THE NEVERENDING
FILM FESTIVAL
#170  [archive] 
White Lotus (first season, 2021) Streaming on Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Max
Free on DVD from the library This is a six-part mini-series, and I’d intended to watch the first installment, but ended up watching all six back-to-back like a long movie. That’s Mike White’s fault — Freaks & Geeks, Chuck & Buck, School of Rock, etc. He wrote and directed all of White Lotus, which is basically Grand Hotel for the 21st century:A bunch of rich white people vacation at an elite Hawaiian resort. In the first few minutes of the first episode, it’s established that someone’s died there, and then we flash back a week to the guests’ arrival, and spend all six episodes wondering who’s gonna be dead. There are several worthy candidates.There’s a rich software executive and her insecure husband, with their withdrawn teenage son, spoiled daughter, and the daughter’s friend; a gorgeous young man and his gorgeous new wife on their honeymoon; and a ditzy woman carrying her dead mother’s ashes to be tossed in the ocean. Over the course of the series, these eight guests carom off each other and a few members of the resort staff, and it’s never quite what you’d expect and never not a blast.All these characters are flawed. Some are mostly flaws. Some seem as shallow as a drip of water, but they might surprise you. The conversations are sometimes lightly-heated arguments about where these people fit into the societal hierarchy. Being mostly white and rich, the answer is “at the top,” but like most of us, they talk of lofty ideals that tend to crumble when exposed to daylight. White’s going to expose them to daylight.There’s a lot of what I’ll assume is authentic Hawaiian music, odd to my ear, but beautiful. The show itself is like that, too — odd but beautiful, and it builds to both the happiest and saddest ending these characters could have.Mike White is a frickin’ genius, and White Lotus is a great place to spend an afternoon.Verdict: BIG YES.
♦ ♦ ♦   Caged Men: Tales from Chicago’s SRO Hotels (2017) Streaming free on YouTube 

This is a documentary about single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels — places with toilets and showers down the hall, like where I lived in San Francisco. An SRO is as low as you can go before homelessness, but for an affordable price you get a bed and a room of your own, and some privacy and dignity. Cities that don’t allow SROs have more homelessness, because these people have nowhere else to go. So SROs are vital, if anyone cares about addressing the homeless problem, but in America that’s a big ‘if’.That’s me talking, more than the documentary, though. Early on, the film establishes its perspective, as SRO owners talk on camera about their problems owning rez hotels, while an off-screen opera singer warbles a sad aria. The singing gets louder and louder and finally drowns out the hotel owner who’s talking.The opera extract seems intended to make sure you know you’re watching a tragedy. One by one, Chicago (where this was filmed) is shutting down its SROs, and that is a tragedy, but the film implies it’s tragic that people live in such places at all. “Caged men,” the title calls them? I never knew any resident of an SRO who would’ve described himself as that.I didn’t watch it with a stopwatch, but it feels like about 40% of the film is hotel owners talking. One of them seems like a decent human, and one’s a scumbag, others are in between, but the filmmakers keep coming back to the scumbag.Another 40% of the film is front desk clerks telling us about their job, which is very interesting, and most of those men deserve a big hug.Perhaps 10% of the film’s time is spent with SRO residents, and I would’ve preferred much, much more of that. And also, how do you make a movie on this subject, without ever panning the camera to show the layout of a typical room, or without giving us a glimpse of the communal toilets and showers?If it sounds like I hated Caged Men, well, I kinda did, but it’s a rare topic to be addressed, and the documentary is helpful and informative and I’m not saying it’s crap.It’s frustrating for me, though, because SRO’s are not inherently tragic, and because the film kept bringing back that scumbag owner to let him drone on a little longer about how he dislikes his line of work and his customers. Verdict: YES, but also, jeez.♦ ♦ ♦    Eight Characters in Search of a Sitcom (2003)Streaming free on YouTube

The Mary Tyler Moore Show was possibly the finest sit-com ever on commercial TV. I loved it when I was a kid, and re-watched all of it a couple of years ago, and almost every episode is still smart and funny. If you’ve never seen the show, and you’re looking for laughs with brains, The Mary Tyler Moore Show is not to be missed.Eight Characters is a documentary that asks the surviving (as of 2003) actors and writers to explain what made the show great. Mary herself isn’t here, though she was alive and, I believe, well. Everyone else weighs in, though, and it’s nice seeing the cast a couple of decades later. Everyone’s points are illustrated with clips from the show, and the clips are great because the show was great, and there are lots of clips. I’d never say “too many clips” — there’s no such thing as too many clips from The Mary Tyler Moore Show — but the entire documentary is only 57 minutes. With a dozen or so actors and insiders talking, interspersed with lots of clips, there’s simply no time for any depth or unexpected insights.Verdict: MAYBE.• Coming attractions •
The Flipside of Dominick Hide (1980)Freaked (1993)Following (1998)  Jurassic Punk (2022)The Invisible Man (1933) Naked (1993) Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (first season, 2022)
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988)
Tunnel Vision (2023) 12:01 (1993)

    • And then •
American Revolution 2 (1969)The Cook (1918)The Corporation (2003)
The Dark Crystal (1982)Delicatessen (1991)The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)District 9 (2009)Good Night, Nurse (1918)High-Rise (2016)Hit! (1973)
Inherent Vice (2014) Ishi, the Last Yahi (1993) Last Tango in Paris (1972) Merrily We Go to Hell (1932)My Life in Monsters (2015) The Scarecrow (1920) They Live (1988)The Thing (1982)

The Unknown Marx Brothers (1993)
Upstream Color (2013)  We Steal Secrets (2013)Who Killed Captain Alex (2010)    Within Our Gates (1920)
8/3/2023  
There
are so many good movies out there — old movies, odd or artsy, foreign
or forgotten movies, or do-it-yourself movies made just for the joy of
making them — that if you only watch whatever’s on Netflix or playing at
the twenty-plex, you’re missing out.To get beyond the ordinary, I recommend:Alter
Cineverse
Criterion
CultCinema Classics
DocsVille
Dust
Fandor
Films for Action
Hoopla
IHaveNoTV
IndieFlix
Internet Archive
Kanopy
KinoCult
Kino Lorber
Korean Classic Film
Christopher R Mihm
Mosfilm
Mubi
National Film Board of Canada
New Yorker Screening Room
Damon Packard
Mark Pirro
PizzaFlix
PopcornFlix
Public Domain Movies
RareFilmm
Scarecrow Video
Shudder
ThoughtMaybe
Timeless Classic Movies
VoleFlix
WatchDocumentaries
or your local library.Some people even access films through shady methods, though of course, that would be wrong.