Awesome dvd online shopping today? Arriving on streaming in the middle of a pandemic, a time when many lives have fallen into unceasing loops of quarantine-related repetition and tedium, the Lonely Island produced comedy Palm Springs perhaps resonated differently than when it premiered at Sundance earlier this year. Jokes about doing the same shit over and over just hit harder now. Tracking a romance between a goofball wedding guest (Andy Samberg) and the bride’s self-destructive sister (Cristin Milioti), writer Andy Siara’s clever script combines Groundhog Day existentialism with a quippy take on quantum physics, doling out inspirational life lessons and math cram sessions at a clipped pace. In the same way Tom Cruise had to battle aliens in Edge of Tomorrow, the two must relive a wedding over and over, struggling to escape from an Instagram-ready, celebratory hell. It might not be as purely funny as Samberg’s other big screen adventures Hot Rod and Popstar, but Palm Springs finds its own winning spin on a surprisingly robust micro-genre.
Several words on streaming services : Netflix’s originals are generally more successful than Hulu’s, including mega-budget productions like The Crown, animated hits like Bojack Horseman, genre pieces like Stranger Things, and adaptations such as The Witcher. Other streaming services also outclass Hulu. For example, Amazon has a growing list of top-notch originals, including Bosch, Fleabag, Patriot, Hunters, The Boys, The Expanse, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Undone. HBO Max offers a substantial catalog of quality past and current shows including Barry, Big Little Lies, Deadwood, Silicon Valley, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, The Wire, Westworld, and VEEP. Hulu’s library of movies is decent with mainstream movies such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall, High Fidelity, Parasite, Rocketman, Superbad, Terminator: Dark Fate, and Twilight at the time of publishing. Things are looking up in 2021, however, with Hulu snagging the same-day release premieres of Nomadland and The United States vs. Billie Holiday, both of which won Golden Globe awards. That said, movie fans will likely want to subscribe to one of the available channel add-ons.
Despair, desire, and madness are all entangled in Josephine Decker’s Shirley, about the late horror writer Shirley Jackson’s (Elisabeth Moss) attempt to pen her sophomore novel Hangsaman while dealing with her unfaithful critic/professor husband Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) as well as two boarders, aspiring academic Fred (Logan Lerman) and his pregnant wife Rose (Odessa Young). The director’s follow-up to Madeline’s Madeline is a psychosexual affair about lost women driven crazy by callous, self-serving men, and their resultant fears and needs. As with her acclaimed debut, Decker’s latest recounts its action through expressionistic visuals—smeary, off-center compositions; intense close-ups; dreamy interludes in which fantasy and reality blend together—and a score of jangly, strident strings, rumbling bass and thunderstorm crashes. As the famed author behind The Lottery and The Haunting of Hill House, Moss radiates ferocity and instability, and she’s matched by Stuhlbarg as the creepy, codependent Hyman. It’s Young, however, who holds the hothouse material together as the self-actualizing Rose, whose journey mirrors that of the missing girl Jackson is writing about, and who serves as the beating heart of this slyly furious film. See additional information on the last dance australia.
The second feature to go out under the aegis of Barack and Michelle Obama as part of their Higher Ground series for Netflix, it’s an inspirational civil-rights documentary that sounds as if it’s going to be Good for You rather than good but turns out to be both. Directed by Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht (who was born with spina bifida and appears onscreen), the film begins in 1971 in the Catskills’ Camp Jened, where teen and 20-something “cripples” (a word then used) are elated by the freedom to shed their defenses and feel at home. Their camp experience lays the foundation for a seminal demonstration in which disabled people (among them the commanding Judy Heumann) occupy HEW headquarters for more than a week. It’s both a profile of people determined not to be invisible — merely getting to the point where they could make themselves seen required a psychological revolution — and a rousing celebration of the activist counterculture that inspired and sustained them.
In the fictional northeast Brazilian town of Bacurau, residents are puzzled to discover that their home has disappeared from all GPS maps, and their cell service has ceased. Stranger still is the 1950s-style UFO zooming around the sky – perhaps a hallucination invoked by the psychotropic drugs the townsfolk have ingested? Or is it a tool of other sinister forces preparing to strike? Teaming with his former production designer Juliano Dornelles, director Kleber Mendonça Filho (Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius) delivers an allegory of zonked-out weirdness with Bacurau, which quickly has locals engaging in a do-or-die battle with a pair of interloping São Paulo bikers and a group of murderous Western tourists (led by a hilariously peculiar Udo Kier) who’ve traveled to South America to partake in a variation of The Most Dangerous Game. Stylistically indebted to both the Westerns of Sergio Leone and the thrillers of John Carpenter, and yet imbued with an out-there spirit all its own, Filho and Dornelles’ film takes a gonzo scalpel to geopolitical dynamics. Find additional information at here.
