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Holiday streaming: confinement vs. escapism

By Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Published: November 25, 2020, 6:04am
2 Photos
Gal Gadot returns as the Amazing Amazon in &quot;Wonder Woman 1984.&quot; (Clay Enos/Warner Bros)
Gal Gadot returns as the Amazing Amazon in "Wonder Woman 1984." (Clay Enos/Warner Bros) Photo Gallery

Watching “Schitt’s Creek,” a pre-pandemic Canadian production that has become a binge staple in millions of mid-pandemic U.S. households, you may find something odd happening around the middle of Season 3. The motel room where much of it takes place starts to remind you, with every new exterior establishing shot, that you’re in lockdown, in late 2020, watching a comedy of confinement. This is getting away from it all?

I like and occasionally love “Schitt’s Creek,” but it’s no wonder many of the same millions have fallen for “The Queen’s Gambit,” the seven-part streaming phenomenon also on Netflix. It offers so many things our lives right now are not: rangy, globe-trotting, a triumph over adversity. We’re still in the muddling-through phase. Some of our fellow citizens are still in the mask-optional phase.

Evoking the image recycled by so many old Westerns, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in early November: “The cavalry is coming.” The COVID-19 vaccine race looks promising indeed. As if she hadn’t done enough for us as a nation already, Dolly Parton invested $1 million in the development of Moderna’s vaccine. I seriously love the idea of Parton, a generous, philanthropic, shining star of music, movies and a theme park, becoming the emblem of a corner being turned. She might achieve the impossible: uniting America in, yes, a triumph over adversity.

Meantime: I screen, you screen, we all screen till our eyes scream.

Some of us look backward, not just to stories such as “The Queen’s Gambit” taking us away from 2020 but to TV shows that were huge a few years back, and are happily new to a new generation.

My 20-year-old son, for instance, has fallen hard for “Mad Men.”

“I got into it,” he wrote me the other day, “because I’d finished ‘Billions’ with Paul Giamatti (highly, highly recommend) and wanted another slow-burn cutthroat office show. I didn’t get into it because it’s a departure from the work-from-home rut too many of us are in. But I do appreciate it as a 1960s time capsule … when there were seemingly no rules in an office culture.” Misogyny and day-drinking, it’s a throwback to a time, as he put it, “when something like an office Christmas party might be on the docket.”

There’s no predicting what might hit our sweet spot during this peculiar, isolating holiday season. On paper, a Netflix adaptation of August Wilson’s breakthrough play “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (Dec. 18) seems an unlikely seasonal winner. Set largely inside a 1927 Chicago recording studio — on stage, it never left that location — director George C. Wolfe’s tightly compressed film is all about confinement and waiting.

In harsh and eloquent ways, scored by beautiful dramatic poetry, “Ma Rainey” takes us back nearly a century. It illustrates, through music and feeling and reflection, how Black talent in America has been forced to work around, and through, a white system of commercial exploitation.

The late Chadwick Boseman finished filming just months before he died. In his superb final performance, he plays the reckless jazz trumpeter Levee (fictional) working with Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (real), portrayed by Viola Davis, no less remarkable. The material isn’t treated somberly, as a self-consciously important American story, though it surely is. With deceptive ease it unwraps like a holiday gift, in which the living honor the deceased.

There are, for the record, other streaming platforms besides Netflix. “How To with John Wilson,” currently streaming on HBO Max, premiered in October and it’s still the funniest thing around. Wilson follows his endlessly distractable curiosity around his homeland, aka Manhattan. We learn about many oddities: the $8 billion a year New York City scaffolding industry; memory tricks and exercises; the pre-pandemic Cancun spring break scene (“a mecca of superficial interactions”). Wilson’s voiceovers, delivered with unerring comic timing, suggest the grandson Bob Newhart didn’t know he had.

Forced into digital release by the novel coronavirus — and by the way, I’m ready for the novelization of the film version of the coronavirus right about now — some huge mainstream enticements have already announced late 2020 streaming dates. Disney/Pixar’s “Soul” made its world premiere in October at the BFI London Film Festival; it’ll be available Dec. 25 on Disney Plus.

Over at Warner Bros., studio chiefs have several nerve-wracking options regarding “Wonder Woman 1984,” which has been in the can for nearly a year now.

They can stick with the Dec. 25 theatrical release plan, which seems unlikeliest. They can give theaters a go for a couple of weeks, where pandemically open for business, and then whisk it onto HBO Max, to drive up subscribers. Or they can wait till deep into next year, as have so may other franchises, from James Bond to the “Fast and Furious” fossil-fuel maniacs.

Such proven global draws remain the stuff that film exhibitors’ dreams are made on. Now more than ever, many of us crave watching destructive mayhem on a large canvas.

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