffalo, I went to New Paltz). I watched his films when I was growing up and as with so many directors I admired from that era, I knew little to nothing about him—not what he looked like or where he was from. I simply knew I loved his films. As someone who was learning what kinds of stories I responded to and what kinds of stories I wanted to tell, I can’t think of many films more consequential to my development as a writer and to the development of my taste than At Close Range, After Dark, My Sweet, and Glengarry Glen Ross. The moodiness and melancholy of At Close Range marked me early. With a script by Nicholas Kazan, Foley makes a dark tone poem of this story about a dead-end teenager, Brad Jr. (Sean Penn), reconnecting with his estranged crook father, Brad Sr. (a terrifying turn by Christopher Walken). Set in rural Pennsylvania but shot in Tennessee, the film unfolds as a classical noir tragedy—a boy drawn to trouble but too righteous to turn all-the-way evil when confronted by a devil in the form of his father. It’s beautiful, haunting. After Dark, My Sweet came out the same year as a higher-profile Jim Thompson adaptation, Stephen Frears’s The Grifters (with a script by Donald E. Westlake), which was my introduction to Thompson’s work (he very quickly became one of my favorite writers). Both are excellent, but it’s After Dark, My Sweet that feels the truest to Thompson’s vision. Desperation seeps out from the edges of the screen. Jason Patric (giving easily his best performance) plays Kid Collins, an ex-boxer turned drifter, who falls in with Rachel Ward’s Fay and Bruce Dern’s “Uncle Bud” and gets embroiled in a kidnapping scheme. It’s a perfect neo-noir. Finally, Glengarry Glen Ross, probably Foley’s most acclaimed work, doesn’t need much of an intro here, I venture, but if it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, I highly recommend returning to it soon. It doesn’t fall into any of the traps associated with adapting a play for the screen. It’s full of rugged, muscular performances from the likes of Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, and Kevin Spacey (ugh), but it’s Jack Lemmon who gives the picture its heart and soul. It’s probably Foley’s most accomplished film technically (even if After Dark, My Sweet remains my personal favorite), and its reputation only seems to grow and broaden.
Dear Mr. Wonderful (Tubi, rarefilmm.com, archive.org, YouTube)
My pal Evan Louison texted me recently and told me about Dear Mr. Wonderful (aka Ruby’s Dream) from 1982, said it’d be right up my alley. Man, was he right. Joe Pesci stars as Ruby Dennis, a lounge singer who owns a bowling alley in Jersey. He lives with his sister, Paula (Karen Ludwig), and his nephew, Ray (a young Evan Handler). The mob is trying to strong-arm Ruby into giving up his bowling alley. Paula is finding purpose in helping the less fortunate. Ray drifts towards a life of crime. Ruby falls for Sharon (Ivy Ray Browning) and still dreams of making it big somewhere like Vegas. Frank Vincent, Richard S. Castellano, Paul Herman, and Ed O’Ross costar. There’s a heartbreaker of a scene where Ruby sings for Tony Martin. Directed by Peter Lilienthal, a German filmmaker, it makes sense that Dear Mr. Wonderful fits so neatly alongside other favorites of mine like Louis Malle’s Atlantic City and Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas—all early ’80s movies by non-Americans about the American experience that rank among the best movies made about America. Dear Mr. Wonderful is deliberately paced, melancholy as hell, and funny in spots—it hits that sweet spot for those of us that care about character and place more than anything else and who find failure more compelling than success. Pesci’s performance is vulnerable and tender—it should be discussed as one of his best. I’m not sure why this movie isn’t more well-known. Maybe there are some rights issues related to music that have kept it semi-buried? Still, I hope it gets a good release at some point—it’d be perfect for a boutique label like Fun City Editions. It’s on Tubi, but the sound seemed a little muffled to me there. I watched on rarefilmm.com—quality was great. It’s also on archive.org and YouTube, but I can’t vouch for the quality on those sites. Definitely my favorite film discovery of the year—don’t see that changing.
Untamed Heart (Prime Video, Tubi)
There was a night recently when I couldn’t sleep because of tornado weather. I put this on, one of my favorites when I was a teenager. When I rewatched it a few years back for the first time in a long time, I was swayed by some critical stuff I’d read about it and came down kind of hard against it. This time—despite all that iffy shit being present—it just felt like the comfort movie it was to me back then. Most importantly, it features Marisa Tomei at her absolute dreamiest. I was fourteen when it came out and I was in love with Tomei. I also loved Christian Slater and Rosie Perez. That’s a lot of love. I’ve heard and read over the years that it’s Actually a Very Bad Movie, so I held off going back to it for many years for nostalgia’s sake. The problems that people have with it involve the use of the attempted rape of Tomei’s Caroline as a plot device and Slater’s Adam being a stalker, and those issues certainly can’t be ignored. I guess they were going for a kind of dark fairytale thing with those elements, but it doesn’t quite work, and it certainly hasn’t aged well. Questionable writing decisions and some wild tonal shifts push this far afield from the sweet riff on Love Affair it might’ve been. Cut the Big Bad Wolves, make Adam less of a stalker and even more of a Sick Sad Saint, and this might be viewed today as a classic ’90s romance—I think the people who grew up with it (like me) do think of it that way in some capacity, but I really can’t imagine a Gen Z audience taking to it. The fact that Adam winds up being a guardian angel made me realize that there’s an awfully thin line between guardian angels and stalkers, ha. Also, Adam just straight up plagiarizes E.E. Cummings in his final note to Caroline—give the guy some credit, Adam! And us. Everybody knows that poem. In the 2020s there are whole goddamn Etsy shops dedicated to that poem. Another thing that struck me is how ancient this feels—it came out over thirty years ago but, storytelling-wise, it feels like a wild-ass 1930s romance. All that said, I still love it, if I’m telling the truth. Tomei is beyond wonderful. Her sweetness and heart and warmth should be more than enough to keep any viewer engaged. Perez is terrific too, and Slater’s likability cancels out some of Adam’s inherent creepiness—it’s one of his most understated performances. It’s also hilarious to see Tomei and Perez, both as Brooklyn as it gets, play Minnesotans (I guess it was originally supposed to be set in New Jersey, home of screenwriter Tom Sierchio). The work of cinematographer Jost Vacano—whose other credits include Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot and seven Paul Verhoeven films (among them Robocop, Total Recall, Showgirls, and Starship Troopers)—was a revelation for me this time around. The movie looks lovely, especially the scenes in and around the diner where the characters work. In his review when the film came out, Roger Ebert focused on its working-class elements, calling it “a fairytale with dishwater hands.” I’ll tell you what: I haven’t smoked regularly in twenty-plus years, but—almost more than anything else—it made me want to smoke a lot of cigarettes. There’s a scene where Tomei is out at a bar with friends and she’s holding a beer bottle and a blue lighter in the same hand, clasping the lighter against the bottle, and it’s the greatest thing ever. I will always hang pictures of Marisa Tomei on the walls of my imagination.
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. 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).
Illustration: Jess Rotter
