December Streaming
All Aboard: it's the End of the World!
Not to Great Depression post, but I’ve been hitting George Gershwin’s “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” pretty hard lately: “The way you wear your hat / The way you sip your tea / The memory of all that / No, they can't take that away from me…”1
Welcome to December streaming.
Yes, just like the man says, the way you've changed my life, they can’t take that away from me. And Lord knows they’re gonna try! It’s the last program of a daunting year, and we’re staring down the barrel of a very uncertain future. In that spirit, I’ve compiled a film program preoccupied with Imminent Destruction: the disaster movie, that great manifestation of destruction and carnage that’s also something like perverse wish fulfillment. Turns out, Hollywood has a long list of ideas as to how we’re all Going to Go, and they include a surprising amount of death-by-volcano movies. Happy Holidays!
For our Actors’ Showcase, we’re featuring two septuagenarian (and European) stars: one is one of the most decorated performers of her time; the other has a Golden Globe…for television! Plus: the irresistible allure of a movie set on a train, and our annual holiday film showcase. Swing it, boys!
Seems Like We’re Going Pretty Quietly into the Night: The Disaster Movie
In March of 2003—just eight days after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and two months before George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” atop an aircraft carrier at the alleged cessation of “major combat operations” in Iraq—Paramount Pictures released a disaster film called The Core. The film follows a team of scientists tasked with reigniting the Earth’s core after it stops spinning, affecting the planet’s magnetic waves and causing a series of natural disaster events not backed by real scientific scrutiny. It was a massive flop at box office, failing to make back its budget; the popular wisdom at the time was that it was too close to real-world tragedies and mass destruction to attract viewers to the theater. I, then 11, must not have gotten that memo, because I saw it…twice…in theaters. Then again on DVD. Then half a dozen times in the years since. I loved (and love) The Core (2003), a feeling not remotely tempered by the film’s absolutely depressing central conceit: we are inches from a cataclysmic event killing everyone on Earth. Two years later, Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) landed in theaters, and—even though we were still occupying Iraq—people flocked to it: the film printed money, becoming a cultural phenomenon (perhaps aided by Tom Cruise’s iconic, messy-ass Press Tour From Hell). When the end credits rolled, I found myself so profoundly depressed by Spielberg’s excellent, manipulative look at familial strife against the backdrop of a world-ending alien invasion that I’ve never been able to watch the film again (unlike, of course, The Core).
Doomsday Filmmaker Christopher Nolan—or maybe his brother Jonathan—once wrote that some men just want to watch the world burn. But I think all men want to watch the world burn…at least on the big screen! The “disaster movie”—or, any film that focuses on the build-up, development, execution, and aftermath of a destructive, life-threatening mass event—represents a release after a great tease: a violent, messy externalization of our greatest fears, fed in digestible amounts, and left behind in the theater after the movie ends. It’s a fairly simple, unimpeachable formula. In the foreground: people, carrying out their petty dramas of interpersonal strife. In the background: floods, disease, fires, shipwrecks, tornados, volcanos, and earthquakes, headed their way to render all of it obsolete. Name a mass tragedy, real or imagined, and it’s been given the glossy Hollywood treatment, achieved through increasingly convincing (then less convincing, computer-generated) special effects and box office gimmicks.2 But the modern “disaster movie,” really, is a Cold War byproduct. Cinematic spectacle of massive, destructive events goes back to the silent era (like Noah's Ark, 1928, which actually killed several extras), with sound-era precedents like Felix E. Feist’s Deluge (1933), about a flood that devastates Manhattan (as if that’ll ever happen!); King Kong creators Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), depicting a volcanic event with miniatures; W. S. Van Dyke’s San Francisco (1936), in which Jeanette MacDonald warbles in the ruins of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; and Henry King’s In Old Chicago (1938), which blames that same goddamn cow for the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 (leave Mrs. O’Leary’s cow ALONE!). But such practical effects-laden blockbuster filmmaking took a back seat during World War II, with the culture focused on the grim horrors of warfare—and war movies—instead. When the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, kickstarting a global arms race that would define the second half of the 20th century, a new mass paranoia began to emerge: mutually assured destruction.
The threat of nuclear holocaust—in which man’s appetite for death and annihilation would kickstart the end of a livable Earth—transformed postwar science fiction filmmaking, which focused on potential worst-case scenarios. Last year, we dug into “Creature Features,” a popular subset of Cold War doomsday filmmaking about the potential fantastical effects of nuclear fallout and radiation. This program focuses on the films that took a more sobering approach: beginning, really, with Byron Haskin’s first cinematic incarnation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1953), a Cold War-flavored alien-invasion classic rendered in vibrant Tecnhiclor.3 The film is, on the surface, about an invading force from another planet, but really, it’s about the political realities blinding a planet to the greater, all-encompassing threat of mutually-assured annihilation of life, indiscriminate to nations or politics. A crop of nuclear weapon-themed proto-disaster films followed, including Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), British doomsday film The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), and Crack in the World (1965). But really, the modern “disaster” film is thought to have come about in the 1970s, in the rubble, if you will, of massive cultural upheaval and the death of the Hollywood studio system—when a series of gimmicky blockbusters became incredibly successful in an industry undergoing a serious identity crisis.
As the world opened up after the war, so did paranoia towards global travel. As commercial air travel became increasingly popular, so did airplane-based thrillers—films like The High and the Mighty (1954), Zero Hour! (1957)4 and The Crowded Sky (1960) conceive of collisions, crashes, and other midair emergencies that seem to presage a spate of high-profile plane crashes. In 1960, two commercial planes collided in the skies above New York, killing all on board; the same year, several players of California Polytechnic State University's football team were killed after their postgame chartered plane crashed; in 1962, American Airlines Flight 1 rolled and crashed during takeoff and tumbled into Jamaica Bay, killing all crew and passengers aboard. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and “The Big Bopper” famously died in a chartered airplane crash in ‘59. Patsy Cline in ‘63. Otis Redding in ‘67. The Marshall University football team in ‘70. In the wake of all of this, Universal Pictures released Airport (1970), an aviation thriller with a sprawling cast of characters—a mix of hot rising stars and some of Hollywood’s greatest fading lights—who must navigate a massive, disruptive snowstorm that shutters a busy metropolitan airport. Shot in 70 mm “Todd-AO,” an ultra-widescreen format, the film was Big Blockbuster Filmmaking—on a fairly modest budget. A massive commercial hit, its success drove demand for similar fare, and the studios supplied it for the rest of the decade.
Enter Lost in Space (1965-68) creator Irwin Allen, the so-called “Master of Disaster,” who made his own disaster spectacle for 20th Century Fox: The Poseidon Adventure (1972), in which a sprawling cast of characters, led by Gene Hackman, must escape out the hull of a ship after a tidal wave upends it, leaving it upside down. Its success officially begat the trend, and Allen followed that hit up with The Towering Inferno (1974)—about a sprawling cast of characters, led by Paul Newman, who must escape a massive fire in a Los Angeles high-rise—while Universal, scrambling to recreate the success of Airport (1970), produced gimmick-driven Earthquake (1974), about a sprawling cast of characters, led by Charlton Heston, responding to a series of earthquakes. Over the decade, studios released a flood (get it?) of imitators and sequels, wearing out the novelty until the format stopped making money and leaving behind a glut of features unlikely to be taught in film school. Disaster movies hit a pause, until nostalgia—and paranoia about global climate change—drove a revival in the 1990s—gifting us a deluge (GET IT?) of big-budget fare like Alive (1993), Outbreak (1995), Twister (1996), Independence Day (1996), Titanic (1997), Dante’s Peak / Volcano (1997), Armageddon / Deep Impact (1998), etc. Did 9/11—and the era of perpetual, invisible war—kill Americans’ appetite for the disaster film? Was it the increasingly bleak reality of global climate change, and America’s steadfast refusal to address the threat?5 Was it the incessant yapping of Neil deGrasse Tyson about bunk movie science? If the mixed bag of aughts disaster films are any indication, it’s difficult to draw definite conclusions. While 90s disaster movie auteurs like Wolfgang Petersen and Roland Emmerich each had massive, big-scale hits—The Perfect Storm (2000) and Poseidon (2006) for Petersen, and The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and 2012 (2009) for Emmerich—others, like Danny Boyle’s terrific Sunshine (2007), couldn’t catch on with the general public, for whatever reason. And while Contagion (2011), a box office hit on release, became popular again in the wake of the global pandemic, the disaster movie really fizzled out in the 2010s, siphoned off into cable television content (and point-of-no-return parody) with Sharknado (2013) and its imitators. The genre definitely isn’t in a good place currently: Roland Emmerich, once the go-to for big, dumb disaster movies like Independence Day, received disappointing returns for Independence Day: Resurgence (2016) and couldn’t even scare up an audience for Moonfall (2022). Don’t Look Up (2021)—more shallow, navel-gazing social commentary from satirist Adam McKay—was dumped on Netflix, a far cry from the glamour of widescreen blockbuster filmmaking that defined the genre for so long. Twisters (2024), while a commercial hit, couldn’t even nail the very simple formula of pretty people + natural disaster + sex = cinema. It’s unsurprising that it found its biggest success in 4DX, proving those old 20th century showmen right: the people still want that big blockbuster razzle-dazzle (and to feel like they’re going to die in a cataclysmic event). We honor the genre nonetheless (and pray for its safe return) with this small survey of some of the most significant disaster films of all time.
Shit Gets Crazy, Scary, Spooky, Hilarious: Isabelle Huppert, International Icon
Michael Haneke, Claire Denis, Claude Chabrol, Paul Verhoeven, Michael Cimino, Jean-Luc Godard, Hong Sang-soo, Catherine Breillat, Jerzy Skolimowski, Bertrand Blier, André Téchiné, Olivier Assayas, Joseph Losey, Marco Ferreri, Andrzej Wajda, Hal Hartley, Mia Hansen-Løve, François Ozon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Pialat, Otto Preminger, Patrice Chéreau, Bertrand Tavernier…
…Not a half-assembled recollection of some of the greatest creative forces in film history, but a shortlist of the filmmakers that septuagenarian French actress Isabelle Huppert has worked with in her monumental, five decade-long career in film, making her a true titan of global cinema. A graduate of France's longstanding national drama academy, the prestigious (and cutthroat) Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique (CNSAD) in Paris, Huppert remains one of the greatest technical actors of her generation: in 2020, she was named the second-greatest actor of the 21st century (so far) in the New York Times’ controversial 25-person list, behind only Denzel Washington. But Huppert’s real strength as a performer is in her ability to pick directors to work with, as well as her willingness to flit between different national film industries, carrying on a legacy of international stardom that puts her in a rare pantheon of performers like Catherine Deneuve, Alain Delon, Marcello Mastroianni, and Helmut Berger. At a time of increasing anti-intellectualism, when arthouse cinema is more precarious than ever, Huppert is still its intrepid sherpa: as jury president of this year’s Venice Film Festival, she opined, “I’m worried about the things everyone is worried about—whether cinema can continue to survive—because it’s very weak now.”
Despite her tony upbringing, Huppert began her career playing sex workers, side pieces, and otherwise marginalized women—she received her first César (the French Oscar) nomination for Aloïse (1975), playing a Swiss painter incarcerated in a mental hospital for publicly opposing World War I; in her breakthrough performance, in Claude Chabrol’s Violette Nozière (1978), she embodies a real-life teenager who murders her overbearing parents to escape the metaphorical prison of her petit-bourgeois life. Chabrol, painfully underrated, would go on to make seven films with his muse, including Story of Women (1988)—about Marie-Louise Giraud, the last French women to be executed by guillotine for performing abortions under the fascist, natalist Vichy regime, for which Huppert won Best Actress at Cannes—and Madame Bovary (1991), in which the actress embodies one of the most unlikable (and misunderstood) female protagonists in modern French literature: Emma Bovary, trapped by her sex and condemned to misery for her love of beautiful things. The pair reached the stuff of cinema legend with La Cérémonie (1995): Huppert, in a César-winning performance, is an unlikable post office worker who maybe murdered her child and is the only source of refuge for an illiterate maid (Sandrine Bonnaire) who comes to work for a rich family living in a mansion in Brittany. These are screen women trapped and shaped by circumstance, desperate to liberate themselves by any means necessary, indifferent to the opinions of society. We love to throw around the phrase “difficult women” to describe female characters who are depicted as complex, fallible human beings with sliding scales of morality, but it’s insufficient to say that Huppert plays “difficult” women: she portrays women who never had a chance at being normal. In Claire Denis’ White Material (2009), for example, she plays a white coffee plantation owner in an unnamed African nation so warped by colonialism that she retreats into her own peaceful delusion, content to ignore the civil war on her doorstep as long as it means she doesn’t have to give up an inch of what’s “hers.” As an actor, I think Isabelle Huppert truly doesn’t care about her characters’ likability or morality: she simply plays the part. Quite frequently, this is something of a radical act.
At the end of the 20th century and into the new millennium Huppert’s work became increasingly eclectic: in Hal Hartley’s Amateur (1994), she’s a former nun who now writes pornography; in Benoît Jacquot’s The School of Flesh (1998), an adaptation of a Yukio Mishima novel (!), she’s a fashion executive who begins a fraught romantic relationship with a far-younger sex worker; in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001), for which she won Best Actress at Cannes, she’s a piano teacher pulled apart by her own fractured sexuality; and she steals the show from every other iconic French actress in François Ozon’s delightful musical Hitchcock spoof, 8 Women (2002). Aging like a fine wine, Huppert’s work has only grown more interesting as she’s grown older, heading some of our most compelling films about aging, such as Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012), Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come (2016), and the three collaborations she’s made with low-fi Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo, the latest of which, A Traveler's Needs (2024), was an oddball highlight of the New York Film Festival.
Huppert achieved (something like) mainstream recognition, and her first Oscar nomination (a true feat for a performance in a foreign-language film), for her spell-binding turn as a ball-busting female video game executive with a complex reaction to sexual assault in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle (2016). In the years since, she’s become something of a cinephile meme: a seemingly self-serious, passionate artist (with an offbeat, incredibly French sense of humor) who doubles down on artistic pretension and standards in an era that rewards mediocrity and fast success (while churning out films at a breakneck pace). Her work onscreen is often labeled “cold,” but I think that’s an oversimplification: really, she plays smart, calculating women who wear metaphorical armor, shielding themselves from a world content to define them. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself!
“Here is Wanda, a good friend of mine,” Huppert quips in her recent visit to the Criterion Closet, kissing the cover of Barbara Loden’s groundbreaking portrait of feminine discontent, about a Rust Belt woman caught in a trap and unable to find liberation. “I like this woman. She is great.”
"When I found out that the Pentagon has a Film Department, a Lot of Things Made Sense To Me": Gabriel Byrne on TV and Film
Would it surprise you to learn that septuagenarian Irishman Gabriel Byrne, alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, was the first (and extremely half-assed) Actors’ Showcase we ever did for the Spread, way back in the dark, impenetrable days of December 2020? This is not an academic operation; The Spread runs purely off vibes, and the discerning viewing habits of one Millennial woman with a predilection for middle-aged European heartthrobs, and for this December, we’re bringing him back (and doing it right this time). Gabriel Byrne is the best kind of actor: genuinely talented, principled, and handsome in a way that’s just odd enough to make him particularly beloved by an inter-generational collective of (mostly) women. For my research for this program, I benefited greatly from the incredible fan archival work at Byrneholics Online, which apparently went on hiatus back in May after sixteen years of service in the trenches. Come back, Byrneholics Online, we need your work! Gabriel Byrne is still acting!
“Look in your heart! Look in your heart!” John Turturro, a gay, duplicitous two-bit gangster begs Gabriel Byrne, enforcer, in Miller’s Crossing (1990), the Coen Bros.’ pitch-perfect pastiche of Classic Hollywood gangster movies. “What heart?” he sneers, with the kind of apathy you used to have to have witnessed a world war (or two) to affect, before firing the gun at the man. It’s one of the best lead performances in any Coen Bros. movie—a moment when intent and execution are so aligned, you get chills—yet it’s rarely discussed as such. On the film’s release, it got no recognition whatsoever. It’s the central paradox of Byrne’s impressive career: everybody knows how good this guy is (he’s the first cultural ambassador to Ireland, after all!), but he doesn’t really get his due recognition as one of the greats (except from the too-horny, hyper-fixated fan communities that have long carried the banner for these types of performers). The only significant award he’s won is a Golden Globe (and that’s pushing it) for his terrific performance as a compromised psychiatrist on HBO’s In Treatment (2008), one of the great forgotten cultural texts of aughts premium cable (I was renting DVDs of it from Netflix, that’s how ancient in spirit I am).
Byrne has worked with a number of talented directors in his impressive, if underrated, film career: he embodied a truly seductive Lord Byron for Ken Russell in Gothic (1986); played a Nazi for Michael Mann in The Keep (1983); fathered Arthur Pendragon in John Boorman’s far-too-sexy Excalibur (1981); drew a horny cartoon world into reality in Ralph Bakshi’s hybrid live-action/animation cult classic Cool World (1992); wooed Winona Ryder as the best cinematic iteration of Professor Bhaer in Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women (1994); matched Robert Mitchum’s villainy as his onscreen son (!) in Jim Jarmusch’s cult anti-Western Dead Man (1995), and paid the price for being the most well-adjusted family member in Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018). He’s further worked with Wim Wenders, David Cronenberg, Costa-Gavras, Tony Scott, Mary Lambert, Joachim Trier, Mira Nair, and whoever directed The Usual Suspects (1995). An outspoken progressive baddie with a delightful disdain for Hollywood and its role in furthering nationalist ideology, he’s also spoken out against the Catholic Church, even bravely disclosing his own extensive history of sexual abuse in his 2020 memoir Walking With Ghosts. In an interview with The Guardian in support of his book, he bitched, “Hollywood isn’t interested in making artistic statements or necessarily even entertaining. It’s interested in making money. That’s its first and only goal. It doesn’t have a conscience…When I found out that the Pentagon has a film department, a lot of things made sense to me. America reveals itself to the world through film. We absorb the American dream because they own the means of production.” Go off, king!
C'Mon n' Ride It: The Train (Movie)
There’s nothing I love more than a film set aboard a train. Nothing. Murder dinner parties are a close second, but there’s something about a story set aboard a moving train that just feels so Old World-glamorous. Maybe it’s just the sheer novelty of an efficient, affordable cross-country train network, as was available before the collapse of passenger rail in the mid-20th century, when incentivization efforts towards alternative forms of travel gave rise to highway and airport culture. But I think it’s because “capsule” story structures make for the best kinds of cinematic storytelling: trap a cast of players on a train or boat—or in a plane or a house—and force them to immediately confront their problems within limited confines….what’s more satisfying than that? Someday I’ll do a full, true capsule program, but until then, enjoy these train-based films (or films with significant train sequences) across all genres. See what happens when John Barrymore parodies Orson Welles in Twentieth Century (1934); indulge in the sex and intrigue of five (!) Hitchcock movies partially set on trains; parse through the contemplative, train-induced ennui of Mahler (1974), 2046 (2004), and The Darjeeling Limited (2007); analyze Trains as Metaphor, in films like Berlin Express (1948), Lars Von Trier’s Europa (1991), and Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013); or simply try to survive Murder Trains like The Silk Express (1933), The Tall Target (1951), The Narrow Margin (1952), From Russia with Love (1963), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Terror Train (1980), and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995). Happy trainspotting!
Holiday Movies + Hanukkah Programming
This is our annual master list of Holiday-appropriate films with updated streaming information, as well as a selection of films celebrating Jewish heritage and tradition in honor of Hanukkah. Each year, we add new little nuggets of seasonal programming, and this year: a whole extra heaping of Christmas noir! A handful of film noirs set over the holidays, relishing in the contrast between seasonal cheer and dark, shadowy stories of crime, avarice, death, and violence. You can find my curated list of Christmas Noir over at Word of Mouth platform Benable, where I’m making cool listicle content as part of their editorial collective. Or, if you just want to find out where Carol (2015) is streaming this year, consider this guide your Ghost of Christmas Present (it’s still on Netflix). And will anyone I’ve recommended The Shop Around the Corner (1940) to ever wind up liking it? It’s a Christmas Classic! Stop blaming me for Margaret Sullavan!
That’s it for December! We’ll be back in the new year with fresh streaming programs. Until then, remember: no man is a failure who has friends. And if you’re reading this, you’ve got one in me. Thanks for another year of support!
Introduced by Fred Astaire in the 1937 film Shall We Dance (1937), with Ginger Rogers!
With the advent of television, movies turned to big, gimmick-laden spectacles to attract moviegoers back to the theater, like Krakatoa, East of Java (1968)—disaster theater shot in Super Panavision 70 and projected in 70mm Cinerama, a widescreen projection format that subsumed the audience in an arc. “Sensurround," a version of proto-4DX technology that emitted low-frequency vibration at moviegoers, evoking the sensation of rumbling, was invented for Earthquake (1974) and recycled for amusement park-based disaster film (!) Rollercoaster (1977).
The decision to include alien invasion films under the umbrella of disaster films was controversial, at least in this household, but I don’t see how you get to late 20th century disaster film culture without War of the Worlds (1953). I did not include the earlier, highly influential alien paranoia film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), because there is actually no mass destruction in that film, in which Humans Themselves are the deadliest threat; that, to me, is straight up science fiction.
The inspiration for Airplane! (1980)
It’s hard to get Americans to buy into the central conceit of the disaster film—that good people, including, crucially, governments, will step in to save people in the event of mass destruction, when, in real life, people were stranded on top of their homes in August 2005 in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
