When private pain becomes political
The artist Nan Goldin takes on America’s opioid crisis; a literary horror about Big Pharma, and everything else worth streaming this week.
All The Beauty and the Bloodshed
Stan
The searing documentary by Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras (CitizenFour) has many moving parts. It’s both a portrait of photographer Nan Goldin and a procedural on her work as an activist who used her art world prominence to take on the family responsible for America’s opioid crisis. The film traces Goldin’s traumatic childhood in the ‘60s — her loveless family and the trauma of her older sister Barbara’s suicide; her burgeoning career in New York in the ’70s, where she photographed friends, queer and trans people, and underground stars like Cookie Mueller; her landmark book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (her famous slide shows of the era are prominently featured); and a 1989 show she curated which was the first to ever tackle the AIDS crisis. In 2017, Goldin, an OxyContin-addiction survivor, founded the activist group P.A.I.N, through which she staged protests and “die-ins” at institutions that had accepted money from the Sackler family, the billionaire dynasty whose company, Purdue Pharma, developed and marketed the opioid painkiller OxyContin. All The Beauty and The Bloodshed is a rare bird, the kind of life-affirming film that never feels overwrought. A side note: there is currently a Nan Goldin exhibition running at the NGA in Canberra that is well worth your time.
Search Party
Stan
If All The Beauty and the Bloodshed left you utterly devastated, and you require pepping up, look no further than Search Party. The show follows four narcissistic 20-something Brooklynites who become amateur sleuths when the heroine, Dory (Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat) becomes obsessed with a missing persons case involving a girl she vaguely knew in college. Rounding off the crew is Drew (John Reynolds), Dory’s well-meaning but overly anxious boyfriend; her gay best friend Elliott (John Early) a catty fabulist who is desperate to be the most interesting person in the room, despite never doing anything interesting; and Portia (Meredith Hagner) a ditzy platinum blonde actor who somehow landed a gig playing a Latino in a stodgy TV detective drama. It’s an anxiety-inducing thriller wrapped in the guise of a comedy that skewers millennial self-absorption. It works great as a sit-com, but takes it even further with impressively well-rounded mysteries. If you loved Broad City, you’ll vibe with this.
The Fall of the House of Usher
Netflix
The writer-director Mike Flanagan, who produced literary horror hits like the marvellous The Haunting of Hill House and the less-satisfying The Haunting of Bly Manor, returns with a new show just in time for Halloween. This series is not, as some may mistakenly believe, a documentary about the downfall of an R’N’B singer — rather, it’s a riff of an Edgar Allen Poe story, and a good one at that. In this, Flanagan has updated the Poe story to the creepy world of Big Pharma. Bruce Greenwood stars as the head of a scandal-plagued family who made their billions flogging opiates that have destroyed the American public (sound familiar …?). He gets his just desserts when every one of his children starts dying mysterious, bloody deaths. It’s a glossy, gothic melodrama rounded off by a great cast including Carla Gugino, Carl Lumbly, Mark Hamill and Henry Thomas.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
Netflix
When Wes Anderson was writing the script for Fantastic Mr. Fox, he lived, for a while, in Roald Dahl’s “Gipsy House” in Buckinghamshire. This writer’s hut is deliciously reproduced in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar — the centrepiece of Anderson’s four-part collection of Dahl shorts for Netflix. It starts with Dahl (played by Ralph Fiennes) mooching around his study, surveying his talismans — colour pencils, a drawing board, chocolate and cigarettes — and discussing his writing process. It stars languidly, but then, like a jumpscare, it’s whizzbang into the action. Benedict Cumberbatch plays a moneyed-up scamp who goes through a kind of spiritual awakening when he learns of the history of Imdad Khan (Ben Kingsley, just perfect), a circus entertainer with X-ray vision, and dedicates his life to learning the tricks of the trade, in the hope of becoming a blackjack cheat. Richard Ayoade — who was born for an Anderson production — and Dev Patel play dual roles.
Gen V
Amazon Prime
Those who baulk at all things “superhero culture” may find themselves pleasantly surprised by Gen V — a snappy teen spin-off of the very adult satire The Boys. The story centres on the orphaned Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair), who we follow Marie as she starts at the prestigious superhero university Godolkin — in which male students are trained to be vigilantes and female students are trained to be … “Dancing with the Stars” contestants. There are plenty of snarky jokes that skewer everything from toxic masculinity, PC culture, right-wing extremism, and members of the ex-Kardashian clan. For a quote-unquote teen show, there is a lot of sex and barbaric violence, but it’s good fun.