Self-isolating upside: A chance to catch up on (or revisit) terrific titles during Hollywood Suite freebie month

With theatres shut, we at Original-Cin are doing what you’re probably doing, watching movies at home. We’ll be reviewing films that would have opened in theatres, but are now streaming, plus other worthy watches on cable and streaming services.

By Linda Barnard
With theatres shuttered, we’re all hitting the couch. And with new releases bowing via streaming, here’s an opportunity to see movies you may have missed when they came out, titles that pre-dated your moviegoing, or ones you want to see again, just because.

Now you have the time to do it. Besides, staying home has another perk: the popcorn from your microwave has all the butter you want. To get you started with look-back movie watching, Canadian streaming service Hollywood Suite has a select free preview this month. The movie menu is grouped by decade, from ’70s to the ’00s.

Luke Kirby and Michelle Williams in Take This Waltz. Take this Waltz is available on Hollywood Suite this month.

There’s no pattern to the four I’ve picked to recommend, one from each decade. Some were chosen because they influenced the culture of the time, or filmmakers that followed. I enjoyed watching them again. Perhaps you will, too — and that includes Flashdance. What a feeling, indeed.

The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

Directed by Bob Rafelson. Starring Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn and Julia Anne Robinson.

Fair play if you rank Five Easy Pieces above The King of Marvin Gardens among Bob Rafelson-Jack Nicolson director-actor collaborations. Two years after making the drama about Nicholson’s pianist-turned-oil rig worker, Rafelson (also co-creator of The Monkees TV series) was still impressing as a force behind American cinema’s new wave. Nicholson, light years from the grinning guy in Ray-Bans in the Oscar’s front row, continued to build on his work as a quietly powerful, insightful actor.

While The King of Marvin Gardens carries some of Five Easy Pieces with it, it stands on its own as an often bizarre drama about the dark side of the American dream. It opens with a monologue from late-night Philadelphia deejay-writer David Staebler (Nicholson). Shot in tight close-up, the tale he tells may (or may not) be a true family story about why he never eats fish. David knows how to spin a yarn, including ones featuring his brother, Jason (Bruce Dern). Jason is living in Atlantic City where, to hear him tell it, he’s all but spinning straw into gold while working on a big deal that will see the brothers running a casino on a tiny Hawaiian island.

Jason convinces David to join him, sending a welcoming committee to the train station starring a ragtag band and his ex-beauty queen girlfriend Sally (Ellen Burstyn in an unsettlingly brilliant performance). Meanwhile, her fresh-faced stepdaughter Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson), pawn or player, is back at the hotel.

The Atlantic City setting, several years before the arrival of gambling, is tawdry and bleakly frigid in the off-season chill. The famous boardwalk is lumpy and nearly deserted. Threadbare furniture fills rundown once-grand hotel lobbies.

Never a hit with critics or audiences when released, The King of Marvin Gardens is often depressing and occasionally off-kilter. But I’d argue for the power of Dern’s wild-eyed monologues, the fascination of watching Burstyn’s Sally coming apart, and the power of Nicholson’s low-key, despondent story spinner.

Flashdance (1983)

Directed by Adrian Lyne. Starring Jennifer Beals and Michael Nouri.

Think of Flashdance as the cinematic equivalent of all that coronavirus stress eating you’ve been doing the past couple of weeks — chips, chocolate, Pop Rocks!

In her first leading role, Jennifer Beals showed us how to take a bra off while still wearing her shirt and proved tough guys can come off the afternoon shift at the steel mill and still appreciate the artistry of the dance.

Beals plays Alex. Welder by day and dancer by night, she has big dreams of going artist-legit as a ballerina. I wondered why I kept hearing Showgirls’ stripper star Nomi Malone insisting “I’m a dancer!” in my head, then recalled Flashdance co-writer Joe Eszterhas was also responsible for the Showgirls script.

Raise your hand if you remember images of the doe-eyed Beals with that voluminous sweatshirt sliding off her bare shoulder. The one-shoulder, slouchy top look was everywhere in the summer of 1983.
Flashdance is pure 1980s nostalgia, a MuchMusic top 10 videos, big-hair, 20 Minute Workout, leg warmers-wearing plunge into the past. The soundtrack is great — Phil Ramone was the music supervisor — with hits from Kim Carnes, Joan Jett and Irene Cara’s vocals on the Oscar-winning title tune “Flashdance… What a Feeling.”

The plot is an afterthought and the dialogue is dreadful but the dancing is terrific, especially numbers performed by Beal’s athletic dance double Marine Jahan. The well-known signature routine features a great gush of water from overhead, soaking Beals at just the right moment.

Alex’s rich-guy boss (Michael Nouri), who never noticed her when she was wearing a welder’s mask, is extremely interested after seeing her dance in a sopping-wet teddy onstage at the local bar. This is the joint where guys hang out over a few beers to watch mostly clothed women furiously dance in highly choreographed routines, usually involving a chair. Because this is Hollywood’s version of what men watch in clubs where women dance, it’s not far-fetched at all.

There’s a running theme of striving, from Alex, to her aspiring figure skater pal Jeanie (Sunny Johnson) and burger flipper Richie (Kyle T. Heffner), who thinks Polish jokes are his ticket to stand-up stardom.
Turn the volume up and do some serious living room dancing for this one, a guaranteed quarantine blues buster.

Brad Pitt in Se7en. Se7en is on Hollywood Suite this month.

Se7en (1995)

Directed by David Fincher. Starring Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kevin Spacey.

Morgan Freeman’s Det. William Somerset is days away from retirement and new hotshot on the beat David Mills (Brad Pitt) is itching to take his place when a serial killer with a Seven Deadly Sins fixation gets to work in David Fincher’s macabre drama, Seven.

The title is often stylized as Se7en, but we’ll stick with the proper spelling from here on. As long as we’re on the topic of graphic style, check out the hand-drawn, jumpy, dynamic opening credits created by Kyle Cooper, a game-changing sequence that continues in Fincher films.

The victims quickly stack up in Seven (which precedes Fincher’s Fight Club and serial-killer drama Zodiac). They’re gruesomely dispatched in creative ways as the killer ticks off his list: gluttony, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and wrath until he reaches an unforgettable and shattering conclusion.

As they try to find the killer, Somerset has the experience to discover his well-hidden clues. The antsy Mills won’t be left behind in the hunt. He’s got some catching up to do on a variety of subjects, which is how he ends up pronouncing the Marquis de Sade’s name like British-Nigerian singer Sade.

Fincher repeatedly pushes the audience off balance. And it’s not just with the freakish murders that draw from both scripture and classic literature. We see unsettling rot in every scene. From the hallway at the police station to an infested tenement, every building in the gloomy city, presumably New York, is dark and decaying, or near collapse. Each grimy room has water-stained walls. And no wonder it’s always raining. Characters miserably shake off raindrops and dodge puddles.

The parade of mutilated bodies is relentless. Fincher does briefly slow things down and gives the audience a break for an engaging scene where Mills’ wife Tracy (Paltrow) tries to bring the battling cops together over the family dinner table.

Both Freeman and Pitt give noteworthy performances, although the plot feels gimmicky rather than original and comparisons to better films of the genre, including The Silence of the Lambs, are unavoidable.

Take This Waltz (2012)

Written and directed by Sarah Polley. Starring Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Luke Kirby and Sarah Silverman.

Everybody is sweat-slicked from summer heat and desire writer-director Sarah Polley’s riotously colourful, Toronto-set romantic drama. As with her 2006 relationship story Away from Her, a challenged marriage takes centre stage. But this time the focus is on younger spouses and the difficulties are of their own making.

Struggling writer Margot (Michelle Williams) and her cookbook-author husband Lou (Seth Rogen, ably handling a dramatic role) have an affectionate, if childish, relationship. A chance meeting between Margot and frustrated artist Daniel (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Luke Kirby) while she is on assignment in Nova Scotia becomes an obsession after they meet again when they return to Toronto. They flirt over martinis and share watermelon aboard the Centre Island ferry on a Toronto Harbour that miraculously looks tropical blue. Meanwhile, unsuspecting Lou blithely works out chicken recipes for his next book in their funky kitchen.
Lou’s sister Geraldine (Sarah Silverman) struggles with sobriety and finds a sympathetic helpmate in Margot, but soon grows suspicious of the stranger who seems to be hanging around her sister-in-law a little too much.
Margot is immature and self-absorbed, one who prefers to have her husband talk baby babble to her until she meets the icy, often-distant Daniel and decides to change the rules about marital fidelity on poor, confused Lou. Throughout, Toronto’s west-end streets throb with the heat and colour of a city summer, a delicious backdrop for a play of love and lust that evolves along patches of steamy pavement.