5 Films To Watch Now on Kanopy

Public access is so important to the survival of any motion picture’s legacy, which is why platforms like Kanopy come highly recommended. Kanopy is a free streaming service available to anyone with an active library account (either public or academic), and here are five recommendations from their catalog for you to check out:

THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (1973) 

“This life’s hard, man, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.”

These words of wisdom, spoken tersely by Jackie Brown, are crucial to the longevity of any small-time hood trying to make a buck in Boston’s unforgiving criminal underbelly. Jackie, a flashy young entrepreneur in the lucrative business of gunrunning, is just one of several street-smart characters you’ll get to know intimately in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Peter Yates’ grounded, meticulous look at the organized crime ecosystem and its all-too-familiar hierarchical structure. While released not long after The Godfather, the grandiose romanticism of that film is light years away from the low-level realism presented here; there aren’t any wise old mafia dons making deals in mansions, no big shootouts or car bombings; here, business is routinely handled by expendable middlemen in bowling alleys and grocery store parking lots, and any violence is incidental, uncinematic.

Faithfully adapted from attorney-turned-author George V. Higgins’ debut novel of the same name, Yates and co. let the dialogue-heavy writing style of its creator do most of the talking (figuratively and literally; the script takes dialogue verbatim from the source); as someone who has read some of Higgins’ stuff, this is a masterpiece of adaptation, capturing the mood, rhythm, and regional flavor of his work.

Another area where it earns the “masterpiece” buzzword is in how it establishes itself as a sturdy labor vs. capital allegory without resorting to didactic shortcuts; it’s too absorbed in replicating this gritty, insular world to ever get bogged down in thesis, but it gives you one anyway, simple and astute.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Robert Mitchum as the titular schmuck Eddie Coyle, the epitome of working-class middle management and the heart and soul of a soulless system, who by the beginning of the film can feel the walls closing in due to his looming prison sentence for a truck hijacking. Despite his star status, Mitchum plays the role like any other member of the ensemble: understated and lived-in; without a hint of hyperbole, it’s one of the greatest stripped-down acting jobs you’re ever going to see. There’s a key scene late where he catches a Bruins game with one of the alleged “friends” and drunkenly admires the team’s star player from the cheap seats: “Greatest hockey player in the world. Number four, Bobby Orr. Jeez, what a future he’s got, huh?” It’s a subtly gut-wrenching moment, played beautifully by Mitchum, of a guy running out of time, looking ahead and feeling momentary comfort; the cruelest irony, in a movie clouded with such tragic cynicism, is the unforeseeable: in five years, Bobby Orr would be thirty, washed, and out of the sport for good. 

GANJA & HESS (1973)

Following the returns for the hit blaxploitation horror film Blacula, b-movie financiers saw dollar signs when reading actor/writer/director Bill Gunn’s own script about black vampirism. Little did they know Gunn’s enthusiasm for such genre fare was close to nil, and his more commercially viable screenplay was intended as a mere outline for the avant-garde meditation on blackness he ended up making. While the finished piece, Ganja & Hess, played to international acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival, the producers freaked out over its experimentation and re-edited the film (cutting out over half an hour of footage), releasing a bastardized, retitled version of Gunn’s vision to a very confused grindhouse audience who rejected it anyway.

The film fell into relative obscurity thereafter, but thanks to restoration efforts, the original cut is now available to be appreciated by a new generation of cinephiles. A lyrical fever dream, Ganja & Hess defies convention at every turn, making a plot synopsis pointless, but I’ll give you a taste anyway: Dr. Hess Green (played with authority by Night of the Living Dead star Duane Jones) is a wealthy anthropologist studying an ancient African blood-worshiping tribe who, after being stabbed by his troubled assistant Meta (played by Gunn himself) with the tribe’s ceremonial dagger, develops a violent arterial addiction. Things are complicated further upon the sudden arrival of Ganja, Meta’s estranged wife.

With a briefing like that, you might think you have a general idea of what you’re in for, but believe me, you don’t. Whether realistic or fantastic (the sweaty catharsis found in a baptist church, the unquenched slurping of red puddles), every moment captured by Gunn is palpable, intoxicating, and wholly singular. It is an essential viewing experience.

PERSONAL PROBLEMS (1980)

Bill Gunn’s next film, an experimental soap opera shot using VCR equipment, is another nearly-lost treasure of African-American cinema that found a second life with the help of preservationists. Gunn, along with influential writer Ishmael Reed, sought to make a candid film about the black experience in a time where funding for such projects was few and far between, so they funded it themselves and broadcast it locally on public television.

Largely improvised on a tight budget, Personal Problems is loosely about an overworked Harlem nurse, Johnnie Mae, and her daily interpersonal stresses, including an overcrowded apartment of moochers, a philandering husband, and her own infidelity stemming from the very human desire to escape our general malaise. The focalized conversations between friends, family, and lovers are documentary-like in their verisimilitude, as if these characters and this world would exist exactly as is, whether a camera was there or not; these lengthy scenes don’t seem to have a conventional structure because life itself is free of such limitations, and freedom within a medium constricted by Hollywood standards of storytelling is what the filmmakers wanted to embody. As real as it all feels, the video tech capturing that raw emotion also gives the overarching visual style a hazy dream quality, like a Cassavetes human drama filmed with the camcorder used at your parents’ wedding.

KNIFE+HEART (2018)

Directed by the exciting French filmmaker Yann Gonzalez, Knife+Heart is a whole lotta movie, a hypnotic, emotionally complex giallo set within Paris’ gay adult film industry circa 1979. The heroine is Anne, a queer auteur of cheap skin flix going through several crises as she struggles to complete her latest production, namely a recent breakup with the love of her life, an escalating booze addiction, and, uh, before I forget, there’s also a slasher sneaking around the city in a bondage mask, cutting up Anne’s crew members with a dildo switchblade.

If that sounds like a lot, it is! And I can’t recommend it enough. You really see the full potential of the medium in something as rich and transgressive as this. It’s gorgeous to look at (shot on 35 mm) and pretty to listen to (credit Yann’s brother Anthony of M83 for the ethereal score), both assets for any decent stab at giallo homage, but Gonzalez is not interested in just copy-and-pasting an aesthetic; he cuts deeper by recreating retro subgenres both formally and psychologically while—through recontextualizing the history of Eurosleaze—developing a distinct perspective on love, sex, gender, exploitation, and their relationships to cinema. Beyond all of its frank eroticism and gnarly violence, there is a core poignancy that I find entirely moving; even the killer gets treated with humanity, even the fluffer. 

FIRE AND ICE (1983)

This one’s dedicated to all my fellow Frazettaheads out there, or anyone who’s ever looked at a High on Fire album and imagined a movie based on its cover art. Yes, subversive animator Ralph Bakshi’s Fire And Ice might be the nichiest recommendation on my list. Released at the tail end of the late-seventies/early-eighties fantasy boom ignited by the monumental success of Star Wars, Bakshi’s lightning-meets-thunder collaboration with fantasy art legend Frank Frazetta was one of a slew of sword and sorcery projects greenlit during this period, with some contemporaries including financial hits Excalibur and Conan The Barbarian; it’s the latter film based on the pulp writings of Robert E. Howard that shares a conceptual link with Fire And Ice (it should be noted that some of Frazetta’s early recognition was through his artwork for re-issued Conan paperbacks).

The plot is as barebones as it gets: a fire kingdom (good) is facing invasion from the north by an ice kingdom (bad); in the red corner there’s a dull, Aryan-looking hero - an ass-kicking rogue warrior/mentor (his look directly inspired by Frazetta’s Death Dealer painting), and a damsel in distress princess; an evil young sorcerer-king, his witchy mother, and their horde of nomadic minions fight out of the blue corner. Even with a layer of Freudian subtext, as a narrative it’s all pretty generic stuff, and the languid pacing isn’t ideal for something with a runtime of barely eighty minutes, but what really blows me away is the animation, combining Frazetta’s heavy metal phantasmagoria aesthetic with Bakshi’s now-unconventional use of rotoscoping, a process wherein scenes are initially filmed as live-action on a soundstage before animators trace over actors’ movements frame by frame in post, giving moments of physicality a certain organic fluidity you wouldn’t get from standard hand-drawn animation (think of it as a precursor to something like motion capture).

As for the elephant in the room, anyone capable of bare-minimum media literacy can pick up on its more problematic aspects; male gazey depictions of women, queer-coded villains, and darker-skinned, neanderthal-like henchmen are indefensible caricatures, but—adult-oriented crudeness aside—is it actually any more guilty than a number of beloved Disney classics (none of which can use “but it’s supposed to be overtly fascist Middle Earth” as a defense)? Opinions will undoubtedly vary, but for anyone with an interest in either alternative forms of animation or the pulpier, nastier side of high fantasy, it’s worth a look.