Netflix Watch Instantly Recommendation Thread

Thought it might be fun/useful to devote a thread that flagged semi-obscure or off the radar films & tv shows on Netflix's Watch Instantly service.

A few recent discoveries:

Burnt Offerings
MST3K: The Wild World of Batwoman
American Grindhouse
Vampyr
Who Is Harry Nilsson?
Shock Waves
Nightmares in Red, White and Blue
Man with the Movie Camera
World's Greatest Dad
Rolling Stones: Stones in Exile

There are so many MST3K movies available, it is awesome.

My roommate and I watched about three quarters of the Doors doc that Tom DiCillo made. Johnny Depp narrates.
It's pretty ridiculous and awesome.

xpost -- between that, the DVD sets and YouTube it's a golden time.

yeah, I think I've gone through about a dozen MST3K's this month already

x-post - I'm not a Doors fan, but that I've heard good things about that doc

Between checking a few months ago and checking a few days ago, a bunch of Criterion Collection films have been added. I don't remember so much from the Essential Art House boxes being available before, and it looks like almost all of them are there now.

Unfortunately, I found this out after I added the Bergman box set to my Criterion order the other day. Hopefully they'll let me return it unopened so I can get the Cassavetes box instead.

you can stream a woman under the influence now so... maybe rethink that, too

oh shiiiit, Killing of a Chinese Bookie is streamable now too!

Recently I've watched and enjoyed the following: The Watermelon Woman, Suspiria, Rockers, She, The Last Picture Show, and Le Jetee (inspiration for 12 Monkeys).

Oh and a lot of old Nickelodeon cartoons from the 90s have been added but y'all probably already know that.

The White Ribbon is available!

Claire Denis' 35 Shots of Rum

I think all of the Paul Morrissey Warhol-produced films are on there.

Louie season 1, one of the most fascinating shows in a long time.

Dogs Decoded: Nova is an awesome doc about recent canine research. Highly recommended for any dog owners.

Loved Louie as well.

Also streaming:
The Girlfriend Experience
Slings and Arrows
Blue Thunder

And HAVOC!

i watched the happy hooker goes hollywood on streaming netflix tonight. "recommendation" is a strong word, but i had fun.

"American Grindhouse"

Haha so amusing who co-produced this (it's okay btw as talking head features like this go).

if you liked "The Wild World of Batwoman", make sure to check out "Eegah!"

Louie season 1, one of the most fascinating shows in a long time.

Yeah, I never got a chance to check this out until it was on Netflix - it's great.

"I Am Love" is pretty fascinating

if you liked "The Wild World of Batwoman", make sure to check out "Eegah!"

I did and it was great!

barking dogs never bite - korean black comedy about eating the dogs
we jam econo - awesome minutemen doc

if i start posting on this thread i will be participating in 3 different netflix streaming threads which seems excessive

There's two other streaming threads? Did I miss something?

dont feel bad, one of them is my own self-indulgent fault and the other is on I Love Games.

JJJUSTEN MAKES ONE SENTENCIRIFIC REVIEWS OF ALL THE CRAP THAT HE WATCHES LATE AT NIGHT ON NETFLIX STREAMING XBOX SOMETHING WHY BECAUSE HE BORED ALSO BECAUSE
Netflix Streaming Film Recommendations: Because You Can't Always Play With Yourself

one is jjjusten's personal joint and the other has a tmi title

xp

Sorry jjjusten! I totally missed your thread. Thought I did a search first. Look forward to reading those threads.

Tales from the Script has interviews with everyone from Richard Rush to Paul Schraeder to Shane Black about big-studio screenwriting. Lots of guys I'd never heard speak before. Good documentary.

the documentary about milton glaser (hugely important graphic designer) is on instant netflix. can't wait to see it.

Exit Through the Gift Shop (aka "The Banksy documentary") is an unexpected mindfuck, and surprisingly isn't really about Banksy at all. I recommend!

yeah that looks good

^Had me all fucked up over art, commerce, life in general, for a couple days.

Recent watches:

Soul Kitchen
Vengeance
Valhalla Rising
Centurion
Rewatched first five eps of Party Down Season 2
Planet B-Boy

Another thumbs up for Exit Through the Gift Shop. Just watched the Joan Rivers doc this weekend, too.

The Eyes of Tammy Faye is a good doc, not sure if it's on Netflix instant.

Rewatched first five eps of Party Down Season 2

when are they going to put up the final 5 is my question

they took mall cops away :(

i only got to see, like, 4 episodes.

you could write, like, ten doctoral thesiseseses just watching that show and never leaving your couch. amerikkka writ sad.

Just watched Black Narcissus -- so good.

when are they going to put up the final 5 is my question

up now

Milton Glaser doc is good btw.

Just watched Black Narcissus -- so good.

― pixel farmer, Thursday, December 23, 2010 12:38 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Beautiful stuff like these seems worth waiting for the disc to show up, no?

I just watch Hoarders and old SNLs

Exit through the gift shop is so awesome

I know the disc would be better quality than streaming, but streaming is definitely better quality than regular tv -- there are far fewer compression artifacts than I get on cable. Maybe Netflix can tell I have decent downstream bandwidth (10 Mbps), I dunno. Turn off the lights in my office, watch fullscreen on the larger monitor, in with the earbuds, ask the family not to mess with me for two hours (or watch in the morning before they get up), a nice near-cinema experience.

"Beautiful stuff like these seems worth waiting for the disc to show up, no?"

Not with my TV, no.

ah good point

i'm a little of worried that Netflix is gonna phase out discs before the internet connections get good enough for streams to be disc-quality

I'M STILL HERE, one of the greatest and most underrated films of the year, is now on instant. Time will be very kind to it.

Just watched Moon, pretty good.
Now starting the Red Riding Trilogy.

Just watched "I Think We're Alone Now" about two disturbed dudes obsessed with Tiffany. Pretty interesting, if a bit depressing.

Come to think of it, both of the dudes are probably ILM regulars.

Didn't realise Knives Out 2 was going to be a Netflix film

knives out 3 will be too

Liking Murderville. It's cool to see a partially improvised show shot and edited like a drama, and there's some good laughs each episode. The guests handle the show in pretty different ways - Conan handled his episode so smoothly, you'd think he read the script!

Yeah it's very funny, although I kind of miss the weird/bad celebrity impressions of the original.

Original?

It's a remake of Murder in Successville, a british TV show.

It's cool to see a partially improvised show shot and edited like a drama

Did anyone else watch Bad Trip? I've never seen any of the Jackass movies so maybe this isn't as original as it seemed to me, but it's a hidden camera prank comedy movie (w/ Eric André, Lil Rel Howery, and Tiffany Haddish) where the prank scenes are part of an overarching narrative, and they never show the camera reveal to the participants bit. It's funny, def gets kinda gross, but it's almost worth watching just for the formal qualities

are today's biggest movie stars the ones who get comic book roles or the ones created by comic book roles

i liked the conan episode of murderville. series doesn't seem to be getting good reviews though.

Murderville was good. It wasn't life-changing but it was good.

I kept getting more and more agitated with Archive 81 because one of the protagonists is a nerdy Black man named Dan and I kept saying over and over "dude wtf I would never do that" to the TV

lol

Hmm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-sWlgFhUGo

I guessed that was jeunet in the first few seconds.

i'm not a fan of retrofuturism or of sexbot revenge stories.

iirc there's a Love, Death & Robots episode that has a very similar plot but is less than 15 mins long. watch that instead imo - you don't even have to switch streaming services

Inventing Anna is too goddamn long by half … i wouldnt call it “good”? … more like a trashy watchable soap opera that pretends to be true

lol yeah it's terrible but I can't stop watching. making Anna out into some kind of girlboss hero is a bizarre take but not surprising coming from Shonda Rhimes, I guess.

also the "journalism" scenes are hilariously bad, it's hard to believe that Jessica Pressler - who wrote the original Anna story and is exec producer on the show - allowed this version of herself to be portrayed this way i.e. doing some deeply unethical things like paying a source, accepting expensive gifts from a source, convincing Anna to change her plea, and literally begging the defence lawyer to part of his team?? wtf

yeah its really weird how they center the journo character & basically throw aside all but the barest bones of the actual story

As soon as I realized Shonda Rhimes was involved, I realized this was going to be about 85% nonsense with some good one-liners scattered through it

The accent is the worst I’ve heard in years. And I saw house of gucci

I've only seen one episode of the show but it's meant to be dodgy fake accent, no?

The big problem I have is that they are trying to thread the line between the audience knowing she's full of shit but not all the characters realizing it, but she's hamming up the unconvincing side so much that it is incredibly difficult to believe that she could convince anyone of anything.

That accent is a monstruosity. That charachter in general is tedious. Some funny moments with Anna Chlumsky and others though

tbh the accent is the least made up thing in the show. her irl accent is almost identical, its SO weird

heres an irl comparison

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

I mean, it's overdone but not by much

finished it :/ this show is wayyyyy too long, could've done without the final two or three episodes entirely.

And I'm reminded of why I dislike Shonda Rhimes shows - ultimately, they're always about characters who take their jobs way too fucking seriously and are constantly yelling at other people about it.

i just finished ep 4 & i’m like HOW are there five more episodes !!??? 😩

the article was fine; it's hard to imagine wanting to think any further about her

It's very easy to imagine wanting to imitate that accent though

And I'm reminded of why I dislike Shonda Rhimes shows - ultimately, they're always about characters who take their jobs way too fucking seriously and are constantly yelling at other people about it.

At least Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder complimented this with a lot of entertainingly batshit murder

as with most things in life, adding viola davis ups the enjoyment factor considerably

Did anyone else watch Bad Trip?

yeah it's totally fun.

Anyone recommend The Woman in the House...? I'm halfway through and while I find the mystery mildly interesting, it isn't the least bit funny to me.

i didnt like the first one so i skipped this one altogether

Watched them all as was fairly short but it's not great. The tone is all over the place and, as you say, it's not particularly funny so that when they do try an absurdist joke it's just really jarring.

Most of the time it just plays as a straight whodunnit.

i watched some of the first ep and got the strong feeling that the script was written as a comedy - it's full of jokes - but was shot and directed as a straight TV mystery. which, you know, is a choice - you could argue that SUCCESSION (2018-) is essentially veep or the thick of it just executed as a prestige drama - but succession allows the comedic beats to land, lets us just roll in the deliciousness of it, where with this, it's like, these carefully written jokes are just buried

Yeah, I like Kristen Bell and she carries the whole thing almost single handedly but I didn't get the point of the whole thing. It's not really funny, it's not really scary/mystery. Seems like they tried and miss their goal.

Just watched Downfall, the documentary about Boeing and the 737 MAX crashes. A bit slow to start but by the end a powerful and damning indictment of Boeing, and of shareholder value theory. Spoiler alert, you will be screaming that the executives should be in jail for corporate manslaughter and, well, they aren't.

Started the second season of Kid Cosmic. The classic Marvel tribute vibe is stronger than ever, with some clear references to Galactus and Thanos in there.

Finished Archive 81. Meh.

Archive 81 felt like there was one element too many in it for me, although I couldn't tell you which one I'd drop.

― Long enough attention span for a Stephen Bissette blu-ray extra (aldo), Tuesday, 25 January 2022 10:28 (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

I would have dropped the 1920s storyline entirely and gone full cthulhu at the end; I knew the climax was probably going to be disappointing but running around a dream version of various irl locations was not exciting or scary. It peaked halfway through with the people/monsters reaching out of TV screens.

Agree one hundred percent.

We just finished watching All Of Us Are Dead. It was maybe too long overall, but my god, the choreography and the stunt work and the fluid movement of some of those young people. Holy crap. If you wanted to get boys to go to dancing lessons, it would be a great thing to show them. "It's not all the Nutcracker! You could get cast in something like this!"

Johnny Hallyday doc series available! Pretty weirdly done, a lot of ominous woosh music that makes it seem like the subject is the Third Reich or True Crime (wife says this is quite common in French docs), but some amazing footage in there.

Getting really into Another Life only to see that nf has axed it

It was pretty awful tbh

More upset Archive 81 isn't getting another season

Classic World Cinema on Netflix UK:

The collected works of Egyptian director Youssef Chahine.

A lot of Bollywood stuff starting from the 60's.

1955's "Seagulls Die In The Harbour", a Belgian social realist film.

Tons and tons of Swedish films, ranging from the silent era to the 70's (at least), put there due to a partnership with the Swedish Film Institute.

It's kinda hilarious that this stuff is on there while even the most basic French, Italian, Japanese, etc. arthouse canon isn't but hey, it's cool nonetheless. The service clearly doesn't give a fuck tho, you really have to go hunting.

Old Enough on Netflix is so adorable! Give young children (2,3,4 years old) a chore and then follow them as they do it.

Man, really wish Netflix provided normal subtitles as well as closed captioned ones for their foreign language shows.

I don't need to know that [♪ cool closing theme playing] has started thanks

I dunno, ♪Ominous music plays♪ always makes me laugh.

I feel the same, and extend the sentiment to non-foreign language subtitles, too. I use them since I sometimes have trouble deciphering dialog, so don’t need sound cues. I’m glad there are more options now for those that need them, but wish we could choose. I do appreciate when subtitles will state the artist and song name when the soundtrack kicks in, though.

I watched Operation: Mincemeat because I'd read the book, and my recommendation is to read the book. Movie does have Kelly Macdonald though which is not a trivial point in its favor.

I started watching Stay Close and I don't quite get what this show is trying to be