If you would have told me a year ago that not only would HBO Max be watchable in the near future, but it would be one of the best overall streaming services out there, I would have called you crazy. And yet, it’s true. Despite starting at rock bottom relative to its competition, HBO Max has actually grown into one of the most reliable streamers out there, with one of the most expansive and varied libraries of content to choose from. It’s a complete 180 from where it was at launch and one of the unlikeliest media comeback stories that we’ve seen in a while. With the entire enterprise upended by Warner Bros’ handoff to Discovery of all things, we might as well enjoy it while we can, because things are doubtless going to change as we go forward.
North by Northwest (1959)
What both the defenders and detractors of the current blockbuster age tend to overlook in their race to out-shout their opposites online is that we didn’t arrive here out of nowhere. It’s not even the one-two-three punch of Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), Superman (1978) at the tail end of the New Hollywood of the 1970s’ fault: at least not in full. The reign of the MCU at the box office is the natural end-point of the gradual, transformative trends that have been churning away in Hollywood since its inception (after all, how else would you explain the four or five versions of A Star Is Born – depending on how exactly you count them – six Thin Man movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, sixteen Andy Hardy movies starring Mickey Rooney and twenty-eight movies about somebody named Blondie?). Things kicked into second gear in the late 1950s / early 1960s, and British émigré Alfred Hitchcock got into the practice of literal block-busting with his incredibly popular, upscale mystery-thrillers (perhaps best emblematized by his famous insistence to not let anybody enter the theater after Psycho started, and not to let pregnant women enter at all for fear that the movie was so frightening that it would induce miscarriages).
This, more than anything, probably goes a long way toward explaining why Hitchcock’s movies in general – and North by Northwest in particular – have enjoyed the incredibly long shelf life that he / they have over the years. They’re big, tentpole, summer blockbusters before that particular business model actually took hold in the industry. North by Northwest actually plays out like a proto-Bond movie, with pretty much all of the excitement, exotic locales and suave centerfolds you’d expect from that franchise-to-be starting a few years after this movie came out. It’s a thrilling, memorable and impeccably well-made feature that more than holds its own against the spectacle-driven entertainment sixty years its junior.
Police Story (1985)
Buddy cop movies were all the rage in the 1980s, and it’s easy to see why. The formula it presented was broad and familiar enough to welcome mainstream audiences back week after week and yet altogether elastic enough to accommodate any number of variations on the bog-standard plot and characters at their center. They invite action and intrigue in equal measure while usually keeping the proceedings focused and goal-oriented enough so that they never are really afforded much opportunity to sag between blowout set-pieces. And, yes, Hollywood has made ample use of this action subgenre over the years and turned in any number of classic crowd-pleasers from it. They are, however, not the only ones out there to try their hand at this kind of filmmaking, and, for my money at least, are hardly the best in the business at doing so. The first of Jackie Chan’s loosely-connected action franchise, Police Story strips away all of the bloat that began weighing these movies down by mid-decade and delivers a whirlabout frenzy of action set-pieces and romantic-comedy beats, leading into the most spectacular mall shootout ever committed to screen. And it’s not like you have to stop there once the credits start to roll; the second movie’s even better than the first, the third teams him up with Michelle Yeoh and the fourth famously has him fighting a gang of criminals with a step ladder.
City of God (2002)
Although summer usually calls for something upbeat and fun, there’s no reason why you have to be constrained to just the same kind of action movie from the last thirty-something years to give you that expected adrenaline rush between rounds of popcorn. Sometimes something more grounded is just what the doctor ordered, something more real than spandexed superheroes and world-ending calamities. Written with the insight of a character-driven drama but shot with the pulse-pounding freneticism of an action movie, City of God tells the sort-of true story of a young boy who grows up in the crime-ridden slums of Rio de Janeiro, having to navigate a life lived on both sides of the law. It’s a gripping story, told with a boundless energy that you rarely see in its genre that makes it so much more accessible than other films of its type.
The Raid: Redemption (2011)
One of the great action films of the last decade, it’s amazing to think that The Raid was made simply as a proof-of-concept for the film that its director really wanted to make (which, funded by the profits and interest generated by this film, eventually became The Raid 2). And while that would suggest that this film is somehow less than worthy of any real attention, the simple fact of the matter is that few films hit harder, faster or sustain their simple premises for longer than The Raid does. Second-cousin to the 2012 Dredd reboot, the film confines its overflow of action into the cramped hallways of a single apartment complex, with deadly combat spilling into and out of every entryway along the way to the crime bosses who run the building (and have no run afoul of the cops). It’s a kaleidoscopic whirlwind of whip pan violence, with some of the most spectacularly choreographed closed quarter combat scenes ever devised for the big screen. And, yes, the second movie’s even better than the first, so you won’t be missing out on any high-flying action once the credits start to roll.
The Bob’s Burgers Movie (2022)
This summer’s been a bit of a chore at the multiplex. With Covid finally slowing film production down to a crawl, there have been less and less worthwhile films to see at theaters on a weekly basis, and there’s only so many times that you can watch Doctor Strange or Thor be awesome on screen before you start looking elsewhere for something fun to watch. Thankfully, 2022 has also gifted us with the long-anticipated big screen debut of the Belcher family. Hitting theaters (and now HBO Max) in what could best be described as “The Simpsons Movie of Bob’s Burgers movies” – that is to say, a bigger, longer, more elaborately animated version of one of the show’s better episodes – it can’t help but feel like essential entertainment in a year such as this. It really does feel like one overlong episode of the series – with all of the humor, charm and eccentricities perfectly intact – which means that any fan of the series will doubtless be just as won over by this fifty-foot expansion of it on the silver screen.