{"id":17259,"date":"2022-01-12T00:15:14","date_gmt":"2022-01-12T00:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=17259"},"modified":"2022-01-12T17:50:11","modified_gmt":"2022-01-12T17:50:11","slug":"streaming-craftsmanship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2022\/01\/12\/streaming-craftsmanship\/","title":{"rendered":"Streaming Craftsmanship"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Ken Stokes<\/em><\/p>\n

When streaming services began producing original feature film content, pundits were quick to write the obituary for cinema\u2014a term that no longer refers to the medium so much as the elusive standard of originality and artistry that holds up over time. A similar thing was said when paid cable got into the production of long-format television.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, Netflix is doing for film what Sundance and (I hate even mentioning the brand name anymore) Miramax did for film in the \u201990s. They\u2019re not the only guys in the game, but if this were high-stakes Texas Hold\u2019em I wouldn\u2019t relish being one of the other players at the table. This year, Netflix is involved with the creation and presentation of two instant cinema classics: The Power of the Dog and Tic, Tic \u2026 Boom!<\/p>\n

\u2018Power\u2019<\/b><\/p>\n

Rewind to 1993. In any other year Jane Campion\u2019s The Piano, a watershed film about a woman crafting a life worth living from the very obstacles presented to her by both nature and men, would have been a lock for the Best Picture and Best Director Oscars. Then Schindler\u2019s List debuted. It was Seabiscuit and War Horse, and the big horse won. After a seeming-eternity away from filmmaking, Ms. Campion is back and has reset the bar for herself and her colleagues with The Power of the Dog, a film so gorgeous, so unique, so relevant and so unexpectedly moving that, frankly, it has no rivals this season.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a Western. So what is a Western anyway? When all is said and done, it\u2019s a genre where people, like hothouse flowers, have been transplanted into hostile environments and circumstances and it\u2019s thrive or wither. And there\u2019s a bad guy. A really bad guy.<\/p>\n

Or is he? What opens up as John Ford by way of David Lean slides into psychological study (thriller?) territory and ends up as a bona fide tragedy. People throw around the term \u2018toxic masculinity\u2019 pretty freely, but the composition and process of making the poison makes all the difference. I\u2019ve never seen the sheer weight of a man\u2019s loss and self-hatred shown on screen as it is in this film, and it opens over time like a festering wound to expose a person so hardened and yet so fragile that one cannot help being moved.<\/p>\n

But the capper, of course, is recognition and redemption from the most unlikely and yet the most obvious source. Benedict Cumberbatch gives a performance for the ages. It\u2019ll break your heart. The sheer craft of the film is astonishing. And it has a debut role for Kodi Smit-McPhee as a very well-placed interloper (not unlike Christ) that will be an inspiration for more struggling people than I care to count.<\/p>\n

\u2018Boom\u2019<\/b><\/p>\n

Now for something completely different but nonetheless wonderful, Tic, Tic . . . Boom!\u2014the little musical that could. In a year when the Latinx community and its gatekeepers are hand-wringing over the merits of two very expensive film musicals, the adaptation of Jonathan Larson\u2019s sophomore outing in musical theater snuck in under the radar. Jonathan Larson\u2014the van Gogh of musical theater\u2014died before the preview of his third and last work, Rent. The unexpected harbinger of an unimaginable tragedy, Tic, Tic . . . Boom! is about running out of time, creatively for oneself and for the genre itself. Hamilton fans will be familiar with the concept.<\/p>\n

Moreover, it is a love-letter to the creative process and how that process is inseparable from the life one lives as one creates. It\u2019s a beautiful tribute to Larson\u2019s mentor and spirit animal, the iconic Stephen Sondheim, and especially to Sunday in the Park with George\u2014Steve\u2019s masterpiece about the creative process.<\/p>\n

The film is charming because it\u2019s small, intimate; this is not West Side Story. Lin-Manuel Miranda directs with a deft second-unit, news-at-11 sensibility that opens up\u2014but not too much\u2014into ingenious musical outbursts that are never less than funny, moving or delightful. Andrew Garfield\u2019s performance is all puppies and birthday candles, even when his character is on the ropes. It\u2019s the embodiment of hope with the foreboding of a short shelf life. But the most refreshing aspect of Garfield\u2019s performance is that it reminds us that current film musical darling Hugh Jackman is old-school and that times must change. And thankfully there\u2019s a new kid in town.<\/p>\n

Format & Function<\/b><\/p>\n

So back to the medium, Netflix. Does this mean artistic imagination will be imprisoned by the dimensions of the largest in-home theater packages sold at Costco? Three things are still very much in play: the ratio of proscenium size to viewer distance, sound, and communal experience. The two films I\u2019ve mentioned are extraordinary in-home entertainment experiences. Offered on the same screens that are the more-customary home of Marvel and DC Comics, suddenly The Power of the Dog becomes \u201cthe magic of the movies\u201d in exactly the same way as cerebral, breathtaking and enduring epics like Lawrence of Arabia or, and not coincidentally, The Piano.<\/p>\n

The challenge will be, as it has been since Mr. Spielberg showed up on set, to get screen time in the best venues that are ideal for a given film\u2019s target demo. How to do that? Well Steve, rather than bitch about the seismic change in who makes what and what\u2019s shown where, wouldn\u2019t this be a marvelous legacy project?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ken Stokes When streaming services began producing original feature film content, pundits were quick to write the obituary for cinema\u2014a term that no longer refers to the medium so much as the elusive standard of originality and artistry that holds up over time. A similar thing was said when paid cable got into the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17262,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17259"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17264,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17259\/revisions\/17264"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}