Netflix Watch Instantly Recommendation Thread

Otm Yerac, it's sooooo lazy! There's a great/terrible bit involving someone trying to escape from prison and it's just laughable, the actor involved literally looks likes she's already tired of this shit. I admire yr perseverance but, having now skipped to the end, I feel obligated to warn you - it doesn't get any better.

The first episode, I kept saying why would you try to rape someone on your first day after waking up on an island without your memory? Your first day!

yeah, give it 24 hours at least!

god that sounds fucking awful, I'll probably watch it. I watched the stupid similar one where all the kids were transported to a town that looked just like their own but with no adults....The Society. It's awful. This sounds worse.

The Great Hack is a fine documentary even if I think it overstates CA's actual effectiveness.

Anyone else seen any of Marianne? I watched an episode last night (as per a recommendation from Andrew Male who has a pretty flawless hit rate) and found it generic and hokey but pretty unsettling in places. The premise is pretty much a Stephen King short (horror writer starts writing to stop nightmares; finishes series of books and the nightmares return but it seems the nightmare has invaded reality...) but with a nice folk-horror edge - almost like something out of Robert Aickman.

I Land is way worse than The Society (which we watched all of).

I like the Two Ferns movie.

Marianne was fine - I enjoyed it, nothing mind blowing.

Started watching The Innocents. First episode was intriguing (TM Netflix) but assuming it turns to shit fairly rapidly as I don't know a single person who watched it.

I don't generally like or find police dramas interesting but we watched Unbelievable and it was pretty good. Partly because of Merritt Wever being insanely watchable.

6 eps in... it's harrowing

Big Mouth's back on Friday!

Avatar the Last Airbender is available now - if anyone hasn't seen it, it's good.

akm xpost. I set up my netflix in Chile so the fees are 4,990; 5,990; and 8,990clp for the 3 tiers. There is currency fluctuation of course but it's been in the $8 range at least for the last year (I just checked) regardless if I am using it in the US or Europe.

"Think of your favorite movie and I’ll bet you think of a vivid and memorable setting," said Horowitz, a correspondent for MTV News. "This series brings those iconic locations back to life with the participants themselves. As a film lover, I'm honored to be the guy to bring viewers along for the ride."

How is this not verbatim Turkington?

oh shit for On Cinema thread

oh damn wrong thread.

Yerac take my hand

let me moisturize first.

Thoughts on The Politician? Getting terrible reviews but I found it enjoyable, even if it lost the plot completely 3/4 of the way through like almost every other Ryan Murphy series I've seen (well, mainly, most AHS series). There were some annoying characters and weirdly dropped or truncated storylines, but on the whole I liked it. I didn't realize it was intended to run into a second season until the last episode which did a lot to course correct where it went wrong toward the end so I'm looking forward to season 2.

also, I'm Sorry is still funny even though Andrea Savage grates after about 15 minutes. She wiggles her shoulders less in the second season, thankfully. She is a funny writer though.

first episode of unbelievable before bed was a bad idea.
great writing, great acting, what a phenomenally sad story.

It's not out yet but Sion Sono has a new movie coming through Netflix! Forest of Love (not the Nicolas Cage project Prisoners of the Ghostland, sadly)

This sounds incredible:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/tell-me-who-i-am-inside-the-most-jaw-dropping-documentary-of-the-year

cool, thanks; will bookmark that

Carmen Sandiego is pretty fun! I like the art and character designs a lot, and the characters are well fleshed out, and some of the plot points pack a real punch. Can't wait for the third season.

I enjoyed the first season! Haven't watched the second - too busy watching crappy horror films on Prime.

Daybreak: post-apocalyptic teen D&D fantasy live action.
https://www.netflix.com/title/80197462

hey Schitt's Creek is really great. hilarious and almost weirdly utopian. it's astonishing how well the Rose family overcomes the cliches in terms of being fish-out-of-water, maybe not so much by avoiding them but going all-in quite specifically where it works.

I'm watching Outlander (or should I say OOTLANDER), beautiful locations plus my newfound appreciation of Scottish accents with a dash of time travel makes this a lot of fun so far.

One more ep left of Unbelievable — I was apprehensive and it was grueling BUT very very good. Super glad it exists and bless Toni Collette for existing as well.

Would like to talk about that last episode when you are done

yeah, I am really glad I watched it and that it treated women like completely normal people.

my gf watched outlander over a very short period of time and any time i was in the room someone was about to be raped or something similar. too damn stressful.

also very historically inaccurate god damn it the jacobite rebellion wasn't nationalist for the love of god

i am halfway through the epic spanish language "The Heist" thing.
i was seriously thinking of giving up during S1 due to the never ending incredible twists and turns, but now i am totally loving the insanity of it.
after an excess of scanda noir it's so much fun.

oh it's so good and so ridiculous.

yup.
its like a pantomime version of a bank robbery.
i am absolutely loving it.

also very historically inaccurate god damn it the jacobite rebellion wasn't nationalist for the love of god

Haven't a clue about someone else's history but I did hear a character say "OK" and that's a 19th-century Americanism!

Outlander got super-rapey and lost me and my wife in the second season (I think).

Uh oh
I’m almost done but right now Duvall’s husband is singing “Mack the Knife”???

Is this supposed to be funny?

Outlander got super-rapey and lost me and my wife in the second season (I think).

Aww dang it.

Aside from that, what part would you like to discuss Ulysses?

Idk if there’s a thread for this series, happy to take the discussion elsewhere if it’s not welcome here.

I agree yerac, women are treated like actual people. It’s revolutionary. And the men are.... gasp ....held accountable for their behavior!!??!

SPOILERS FOR UNBELIEVABLE, DON'T LOOK IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE SHOW

So here's my issue with the last episode of unbelievable which was, overall I think, a really great show: having spent six hours explaining to me how broken and fucked up the system is and how the deck is always stacked in favor of the assaulter and how violent and prone to abuse the cops are, we end on a hour of full catharsis. Marie gets closure with the cop who fucked her over and the police get a complete win with this serial rapist put away for multiple lifetimes. Marie calls Detective Grace from a beach and thanks her for being there, explicitly stating that what made the difference was knowing that someone out there was watching over her, even if she didn't know it... and then she literally drives off into the sunset to her new life.

Now I read the propublica piece (and i recommend everyone after watching this does too! it's astonishing how close the story sticks to the record: https://www.propublica.org/article/false-rape-accusations-an-unbelievable-story ) so i get that they're basically hewing to the actual facts but they certainly do have control over the themes they're touching on. After so much time showing and telling how the system is broken, i couldn't help feeling that the conclusion of the series suggested that what Marie's shitty foster mom hurtfully said ("sometimes the system works") was the moral of the overall story. That left me VERY cold, that they would hint even obliquely, much less openly and blatantly, that though the system is busted it occasionally works and might even be defensible for its occasional wins. Which runs counter to most everything we've been told up until then!

I was really taken with the veracity of the show up until then and the way that it showed rape policing done both as good as it could be and as bad as it could be... but that in both case it amounts to a secondary assault and that no one seems to be addressing how to change that. I thought the acting was outrageously good and that the casting couldn't have been better; as soon as ANY minor character showed up I was jolted with the "ooo they got THEM!" I felt battered after the first two episodes. I appreciated the program's willingness not to give the rapist a voice or any platform whatsoever; the moment of his strip search seemed appropriately cathartic. I just felt cheated that after so much honesty and clarity, we wind up with such an entirely optimistic ending and one that seemed, well, unbelievable. Even if it did happen! There were different and less maintain-the-status-quo endings to be had i think.

Anyways, this is incendiary subject matter and i feel it would be a better conversation than trading of paragraphs but i'm wondering if you had similar feelings.

SPOILERS CONTINUE DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT WATCHED UNBELIEVABLE

yeah i had a quite different reaction! i was afraid that Marie was going to toss herself off the cliff after talking with Duvall, but instead she walked back to her car, and she was more or less ok. yeah, she was still alone in the world (which i can relate to) and had some heavy baggage, but she didn't toss herself off the cliff. and her confrontation with the cop who didn't believe her was clearly so shameful for him. i think the thing that struck me was that he, the guy who deeply fucked her life, DID seem to recognize his role in the system. that was actually hugely gratifying for me to see. in a world where we see powerful people sneering and howling to protect the careers and reputations of Their Boys even though Their Boys are rapists, it felt good to see a doubter squirm & repent. i thought he might kill himself too tbh.

haven't read the propublica thing yet -- but what the show illuminated for me personally was the very clear double-assault nature of this type of violent assault. first, you have the actual assault. then you have the assault of no one believing you/DARVO from people defending the assaulter. in this situation, the rapist had no defenders. not even himself. that was powerful and actually made the show easier to watch.

the casting was indeed excellent.

as stated, i thought singing "mack the knife" was quite tasteless under the circumstances but maybe that is dark humor that i don't get or just an oversight.

and they did show the other cop that helped push the retraction just kind of blow it all off.

WHAT MORE SPOILERS OH MY GOD WHY HAVEN'T YOU STARTED A THREAD WELL I GUESS WE ARE IN A THREAD YOU MAKE A GOOD POINT

Honestly didn't even occur to me that Marie might kill herself on the beach! Obviously your take on he power dynamics is valid and I'm not sure what I wanted or expected... a horrible painful ending where everyone acknowledges that even when the bad guy goes down and justice is in some sense served that the system is equally culpable for generally allowing these sort of assaults to go unreported, uninvestigated and unwitnessed wasn't going to do anybody any good when the actual story does have clearer, less horrendous closure.

I guess I saw an opportunity to use this story to call for change in the way rapes are investigated, reported and in the way police and communities deal with victims and I'm not sure this ending did that at all. My sense was that the directors named the problem but then mostly acted like it was unavoidable. I would've liked more of cri de coeur than a general thumbs up to "good policework". But I can certainly understand how an ending in which repercussions for horrible actions are repaid with imprisonment amidst a great cast of strong, intelligent female leads might trump that concern for you. I guess what offended you about the mack the knife bit was what offended me about the larger, pro-police structure of the whole episode: I don't see how this pertains to the story I've been told up till now and it seems in bad taste.

in the propublica story, i think the other cop is either dead or retired by the time marie comes back so that was probably there to provide some narrative balance.

I listened to the This American Life episode they did about the real life case in 2016, and it's pretty stunning that even after everything that happened the foster mom still thinks it's kind of Marie's fault for not acting the way she should have after being raped

ugh, one way to remove her responsibility from what happened to Marie.

the show writers went out of their way to show the humanity of pretty much all the female characters except for her.

i did think the show did an excellent job of illustrating the lifelong reverberations of sexual assault, and that it actually takes a special sort of investigator to interview victims. it highlighted a lot of the failures of the system without being super obvious about it because they were highlighted by the way the two women investigators handled things in contrast to...everyone else.

it did a good job of dismantling elements of rape culture that seem extremely difficult for many people to grasp.