August Departures: The New and the (Very) Old

Fallen Angels

Strange goings-on at Prime this month. As mentioned in my August 6 post, a significant portion of this month's arrivals also number among this month's departures. Most of these are Paramount titles, some quite notable—not just for their quality but for their scarcity among the streaming ranks. So now is the time if you've been waiting to check out Ironweed (1987), Mel Gibson's Hamlet (1990), Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady (1997), the classic Johnny Guitar (1954), or Leo and Kate in Sam Mendes' 1960s drama, Revolutionary Road (2009).

If all those are a bit too highbrow for you, then other one-month stays include the more low-rent (but possibly more pleasurable) 10 to Midnight (1983), Bolero (1984), Hannie Caulder (1972), A Show of Force (1990), and Walking Tall (1973). Meanwhile, your kids (or the one still inside you) will soon be without Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown (1977), The Monster Squad (1987), and the evergreen Charlotte's Web (1973). All of these will be streaming through midnight on August 30 (full list below).

Mid-August Arrivals (Now with More Troma!)

Steve Carell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin

Some fun new titles were made available for streaming on Amazon Prime in the past week, including Judd Apatow's unrated cut of the very funny The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Clair Denis' extreme 2001 vampire flick, Trouble Every Day, Clint Eastwood's White Hunter, Black Heart (a fictionalized account of director John Huston big-game hunting while making The African Queen), and the 1946 Barbara Stanwyck-Kirk Douglas film noir, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Those titles alone show a nice range of the old and the new(ish) that seem to be hitting Prime with increasing regularity.

Among even newer releases are Kevin Pollak's documentary, Misery Loves Comedy (2015), exploring the psyche of comedians; A Most Violent Year, a 2014 thriller starring Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac, from the director of All Is Lost; the drama If I Stay (2014), starring Chloë Grace Moretz; and a pickup from Netflix, the Japanese music documentary, We Don't Care About Music Anyway (2013).

Television arrivals include The Forsyte Saga (which expired from Netflix mere days ago), the return of 2012's Masterpiece Mystery: Endeavour, which was among June's PBS casualties, and the (long-awaited?) debut of Toxic Crusaders, the 1991 animated series featuring a kid-friendly version of Troma's very own Toxie, a.k.a., The Toxic Avenger.

What's Noteworthy in August? A Lot.

Michael Douglas gets glittery

August has turned into an exceptional month for Amazon Prime. And while I don't want to keep harping on comparisons with Netflix (who's currently in my digital doghouse), the fact is, the quality of this month's new arrivals puts Netflix's spotty August list to shame. Whereas there were too few notable titles on that service to even bother listing, here on Prime it's all I can do to track everything. (Funnily enough, last month I had a similar urge to throw up my hands at Netflix—but it was over all the expiring titles.) At the same time, so many of Prime's new arrivals are exclusives, I've broken with my usual practice of labeling them PRIME ONLY and am noting instead those few exceptions that aren't exclusive.

HBO

So, where to begin? The most obvious headliners are the newly available HBO series, Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom: Seasons 1-2, which arrived towards the end of July, and today's debut of all eight seasons of Larry David's cringingly funny Curb Your Enthusiasm. These two high-profile shows will likely get plenty of visibility on the Amazon site, so I don't need to spend much time on them here except to say what a great coup the service's HBO deal continues to be.

If further proof were needed, there was also the late-July arrival of Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra, a 2013 production meant to be the director's final theatrical film but, due to the skittishness of Hollywood's bean counters, was financed and released by HBO. Starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, this biopic of Liberace boasts not only a ridiculously high 95% score on Rotten Tomatoes, but a passel of industry awards including Emmys for Outstanding Movie, Actor (Douglas), and Director. In other words, a prestige production if there ever was one—TV or otherwise.

July Departures: Catch 'Em While You Can

For some of you this may be short notice, but if you've been checking the Expiring Soon page for the last few weeks, you know there are only a couple of days left—through July 30, in fact—to catch most of the below titles before they leave Prime Instant Video. If you haven't been checking regularly, then, well, you've got some streaming to do!

Matthew Modine and Elizabeth Berkley in The Real Blonde

Not sure what to watch in the next 48 hours? A fair number of these movies tend to appear and reappear on a regular basis (on both Prime and Netflix), and many are big-name titles you likely already know or have seen. So if you need a place to start, consider some of the following:

CLASSICS
Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) - an early film of the French New Wave that retains its fascinating fly-on-the-wall quality, delivering an unvarnished look at the sometimes dangerous business of attraction, directed by the great Claude Chabrol (expires 7/31) PRIME ONLY
Harold and Maude (1971) - a classic cult film of the 1970s, reviewed here
Love Story (1970) - one of the great tearjerkers of all time, and a major phenomenon in its day
Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) - considered by many to be the worst movie ever made. How can you resist? (expires 7/31) PRIME ONLY

More July Newbies

Robey and Co.

Another crop of interesting additions found their way to Prime Instant Video this week, including a few unexpected TV shows and a number of new-ish foreign and indie titles.

TV Series

All of the new TV offerings, except for Star Trek: The Animated Series—which I wrote up elsewhere a while back—are exclusive to Prime (i.e., not on Netflix), while Beauty and the Beast, like a number of previously mentioned arrivals, was another Netflix casualty earlier this month. Does this mean Prime will soon be acquiring some of the classic series currently scheduled to leave Netflix, like Adam-12, Magnum P.I., and Quincy, M.E.? One can only hope. Meanwhile, fans of cult '80s shows (and anyone old enough to remember Robey) will be thrilled to fill their watchlists with three seasons' worth of Friday the 13th: The Series. Brrr—scary, boys and girls!

Beauty and the Beast (1987-1990)
Belfast Zoo (2006-2007)
The Cleaner (2008-2009)
Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman (1993-1998)
Friday the 13th: The Series (1987-1990)
Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973-1974)

Pasolini, Chabrol, and Other Arty Newcomers

Claude Chabrol's The Bridesmaid

Through its agreements with distributors such as Film Movement, Indie Crush, Zeitgeist Films, Asian Crush, and First Run Features, Amazon has quietly pieced together a respectable catalog of foreign and indie titles on its Prime service, many of them exclusives. Yes, a lot of these may be obscure to mainstream audiences (some justifiably), but among them are plenty of unsung and forgotten jewels. (See the Foreign section of this site's Only On Prime page for a few older examples.)

This month Amazon added two Pier Paolo Pasolini films—his first feature, 1961's Accatone, along with 1967's Oedipus Rex. As the director of such controversial fare as Arabian Nights, Canterbury Tales, and Salo, Pasolini isn't for everyone. But given his importance to European cinema in the 1960s and '70s, it's nice to see these (less salacious) examples of his earlier work available to stream.

Another important European filmmaker was the incredibly prolific Claude Chabrol. As one of the French New Wave directors who came into their own in the late 1950s and early '60s (including Jean Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette), Chabrol first made his mark with Les Bonnes Femmes (1960). He went on to distinguish himself with a long and vital career that included a string of acclaimed thrillers, making him, in many ways, France's answer to Alfred Hitchcock. Aside from a half dozen or so Criterion titles available exclusively on Hulu, Chabrol's work is severely underrepresented in the streaming world, so it's nice to see Les Bonnes Femmes and Merci Pour Le Chocolat (2000) joined by 2004's The Bridesmaid (never to be confused with the comedy Bridesmaids!) on Prime. [Note: It's been pointed out to me that Les Bonnes Femmes is set to expire on July 31—so catch it soon.]

New July Titles

Where Netflix this month seemed all about shedding as many older titles as possible, Amazon looks to be doing just the opposite, adding an impressive mix of genuine classics, public domain flicks, TV shows, and a diverse blend of 1980s and '90s content. In some ways the service has one-upped its larger competitor by acquiring a number of Netflix's recent castoffs, including King Kong (1976), the original The Odd Couple (1968), and David Cronenberg's Shivers (1975).

CLASSICS

Classic (i.e., pre-1982) movies are growing into one of Prime's unsung strengths. In addition to the older titles it often shares with Netflix, the service continues to add an assortment of rarely seen potboilers like Hour of the Gun (1967), The Red House (1947), and Three Came Home (1950), along with bona fide classics such as Howard Hawks' majestic Red River (1948) and, not one, but three Marilyn Monroe pictures (Bus Stop, Niagara, and How to Marry a Millionaire). There's also the campy fun of 1966's feature-length Batman movie, plus Abbott & Costello fooling around in 1952's Jack and the Beanstalk (you know, for kids). A summary of exclusive classics wouldn't be complete without mentioning Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) and the Roger Corman biker flick, The Wild Angels (1966), starring Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, and Bruce Dern.

June Expirations: Riding Into the Sunset

For those of you who also subscribe to Netflix, most of the below titles may look familiar—the majority of them are also streaming there. But not all of them are expiring from both services (a bit confusing, yes).

In addition to the shared titles that are expiring this month, a number of PRIME ONLY movies are also leaving, five of which belong to the increasingly beleaguered category of Genuine Classics. That means fans of westerns like 1958's The Big Country, starring Gregory Peck, and 1950's Broken Arrow, with Jimmy Stewart—not to mention John Ford's 1939 Drums Along the Mohawk and the John Wayne-starrer Brannigan (1975)—should move those titles to the top of their watchlists right away (especially The Big Country, which clocks in at almost three hours).

If you've already seen those but are still craving something less current than the usual streaming fare, check out the more obscure Lily in Love (1984), starring Christopher Plummer and Maggie Smith, or the Alistair Maclean thriller, When Eight Bells Toll (1971), featuring a young Anthony Hopkins in a rare action-adventure role. Some of the more highbrow critics championed Paul Schrader's Douglas Sirk-like melodrama, Forever Mine (1999), but I found it a bit hard to take (even with generous helpings of Gretchen Mol's many charms). View at your own risk.

Here's the full list of what's expiring in the next few days. Feel free to add your own in the comments below.

HBO, Comedy, and...Troma Time!

If you like really bad movies with lots of trashy titles (or is that lots of trashy movies with really bad titles?), then this new batch of Amazon Prime arrivals is for you. I can't claim to be a big follower of Le Cinema du Lloyd Kaufman (a.k.a. Troma Entertainment), but I'll always appreciate his influential role in the vanishing art of low-budget exploitation cinema. How much less rich would the world be without movies like Demented Death Farm Massacre, Maniac Nurses Find Ecstasy, Blood Sisters of Lesbian Sin, and Croaked: Frog Monster from Hell?

Each of us must make peace with this question for ourselves, but if you're looking for a little something to cleanse the palate between big-budget summer gloss, then you won't do worse (or is that better?) than settling into the La-Z-Boy with a brewskie and/or barf bag and queuing up one or more of the below titles. Given the number of imported titles, along with the lack of such (cough) classics (cough) as Tromeo & Juliet, Class of Nuke 'em High, and Toxic Avenger, my guess is that many, if not all, of these were distributed by Troma as opposed to actually being produced by them. Which means they could be much better—or far, far worse—than even the usual Kaufman fare.

For June: Coppola & Kubrick In, PBS Out

[6/19 NOTE: It appears most of the PBS shows have now been renewed.]

In a month that saw the arrival of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), and a handful of classics that include People Will Talk (1951), Roman Holiday (1953), and The Paper Chase (1973), you would think there would be cause for celebration among subscribers to Amazon Prime (especially considering the ongoing scarcity of Kubrick films on streaming services).

Unfortunately, if you're a PBS fan, the more significant story is the scheduled June 13 June 20 departure of a large number of programs, including such stalwarts as Nova, Frontline, American Experience, and the many acclaimed documentaries from Ken and Ric Burns. Given the recent loss of nearly all things Comedy Central—plus a large swath of BBC content earlier this year—that leaves some sizable gaps in Prime's TV catalog. Sure, HBO and original Amazon series continue to grow, and there's still a decent mix of FOX, USA, and other network content, but that will be of little consolation to diehard comedy and public television fans.

Recent Arrivals, Upcoming Departures

When HBO first announced its HBO Now standalone service, the concern among many Prime subscribers was whether this meant the end of HBO's presence on Prime Instant Video. Would the contract on the service's current shows simply be allowed to run out, with no new content made available? If the additions of the last few days are any indication, you can relax: it looks like you've still got time to catch up on The Wire and The Sopranos—not to mention some other great shows that are now available, including the first seasons of Girls, Veep, and the very unlucky Dustin Hoffman-starrer, Luck.

Arrivals (HBO series)

Banshee: Season 1 (2013) (Cinemax)
Girls: Season 1 (2012)
Hung: Seasons 1-3 (2009-11)
In Treatment: Seasons 2-3 (2009-10)
John From Cincinnati: Season 1 (2007)
Luck: Season 1 (2011)


Treme: Season 4 (2013)
True Blood: Season 4 (2011)
Veep: Season 1 (2012)

Also among the new HBO titles is 2012's Game Change, with Julianne Moore kicking butt as Sarah Palin and Ed Harris as John McCain. This joins a number of other quality HBO films on Prime, many of which can be found toward the bottom of the Only On Prime page.

May's Noteworthy Arrivals

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary

Some interesting PRIME ONLY entries this month, especially for fans of cult and art films. If you like things weird, wacky, and highly original, it's tough to go wrong with anything by director Guy Maddin. He's the guy who directed 2004's hoot, The Saddest Music in the World (probably his best-known film), as well as Careful (1992) and the highly regarded ballet adaptation, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (2003), both of which are now streaming.

Also falling into the weird category are a handful of cult horror flicks released under the Mutant Sorority Pictures label (which for some of you should be recommendation enough):

Death Laid an Egg (1968)
Demon Seed, a.k.a, Satan's Mistress, Dark Eyes, Demon Rage (1982) - not to be confused with Donald Cammel's far superior 1977 film starring Julie Christie
Jail Bait Babysitter (1977)
Satan's School for Girls (1973)