I Wake Up Streaming: September 2021
Movies
In this edition of “I Wake Up Streaming,” novelist William Boyle rounds up his top streaming picks for the month of September. 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.
New York Stories (Criterion Channel)
The New York Stories collection, just added to the Criterion Channel, is overwhelming and incredible. Spanning sixty-one films, it traverses terrain from groundbreaking silent films and underground experimental films to documentaries and indies and blockbusters. I’ve never highlighted a whole collection for this column, but this is essentially a retrospective of the films that have most shaped me and continue to shape me, so it feels irresponsible to just cherry-pick a few. You want one recommendation? Can’t do it. Sorry. You need to watch every film in the collection! I confess my bias here: I’m from New York and write fiction almost solely about the neighborhoods in Southern Brooklyn where I grew up. Naturally, the New York Stories collection feels like a roadmap to my obsessions. Getting lost in this lineup will be nostalgic as hell. It’ll also be quite interesting to see the past century of New York life on film laid out like this. For that reason, I intend to rewatch the films in order in the hopes that doing so will create an overall effect that would be otherwise unavailable with more scattershot viewing patterns. It’ll probably be difficult to maintain (I sure hope this collection is available for a long stretch), but that’s my goal. Here are some of my absolute favorites: The Crowd; The Clock; The Naked City; Little Fugitive (a life-changer for me); On the Bowery; Shadows; Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One; Putney Swope; The Panic in Needle Park; Born to Win; Little Murders; Super Fly; Sisters; The Taking of Pelham One Two Three; God Told Me To; News From Home; Stations of the Elevated; Smithereens; Variety; Old Enough; Stranger Than Paradise; After Hours; Moonstruck; Do the Right Thing; King of New York; Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.; Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle; The Daytrippers; Smoke (will be added to the collection on 10/1); In the Cut; Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child; Margaret. And still I feel like I’m leaving off so many movies I love.
Bye Bye Braverman (Watch TCM) and Garbo Talks (Paramount Plus, Epix)
If I have a complaint about the Criterion Channel’s New York Stories lineup, it’s that it’s conspicuously missing anything by quintessential New York filmmaker Sidney Lumet. Both Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico are available on HBO Max. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (one of the truly great last films by a great director) is on Kanopy. Prince of the City just got a stunning Blu-ray release from Warner Archives. But I’m going to focus on two recent first-time watches: Bye Bye Braverman (1968) and Garbo Talks (1984).
Bye Bye Braverman is not Lumet’s best by a long shot, but it’s a gorgeous snapshot of late ’60s New York City anchored by a bunch of warm and funny performances. In his wonderful book, Making Movies, Lumet says he hurt this picture by directing it “too ponderously,” with not enough “lightness of spirit.” He goes on: “Bye Bye Braverman was practically a perfect script [by Herb Sargent, based on a novel by Wallace Markfield]. And I wound up with a pancake instead of a soufflé. A cast of wonderful comic actors . . . was left floundering like fish on the beach by a director who takes funerals and cemeteries too seriously.” Still, there’s so much I love about it. The streetscapes. The cluttered apartments. The banter. The rich details. Nostalgia for a way of getting lost. Lumet’s few stabs at slapstick. The way he lovingly shoots that little VW Beetle scurrying on Brooklyn avenues and parkways. That incredible scene near the end of George Segal wandering through the cemetery, amongst a sea of headstones, talking to the dead.
Garbo Talks stars Anne Bancroft, Ron Silver, and Carrie Fisher. It’s solid all the way through if a bit slow and unsteady on its feet, but it builds to a monologue from Bancroft near the end that gutted me—a truly beautiful performance. Everything I love about movies summed up in that one scene. The mystery, the wonder, the hope. It’s also far from Lumet’s best, but it is a lovely New York movie, and that one scene with Bancroft has joined other long scenes (particularly Jennifer Jason Leigh singing Van Morrison’s “Take Me Back” in Georgia and Barbara Harris’s quick turn in Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?) that will eternally haunt me.
Not Fade Away (Hulu, Epix, Paramount Plus)
David Chase’s Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark (written by Chase, directed by Alan Taylor), is coming soon, which should lead you to want to rewatch The Sopranos in its entirety. But it should also drive you back to this underrated gem from 2012, written and directed by Chase, and a masterpiece in its own right. What might’ve initially been perceived as a boomer nostalgia trip has revealed itself as something much deeper: an interrogation of artistic expression that avoids easy emotional beats, a movie about music and distortion and conflict and disappointment. Chase takes the bones of a very recognizable story but makes it feel fresh and profound. Knockout performances by John Magaro and James Gandolfini anchor the picture. The generational and cultural gap between Magaro’s Douglas Damiano and his father, Pat, played with looming intensity by Gandolfini, is lovingly and achingly rendered. Given Steven Van Zandt’s involvement as music supervisor, it’s no surprise that the story feels so in tune with Springsteen’s origins. In fact, this is the story of how rock and roll altered the lives of so many kids at a tumultuous time. Inspired by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Douglas and his pals start a band, the Twylight Zones. It’s the mid ’60s, a time when radio was everything. They play around town, mostly at parties, and get a shot at auditioning for a major producer. It’s a melancholy and heart-hearted film, full of flawed characters and what critic Scout Tafoya called “sketches of grim honesty.” (I highly recommend checking out Tafoya’s installment of “The Unloved” dedicated to Not Fade Away.)
Sarpatta Parambarai (Prime Video)
A three-hour Tamil boxing epic directed with heart and style by Pa. Ranjith. Feels like an old-fashioned double VHS spectacle. Set in the 1970s, the film revolves around a clash between two clans, Idiyappa Parambarai and Sarpatta Parambarai, in Madras. Dosed with homages to Rocky, Raging Bull, Ali, and The Karate Kid, it still manages to feel like its own unique thing. Bursting at the seams with melodrama. (Has any other boxing hero ever cried as much as Arya’s Kabilan?) Engaging, intense, fun boxing scenes. Three hours fly by. One of my favorite films of the year and one of the best boxing films in recent memory.
Summer Days, Summer Nights (VOD)
I have a soft spot for Edward Burns. There’s nothing original about his newest film, Summer Days, Summer Nights. Burns’s script is formulaic and his characters speak in clichés (which is how most people actually talk, so that’s not really a complaint). Still, this has a sweetness to it and the cast—especially Stasey, Morgan, Ramos, and Burns himself—are damn likable. Rides a nice summer hangout vibe. Glinty and shimmery and tender. The cars and houses and streets feel right. The ’80s thing—so often overdone and patently phony—is mostly spot on (except for the fact, as my wife pointed out, that nobody smokes at all, which is bonkers). Soundtrack’s fine—hits about all the songs you’d expect it to. Surprised by how good it looked overall—some downright stunning shots and nice camerawork—and, again, solid on the details of the time and place. Even when the script and performances are at their corniest, it’s hard not to like the kind of Linklater Lite on Long Island thing that Burns has put together. Goes down like a decent cheap beer. Nothing fancy. Gets the job done.
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 (forthcoming November 2021), 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.
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