Some Picks to Stream This Week After the Jump:
Warner Archive Instant
S.O.B. - Blake Edwards' Hollywood industry farce is probably most famous for Julie Andrews (Edwards' wife) going topless in a scene. Richard Mulligan plays a director (based on Edwards) married to Andrews' character, regarded as America's Sweetheart. When the director's latest film sets a record for worst opening weekend in history, he goes into a suicidal funk which he only snaps out of when he decides to re-shoot the film as a soft-core sex fantasy starring his wife. While fairly uneven and not nearly as cutting as it seems to think it is, the film is still a mostly amusing inside look at the state of Hollywood at the end of the "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" era. Warner Archive Instant 2 week Free Trial
Amazon Prime Instant
Daria - Going in a bit of a different direction here by recommending this MTV series from the late 90s, which is available for free streaming if you are an Amazon Prime
member. The series follows outsider Daria Morgendorffer and her friend Jane Lane as they comment acerbically on the high school shenanigans going on around them. While a spin-off from Beavis and Butthead, the shows are very different in tone and structure. The series is dripping with privilege - Daria is a rich white girl in a prosperous suburb and her contempt for everyone else sometimes gets to be a bit much considering how sheltered she really is (I imagine after seven years in northeastern liberal arts college and Ivy League grad school she's probably leveraging her parents' connections for good jobs these days.) The pilot of the show was so lily-white that they rather conspicuously added some racial minority characters to subsequent episodes, but it really didn't change much. Nonetheless, it passes one test that really matters: it's funny (and the humor still stands up).Netflix
Swimming With Sharks - Written by a former assistant at Columbia Pictures, this Hollywood satire cuts much less broadly but more deeply than S.O.B. From the mid-nineties and detailing the abusive relationship between a Hollywood executive (Kevin Spacey) and his unfortunate assistant (Frank Whaley). When the assistant can take no more, the film morphs into a revenge fantasy. In the end it provides some rather acidic commentary on what it takes to get ahead in the dysfunctional environment of Hollywood office spaces. In unfortunate echoes of the reaction to Oliver Stone's Wall Street, some in Hollywood at the time took Kevin Spacey's monstrous executive as something of a role model.
Crackle
Barney Miller - Returning back to TV, Crackle has a handful of episodes of the classic sitcom Barney Miller. The series is set almost entirely in a detective's room at a Manhattan precinct in the era when New York City was viewed as a crumbling hive of crime. Hal Linden, Abe Vigoda, Jack Soo and others don't engage in much action - they merely crack jokes as they fill out reports and book the stream of wacky criminals that find their way into the room. Great humor that really holds up and a series that some have called, oddly enough, the most realistic cop show on TV in history. It also has one of the great TV show themes. Well worth a watch.
From Crackle:
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