Thirteen Lives - Directed by Ron Howard
Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s recent documentary The Rescue chronicled a not-too-distant event that captured the world’s attention and united strangers: the 2018 mission to save a youth soccer team trapped inside a flooded cave in Thailand. It did so with escalating drama, white-knuckle tension and inspirational uplift, successfully dodging the cliché of being “too soon.” Director Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives, a fictionalized account of the same saga, manages to marshall all the right resources and recreate the drama, tension and uplift to stunning effect.
June 23 begins as an average day for the young kids and the coach of the Wild Boars, having fun, playing soccer in the summer sun. To celebrate Prem’s (Achi Jinapanyo) birthday, the Boars take a spontaneous field trip to explore the Tham Luang cave network, just as torrential rains flood the miles-long system. Outside, parents call the Thai authorities, but it quickly becomes clear that the impending rescue effort is going to take a miracle.
This film is at its best with the underwater scenes, where Howard’s cave-diving footage puts the audience into claustrophobic, muddy-water environments. These submerged sequences skillfully convey the dangerous external stakes faced by the protagonists. By shooting scenes in the first-person perspective, the camera becomes our avatar. The divers’ fear of the unknown is our fear of what’s lurking beyond the frame. Ron Howard continues to take risky steps at this point in his career and I’ll happily show up for every single one.
Thirteen Lives is streaming on Amazon Prime.
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story - Directed by Eric Appel
Biopics about famous artists have long been so ubiquitous that their tried-and-true tropes have become ripe for parody. One that’s particularly easy to mock is the “Eureka!” moment in which the celebrated artist reaches an epiphany that leads to a creative breakthrough, whether it’s Jackson Pollock’s first paint splatter leading to his signature style or Johnny Cash overhearing chatter that inspires the lyrics of a future hit. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a suitably irreverent meta-biopic of the lovably loopy song parodist co-written and co-produced by Yankovic himself, spoofs this cliché by having Al (Daniel Radcliffe), right after venting to his roommates about the difficulty of achieving his dream, which is to “make up new words to a song that already exists,” begin making a bologna sandwich while The Knack’s “My Sharona” plays on the radio.
Once Radcliffe dons the curly wig and glasses of the grown-up Weird Al, the character gains the freedom to pursue his musical passions, as well as the approval of a more encouraging father figure in the form of the trailblazing radio jester Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson). With “My Bologna” being the first of many hits for him, Al rockets to the level of fame he’s always dreamed of. But it quickly goes to his head, with Al becoming the kind of celebrity who wears his Gold and Platinum records on chains around his neck and who stumbles across the stage during his concerts shirtless and spewing booze-fueled rants to the crowds.
Weird finds its comic footing as it eventually gets, well, weirder, spiraling off into tangents about Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood, nailing the Material Girl’s confident snarl) cozying up to Al for what one character deems “that sweet, sweet Yankovic bump” that artists he parodies experience on the sales chart, and about Al going toe-to-toe against drug kingpin Pablo Escobar (Arturo Castro). The closer the film comes to resembling Yankovic’s anarchic, late ’80s starring vehicle UHF, the funnier it gets.
Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is streaming on Roku
The Stranger - Directed by Thomas M. Wright
Sean Harris has always had a fascinating screen presence, one that’s slightly unstable and unsettling. There’s something haunted about the characters he plays. And he makes great use of that skill set in Thomas M. Wright’s taut and effective The Stranger which premiered at Cannes back in May and snuck its way onto Netflix with almost zero promotion or fanfare.
Harris plays Henry Teague, the main suspect in one of the most notorious missing person cases in the history of Australia. At first, it seems like Henry is about to get involved in a criminal underworld that could get him in serious trouble. He keeps asserting that he doesn’t “do violence,” but agrees to meet some mysterious people, including one named Mark Frame played by Joel Edgerton. As the two become closer we learn that Mark is actually an undercover cop and the entire criminal enterprise on display is an elaborate sting operation to try and incriminate Henry. Saying anything more will let the air out of this incredible thriller.
Netflix has an increasingly bad habit of burying projects, notoriously making them hard to find on the home screen even on the day they’re released. The Stranger seems to be breaking through and it’s nice to see something worthwhile break through the crowd of familiar faces.
The Stranger is streaming on Netflix.
Nothing Compares - Directed by Kathryn Ferguson
We expect a lot from our celebrities. We want them edgy enough to make us feel special. But we don’t want them so edgy that they offend someone. And if, God forbid, they do offend someone, we are quick to cancel them. Sometimes enough time goes by and that artist is allowed back into the cultural spotlight. Sinead O’Connor hasn’t been fortunate enough to receive that allowance but there’s a good chance that’s because she isn’t interested in it. Nor was was she interested or prepared for the massive pop stardom she garnered in the late 1980’s.
This is not the typical “behind the music” documentary. It does not aspire to be comprehensive either as biography, as an overview of an entire artistic career, or as cultural commentary. There is no effort to cover O’Connor’s marriages, religion, name changes, her mental illness challenges, or even the last 11 albums she has produced. The focus is on what will be the first line of O’Connor’s obituary: on “Saturday Night Live” she sang a Bob Marley song about racism with lyrics based on a speech to the UN by Haile Selassie. And then she held up a photograph of the pope and tore it in half. The film reveals, as O’Connor did in her memoir, that her reason was as personal as it was political; that was the photograph that was on the wall of her abusive mother’s home.
Director Kathryn Ferguson and her co-writers Eleanor Emptage and Michael Mallie want us to think about the way O’Connor’s influence is reflected in today’s outspoken female performers, a legacy they consider more significant than the Prince song about lost love. A song that Prince’s estate would not let them use for the film since the SNL incident still hangs on Sinead’s shoulders. Thankfully even with this narrow focus on a small part of O’Connor’s career her impact on the music world is still felt. Her story and her voice are impact enough.
Nothing Compares is streaming on Showtime.
Decision to Leave - Directed by Park Chan-wook
On its deceptively clean surface, Park Chan-wook’s Decision To Leave is the story of a detective who falls obsessively in love with a suspect. But that’s completely missing the forest for a single tree. To truly experience this film it should be view with the expectation that the devil is in the details—and there are dizzying amounts of them.
His nonstop visual inventiveness stresses the longing that Detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il, taking his place amongst the great film noir detective saps) feels for possible black widow Seo-rae (a captivating Tang Wei from Lust, Caution). They show simmering chemistry in this poignant and near inscrutable love story, where the more Hae-joon learns about Seo-rae, the more mysterious she becomes, which has the viewer constantly questioning what they see and hear.
Working at high levels of craft and with the delicacy of a watchmaker, Park spins an intricate web where everything has its place, even seemingly unrelated moments like the well-staged rooftop chase and the tasty Chinese food that Hae-joon prepares for Seo-rae. With Decision To Leave, Park expands his formidably-deep skill set. The film is a reserved (for Park, at least) and probing drama about a man who risks being professionally corrupted and personally destroyed by a woman about which he knows everything—and nothing.
Decision to Leave is available to rent now on Amazon Prime.