Netflix Watch Instantly Recommendation Thread

#latepass af but Chef's Table is SO breathtaking and cinematic in a way I was not prepared for!!

I've tried Chef's Table several times and I just can't do it. It's like the anti-Mind of a Chef.

Green Room is on UK Netflix now.

^^^doubly recommended if you are a punk fan and/or have spent a lot of time in dingy punk dives (and uh aren't squeamish)

i really liked green room's simple, brutal 70s/80s style approach to an action/thriller/quasi horror thing after all these bloated super hero CG flicks

i don't actually know how much time i want to take to think about the OA. if there were a thread devoted to it. i definitely watched the whole thing. but i might have felt a little Shyamalaned by the end of it.

we been watching the OA. i like to watch things slower than Helen does. First couple eps were not that great but we just watched episode three and it was good. certain parts made me feel like i was gonna have a panic attack. so tense. and so creepy. prepareing myself to be annoyed by the end.

we also watched COMPULSION which is a cool movie I had never seen.

all of this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_television

http://www.avikinginla.com/2016/09/guide-to-norways-slow-tv-on-netflix/

Binged the OA the last two days, And because most people did that, and do that these days, it feels silly to open a new thread for it if we can't discuss it on a weekly episode basis to gawk over. Anyway,

***spoilers***

It was a mess, but a very entertaining mess imho. The Kathun scenes were excruciating. But I decided after episode two that despite the obvious cheesiness to justgo with it and ride it out. And it was very entertaining, had some nice stuff to think about. I was captivated, despite the airy fairy stuff.
The ending though, God I hated it: as a viewer I don't want to be reminded of mundane, real, worries like "will there be a next season, and if so, what the hell are we going to do with it, whilst also wrapping it up sortof in case we don't get a second season." Also one of today's tv problems, more than ever. I don't want to be bothered by that shit, but it's exactly the note on how it ended. Guns (literally) blazing with the school shooting - which didn't offend me morally as it did some reviewers, but more as a viewer: you don't need this HUGE event to somehow tie stuff together and keep us guessing when the whole series is chock full of it already.
The Amazon box of books is another very cheap trick. She constructed this whole story through four books she bought, seemingly unread, and keeps them together in one box? A highly paranoid woman who while blind and in captivity for years learned to pay attention to every minor detail leaves that box under the bed? O rly? And if not, the opposite is just as awful: someone planted that box of books? For the boys to suddenly find out? O rly? GTFO. That finale felt like watching the writers trying to balance the fate of the show instead of writing the show and the story they want to write.

And yet, despite all those huge flaws I was still captivated. They did something right alright. I just hope enough people are entertained/frustrated for Netflix to give them carte blanche, so the writers can focus on the story instead of on survival of the series itself.

Totally agree with your post Le Bateau Ivre - and also why I was frustrated. The show ends up feeling like a beta version that will get passed off as final if it's not renewed. I really enjoyed the show over all though and have went back and watched Brit's "Another Earth" film, which was like a more mainstream Melancholia.

Ohhh, 'mainstream Melancholia' scratches me right where I itch, will watch that!

(For despite my criticism I truly did feel OA was perfect holiday season fodder, this stuff is made for the season isn't it?)

Nicholas Ray's offbeat Joan Crawford western 'Johnny Guitar' is on Netflix atm. I watched for the first time last night

Johnny Guitar is an amazing movie. Watched it in a bunch of classes in college. Lots of talk about the communist witchhunt of the time.

yeah that movie is pretty damn good

Also the gender roles. It's called Johnny Guitar but the movie is about Joan Crawford vs Mercedes McCambridge (voice of the demon in the Exorcist!). Her performance in Johnny Guitar is one for the ages.

This is UK only?? Was watching Ray's king of kings last night

i think it is u.k. only. maybe the u.k. ilxors can have their own netflix thread on the I Love Snooker board. it's very confusing.

Not available in US, but and more's the pity. It's been on my list for years.

Damn I was excited

There is a uk Netflix thread I think

I watched Triple 9 (via a t0rrent-but it is on netflix) earlier and can see why it got bad reviews but it was still a hell of a lot of fun.

But... it's on amazon for rental at $2.99?

sorry, as a proliferate t0rrent user I didn't notice that - but google said it was on netflix

some new stuff up on netflix:

an american in madras (Extensive film clips and interviews tell the story of American filmmaker Ellis R. Dungan, who spent 15 years in India and helped define Tamil cinema.)

boogie nights

braveheart

caddyshack

the day the earth stood still

E.T.

el dorado

hugo

the inn of the sixth happiness

the land of the enlightened (In the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, armed bands of young boys survive by scavenging for old land mines, mining lapis lazuli and trading in opium.)

the manhattan project

menace II society

the shining

the sons of katie elder

superman I/II/III/IV

v for vendetta

vanilla sky

but you've seen all those.

so Ally McBeal is.... something

i never got into that

There's a documentary on there called Minimalism which is about how extremely good looking people with MacBook pros can feel better about their lives by reducing the amount of possessions they have. Quite a good hate-watch if you're in that mood.

i think i read about that one guy in the new york times. wanted to plop him down in the middle of the Amazon jungle with a penknife and a granola bar.

whatever happened to becoming a monk? used to be a thing. just walk away from it all. didn't have to make a big deal about it.

I think you can do without a couple of limbs too

Oh, you can watch that stuff all the time on regular tv, what with the deluge of tiny homes shows (which I've always felt would be much improved with the addition of a check-in 6-12 months later, when the couple has unsurprisingly divorced because they invested very little forethought in what it actually means to constantly be within thirty feet of your partner).

I do have a troublesome limb

tiny homes? you mean apartments?

no, there's an actual number of people (all of whom have probably been interviewed or the subject of an article) who live in houses the size of a storage shed or shack. some of them are a little wiser and just have an airstream trailer or something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_house_movement

"the forest is my living room"

split the difference and put your tiny house in a wal-mart parking lot

put it in yr pipe & smoke it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXKqdi0Wp0E

i assumed morbs was being ironic

So, I started watching "One Day at a Time", the new Netflix sitcom they just added, and it's pretty good! It's about a Cuban-American single mother living with her two kids and widowed mom, and apparently it's a remake of a '70s sitcom of the same name, but I'm not familiar with that. Anyway, like their "Fuller House" remake it's very much in the old-school sitcom mold, with a laugh-track, characters who are clearly defined types clashing with each other, a wacky boss, etc.

But this one is way more progressive, at least based on the first four or five episodes I watched. The teenage daughter is a feminist, and in the first two episodes they already tackle sexist traditions, wage differences between men and women, and mansplaining. And there's a really good episode where the protagonist's secular worldview clashes with her mom's deep Catholicism, I wasn't expecting a sitcom to deal with this in a serious manner, but it does.

Anyway, the show is (co)written by Gloria Calderón Kellett (who also writes for iZombie, my favourite series on telly right now), who is of Cuban descent too, so I like it how it's unafraid to do broad humour on Latinx sensibilities without reverting to obvious stereotypes. Even the conservative Catholic abuela (played by Rita Moreno) gets way more depth than you'd expect. So yeah, seems like a good series, I guess I'll binge watch the rest of it this week.

laugh track kinda kills it for me but i'm pleased that norman lear is still in the game

I read an article about the series, apparently it's not a laugh track but an actual live audience.

It was a bit distracting at first, but I was willing to accept it as a part of the series classic sitcom sensibility. Like, it really feels like they wanted to do something that could be formally from the '80s, but with a '10s awareness.

And the classic form somehow makes it more affecting when they go deep into issues that mostly weren't addressed in those '80s sitcoms. If the aesthetics were more contemporary, somehow I don't feel the juxtaposition would work as well. Like, if the classic sitcom form is some sort of a heightened representation of the world, here they show that it can be more inclusive than we thought.

And this is even more striking when you compare it to Fuller House, which really does use the classic form as if nothing had changed, as pure nostalgia comfort food.

All qualitative questions aside, I don't understand the branding of that show at all. It's a remake that doesn't resemble the original in any significant way and the original doesn't seem to be much of a nostalgia trigger, so...why not just make it its own thing?

To the extent that he's actually involved (he has to be like 117 by now), I am glad that Norman Lear's back, though. If not him, we definitely need somebody doing what he used to do about now.

the original doesn't seem to be much of a nostalgia trigger

I have no idea why, but a bunch of people in their early 20s think it's the greatest thing ever? I have no idea. I have some fond memories of a few tv shows but that one would never make my list

Huh. That is very weird information you've just related. Like...how on earth did people in their early 20s even discover or see the original?

I guess really there are zero sitcoms I remember from young childhood that I have fond memories of so maybe I'm the weird one here.