Netflix Watch Instantly Recommendation Thread

I disagree. I found it ultimately moving, albeit on a small scale.

Muscle Shoals

that is a fucking horrible and borderline racist movie

oh, word? [quietly removes from queue]

plz explain

I saw it at a doc showing and ended up leaving around halfway through. It's the sort of movie that perceives an endorsement by bono of the "Black Sound" of muscle shoals as being ringing and meaningful. It's pretty clearly a Rick Hall hagiography; the directors at the talkback copped to not knowing much about muscle shoals before they started filming. there's a lot of "we didn't see color" rhetoric juxtaposed with Percy Sledge as a "shucks i didn't know nothing" churchfearing man and wilson pickett as a renegade negro who had to be held in check. tons of nonsense and backstory about hall but none of it any deeper than his immediate perspective, which pretty clearly governs the tone and mythmaking.

Times Review is mostly right on but they liked it more than i did: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/movies/muscle-shoals-directed-by-greg-camalier.html

definitely give it a shot and let me know if i'm being overly sensitive or missing something but i remember yelling at the screen three times before i finally left.

like why the fuck do i wanna hear fifty minutes of WORDS O BACK SOUTH WISDOM from Rick Hall for fucks sake
everything 20 feet got right (focus on the artists, allow the story to guide you, get deep into the personal lives of the performers, sparingly speak with the legends and moneymen) this got wrong

Said it before on the dedicated thread, but if you want to learn about the Muscle Shoals sound scene you've gotta read Get A Shot Of Rhythm And Blues: The Arthur Alexander Story, by Richard Younger.

Roger Dodger

Roger The Cabin Boy

Rick Hall looked like a tool in the Muscle Shoals doc. It seemed clear to me he was a megalomaniacal - if talented - clown.

enjoying the first few episodes of The Returned -- but can't decide whether it's going to end up like a French version of LOST or something. Still, good atmosphere, nice Mogwai soundtrack. is it a self-contained thing or is there more than one season?

more than one season. so you'll have to wait for resolution, but it stays good throughout this season imo.

I've talked up 'Best Kept Secret' on numerous threads in the past and it just came available. It's one of my favorite films from last year, very deeply effecting. It's a look into the public school system in Hoboken and how they handle autistic students.
http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/Best_Kept_Secret/70287268

The Muscle Shoals doc is just fine, not racist, but also a view of the time sort of painted by Rick Hall's recollection. When you finish watching it, you're not going to leave with any inaccurate information and if you can't handle one minute of screentime from Bono acting like he knows something then I have no idea how you've lasted all the way to 2014. Basically, forks is a dork and anybody/everybody should watch Muscle Shoals.

a friend had a lot of his photos used in the doc, he's down with forks' view

Muscle Shoals was way better than that 20 Feet From Stardom dreck. Talk about ruining an important and interesting subject with bullshit.

Yeah, 20 Feet was definitely a disappointment except that it turned me on to Lisa Fischer's fucking AMAZING voice.

Check out the top billing on Netflix...

https://scontent-a-atl.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/t1.0-9/1972548_10153963293505066_554703125_n.jpg

charlie countryman -vs- danny deckchair

Lisa Fischer rocks.

oh but did anyone watch Bullet? maybe i'll watch that one. wanted to know if it was worth my precious time.

friend of mine said i should watch this:

http://instantwatcher.com/titles/180323

I watched Slavoj Žižek's The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology last night. It was quite a slog, a lot longer than it needed to be. It had it's cute moments where he inserted himself into various scenes from famous films, but overall didn't feel like it added up to much. I expected him to fire off some really contentious or controversial ideas, but it was mostly just standard critical theory. Mostly I found myself wishing that someone would give him a hankie because he kept wiping his nose with his hand and sniffling a lot as he spoke.

Basically, forks is a dork

and anybody/everybody should watch Muscle Shoals.

and again, i wouldn't call it racist so much as borderline racist

as for 20 feet, tastes can vary but the popular revival of several of these women's careers on the back of it has to be universally positive right? I mean fuckin darlene love at the oscars!

for real

The results of 20 Feet's success are laudable but don't mean the movie isn't a piece of shit.

i liked it, i'd recommend it, i'd defend it.
you are literally the first person i've heard of not liking it. And i've talked about it with people who both book and sing with darlene! what's your beef exactly?

most music docs suck. didn't anyone watch bullet yet? if zizek were in bullet you all would have watched it by now i bet.

My "beef" is that backup singers are a good topic, but I thought the movie was trite, PBS Doo-Wop reunion special pap. I'm glad it spotlighted such amazing talents, and it was nice to see them finally get their due. It was feel-good Oscar bait and it caught the fish. I'm happy for all involved, but I will never suggest anyone spend a minute watching it. Folks would be better off looking up youtube clips of all the singers in the credits.

did you guys see jailbait yet? that's a good one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR-ouRYzlm8

i spoke with the director of 20 feet, i really don't think he was aiming for oscar bait. He seemed passionate about the performers and the music and that showed to me in the performance? He said he interviewed another thirty or forty performers who didn't make the cut, not because their stories weren't meaningful but because their experience was similar to other folks in the film already.
I'm generally pretty sensitive to soft pedal bullshit in music docs; this one was certainly mom-friendly but it didn't seem spoon fed to me. What was missing for you?
ps 'muscle shoals' still sucks

I didn't like the structure. I wanted more meat, more history - both past and present - and less folks sitting around a table proving they could still sing. I was dreading the inevitable "everyone in a room together" ending from the very start. This was gauzy Hollywood standard fare, not for fans but an uninformed public; one that would never see it without the Oscar run. I also thought that unfortunately it was far too much about Darlene and not all the other equally talented folks. I'm sure it doesn't get made without her, but I went from anger at the way she was treated to wanting her to shut up.

Likewise, I thought Darlene's first measure of singing at the Oscars was great, but then she went on and on and on.

more meat and more history would certainly have been welcome but doing it at the expense of the stories of the women he was interviewing would've not necessarily have improved it for me. I'd love to see the film you wanted to see too but I didn't need this to be that.
I was not a fan of the lean on me singalong, agreed.
i could listen to darlene all day quite frankly but if i was gonna pick the lead in this i would've picked merry clayton which was A OK by me.

Star Trek a new generation

How did it take me so long to get into this??

Merry Clayton was all charm, no smarm. Darlene, alas, was not.

maybe this has already been discussed but i just watched the doc about levon helm and it was really good! i enjoyed all the musical parts as well as the life parts. the ENT visits were a little rough, but he was always fun to watch.

Rutger Hauer's "The Future"

^^I imagine it's different from the Miranda July one.

o/t but Miranda July's The Future was excellent

both underwhelming

I've never been so pleased by a cat's death, tempered only with the sadness that it wasn't depicted more explicitly.

I do think Hamish Linklater is foxy but yeah cat v/o was a dealbreaker. MJ's mistake was adapting one of her goddamn "performances."

When July said in a Walker Q&A that she thought keeping the v/o despite everyone else's reservations (or downright objections) was a "punk moment" for her, I struggled not to raise my hand and have a Michelle Visage moment with her. "Oh, it's cute that you think that's what punk is, bitch."

Don Jon totally worthwhile.

Honglei Sun was so good in Drug War. Does he have another stand-out performance anyone would recommend?