Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 7 November

Greyhound (Schneider, 2020)

When AppleTV+ launched in 2020, it looked as if they were tak­ing a meas­ured and cur­ated approach to their con­tent and so it has proved. Quality over quantity.

Greyhound, writ­ten by and star­ring Tom Hanks, wasn’t a true Apple ori­gin­al. They picked it up when the Covid pan­dem­ic closed movie theatres and Sony decided that they had to cut their losses. It cer­tainly deserved a big screen release but I’m also glad that it got res­cued by a stream­er with some taste.

Hanks plays Ernie Krause, a career com­mand­er in the U.S. Navy but on his first act­ive duty mis­sion – escort­ing mer­chant ships across the Atlantic. It’s as close to a sui­cide mis­sion as you can think of and over the course of the film the odds that they will make it to Liverpool get longer and longer.

I reviewed this for RNZ when it came out in July 2020:

Hanks’ script is based on the 1955 nov­el The Good Shepherd by C.S. Forester who knew a thing or two about how to about write nav­al war­fare and you can see why Hanks was attrac­ted to it. More than just a war film, Greyhound is char­ac­ter study of a man who, des­pite being a career nav­al officer had lim­ited exper­i­ence in the field, who spends a lot of the film won­der­ing wheth­er he had, in fact, arrived at a point bey­ond the lim­its of his exper­i­ence and tal­ent, sus­tained by his faith when he might have been bet­ter off being sus­tained by the freshly cooked food he keeps for­get­ting to eat.

The fact that the source mater­i­al comes from the mid-20^th Century is illu­min­at­ing as this is a char­ac­ter you can ima­gine being played by a Humphrey Bogart or an older Gary Cooper. It’s a good coun­ter­point to the uncon­flic­ted super­her­oes we see rep­res­ent­ing mas­culin­ity so often on screen. Hanks knows what he can pull off these days and he’s tailored this per­fectly to him­self. There are a couple of lovely moments where the German U‑Boat com­mand­er dis­cov­ers their radio chan­nel and starts shit-talking to Hanks’ great annoyance.

Where to find Greyhound

Worldwide: Streaming on AppleTV+

So far, it looks as if Apple’s ori­gin­al con­tent (which means everything on AppleTV+) is stay­ing in their lib­rary rather than dis­ap­pear­ing off into the void which is what’s hap­pen­ing with some oth­er stream­ers. This is good news.

Further reading

I just pos­ted the latest entry in my run­down of the Sight & Sound Top 50 greatest films of all time: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep at equal-43 with Stalker.

And, for those non-paying sub­scribers who missed out on the bot­tom third of yesterday’s news­let­ter, I reviewed the new ViaVision/Imprint/Madman box set of three Jennifer Connelly movies.

Gratitude

Every time I see a noti­fic­a­tion that someone has upgraded to a paid sub­scrip­tion my heart sings a little and I’m motiv­ated to keep going.

Don’t for­get that encour­aging oth­ers to sub­scribe is a great way to pay for your own sub­scrip­tion and that the top recom­mend­er at the end of November will receive a copy of the 35^th anniversary Blu-ray of My Neighbor Totoro as a ges­ture of thanks.