I Wake Up Streaming | March 2022

In this edition of “I Wake Up Streaming,” novelist William Boyle rounds up his top streaming picks for the month of March. 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.

Some of my most anticipated movies of 2021 are now available on streaming services—Benedetta (Hulu) and Titane (Hulu) jump to mind—but I haven’t had a chance to watch them yet. Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story (HBO Max and Disney Plus) is as good as everyone is saying. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (HBO Max), based on a story by Haruki Murakami, is a masterpiece deserving of the recognition and awards it’s been receiving. How you feel about Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch (HBO Max) will largely depend on your tolerance for his movies, but I thoroughly enjoyed it as the tribute to a bygone era of writers like Joseph Mitchell and James Baldwin. Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi (HBO Max) is another terrific entry in his illustrious filmography, a paranoid thriller with nods to Rear Window, Blow Out, and The Conversation, a killer lead performance from Zoë Kravitz, and a knockout score by Cliff Martinez. It’s also worth going back to Soderbergh’s No Sudden Move (HBO Max) from last year, as I did this past week; I’m not sure why it didn’t quite land for me on that first viewing since it’s so far up my alley in every way, but I loved it this time through. Dark and beautifully convoluted. Echoes of Chester Himes, Elmore Leonard, Chinatown, and Robert Altman’s Kansas City. All that said, I’m going to focus on a few more under-the-radar picks this month:

The Devil Is Driving (Criterion Channel)

The whole Paramount pre-Code collection that just got added to the Criterion Channel is cause for celebration. I’ve seen many of the films, but many will be new to me. 1932’s The Devil Is Driving, directed by Benjamin Stoloff, was a first-time watch. I knew I’d hit it off with this movie after reading the summary. Metropolitan Garage is situated in an eight-story building in New York City; there’s a winding ramp through the building, and it’s a place where stolen cars are brought and flipped. The building contains a repair shop, storage rooms, and a paint shop, where the hot cars are quickly given a new look. On the seventh floor of the building, there’s a speakeasy, and on the eighth is the penthouse where the fake gang leader, Jenkins (Alan Dinehart), resides, while the real head of the outfit poses as a deaf-mute underling, referred to as “The Dummy” (George Rosener), communicating only through some sort of writing machine (and looking, rather hauntingly, like a dead ringer for Clint Howard). Gabby (Edmund Lowe) is a good-hearted alcoholic gambler given a job in the garage by his brother-in-law, Beef (James Gleason). Beef knows the operation is a front for a stolen car ring, but he’s an honest guy. Gabby is sent to pick up Silver (Wynne Gibson), Jenkins’s girlfriend, whose car has broken down, and they strike up a relationship. Beef’s little boy, Buddy (Dickie Moore, a good kid performance) is clipped by a stolen sedan as he crosses a street in his own toy car. Gabby and Beef put the finger on who’s responsible, and trouble brews. First off, when your main characters are named Gabby, Silver, and Beef, you’ve already got one foot in heaven, and you’ve got me eating out of the palm of your hand. As with most Pre-Codes, The Devil Is Driving is tonally wild, feeling like an action movie one minute, a screwball romance the next, and then a tragic melodrama and a more straightforward crime picture. The script is full of zingers. There are some deeply memorable chase sequences. The best part: it’s lean and efficient at sixty-three minutes! Dynamic as hell.

Sister, Sister (Tubi)

Released by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures in 1987, Sister, Sister was co-written and directed by Bill Condon. Given my undying love for Jennifer Jason Leigh, I can’t believe I’d never seen this or even heard of it before. Vinegar Syndrome recently released a restoration on Blu-ray (which I plan on picking up), but I watched it on Tubi. It’s a twisty and swampy Southern Gothic thriller that falls somewhere on the continuum between Brian De Palma’s Obsession, Don Siegel’s The Beguiled, and John Grissmer’s Blood Rage. It made for an inadvertent good double feature with John McNaughton’s Wild Things, hitting the same lurid notes. Roger Ebert wrote that Wild Things was “like a three-way collision between a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir,” and Sister, Sister very much operates in that same territory. Two sisters, Charlotte (Judith Ivey) and Lucy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), have turned their ancestral Louisiana estate into a B&B. Some trauma haunts them. Charlotte is Lucy’s caretaker—Lucy isn’t doing well, pumped full of medication, seeing ghosts, hallucinating. A young guest, Matt (Eric Stoltz), enters their lives and they are forced to confront the dark realities of the past. An all-star supporting performance by Ann Pitoniak as another guest, Mrs. Bettlehelm, brings some much-needed humor to the proceedings. Cinematographer Stephen M. Katz has one of the wildest filmographies ever: Messiah of Evil; Switchblade Sisters; The Blues Brothers; ’Night, Mother; Kentucky Fried Movie; Gods and Monsters; Who’s Harry Crumb?; this, and many more films. Anyhow, it looks flat-out gorgeous. Gauzy and stormy. Jennifer Jason Leigh is one of my favorite actors of all time, and this is a great, earlyish turn (that she’d follow with an iconic run over the next eight years, including stellar performances in Heart of Midnight, Buried Alive, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Miami Blues, Rush, Single White Female, Short Cuts, Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, The Hudsucker Proxy, Dolores Claiborne, Georgia, and more). She has kind of a Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive quality here. Always so ballsy, always so strange.

El Planeta (HBO Max)

I hadn’t heard anything about this movie until I picked up the Blu-ray—put out by Utopia—on a whim last time I ordered from Vinegar Syndrome. I was glad to see it had just been added to HBO Max, though it’s not getting much attention there, buried as it is under more prominent releases like West Side Story. It’s the first feature by artist-turned-filmmaker Amalia Ulman, who also wrote the script and stars as Leo, returning to her hometown of Gijón, Spain, to be with her widowed mother, Maria (played by Ulman’s real mother, Ale Ulman), barely hanging on in an apartment they can’t really afford. Maria is an eccentric con artist, and Leo is drifting, searching for something, anything. The film is shot in beautiful black and white. Tonally and aesthetically, it recalls Hong Sang-soo and early Jim Jarmusch and Hal Hartley. Both Amalia and Ale Ulman are deadpan comedic performers, and their characters charm their way through desperate scenario after desperate scenario. It feels terribly reductive to label El Planeta as Spanish mumblecore, as I’ve seen—so much more is going on under the surface. The characters have really lingered in my imagination. Also, it features a hilarious Martin Scorsese subplot. One of the best debut films of 2021. I have the feeling that I’ll return to it often.