Pam & Tommy
(Robert Siegel)
In 1995, newlyweds Pamela Anderson Lee and Tommy Lee made a sex tape, which was stolen from their safe by disgruntled contractor Rand Gauthier, who sold copies of it online in partnership with porn producer Milton Ingley. The resulting scandal now looks like a fault line in American celebrity culture, affecting Anderson’s career far more than Lee’s, with the Baywatch star turned into a late-night punching bag while the Motley Crue drummer was treated like… well, like a rock star. Pam & Tommy wants to unpack the story from multiple angles, and that’s sort of its problem. (As is its running time; this is yet another television series that really should have been a two-hour movie.) Showrunner Siegel previously explored the disconnect between celebrity and real life in The Wrestler and Big Fan, but any point he might be trying to make here is lost in the bloat of eight tonally inconsistent episodes. Buried under uncanny-valley prosthetics, Lily James does terrific work giving Pam the vulnerability and complexity she deserves, while Sebastian Stan manages the tricky job of playing Tommy Lee as someone who doesn’t have an inner life, and is fine with it. But Seth Rogen, who also produced the project with his partner Evan Goldberg, struggles to do much with Gauthier; the show also never figures out who the guy is, and his self-righteous floundering just eats up screen time.
New episodes Wednesdays through March 9 on Disney+. NNN (NW)
Reacher
(Nick Santora)
After two very silly Tom Cruise movies, this Amazon series gives the hero of Lee Child’s bestselling novels a considerably less annoying incarnation in Alan Ritchson, a very large man with a different take on Child’s man-mountain investigator. Cruise’s interpreter of Reacher was his usual swaggering confidence; Ritchson’s take is more impatient. This Reacher can quickly assess every angle of a situation, and he’s tired of waiting for the people around him to catch up – but Ritchson understands that impatience isn’t necessarily an admirable quality. Here, in an eight-part adaptation of Child’s novel Killing Floor, he’s caught up in a series of murders in a small Georgia town – murders which quickly get personal – and allies himself with the local cops to solve them. It’s meat-and-potatoes storytelling, with at least one bare-knuckle fight and two veiled threats per episode, but Scorpion creator Santora has a good sense of procedural rhythm and he’s assembled an engaging cast, including iZombie’s Malcolm Goodwin and Dare Me’s Willa Fitzgerald, to play it out. And the Ontario locations are surprisingly convincing as the rural South, which I never would have expected.
Entire season now streaming on Amazon Prime Video Canada. NNN (NW)
Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché
(Paul Sng, Celeste Bell)
Poly Styrene was one of the most unique singers in punk. Powerful and subversive, a young biracial singer in a scene dominated by spiky-haired white men – she was anything but a cliché. Watch any of her performances with X-Ray Spex from their late 70s run and your eyes will be glued to the screen. With that kind of footage, it would be easy to focus on that undeniable stage power and celebrate Styrene’s influence as a Black feminist punk icon. That’s definitely in this doc – including commentary from icons like Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, Neneh Cherry and Vivienne Westwood – but the tone is more lyrical, contemplative, almost mournful. That’s because it’s co-directed and co-written by Styrene’s daughter Bell, who doesn’t approach the project as an objective biographer, but rather the daughter of a musical genius who was also a very complicated human being. She doesn’t treat her mother as a perfect saint and delivers a deeply felt memorial in the process.
96 min. Now playing at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema and available online. NNNN (Richard Trapunski)
Murderville
(Krister Johnson)
If you know what “yes-anding” is, this experimental Netflix series will be your new favourite thing. It’s a reworking of the BBC comedy Murder In Successville, where a celebrity guest is taken through an improvised mystery and forced to solve the crime. (Showrunner Johnson has left out the most obnoxious element of the original, which was that all the suspects are other famous people.) With Will Arnett as hard-bitten detective Terry Seattle, who gets a new corpse and a new partner every episode, Murderville might not satisfy as straight comedy, but as an exploration of the process of making comedy it’s absolutely riveting. It feels like a weird take on Survivor, with a funny person dropped into a fabricated situation and forced to either go with it or get left behind. (The guest hasn’t been given a script, and must name the killer themselves.) It’s possible to enjoy as a comedy about dopey cops trying to solve crimes, but it’s much more interesting to focus on the contrasting approaches of Conan O’Brien, Marshawn Lynch, Kumail Nanjiani, Annie Murphy, Sharon Stone and Ken Jeong as they try not to break character while barging into preposterous situations or following ridiculous instructions from Arnett. I can’t say I laughed a lot at Murderville, but I enjoyed the hell out of every episode. And I want to see Sharon Stone in more comedies.
All six episodes now streaming on Netflix Canada. NNNN (NW)
Available on VOD
Clerk.
Documentary directed by Malcolm Ingram
Apple TV, Cineplex, Google Play
Hive
Yllka Gashli, Çun Lajçi, Aurita Agushi; directed by Blerta Basholli
House Of Gucci
Adam Driver, Lady Gaga, Jared Leto; directed by Ridley Scott
Apple TV, Cineplex, Google Play
Julia
Documentary directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West
Apple TV, Cineplex, Google Play
Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliche
Documentary directed by Celeste Bell and Paul Sng
Apple TV, Cineplex, Google Play, Hot Docs At Home
Streaming guides
Everything on streaming platforms this month:
Disc of the week
Ghostbusters Ultimate Collection (Sony, 4K)
Well, this is awkward: just three days after arriving in stores, Sony’s super-special release of the three “official” Ghostbusters movies – yes, it’s insulting to Paul Feig’s 2016 reboot, and I’ll get to that – is officially sold out. Meaning that if you haven’t already secured your copy, you are unlikely to ever own this frankly dazzling 10-disc set, which rounds up newly remastered 4K editions of Ivan Reitman’s 80s horror-comedies Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II and packages them with Jason Reitman’s 2021 legacy sequel Ghostbusters: Afterlife, two discs of franchise-spanning special features and a reproduction of Don Shay’s 1985 book Making Ghostbusters in a cardboard replica of the franchise’s signature ghost trap.
As overpackaged nerd collectibles go, it’s very charming. But what’s inside is invaluable: glorious new presentations of the 80s movies – now encoded in Dolby Vision as well as HDR, with their original 5.1 and 2.0 stereo soundtracks included alongside the Atmos mixes that were the only audio option on their previous UHD incarnations – as well as the brand-new Afterlife and a host of special features. The 4K discs of each film are accompanied by a companion Blu-ray, where you’ll find the audio commentaries and picture-in-picture stuff. The rest of the supplements are spun off into those bonus Blu-rays.
The original Ghostbusters gets its own disc, and rightly so. Try as Hollywood might to replicate Ivan Reitman’s 1984 mixture of laconic comedy and elaborate horror fantasy, there’s never been another movie like it. What’s remarkable now, almost 40 years on, is how weird and volatile every scene feels, as if neither the characters nor the filmmakers fully understand the energy they’ve unleashed. (They couldn’t even recapture that perfect balance of Dan Aykroyd’s elaborate multidimensional mythology and Harold Ramis’s everyman attitude five years later in Ghostbusters II.)
And in addition to the exhaustive supplements from previous releases of the film – audio commentaries, deleted scenes and alternate takes, retrospective documentaries, effects breakdowns, that Ray Parker Jr music video – this set offers hours of new supplements on the first bonus Blu-ray, starting with an unfinished, longer cut of the film screened for test audiences that offers an invaluable window into the production process. (Producer Joe Medjuck and editor Sheldon Khan provide a new audio commentary filled with weird little insights.) It’s presented in standard definition; the dropouts are a dead giveaway that it’s been transferred from an old videotape. But it’s much more watchable than I would have expected, given its age. The broadcast TV version is also included, also in SD, with László Kovács’s widescreen compositions hideously panned-and-scanned – as was the style at the time. I do not recommend it.
A must-see, though, is the archive of casting tapes for Dana Barrett, the role ultimately played by Sigourney Weaver. There’s an hour of video here, with actors like Denise Crosby, Kelly LeBrock, Melanie Mayron, Kelly McGillis, Joanna Pacula and more all reading Dana’s initial meeting with Peter Venkman. (An offscreen Ramis reads the Venkman role in most of them; Aykroyd steps in for LeBrock’s session.) It’s both informative and fascinating to see all these talents taking a run at the character, and realize how important the flinty, flirty bemusement Weaver uses to parry Venkman’s advances was to making that relationship work. There’s also a feature-length documentary produced for the Reelz cable channel’s Behind Closed Doors series in 2019, using the production of Afterlife as a hook.
The second special-features Blu-ray feels a little paltry, being mostly devoted to Ghostbusters II, a film for which no one seems to have regard these days. (I still like it, dammit; Peter MacNicol is hysterical and the notion of mood slime seems awfully relevant again these days.) The existing extras from previous releases are now accompanied by about 20 newly unearthed deleted and alternate scenes (most of them pretty short, and in various stages of completion; the entire section runs just under 20 minutes) and the 4:3 SD broadcast version of the film (which, again, ugh). There’s also a tiny section of Afterlife exclusives: a handful of trailers and a video message for exhibitors shot by Jason Reitman on the Calgary set.
Most of the Afterlife extras are on that movie’s Blu-ray disc, and they’re pretty standard stuff for a contemporary studio tentpole. The slickness of the featurettes feels even more processed when compared to the messier marketing material of the 80s. And, of course, the highlights are tied directly to the original Ghostbusters: there’s an extended version of the scene between Carrie Coon and Annie Potts in the dirt-farm cabin that adds a little more exposition and a lot more wistfulness, and a featurette where Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson and Ivan Reitman sit down together and discuss the enduring appeal of the original movie. It’s only 10 minutes long, but it’s a more satisfying interaction than they’re given in the new picture.
