Streaming Shuffle
In which awkward screaming fits claim yet another Christmas party. Will the world never learn?
If you want a taste of Christmas in (almost) July, and you have a spare fifteen minutes, Chris Shepherd’s “Bad Night for the Blues” is like a shot of boozy eggnog.
It’s a darkly funny slice-of-life film, unsentimental about human nature but—in the end—aware that we rotten creatures may still miss each other when we’re gone. There’s something very Christmassy about that, after all. The holidays are often a time for family … whether you like it or not.
Chris (Kieran Lynn) is a young Liverpudlian doing his duty by his old aunt Glad (Jean Boht), who lives to criticize and complain; Chris chauffeurs her to the local Conservative Club, where Christmas means bingo, sleaze, backbiting, and public drama. And so we settle in for a night with some aging Tories, and Shepherd makes sure it’s a night to remember.
The comedy starts out standard but effective, with the generation gap between Glad and Chris leading to predictable (but, again, funny) bits like Glad giving her nephew a death-glare from behind the curtains for even thinking it was acceptable to announce his arrival by honking instead of coming to the door. Chris should get rid of his accent. He should wear a tie. Manners, manners.
But everything changes when they reach the banquet hall. Before they even sit down, Glad has faked a cancer diagnosis in a conversation with a cancer patient: “Why should she have a monopoly on dying?” she sneers to Chris.
Glad’s essential nature emerges over the next few minutes, revealing an almost childlike greed—for attention, for love, for preeminence. And, naturally, for free wine. But even as she viciously harangues a widow, there’s a vulnerability beneath her nastiness. The drunker she gets, the more Boht opens up her performance, until her emotions are almost naked.
The man the widow is mourning is, after all, Glad’s ex, and she’s mourning him too: there’s an uneasy sense of both black comedy and the gothic to how she eagerly strokes her nephew’s hand as she slurs her way through the tale of what may have been her first time. Uncomfortable? Sure. But this is an elderly woman who still talks about an erection like it was a phenomenon specific to one man, her Roger—“And it grew and grew … like a flower”—and who may have never had that kind of intimacy again. She didn’t lose a husband, but she lost her only connection to a freer, more passionate life. So she drinks—and screams.
Her drunken breakdown is paralleled by a small, two-beat subplot. Some of the attendees buttonhole the party’s host, a smarmy local politician, and demand clarity on the bingo situation: where are the pens? It’s stand-up bingo, where you sit down as your number is called and the last person standing wins? What newfangled nonsense is that? Bingo is supposed to have pens. But even though much of their outrage stems from the violation of hallowed bingo tradition, they hit on a valid objection: what about Veronica, who uses a wheelchair? She can’t stand up. Their host—what with being a Conservative politician and everything—shrugs this off. No suggestion of alternatives, like Veronica raising her hand, no, she’ll have to “sit this one out.”1 “Come on, ladies,” he says. “There’s more to life than bingo.” They’re aghast: “That’s what you think!”
It’s funny, but it’s also Glad’s story in miniature. There’s more to life than this, or so I think, but there’s no more to her life. She’s been left out of the only game she knows how to play.
In this gathering thick with familiar, authorized crudeness and contempt, however, Chris stands out as someone as not at all interested in this particular playbook. He’s believable as a young man having a comically hellish night out, which is to say that he never wants to make too much of a fuss and he’s not above a spot of surreptitious laughter at it all. But he’s kind, and his kindness is a breath of fresh air. (And he’s a little bit of a troll, which is pretty good too.) When he puts Aunty Glad’s hat back on her and patiently escorts her to the car, shrugging off her disapproval of him and promising to do better next year, it feels like unconditional love, however mild and however amused.2 It’s a real ancient virtue in the midst of all the fake traditional values. For one day every year, he’ll be there for her.
Maybe it’s not enough. But like bingo, it’s something.
“Bad Night for the Blues” is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
Dan Duryea gets a shave and a second chance.
Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Alias Nick Beal — noble but frustrated DA Thomas Mitchell remarks that he would sell his soul for the opportunity to finally put away a corrupt gangster, and Ray Milland immediately comes calling. Could this mysterious stranger be (an agent of) SATAN? Criterion hypes this as a riff on Faust and I have noticed some real suss hype in the Criterion blurbs, because this is a straight morality play that doesn’t for once pretend there is anything good on offer here and all consequences are orchestrated by Milland anyway, so Mitchell’s fall is never really his fault, and that’s what really hurts the movie. Mitchell is fine but not really tormented, Audrey Totter as the sex worker recruited to help set up Mitchell’s downfall is much better, she gets a great scene of realizing Milland’s power and just how trapped she is. And Milland rules, a Mitchumesque countenance and smooth but not slick manipulation, he fits right at home in John Farrow’s foggy wharfs and eerie dissolves. Until the absolute dogshit ending, a total turd in the punchbowl. A curiousity and not bad but not a must-watch, this could’ve been a killer B with some more nastiness and guts.
Three — Johnnie To, on the other hand! Criterion brings the goods here, a later film about Zhao Wei’s uptight and cracking brain surgeon dealing with bank robber patient Wallace Chung, who has been shot in the head by the cops, and Louis Koo, one of the cops involved who wants more information about Chung’s buddies. But there is more to the story than first appears. This all takes place in the hospital as Koo and Chung play mind games with each other and try to enlist Wei to their respective sides, and it builds to a gonzo shoot-out that apparently films people actually moving in slow motion, rather than having the camera slowed down, it’s a very unique effect and one that seems to acknowledge and trump Wickian styles. But that is not my favorite mode of action anyway, an earlier setpiece of no guns, just people moving into position and trying to sneakily obtain objects is even better in my book, just great classical filmmaking from a guy who knows how to block and edit and rely on his actors to convey everything without words. And the story feels very old school in the best way, 90 minutes with very little fat (the beginning takes some setup time but then it’s off to the races) and side characters causing mischief while the leads go through ups and downs, themes of honor and ambition and duty are developed through action and if things end in a bit of a pat way it is very much earned because of those actions (and some ambiguity hovers around the edges). A damn good B movie, turns out they or at least To does make them like they used to. Or even better!
The X-Files, “Squeeze”
Lots of phenomenally creepy images in the first monster-of-the-week episode, but my favorite may be Tooms’s immense, inhuman calm as he licks the newspaper at the end, assembling his new nest. And then that smile, as he processes his escape route. Magnificent.
The polygraph scene is excellent in a more subtle way, with Hutchinson nicely underplaying how Tooms can’t help but falter when the questions take an unexpected turn. (Hobbyhorse: polygraphs are bullshiiiiit. But sometimes fun in fiction.)
I always like seeing Donal Logue, and having him as an ambitious, careerist foil to Mulder and (especially) Scully is a lot of fun; I also appreciate the show zigging rather than zagging here, keeping the battle for Scully’s help and professional allegiance away from accusations of sexual/romantic involvement. Logue isn’t sleazy, he’s just a highly motivated jerk (one who starts out with a lot of reasonable points, even). Having the investigation function as a choice Scully has to make between professional success and truth, however strange and inconvenient it can get, is really effective. And of course she’ll go with the latter, because she’s a natural investigator, someone who will sit through a parking garage stakeout for hours on end even when her preferred partner is telling her it’s pointless. And she’ll be right about it, too.
Two favorite Mulder-and-Scully moments in this episode: Mulder hooking his finger on Scully’s necklace (it’s mostly a deft way to draw the audience’s attention to it before Tooms steals it; it establishes that Mulder would recognize it when he sees it in Tooms’s lair, and it makes sure we will too … and it’s also another instance of them having breathtaking chemistry). Mulder respecting the work Scully does in their partnership but also respecting her enough to smoothly accept losing her help, if that’s what she thinks is right for her.
“Squeeze” is definitely one of the all-time “first episodic plot” episodes, up there with “33” on Battlestar Galactica or the opening episodes of Community. It’s intensely confident, thrilling, and weird. The uncanny way the episode first presents Tooms’s power is my favourite part – it manages to stretch (ugh) the moment out so that it does take you a moment to figure out what’s happening, and it plays like an eerie dream.
Justified, Season Two, Episode Two, “The Life Inside”
My first new-to-me episode and it’s a killer one. The plot with the pregnant convict getting kidnapped is classic Justified in its twists and turns and little characters; the ex-EMT is great because he’s basically like Gale Boetticher on Breaking Bad, a new criminal who thought he could get through this life without resorting to, or worse, witnessing violence, and Jess manages to pull off a classic Jules Winfield speech where you tell a cool story before pulling off some violence. But this ends up disguising the real meat of the episode; people, at this point, have gotten used to Raylan, which isn’t to say they don’t find him annoying.
Like, Art has grown to love and tolerate Raylan and can blow off his antics with a smartass comment, but Tim is getting genuinely frustrated with him. What makes Leonard great and what Justified learned from him is that you can get through a plot zigging instead of zagging; Raylan pulls off one of his typical schemes with the fingerprint on the cuffs, and Tim quietly acknowledges it, and then it climaxes with Raylan acknowledging Tim’s skillz in turn. The plot plays out in the most roundabout yet straightforward way you could imagine – one extraordinarily sideways big speech.
Meanwhile, there’s a vacuum left by Bo, and Mags is stepping up to take it. She’s the maternalistic poor person figure in contrast to Bo’s paternalism; sincere-ish, trying to protect a young woman from the situation she grew up in, not quite realising how her emotional investment may be fucking up her judgement already – not in major decisions, but she’s clearly awed by Loretta to the point of making her mildly uncomfortable, at least in that scene.
Also, Boyd is pretty clearly to Raylan as Shane is to Vic – smarter, perhaps, but nevertheless a shadow of Raylan’s authoritarianism, the ultimate victim and subject of Raylan’s desire to control and punish the world around him, and unstoppable force to his immovable object. Which makes it really funny that Boyd seemed, legitimately, to not give a shit what he thought in that moment. Arlo is too, but he’s much closer to Shane’s impulsiveness.
“I can’t carry a tune. I don’t know how to shoot a basketball, and my handwriting is, uh, barely legible. But I don’t miss.” I love Tim defining himself by his absolute, stone-cold competence in this particular area: this is a guy who knows who he is and what he’s good at. He never gets that much characterization, but honestly, that one point is all he needs to be cool. In fact, more might get in the way of the coolness.
An alternate universe Ronnie Gardocki.
It will not surprise you that I spent several minutes in that comment comparing and contrasting him with Ronnie before deleting it all for going on for too long.
At least at this point, my take on him is that he’s a Ronnie who never fell in with a Vic – who has loyalty only to the job, without distraction from loving a guy who would shoot a fellow cop in the face.
Tim is just the coolest. And gets many more opportunities to be awesome in this season and the next!
The Singing Detective E4, this makes good pairing with The Rehearsal, both question naturalism and the fabric of reality with different platforms, in part because the kind of reality TV Nathan Fielder’s deconstructing hadn’t become part of our language yet. On rewatch the most satisfying meta-plot here is the paranoid Marlowe manufacturing an entire conspiracy involving his ex Nicola and Mark Finney/Binney, to the extent that Finney and Nicola often speak in punctuation while Marlowe writes their dialogue (“Darling, question mark?” “Premonition, full stop.”) This, young Philip’s speeches straight to the camera, and the excellent “Accentuate The Positive” number emphasize the mind as liberator and jailer. We can free ourselves from bullshit Christian missionaries or believe the ones we love are out to get us – it’s all perception.
Curious if anyone’s seen Potter’s notorious Blackeyes or the Lewis Carroll movie he wrote, Dreamchild.
It Happened One Night – The classic ur-screwball comedy holds up for the most part, but the casual misogyny (manifesting in advocating Claudette Colbert be slapped every day,. and one brief spanking) are not good at all. Gable and Colbert are perfect together, and I would say this movie earns all of its Oscars. Plus we get some really interesting background stuff that reminds us how everyone who isn’t a millionaire’s daughter or Charles Lindbergh is struggling in the Depression.
Kojak, “Chain of Custody” – A friend of Kojak’s – his tailor but also the owner of a small factory in the garment district – is really to provide evidence against a loan shark, and is murdered. Kojak tries to work with the DA, but something’s amiss. Before long, corruption is revealed, though it takes Kojak being suspended again to get there. A new theme has emerged as we get to the end of the show: Kojak is the last honest and caring cop in a system of corruption at all levels. I wonder where this came from so late, but it’s made the show more interesting if perhaps a bit self serving in shining Kojak’s badge.
Frasier, “Gift Horse” – It’s Martin’s 65th birthday (which would mean Martin lived into his 90s), and the brothers Crane compete with each other to get the best gift, a competition that for once Martin encourages. This one is played fairly cartoonishly until Niles’s gift of gifts is acquiring the horse Martin rode on as a mounted cop. And suddenly Martin is much less celebratory and the story take a well done turn into the reflective, as he ponders how old the horse and he have both become.
When watching IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT in the context of earlier ’30s comedies one is struck by how its presence changed the course of American Cinema in terms of fusing romance and class structure by joining it to contrasting visions of America; namely urban cynicism and middle class idealism. It’s like watching the conception of a genre from various strands of cultural DNA.
It also helps create the Hays Code (by accident!) suggesting how much the genre’s sexuality might have threatened some people.
One definitely sees a domestication of female sexuality in IHON; in fact it’s the entire premise–Whereas many of the pre-code comedic stars feel less erotically constrained and more manipulative in their deployment of sex (Jean Harlow, for example), it doesn’t take long to establish a certain beourgie propriety that Colbert wants to impose on her relationship with Gable, probably best represented in the famous “walls of Jericho” metaphor. The film, besides carrying a lot of baggage of social awareness with a pronounced breeziness, chartered a path by which sex comedies could proceed within the Hays Code restrictions.
The World (2004)
I think I’m going to try to dive back into Jia Zhang-Ke. For someone I claim is one of my favorite directors, I have gone too long without watching something by him. This is a masterpiece, and Jia is a master. This is a film about the workers at a theme park in Beijing where visitors get to see smaller-scale versions of major world landmarks. There’s an Acropolis and a Downtown New York (they still have their Twin Towers). The film is a human-scale drama that never loses sight of the irony of Chinese people’s inability to travel much compared with this theme park that lets them travel without getting on a plane. Jia’s filmmaking is incredible. His penchant for starting a shot focused on one person or group of people before following someone else as they walk out of frame, shifting the subject of the shot and suggesting that no matter what we watch, there are more stories to be told, is incredible. I fucking love this.
The Life of Chuck (2025)
I appear to be the dissenting voice in a sea of praise for this. As a 38 year old accountant whose soul longs to be more than just an accountant, this should speak to me intimately. And yet it didn’t. I found myself picking apart the dance sequences (if you’re going to directly cite the greats, you’d better be top class), and they were not as good as I would have liked. Nick Offerman’s narration is so overbearing that he interjects “he said” after some lines, as if he were telling a story. But the narration never feels like it coheres around a theme, and I found myself wishing I was watching another film whose scope is the grand mystery of life and does that through an overbearing narrator. I’m speaking of Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day, a film that speaks so much more to me about what life is about and how life is precious, no matter what the tragedy might be.
Everything Will Be OK (2007)
When I got home from The Life of Chuck, I wanted to remind myself of greatness, so I fired up Youtube and watched this on my phone in bed. The film is incredible. One of the best of the 00’s. I cannot properly express how much this film speaks to me. It’s funny. It’s tragic. It’s depressing. It’s inspiring. And no matter what is happening, life goes on. It’s magnificent. And it’s here that I will say that since 2007 when I first saw this film, I have always picked my fruit from the back of the display so I can avoid the fruit that’s near everyone’s crotches.
I was really moved by The Life of Chuck in novella form, but I wasn’t sure how well it would translate to the screen. I wanted to hope, but this has done some valuable tempering in that regard: I’m especially glad to be warned about the overbearing narration.
It’s Such a Beautiful Day really is a masterpiece. One of those films I want to rewatch every time it comes up.
I haven’t read the story Chuck is based on and perhaps I will, King can make sap work, but I saw the preview for the movie a few weeks back and thought I was being pranked. It felt like a parody of an oughts vibe, The Majestic or something. Hertzfeld handles sentiment via existential slapstick, not cloying goo, and that makes his emotions hit so much harder. And I really like this observation on Jia’s camera and focus, his view of humanity is his view of humanity and that also builds to something powerful.
Bingo is real serious fucking business. The least realistic thing about this movie might have been that the host gets away with screwing with the game!
That alone should cost him some votes in the next election!
Saul Goodman, take note!
Year of the Month update!
This June, we’re covering 1983, including all these movies, albums, books, et al!
Jun. 19th: Cameron Ward: Barefoot Gen
Jun. 24th: John Bruni: Legendary Hearts
Jun. 26th: Cameron Ward: Twice Upon a Time
Jun. 30th: Tristan Nankervis: The Big Chill
And next month is 2005, including all these movies, albums, books, et al!
Jul. 28th: Tristan J. Nankervis: Sin City
Captain Nate and the Ploughman have put out feelers for a Happy Hour!! next week. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday work best for me. Which of those days works for other attendees?
Thursday is best for me!
Thursday!
I’m probably going to be fairly late whenever it is, so don’t plan around me. But looking forward to it!
I like Thursday!