Streaming Quick Picks: Michael Winterbottom
With The Trip to Italy as our upcoming Tuesday night Madfilm Meetup at Sundance, I thought it would be a good time to discover how many Michael Winterbottom films are available on streaming services. Overall, he is pretty well represented on Netflix, Amazon, and Vudu, and he makes a pretty interesting director to look at because of the range of his work.
Fans of The Trip films will likely gravitate first toward his collaborations with Steve Coogan: 24 Hour Party People (2002), Tristram Shandy (2005), and the recent The Look of Love (2013), which I plan to look at in an upcoming Missed Madison Review. The serio-comic tone of the Coogan films almost leads you to forget about the controversies surrounding images of violence against women in his Jim Thompson adaptation, The Killer Inside Me (2010, the same year as The Trip). His only true critical drubbing has been sexually explicit 9 Songs (2005), which despite its 24% Tomatometer Rating does have its defenders (including me). And like other ambitious filmmakers these days, he as ventured into documentary forms with The Shock Doctrine (2009) and the hybrid The Road to Guantanamo (2006). Perhaps Winterbottom’s most interesting characteristic is how he can divide critics; for example, take a look at the reviews for another Winterbottom experiment, Everyday (2013). Even when he misfires, Winterbottom is one of the most interesting filmmakers working today.
There are three notable exclusions from the list below: Wonderland (1999), Jude (1996) and I Want You (1998). Wonderland was my introduction to Winterbottom, as I saw the film at my one trip to the Sundance Film Festival in 2000. I came home looking forward to telling people to go see the film, but it never made it to Madison theaters. Wonderland is available on DVD from Netflix. Jude, an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure starring Kate Winslet and Christopher Eccleston, must have been released on DVD at some point, but I can’t find it locally nor does it appear to be at Netflix DVD currently (if Netflix made searching for DVDs by non-subscribers a wee bit easier, I could tell you with more certainty). I Want You (a.k.a. Beloved) is an early starring role for Rachel Weisz, and I can find very little about the film or its availability.
Those looking for even more Winterbottom might also look into his early television work like Family (1994), written by Roddy Doyle, and the first two episodes in season one of Robbie Coltrane’s Cracker (1993-1995).
