Do you feel like you’re drowning … but you haven’t even left your couch? Welcome to the Great Content Overload Era. To help you navigate the choppy digital waves, here are The Globe’s best bets for weekend streaming.
Party Down, Season 3 (Crave with Starz)
Following the struggles of a group of Hollywood hopefuls working for a cheesy catering company, the original iteration of Party Down not only delivered sharp doses of tragic humour, but also a meta-ness of sorts.Colleen Hayes/Courtesy of Crave
At the risk of repeating what will likely be every critic’s opening line describing the improbable decade-and-a-half-later return of the sitcom Party Down: So ... are we having fun yet??? For those who either caught the initial 2009-10 run of this Starz series or those who discovered it years later when it was pumped into Netflix’s catalogue, that “fun” catch phrase will trigger a Pavlovian reaction, reminding fans of a comedy that was at once empathetic, wry and deeply cynical. Following the struggles of a group of Hollywood hopefuls working for a cheesy catering company, the original iteration of Party Down not only delivered sharp doses of tragic humour, but also a meta-ness of sorts. For many of the performers on the show, this was indeed their big(ish) break that helped them escape a life of food-service hell.
And now that the series has returned for a much-delayed third season thanks to a years-long fan campaign – a Party Down movie was this close to going into production in 2019 – we’re reminded that while its cast members have gone onto bigger, sometimes even better things, Party Down will always feel like their hors-d’oeuvres-splattered home. Which is no easy trick to pull off, either, as the first episode of Season 3 has to somehow get Adam Scott’s one-time actor (now a deeply unhappy high-school English teacher) and other returning players (including Ryan Hansen’s daydreamer, who is now the lead of a Marvel-style superhero pic, and Jane Lynch, who Zooms in as a flighty investor) back into the catering business led by the increasingly unhinged Ron (Ken Marino, perfect as always).
Just how creators Rob Thomas, John Enbom, Dan Etheridge and Paul Rudd (yes, that Paul Rudd) manage to pull it all off is a thing of small-scale beauty. Sure, it’s sad that original Party Down-er Lizzy Kaplan couldn’t make it back – more trouble caused on behalf of that pesky Fleishman, no doubt – but we get Jennifer Garner, Nick Offerman, Zoe Chao and James Marsden as compensation. So, yep, we’re having fun.
Plane (on-demand, including Apple TV and Google Play)
Gerard Butler in Plane.Kenneth Rexach/Lionsgate/Lionsgate via The Associated Press
Plane unfolds like a series of increasingly outlandish screenplay-writing “What If …?” exercises. What if, for instance, Gerard Butler played respected airline pilot Brodie Torrance, who is hoping to complete a Singapore-to-Tokyo leg in order to reunite with his daughter … but that job is complicated by the presence of a passenger named Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter) who is being transferred by a federal agent to prison? And what if the plane ride then encountered severe weather … but Brodie was able to guide the aircraft to safety on an island in the middle of the Philippines?? And what if Brodie needs to free Louis in order to help with life on the island … but everyone’s new home was ruled by a lawless Filipino militia??? I think that by this point you know whether this guns-and-blammo exercise is either too absurd or just absurd enough for your tastes.
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (digital TIFF Lightbox)
One of five films up for the best documentary Oscar at the Academy Awards next month, Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed dips into two epic narratives – the life of photographer Nan Goldin, and the ascent of opioid abuse – to come out the other side with a unified portrait of American triumph and tragedy. Initially, the doc plays like a time capsule as it chronicles Goldin’s early, painful family life, and then her ascent in New York’s underground arts scene in the AIDS-wracked 1980s. Frequently, though, Poitras flash-forwards to Goldin’s present-day fight with the Sackler family’s Purdue Pharma, producers of OxyContin and, in the views of many including Goldin’s advocacy group P.A.I.N., the architects of the U.S.’s opioid crisis. The result is a powerful, singular film that feels close to essential.
Rocketman (Netflix)
Taron Egerton as Elton John in Rocketman.Photo Credit: David Appleby/Paramount Pictures.
Back in 2019, the only thing that I expected from Dexter Fletcher’s biopic Rocketman was nothing at all. The best-case scenario was that the director’s Elton John biopic would be a mild headache, not as bad as Fletcher’s pick-up work on the hagiographic and insulting Bohemian Rhapsody but not as good as, say, listening to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on repeat. In a delightful upending of expectations that still knocks me out four years later, Rocketman has set the standard for what a jukebox drama can be: bright, bouncy, fantastical and off-kilter in every possible way. Good luck to the team of the recently announced Michael Jackson biopic in trying to top this.
Sicario (Paramount+)
Benicio Del Toro in Sicario.Richard Foreman/Sony Pictures
In the new academic text Canadian Cinema in the New Millennium (wait, where are you going?), there is a fascinating chapter by the book’s co-editor Lee Carruthers that dissects the films of Denis Villeneuve. The basic argument, which Carruthers makes with a rigorous exactitude, is that there isn’t a defining vision uniting the Quebec director’s canon, or at least not yet. I’m not entirely convinced that’s the case, but it was an interesting thesis to have rolling in the back of my brain while rewatching 2015′s Sicario, which paves the way for so much of Villeneuve’s Hollywood filmography. The wound-far-too-tight performances, the caustic humour of Blade Runner 2049, the silliness of military protocol found in Arrival and, well, the sands of Dune – it’s all here, dripping with blood and a skin-prickling score.
Barry Hertz