What’s Streaming
HOLLYWOOD Stream on Netflix. Hollywood’s golden era is viewed through a gilded but piercing lens in this soapy new mini-series, from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan, both of “Glee.” Set in a sumptuous version of 1940s Los Angeles, “Hollywood” imagines a more inclusive version of that era’s Tinseltown. Many characters are people to whom the real Hollywood would have been hostile. They include Archie (Jeremy Pope), an aspiring screenwriter who is black and gay, and has a movie to sell. He teams up with a young director (Darren Criss) to make that dream a reality. “The bid to make Archie’s movie starts as a glitzy, funny, gimlet-eyed dissection of bigotry and power,” James Poniewozik wrote in his review for The New York Times. “Then it lurches, halfway through, into a pep talk about what some kids can accomplish if they gather up their moxie and put on a show.”
PROP CULTURE Stream on Disney Plus. Where is the snow globe from Disney’s original “Mary Poppins” movie? Find out in this new series, in which Dan Lanigan, a prop collector, tracks down Disney artifacts. (Note to viewers: A tolerance for corporate self-promotion is required.) Lanigan spends the first episode revisiting props from “Mary Poppins,” and speaking with some of the members of that film’s creative team. Among them are the costume and set designer Tony Walton and the songwriter Richard M. Sherman, who describes Walt Disney asking Sherman and his brother and songwriting partner, Robert B. Sherman, to come to his office and play their song “Feed The Birds,” from “Mary Poppins,” for Disney. “He would say, you know, ‘play it, play it for me,’” Sherman says.
SAVING FACE (2005) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. In a recent interview with The Times, the filmmaker Alice Wu described her intention when she made her first feature. “I was trying to make the biggest romantic comedy I could on a tiny budget,” she said, “with all Asian-American actors, and half of it in Mandarin Chinese.” The result? “Saving Face,” which revolves around a young Chinese-American surgeon, Wil (Michelle Krusiec). Set primarily in Flushing, Queens, the plot involves a romance between Wil and Vivian (Lynn Chen), a dancer. Wil hasn’t come out to her mother (Joan Chen), which complicates her relationship — as does the discovery that her mother is pregnant. While “Saving Face” proved influential (Last year, The Los Angeles Times named it one of the 20 best Asian-American films of the last 20 years), Wu’s new movie, “The Half of It,” out this week, is her first film since.
What’s on TV
IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953) 10:15 p.m. on TCM. An alien spaceship slams to Earth at the beginning of this sci-fi horror movie, based on material by Ray Bradbury. The story that follows may be less frightening to contemporary cable viewers than it was to the film’s original movie-theater audiences, who got to experience it with early 3-D effects.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
