Logan Lucky – Memphis Flyer

Those of us who are not doctors, nurses, or EMTs or others on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19 are faced with some time on our hands. The only silver lining to the situation is that our new reality of soft quarantine comes just as streaming video services are proliferating. There are many choices, but which ones are right for you? Here’s a rundown on the major streaming services and a recommendation of something good to watch on each channel.

Stevie Wonder plays “Superstition” on Sesame Street.

YouTube

The granddaddy of them all. There was crude streaming video on the web before 2005, but YouTube was the first company to perfect the technology and capture the popular imagination. More than 500 hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Cost: Free with ads. YouTube Premium costs $11.99/month for ad-free viewing and the YouTube Music app.

What to Watch: The variety of content available on YouTube is unfathomable. Basically, if you can film it, it’s on there somewhere. If I have to recommend one video out of the billions available, it’s a 6:47 clip of Stevie Wonder playing “Superstition” on Sesame Street. In 1973, a 22-year-old Wonder took time to drop in on the PBS kids’ show. He and his band of road-hard Motown gunslingers delivered one of the most intense live music performances ever captured on film to an audience of slack-jawed kids. It’s possibly the most life-affirming thing on the internet.

From Netflix to Criterion: All You Need to Know About What’s Streaming

Dolemite Is My Name

Netflix

When the DVD-by-mail service started pivoting to streaming video in 2012, it set the template for the revolution that followed. Once, Netflix had almost everything, but recently they have concentrated on spending billions creating original programming that ranges from the excellent, like Roma, to the not-so excellent.

Cost: Prices range from $8.99/month for SD video on one screen, to $15.99/month, which gets you 4K video on up to four screens simultaneously.

What to Watch: Memphian Craig Brewer’s 2019 film Dolemite Is My Name is the perfect example of what Netflix is doing right. Eddie Murphy stars as Rudy Ray Moore, the chitlin’ circuit comedian who reinvented himself as the kung-fu kicking, super pimp Dolemite and became an independent film legend. From the screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski to Wesley Snipes as a drunken director, everyone is at the top of their game.

Future Man

Hulu

Founded as a joint venture by a mixture of old-guard media businesses and dot coms to compete with Netflix, Hulu is now controlled by Disney, thanks to their 2019 purchase of Fox. It features a mix of movies and shows that don’t quite fit under the family-friendly Disney banner. The streamer’s secret weapon is Hulu with Live TV.

Cost: $5.99/month for shows with commercials, $11.99 for no commercials; Hulu with Live TV, $54.99/month.

What to Watch: Hulu doesn’t make as many originals as Netflix, but they knocked it out of the park with Future Man. Josh Futturman (Josh Hutcherson) is a nerd who works as a janitor at a biotech company by day and spends his nights mastering a video game called Biotic Wars. A pair of time travelers appear and tell him his video game skills reveal him as the chosen one who will save humanity from a coming catastrophe. The third and final season of Future Man premieres April 3rd.

Logan Lucky

Amazon Prime Video

You may already subscribe to Amazon Prime Video. The streaming service is an add-on to Amazon Prime membership and features the largest selection of legacy content on the web, plus films and shows produced by Amazon Studios.

Cost: Included with the $99/year Amazon Prime membership.

What to Watch: You can always find something in Amazon’s huge selection, but if you missed Steven Soderbergh’s redneck heist comedy Logan Lucky when it premiered in 2017, now’s the perfect time to catch up. Channing Tatum and Adam Driver star as the Logan brothers, who plot to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Inside Out

Disney+

The newcomer to the streaming wars is also the elephant in the room. Disney flexes its economic hegemony by undercutting the other streaming services in cost while delivering the most popular films of the last decade. Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars flicks are all here, along with the enormous Disney vault dating back to 1940. So if you want to watch The Avengers, you gotta pay the mouse.

Cost: $6.99/month or $69.99/year.

What to Watch: These are difficult times to be a kid, and no film has a better grasp of children’s psychology than Pixar’s Inside Out. Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) is an 11-year-old Minnesotan whose parents’ move to San Francisco doesn’t quite go as planned.

Cleo from 5 to 7

The Criterion Channel

Since 1984, The Criterion Collection has been keeping classics, art films, and the best of experimental video in circulation through the finest home video releases in the industry. They pioneered both commentary tracks and letterboxing, which allows films to be shown in their original widescreen aspect ratio. Their streaming service features a rotating selection of Criterion films, with the best curated recommendations around. You’ll find everything from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent epic The Passion of Joan of Arc to Ray Harryhausen’s seminal special effects extravaganza Jason and the Argonauts.

Cost: $99.99/year or $10.99/month.

What to Watch: One of the legendary directors whose body of work makes the Criterion Channel worth it is Agnès Varda. In the Godmother of French New Wave’s 1962 film, Cleo from 5 to 7, Corinne Marchand stars as a singer whose glamorous life in swinging Paris is interrupted by an ominous visit to the doctor. As she waits the fateful two hours to get the results of a cancer test, she reflects on her existence and the perils of being a woman in a man’s world.

Who is the greatest living American director? That’s the kind of question I usually avoid because it’s unanswerable and ultimately meaningless. Ranking is for sports. What’s important is not who is better than whom. It’s “does the movie work?” Does it make you feel like it intended to make you feel, and if so, is that a good feeling? If a film not only works in the moment, but transcends it and becomes something people want to watch again and again for years to come, that’s the kind of win a director wants to chalk up.

Nevertheless, as I was leaving Logan Lucky, the question of who is the greatest living American director was on my mind. There’s Steven Spielberg, who has an unparalleled breadth and depth of work over the last 43 years. Then there’s David Lynch, who is currently unspooling an 18 hour epic about the struggle for the soul of America with Twin Peaks: The Return.

And then there’s Steven Soderbergh. Along with Spike Lee, he was there at the creation of the modern indie movement, winning Sundance in 1989 with the sleeper hit sex, lies, and videotape. He made George Clooney a movie star with Out of Sight and defined the 21st century’s first crop of superstars with Ocean’s Eleven. Yet he can adapt Soviet sci-fi with Solaris, get his hands dirty in the DIY underground with Bubble, and take a deep dive into political biography with the two-part, four hour Che. Soderbergh is a filmmaker’s filmmaker, the one young directors look to to learn how it’s done. He works fast and lean and gets the job done with a minimum of fuss and bullshit.

It’s that commitment to craft that led him to quit Hollywood filmmaking in disgust in 2013. On his way out, he torched the current corporate regime with his State of the Cinema speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival. What was his idea of retirement? Single-handedly writing, shooting, and editing The Knick, a Cinemax TV series.

Everybody knew Soderbergh couldn’t stay out of the game, and he managed to come back on his own terms. At a time when the mainline studios are running up $200 million tabs to pay for a sinking Pirates of the Caribbean ship, Soderbergh’s new film comes into theaters already paid for using an innovative financing and sales scheme that cut out layers of corporate bloat. Logan Lucky isn’t going to win the weekend, but it doesn’t have to. And that means Soderbergh gets to work without an MBA looking over his shoulder. The results of this financial experiment speak for themselves: Logan Lucky is the best movie I’ve seen in 2017.

Channing Tatum (left) and Adam Driver star in Steven Soderbergh’s directorial return, Logan Lucky.

There I go ranking again.

Rebecca Blunt’s script is so tight you can bounce a quarter off of it. Channing Tatum and Adam Driver are Jimmy and Clyde Logan, two West Virginia brothers who’ve been down so long they don’t know what up looks like. Along with their sister Mellie (Riley Keough), they hatch a needlessly elaborate plan to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway, just across the North Carolina border.

Every part of the sprawling cast is spot on. Katie Holmes swills chardonnay as Jimmy’s ex-wife who left him for a rich car dealer, greased to perfection by Seth McFarlane. Daniel Craig has way too much fun as a mad bomber named Joe Bang, who has to break out of, then back into prison, where Dwight Yoakam is the nicotine stained warden. Just when you think things are winding down, out pops Hilary Swank as an impossibly flinty FBI agent hot on the trail of the robbers-turned-folk-heroes.

It probably goes without saying that the photography and editing are beyond reproach, but I’m going to say it anyway. Logan Lucky is a ruthlessly designed and executed entertainment machine, but its obvious virtues may obscure its depth. Appalachia’s lack of affordable health care, the toxic at-will employment environment, the ravages of the for-profit prison industrial complex, and the impossible burdens of patriarchy on women young and old all serve to create plot points along the way to wacky larceny. With an instant classic comedy as subversive as it is hilarious, Soderbergh has served up a stunning rebuke to corporate Hollywood and cemented his status as one of the all-time greats.