With the calendar turning 2023 this month, a new cyclical start is a good time to dive into history - to remind us how things have and haven’t changed - and social relationships - to remind us of how things can (and sometimes, maybe cannot) change. These seven films streaming on Hulu this month explore humans’ potential to make a mess, come together, and chart different kinds of histories and progress through individual, and collective living. This month, let’s get into what action - and stasis - make.
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A League Of Their Own (1992)
Available: January 1 | Director: Penny Marshall | Writer: Kim Wilson, Kelly Candaele, Lowell Ganz
Cast: Geena Davis, Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell
The Illinois-based Rockford Peaches, the team depicted in the film, is one of the founding members of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. In the early 1940s, the league was formed to keep up public interest in baseball by employing women players, since the majority of men players were overseas in World War II. With authentic personalities and relationship dynamics between characters, the film is a historic and emotional story.
The Breakfast Club (1985)
Available: January 1 | Writer & Director: John Hughes
Cast: Emilio Estevez, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy
The Breakfast Club is one of the finest contemporary, American films that offer an education not only in the we-are-more-similar-than-we-are-different philosophy, but a film that establishes, through an excellent script and ensemble cast acting, what those core feelings, and values that come from sentiment, are that bring us together or threaten to move us spaces apart.
The King of Comedy (1982)
Available: January 1 | Director: Martin Scorsese | Writer: Paul D. Zimmerman
Cast: Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Sandra Bernhard
The King of Comedy is a meta-dark comedy set in the show business industry. Robert De Niro plays Rupert Pupkin, a man whose struggle is not so much towards fame as it is about the clarity needed to see oneself and one’s goals clearly, an artist or another vocation, notwithstanding. While the comedy is here, so is the darkness of drama: behind that need to be applauded and accepted, what remains, or is exposed?
The Proposal (2009)
Available: January 1| Director: Anne Fletcher | Writer: Peter Chiarelli
Cast: Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds, Betty White
Filmed in oceanside Rockport, Massachusetts as a stand-in for Sitka, Canada, The Proposal leans on Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds’ superb comedic acting, alongside a warm-hearted, quirky ensemble cast. Their chemistry is excellent. The two are a fit from the start, and we watch them struggle, ala the delicious, messy unraveling of a rom-com. Plus, it’s really fun to watch Bullock’s Type A overdrive morph into where she feels best but has been scared to go: home.
Snatch (2000)
Available: January 1 | Writer & Director: Guy Ritchie
Cast: Brad Pitt, Jason Statham, Vinnie Jones, Benicio del Toro
Snatch follows a diverse group of characters, including bookmakers, jewelers, promoters, and robbers, on their journey to recover a stolen diamond. A crime story made comedic, due to an often slapstick mayhem the group creates, and encounters, the film tracks in fast dialogue, friendship, and enough mystery to keep crime fans interested in the human drama. If you enjoy the Ocean Eleven franchise, give Snatch a try.
One Fine Day (1996)
Available: January 1
Director: Michael Hoffman
Writer: Terrel Seltzer, Ellen Simon
Cast: Michelle Pfeiffer, George Clooney, Anna Maria Horsford
Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney make an adorable anti-pair in this film as single parents with one child each, both of them on work deadlines for the day. In retrospect (the film came out in 1996), the film is making understated commentary about the very real challenges single parents face when they do not have support networks. The film, though, takes the theme as comedy, but there are moments when the reality of single parenthood lay bare.
Love, Gilda (2018)
Available: January 31 | Director: Lisa D’Apolito
Love, Gilda follows Jewish-American comedienne Gilda Radner, the first person hired as a cast member of Saturday Night Live. Voiced by present-day comedians and comediennes, Radner’s notes come to new life by being read aloud. In it are her reflections on the industry, her work, and her own life, together revealing a profile of one of the most influential and talented contemporary artists in the comedy profession, especially for the women who would come after her.