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If you're looking for some excellent cheese, I might recommend 1983's The Dungeonmaster  Bull from Night Court is some kind of evil wizard who lives inside a computer, and he sucks some nerd into it to fight through an anthology of seven borderline-plagiarized segments where he does poo poo like enter a Greek legend and fight a rock monster. Later he enters Road Warrior, and eventually he meets the rock band WASP, where one of them attacks with his trademark flaming codpiece. It's also great because it plagiarizes Tron in a way gratuitous enough that I'm pretty sure they changed it from something else so that it would include a computer, even though by 1983 everybody knew that Tron was a total bomb. Also interesting because one of the segments was written by Charles Band, who would go on to found Full Moon Pictures. It's only up there for another week, so knock yourselves out to watch it. I saw this one in 1999 while in college because the local mom-and-pop video store was switching over to dvd and liquidating their ancient VHS collection. I saw this one and fell in love. I was surprised as hell to see it on netflix.
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Oct 9, 2011 23:08
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Hellhouse I'm a sucker for documentaries about weird subcultures, so I really enjoyed this film about an enclave of fundamentalist Christians who put on a haunted house for Halloween that's designed to scare people into joining their religion. It's basically a community theater production where people engage in enthusiastic tryouts to play the part of "rapist" and "gay guy dying of AIDS" (the most coveted role seems to be a girl who dies while getting an abortion) in moralistic vignettes, and the cognitive dissonance on display is simply amazing. Everybody's navigating a situation where they're excited to portray people and things they think are evil: there's a scene where a guy describes how he met his girlfriend while she was playing "suicide girl" and he was playing a demon tempting her to kill herself, and it gets really uncomfortable because the guy's obviously trying not to think about how hosed up his story is. It's also fascinating to see the way these people portray secular American culture. I think it does a pretty good job getting inside the lives and culture of these people and letting them keep their dignity, but it also provides a good view of how repugnant many of their beliefs are. There's certainly a sense that these people could get pretty vicious with someone they consider an outsider. Also There is a fantastic shot where they're making up a set where a satanic ritual will take place, and one of the dudes draws a star of David instead of a pentagram.
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Oct 21, 2011 03:56
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ryan_woody posted:I'm watching this right now and am about halfway through, and I am furious as I watch this movie. Just the pure insanity of the thought processes of everyone involved is mind boggling. They're brains are broken because they're excited about enacting the very things they're supposed to hate the most. Also their incredible ignorance and bigotry really grate against how normal they seem otherwise. On that count I think they're mostly sincerely naive and ignorant about the reality of the things they represent in their community theater hell house. Like, they've just heard that's how it is and they believe what they've heard without question. That may or may not mitigate your fury.
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Oct 23, 2011 08:14
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Gyges posted:It's weird, but out of all the crazy poo poo in Hell House the thing that stuck with me the most was the nixing of the lesbian pick-up attempt. So a scene where one girl pretends to hit on another girl can't be done because of the time spent together and temptation, but all the pretend violence and other iniquities aren't something to worry about? Truly, the Gay Agenda is something to be feared. Remember that he also didn't want a boy-girl version of that scene for the same reason. But oh God it would be wonderful if his daughter got picked for the rape scene!
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Oct 28, 2011 03:12
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Does anyone know when Supernatural goes up for streaming? I remember that back in October there was an announcement that all CW shows would end up there by the end of the year, and most of them are up--but not Supernatural or Smallville (not that I would ever watch Smallville)
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Jan 3, 2012 04:00
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Emron posted:He is, but he really struck me as getting a taste of what he REALLY wanted in life with the fans and the autographs, then trying to cling to it while making it seem like he didn't care too much. That may have just been the selection of shots they used on him, but things like him saying "And then I say this!!! And...you know...it becomes a famous line in the movie" to an obviously uninterested person made me squirm really bad. I felt triumph and relief when he decided to turn his back on all that bullshit and became a happy dentist again. It's great when he describes how depressing it is to meet (I think) Robert Englund or the guy who plays Jason or some other b-movie convention "success." Hardy says soemething like "it was like all the guy could talk about was those movies," and then he gets a look on his face like he understands he's a normal man with a life and a career and all of the other people at the convention are the loving losers. It's like being a failure at being a horror movie convention guest proves what a winner he actually is.
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Jan 13, 2012 20:02
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Wilhelm Scream posted:Almost positive they have an interview with her in the extras There's an interview with her in the extras that's pretty long, and it shows her to be a really interesting person with a lot of unique life experiences. But they're not really horrifying and she's not at all delusional so they don't fit in with segments like Draco Floyd or the grandpa.
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Jan 15, 2012 08:03
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Zwabu posted:"The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane" is up now. If you like Jodie Foster at all (in an early role here as a mysterious adolescent girl with a secret, she's easily the best thing in the film and amazing talent evident even early on here) and Martin Sheen as a creepy pedophile, see this movie which I think is excellent. That one used to air on that weird over-the-air digital channel that only plays MGM movies pre-1999, THIS!TV, I think it's called. It's pretty good.
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Feb 3, 2012 15:39
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Tewratomeh posted:Yeah, Glenn Beck is basically a living parody of the Howard Beale character. It's like he watched Network and completely missed the point, adopting the "Truthsayer" persona without upholding any of the principles behind it. Glenn Beck is Howard Beale after he gets that speech about capitalism from Arthur Jensen. Only Glenn Beck actually believes in everything Jensen says. He has stated in interviews that he bases his television persona on Howard Beale. I'd imagine he missed most of the rest of the movie, even if he saw it: http://hotair.com/archives/2009/03/23/video-glenn-beck-responds-to-bill-maher-compares-himself-to-howard-beale/
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May 5, 2012 06:43
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dayze posted:Is is so boring and pointless that I can skip it, or is there some sort of small thing that happens in a random episode that I'll miss out on? 24 episodes is a lot of time at 43~ minutes each. Start watching and see what you think when you can watch it all at once. A lot of the reason I found the third season disappointing is that it was aired in a really hosed-up way where they aired the first 8 or so episodes in the Fall and held the rest until the Spring. It really distorted the arc of the narrative and emphasized a bunch of poo poo that wasn't really important or consistent over the season. There's a really strong Hurley episode that I remember, and a really funny one about the background characters that kind of takes the piss out of some of the show. And there's one that's mostly about Ben that I really liked. And the last three are really stellar but build upon themes and plot threads that grow out of the last half of the season. If you can power through the first ten I think they're about as good as season 2. And after that, the seasons are half-length and plotted pretty tightly. The final episode gets a bad rep but just try it with an open mind and see what you think. I think I only reacted strongly because of all the hype and pressure--the conclusion of the show works really nicely as commentary on the show and the phenomenon of the show being really popular and discussed, which sounds really pretentious and I kind of hate myself for saying it. But it's fun and very well-made and the acting is top-notch even when the writing gets iffy.
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May 6, 2012 07:21
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Tewratomeh posted:Yeah, I only remember the show from the few episodes I caught around season 3 or 4, so seeing some of the low-tech moments from the first season is pretty funny. In one episode, they're talking about binary code like it's this amazing new concept... "the ones and zeroes could be a painting, or they could be a piece of music!" I love the one about the computer that can kill people in their houses by using the internet--it's connected to everything!
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May 11, 2012 03:42
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SRM posted:Beast Wars just got added. If you want to watch some really hokey and dated CGI in a show about transforming robots who turn into dinosaurs and gorillas that eventually gets fairly dark and mature, the first season's up. On this note, do not watch Transformers or GI Joe if you think it will be fun to see what you liked as a kid. They are loving unwatchable, incomprehensible trash produced to sell toys. My parents have a lot to answer for for not savagely beating me every time I tried to watch either as a small child. I was just a loving kid, Now I'll never know what shows did to my plastic brain and I drank in the explosions and bright colors.
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May 30, 2012 05:08
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Maxwell Lord posted:I actually think some of the 80s cartoons end up interesting if you consider what the writers had to put up with. They not only had to sell toys, but appease the various parents' groups that got involved. Mark Evanier worked on the D&D cartoon and wrote about how they had to have a whiny jerk character so that every episode would have the theme "If the group wants to do one thing and one person wants to do something else, the group is always right." Actually, those "parents' groups" were organized and populated by the toy companies too: conformity is better than going it alone because it's better when you bow to group pressure! Your friends are right to love Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and you should too! You don't want to be the loser loner who gets proven wrong, do you? At least, Mark Evanier claims as much elsewhere in his blog. I don't doubt at all that it's true.
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Jun 1, 2012 00:08
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Skywalker OG posted:Not quite? He grew up a Catholic but he's been pretty forward with how ridiculous he thinks much of it is. He's never come out as being athiest or anything but if Dogma, Red State, and his podcast are any indication he certainly questions much of it. Dogma's pretty enthusiastically pro-faith and pro-Christianity. If anything, he has some Martin Luther-like contempt for Catholicism obscuring what he sees as the truth of Christianity. Except Martin Luther could walk up the front steps of a church and have enough energy left to post something on the door.
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Jun 2, 2012 16:25
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X-Ray Pecs posted:The original Superman is on Instant Watch. Please watch it if you never have before. It's really good, it's from the same director as Lethal Weapon, and is one of those films that reminds me how magical movies can be. Plus, it's got Gene Hackman hamming it up as the world's greatest criminal mastermind. It really is a perfect film: it captures the earnest optimism necessary for a movie about a man with superpowers, but cuts it with just enough awareness that you can have a good time and not roll your eyes. It's like this perfect transitional moment out of the '70s and into the '80s.
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Jul 14, 2012 01:21
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origami posted:The teacher in Rushmore was Olivia Williams. I think the last movie she was in was The Ghostwriter. She's in Dollhouse too, which is a really mediocre show with a few pretty good actors--she is one of them and elevates every scene she's in. There's also an episode (or maybe two episodes) with the bully from a Christmas Story, who as an adult looks exactly the same but larger.
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Jul 19, 2012 03:42
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After being gone for a while, Lake Mungo is back on streaming. I'm actually going to watch it this time.
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Sep 3, 2012 06:40
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It recommends Toy Story 2 if you search for Salo. I guess that's way better than the other way around.
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Sep 19, 2012 03:17
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It looks like all the Friday the 13th movies are leaving instant as of next Monday, so get them in if the season has put you in the mood for them.
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Sep 25, 2012 02:39
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I just watched Lake Mungo after having it on my queue for a long time, and I found it an incredibly moving film. Even though I guess it's a ghost story, there's really only maybe one scare in the entire thing. It's just this great meditation on loneliness and human relationships and guilt and loss, and the whole things suffused with melancholy instead of dread. I think part of it is that I find the idea of shared experiences that take place outside of the regular flow of time to be really sublime and, when one of the participants is dead, tragic and compelling. I just kept thinking about how things might have been different if Alice had told her parents about the dreams she was having and the premonitions of her own death. Her parents are so sad because they realize after she's dead that they didn't know her at all, and they long for some kind of connection with her, but they don't know enough to realize that their visions of her are events she experienced as dreams or visions while she was alive. Even if they couldn't have saved her, they would have known after she was dead what was happening and maybe reacted differently. This is mostly just an emotional response, but it's so sad that Alice had a vision of standing before her parents' bed feeling sad and alone and remembers her mother reacting in terror and further alienating her--and then when her mother experienced that same vision after Alice died, she didn't know what she was seeing and so reacted in terror and retroactively caused her daughter to suffer. It's just so tragic her mother and her father had a huge missed opportunity to speak to her, which would in turn have affected how she thought of them in the months leading up to her death. Instead they just turn away and miss the rest of the closing window of opportunity to speak to her during one of her remaining visions. I don't know how clear that was, but I guess I'm really struck by the idea that Alice and her parents had this chance to have some weird connection outside of the normal relationship of cause and effect--one that would have lessened both their terrible burdens--but it ended up hurting them all more because Alice and her parents were too distant from each other. I kind react the same way to the scene in Fire Walk with Me where Laura reveals that she had Cooper's dream years before he did, while she was still alive and could have been saved.
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Oct 2, 2012 01:07
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:It's not a coincidence that you also compared it to Twin Peaks. This is pretty close to how I feel about Lake Mungo, my favorite horror film of last decade. Laura's death in Twin Peaks mixes grief and regret in the same way, for sure. Both Alice and Laura have secret lives that resulted from them feeling cut off from everyone they loved (or I guess so in Alice's case), and that also left everyone around them with a crazy need to make their lives into cause-and-effect stories that make sense. I guess a big narrative difference for me is that Laura's life did get put into a linear narrative that reconciled all the known facts, and nobody's really interested in that part of the story (but I like it, and it showed that Sheryl Lee is a good actor).
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Oct 2, 2012 01:43
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Slackerish posted:I love it how people don't give much second thought to admiring someone like Roman Polanski or Lars Von Trier but freak out over liking Tom Cruise just because of his wacky religious beliefs. Cruise is a fantastic actor. What did Lars Von Trier do?
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Oct 6, 2012 03:04
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kuddles posted:I always feel like Ed Wood's material was over-rated, if that's the way to say it. His movies are bad, but they never struck me as particularily worse than a lot of similar shlock coming out at the same time. They're so enthusiastic, like he's just having the time of his life making a movie. I'd call them relatively inept movies made by a guy who's so excited to be making them that they're full of slap-dash sets and continuity errors--not lazy ones, but ones where he didn't fix them because it would slow down his good time.
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Oct 24, 2012 01:17
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RightClickSaveAs posted:I could just skip the non-storyline ones, but I have an obsessive need to watch them all in order. If you have to skip anything, make it the storyline ones. Those turn into an awful convoluted mess and are almost never good or memorable outside of the plot. The last cool one is the one that starts with the American Indian guy talking about a white calf being born. The episodic ones are usually much better written, and it seems like much more care went into them, strangely enough.
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Oct 24, 2012 03:18
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Stare-Out posted:I can forgive most of the first season episodes for their 1990-isms but "Ghost in the Machine" is a really terrible episode, even if you ignore all the dumb technobabble. At least "Fire" has some neat pyrotechnics going for it. It's quite an interesting time capsule in its way. I love the way that computers slowly change from quite exotic magic machines to regular tool used to get work done. In the first seasons, Mulder gives slide shows in his office because nobody has a desktop at work yet.
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Oct 24, 2012 12:18
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Snowy posted:I just rejoined Netflix after a year or two without it. Due to desktop trouble I'm just using an ipad now and finding browsing less helpful than it used to be. Do I have this on child settings or is there no way to sort when browsing? I'd like to sort by avg. review or "recommended for me", but the default order seems very random. And didn't they used to include more info than just the poster image when browsing, like maybe the stars underneath? I've noticed that when I add something to my queue I no longer get suggestions of similar films. Does anybody know whether that's an issue with settings or whether they dropped that feature?
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Oct 26, 2012 13:40
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So I just discovered The Killing, and in the span of three days it went from "incredible and full of promise" to "the most infuriating thing I have seen on Netflix." I thought it was a meditative and atmospheric look at how tragic death impacts both personal lives and entire communities, but it turns out that it's just an episode of Law and Order stretched out to--I'm guessing--24 episodes (I gave up at episode 13).
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Oct 27, 2012 04:43
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I was honestly fine with a slow story as long as I thought that it was just a bunch of character pieces, that the teacher obviously didn't do it but the show was exploring the consequences of him being thought a suspect, maybe with an option where more unrelated crimes get exposed. I thought racism was going to be a big thematic element and the show would just be about the community and how developments in one place have unexpected consequences for another. Then it became obvious that the show was really all about who did it and all that poo poo was just an endless stream of fakeouts, and even the detective's relationship with her fiancee and the dude's AA meetings were just a bunch of fakeouts and not about developing character at all. That series finale sounds like the dumbest loving thing, and the fact that I can half-follow it having only seen the first half of the series tells me how unsatisfying everything about the show is. Still, I am so grateful to have watched it in two evenings and had my enthusiasm killed so quickly instead of over the course of an entire season (with a huge BSG-style break, I'm guessing).
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Oct 27, 2012 18:39
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I love the poo poo out of Stevie Wonder playing "Superstition" on a fire escape on Sesame Street.
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Nov 4, 2012 18:43
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The Rock-a-Fire Explosion is getting taken off soon, so I thought I'd give it a watch. It is incredibly sad and even a little horrifying, although I don't know if the director was trying for that or not. The saddest parts are hands-down the ones with the owner of the company that built the robots, sitting alone in his mouldering factory waiting for the order to come in for more robot performers, waiting and waiting in darkness and silence for the success that seemed so certain when he was young. The scene where he tells the story of how Showbiz Pizza cut him loose is terrifying, because you can tell he plays that story over and over in his head, wondering what else he could have done to save the livelihood and careers of his friends. I guess it all just really communicates a sense of what it feels like to believe that things aren't how they should be, that a mistake has been made and this poor guy's approach is to sit around and wait for somebody to come by and correct it.
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Nov 4, 2012 23:40
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Tewratomeh posted:It was pretty sad, but not because of a "success that didn't come". I got the impression that the guy was pretty well-off after the whole Rock-Afire thing, and for his various other inventions, but the sad part was that the guy peaked early with the Rock-Afire Explosion and then just completely faded into obscurity along with the animatronic band. The sad thing was the unused, dusty workshop that looked like a tomb, like a time capsule from a post-apocalyptic alternate 1980's, with faux-wood paneling and a warehouse full of old robot parts. But I didn't feel like Aaron Fechter was personally suffering, financially or otherwise. I guess that's what I meant: the guy's not in financial distress, but he seemed to eager to make his mark on the world when he was young. He mentions "solving the gas crisis" as the thing that made him be an inventor in archival footage, and then again as something he'd like to do in the present. I do think part of what makes his situation sadder is that he might have the luxury of being able to keep up his tomb of a factory and preserve it in that condition. When I talk about success, I mean fame and ongoing active application for a brilliant mind, like he thought he'd be going on to bigger and better things forever and he just never had his chance. moller posted:What is on netflix is the glorious The Fog of War, an Errol Morris joint that consists of a single inteview with Robert Strange McNamara. It's doesn't redeem that monster entirely, but it is an interesting meditation on the banality of evil and how statistical analysis can be used to justify objectively terrible situations. Also you get a dope Phillip Glass score. I can find Thin Blue Line, but Fog of War doesn't seem to be up for me. I'm using the PC version of the site.
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Nov 5, 2012 13:31
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Kevar posted:Why did I click on that? Why am I reading the reviews for Irreversible? quote:Real fellatio at the beginning. Actress not beautiful; but appears nude. Some people have criteria for judging the quality of a film that are very different from my own.
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Nov 20, 2012 13:19
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X-Ray Pecs posted:Post-cancellation Futurama certainly has its moments, but it suffers from trying to satirize modern pop culture phenomenons. This is most evident in a season 5 episode, which aired in 2010, in which they spend an entire episode making fun of The DaVinci Code. There are some good moments in the post-cancellation stuff I've seen, but also some really bad poo poo. It varies wildly in quality, but the best episodes are arguably better than the best episodes of the old run. "The Late Philip J Fry" might be the best single episode of the series. Basically, any episode where they enthusiastically violate the status quo--like by killing characters or jumping into the future or something--is really great. A lot of the episodes seem to pair two characters for a lot of the story, I guess because of budget restrictions. They're very creating pairings, though, like Nibbler and Amy or Hermes and Bender, and they make for fairly strong episodes.
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Feb 10, 2013 23:28
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Steele Justice is the perfect complement to the Octagon if you ask me.
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Feb 17, 2013 05:28
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kuddles posted:So people were talking about that Lake Mungo film in this thread about a month back and I noticed it was expiring soon. I don't know why I didn't bother earlier, other than the fact that it looked like some weird Australian Paranormal Activity ripoff. You summed it up perfectly. It made me the most melancholy I have been from seeing a film in a long, long time. I will pop up to insist that this film is wonderful every time it's mentioned.
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Feb 18, 2013 01:50
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SRM posted:I don't have a problem with protagonists who are less than the good guy. It's just so rapey that I have a hard time staying interested in it. I've got like 45 minutes to go, based on the last few posts maybe I'll give it a third try and finish it up some time this week. I would very much like to hear your thoughts about the rest of the movie. In some ways, the movie changes radically once Don Johnson gets to Topeka, though I don't know that he's ever completely redeemed from what he did in the first half of the movie. If anything, I think the dog is the one we're supposed to root for. He's the only one who remembers life before the apocalypse and he's doing his best to teach this amoral kid something about how decent people are supposed to behave, but he can't do it very well because he's a dog and he needs the kid to keep him alive.
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Feb 18, 2013 23:21
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Don't worry, the whole movie is just a big leadup to the dumbest punchline for the dumbest joke in movie history as the last line. It's like something a baby would write. A baby that hates women.
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Feb 20, 2013 03:53
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FAT WORM OF ERROR posted:Yes, yes I did. Is that Rudy from the Cosby Show?
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Mar 22, 2013 15:01
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Cocoa Ninja posted:Ok, I just watched this movie an it was a great watch. I have one huuuuuuge beef with the end: I just caught this and I agree completely. The movie never addresses the notion that accepting the crazy Frenchman with the transparent story would do nothing to hide the kid's murder and would in fact attract more attention. If the family had killed the son, they had gotten away with it already. The only sane move for them would be to expose the guy immediately and leave him in Spain. The narrative that comes through despite the film's attempt to bury it is the one about the family driven so insane by grief and lack of closure that they accept the impossible because it was what they longed for for so long. I also love that despite being the one to discover the truth, the private investigator comes off as the most insane crank in the whole movie. I can't imagine why the FBI didn't take him seriously when he called them and started yelling about the ears not matching. I wonder if he added the information that he was hired by Hard Copy to cover a story for them--you know, so that he'd have more credibility. And a close competitor for the biggest tragedy in the film is that Bourdain never got any psychological help despite being totally insane. I have to wonder if he's still trying to pass himself off as missing kids, despite now being in his 30s and having a bunch of kids of his own. I can't believe that the socialist utopia of France would allow somebody like that to raise kids at all.
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Mar 24, 2013 02:52
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To anyone who liked the Imposter, there's a drama based on the life of the French guy called the Chameleon also up for streaming. I haven't watched it yet, but it might be of interest.
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Mar 24, 2013 14:45
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