What to Watch - August, 2024

I DO NOT OWN THESE CLIPS.
1. The Bridges of Madison County (1995, Prime Video)
2. The Insider (1999, RUclipsTV)
3. Heavyweights (1994, Disney+)
4. The Pale Blue Eye (2022, Netflix)
5. Paris, Texas (1984, Max)
There’s something about The Bridges of Madison County that feels so intrinsically true that I was initially shocked to learn it hadn’t been taken from a memoir. This film so astutely uses its setting, to the point that one cannot separate the story from its sense of place. It’s obvious that there isn’t a single frame of this movie filmed on a soundstage - it’s all on location in Iowa, inside an old house that feels like another character in the film, on unnamed dirt roads and, of course, under the covered bridges. Director Clint Eastwood finds romance in the smallest details, like every corner of the farmhouse where most of the action takes place contains some delicate secret that, once the affair between the two characters has ended, will take on a new significance. It is tragic and beautiful in a way that few movies are. Available to rent on Prime Video.
Before Gladiator, Russell Crowe gave an Oscar-nominated performance in 1999’s The Insider. It is the true story of Jeffrey Wigand, a man who risked his personal and professional life to blow the whistle on malpractice within the tobacco industry. Al Pacino plays the seasoned news producer who eventually convinces Wigand to come forward with his story in a collaboration that results in a primetime interview conducted by Mike Wallace and aired on CBS. It would become one of the most important pieces that 60 Minutes would ever broadcast. The interesting thing about The Insider is that there isn’t a single character who ever stops to worry about being nice or polite or pleasant to be around. Every character here has a mission to accomplish, and their convictions are such that they’ll either get what they want or die in the process. Available to rent on RUclipsTV.
Before Judd Apatow became the go-to guy for adult comedies with heart, he co-wrote this family comedy - with heart. Ben Stiller plays an overzealous fitness guru who turns a once fun summer camp into a militant weight-loss program for kids who live in bigger bodies. There are plenty of chances to tell this story at the expense of these boys, but it never takes them. The campers endure a grueling summer at the hands of Stiller’s character before taking charge and claiming back their camp in a sort of less-violent Lord of the Flies scenario. The kids are the heroes of Heavyweights - and none of them are required to lose a pound in the process. Heavyweights does what Apatow’s better movies do - like The 40 Year Old Virgin or Funny People or even Knocked Up - it delivers on laughs and then disarms with humanity.
The director of The Pale Blue Eye, Scott Cooper - has shown great mastery of the cinema with movies like Crazy Heart and Out of the Furnace - so I’m always interested to see what stories he chooses and how he brings them to the screen. With this film, he reteams with frequent collaborator Christian Bale to create a period murder mystery that features a young Edgar Allan Poe as one of its main characters. In fact, it’s this character that holds the key to all the best things about the movie. Poe is played here by Harry Melling - the actor who played Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter movies - and it may be solely his performance that makes me recommend The Pale Blue Eye. If Melling continues to turn in nuanced performances like this one, eventually no one will remember that he was once Harry Potter’s bratty little cousin. Streaming on Netflix.
You know actor Harry Dean Stanton, if not by name then by his unmistakable face. He shows up in Alien, Pretty in Pink, the Green Mile… and happens to have one of the best actor names ever. In Paris, Texas, he is at first an unidentifiable man wandering through the desert. Over the course of the film, we will learn that he is the father of a young boy, the husband of a runaway wife, and a long lost brother whose trauma and sadness had pushed him into an anonymous, inconsequential existence. This is a movie that is given all the time in the world to breathe - to just be. Each scene takes its time to play out the way it needs to, and is never in a rush for anything. This is not something American movies are known for, and in fact it is the work of a German director, Wim Wenders - one of the giants of film. This one gets overlooked sometimes - I was thirty before I ever heard of it. But it’s essential. Streaming on Max.

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Awesome list! I want to add that Heavyweights is a great summer movie and kid-friendly