Streaming guide: Lost Aretha Franklin documentary Amazing Grace like watching history being made
Aretha Franklin’s musical perfection has always been there for all to hear and now you can see it too, with Amazing Grace now available to stream. And here’s what else to binge this weekend.
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THE ONE THAT SINGS IT … AND BRINGS IT
AMAZING GRACE (G)
*****
BINGE, FOXTEL
The perfection has always been there for all to hear. Now all can finally see it too. This magically uplifting doco leads you to a room where one of the greatest musical performances of the past century took place. The year is 1972, and singer Aretha Franklin is already renowned far and wide as ‘The Queen of Soul’. At the height of her powers as an incomparable purveyor of rhythm and blues, Franklin took the radical step of recording a live album of the gospel music that forged her golden gifts at a young age. All you will be treated to in Amazing Grace is a filmed chronicle (long thought lost due to technical issues) of this incredible session, staged over two nights with a local community choir in a Baptist Church in Los Angeles. All the places you will be taken to by Franklin’s twelve sublime renditions of homegrown spirituals and time-honoured standards cannot be found on any map. This is history being made. This is music at its most powerful and totally embracing: awash with all the joy, sorrow and wonder of life itself.
THE ONE THAT SHOOTS FOR THE MOON
FIRST MAN (M)
****1/2
NETFLIX
The epic story of the eight-year journey of Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) from unassuming civilian pilot-engineer to unlikely NASA astronaut, becoming the first man to set foot on the moon. Though its brave visual style and skeletal storytelling are sure to divide viewers, First Man is still undoubtedly one of the best movie releases of the past few years. Oscar-winning director Damien Chazelle (La La Land) has shaped an imposing screen spectacle with an intimacy and intricacy normally undetected on this vast cinematic scale. The key scenes are those focusing exclusively on Armstrong strapped inside a variety of spacecraft as the US missions of Gemini and Apollo evolve. Chazelle’s frenetically rattling camera keeps registering confusion, concentration and real terror in Armstrong’s eyes. Then there is the sound the craft makes: a chilling combination of a rolling thunderous rumble, topped by a continuous metallic scream. To reach for greatness from such a primitive, low-tech place inspires legitimate awe, fear and wonder.
THE ONE WHERE A NEW LOVE MAY NOT BE TRUE LOVE
ON CHESIL BEACH (M)
***1/2
BINGE, FOXTEL
An upfront warning on this deceptively intense and insightful romantic drama: do not schedule On Chesil Beach for your next date night. The bulk of the plotting transpires in 1962, on the first day and night of a coastal honeymoon for young newlyweds Florence (Lady Bird Oscar nominee, the ever-consistent Saoirse Ronan) and Edward Mayhew (Billy Howle, a rising star on the UK scene best known in these parts for a quality turn in Dunkirk). It only takes the most basic scan of the pair’s first conversation to realise this is a couple who love each other to bits, yet barely know each other at all. A series of flashbacks which recur across the length of the film fill us in on how this awkward state of affairs came to be. Both lead performances deliver exactly what is required from author Ian McEwen’s screen adaptation of his own novel. Particularly when it comes to finding that fine, defining line that separates innocent longing and irrational desire (not unlike another well-known McEwen movie, Atonement).
THE ONE THAT GOT SOMETHING COOKING
THE KITCHEN (MA15+)
***
NETFLIX, FOXTEL & rent via GOOGLE, ITUNES, YOUTUBE
This unorthodox and unrelentingly violent crime drama hits the ground running, only to slow down to a jog before falling across the finish line exhausted. Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss star as three Hell’s Kitchen’s housewives hitched to three crooked gangsters. When their brutish better halves are thrown in jail, the ladies are left to fend for themselves. This being New York City in the early 1980s, the hard-boiled heroines know all too well desperate times demand desperate measures. So they set up a protection racket – first using hired muscle, then their own rapidly evolving intimidation techniques – to become the dominant mobsters in their neighbourhood. While the three leads impress, the screenplay (based on an obscure comic book series) can get somewhat sketchy. Co-stars Domhnall Gleeson, currently doing great work in the Foxtel series Run.
THE ONE THAT JUST WON’T STAGGER OFF AND DIE
ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP (MA15+)
***
FOXTEL, AMAZON & rent via GOOGLE, ITUNES, YOUTUBE
Did they really need to go and make a sequel to the 2009 comedy thriller Zombieland? No, they, did not. Have they gone and made a decent fist of that sequel anyway? Yes, indeed they have. If you remember the original at all, it will still be fondly, if kind of vaguely. No crime in having a hazy memory on this front. Let’s be frank: a helluva lot of zombie-ness has passed through the collective consciousness in the last decade. Anyway, the most important factor in play here is that most of the original cast has returned to active duty. When you’re talking names such as Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson – all bigger names now than they were back then – a diminished team sheet would have guaranteed a diminished movie. Not so here. Though a slight notch down from its predecessor, Double Tap goes about its undead and up-to-something business the right way from go to whoa.
THE ONE PLANNING FOR A BETTER FUTURE
2040 (G)
***1/2
BINGE, FOXTEL & rent via GOOGLE
Damon Gameau follows up his surprise edu-doco hit That Sugar Film by taking on a more complex and contentious issue: the future environmental health of our planet. The target audience here is schoolchildren, who will be of adult age by the year quoted in the title. So too will Gameau’s own young daughter, and it is with her in mind that the filmmaker travels the globe for an array of perspectives on how our world might look in 2040. The tone here is more sky’s-the-limit than sky-is-falling, so Gameau’s modest, yet refreshingly upbeat game plan is all about looking for solutions, rather than anguishing over ideologies. Straightforwardly informative, relatable and engaging throughout.
THE ONE PLANNING FOR AN ALL-OUT ATTACK
THE LAST CASTLE (M)
***
NETFLIX
A welcome return to streaming for an underrated guilty-pleasure flick. What could have been one very average prison drama is elevated to something much more entertaining thanks to a single plot twist, which sees the inmates-versus-the-guards battle take place in a military jail. Robert Redford (as a court-martialled war hero) and The Sopranos’ James Gandolfini (as a cruel, unhinged warden) serve up an enthralling acting duel, even if credibility is stretched to breaking point by a ludicrous finale. Soul-stirringly silly feelbad fun.
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