My Time with Netflix - Part Six (The Complete List)

     So, in looking over this I come to realize that I skipped some really bad movies (I'm not going to write any kind of reviews for them).  But The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008), Saw VI (2009), and Eyeborgs (2010) are all some kind of awful – though Eyeborgs is still more entertaining than Terminator Salvation (2009).  Dreamcatcher (2003) is quite derisible, but it was better than I had heard so I kind of view it as an average movie for my purposes here.  When I take a look at what I watched, I cannot complain about the cost-to-value of Netflix.  But even with that being the case I'm not in a hurry to renew my acquaintanceship with them.

My Time with Netflix - Part Five: The Good Streaming Content

     Now I finally get around to the movies and television shows available to Watch Instantly I found rewarding.  No big preamble to this one.

Streaming Movies and TV that were Worthwhile

The Crazies (2009)

     This is another cheat.  I saw The Crazies in the theater, but I wasn't sure if I liked it as much as I was glad Breck Eisner handled the tone with the right mix of tension and absurdity.  Given a second viewing, I might like it a little less, but I am more convinced that it works as a movie.  I'll give Radha Mitchell a chance in nearly everything, but it is Timothy Olyphant who is most successful in hitting the right notes and meeting the intensity level required throughout the calamity.  The Crazies satisfies nearly everything I look for in a disaster movie – it introduces the audience to the characters, then to the disaster, and the audience gets to watch (in this instance) the disaster kick those characters asses.  There is no uniformity in how the people are afflicted in The Crazies, which plays as both more realistic and more terrifying.  Even with a somewhat limited budget, it doesn't feel constrained.  Given how much I enjoyed it, I thought it would only be fair to give the original 1973 version a watch.  I couldn't make it through the first half hour.  Where Romero appeared more concerned with selling conspiracy theories and orchestrated inefficiency, Eisner opts for a more focused approach showing the deterioration of a town through the eyes of a select few residents.  Maybe it doesn't work as commentary, but I'm convinced it was not intended to.  It is an almost horror, mostly suspense, disaster movie where people behave in decidedly less than civil ways.

My Time with Netflix - Part Four: The DVD Gems

     Something I never did when renting from RedBox, Blockbuster,Oak Park Video, or Orland Video was rent foreign language films.  I kind of viewed my renting dollars as too valuable to risk checking out a movie I didn't know much about and would have to read all the way through.  This was a foolish outlook, and not just because I've learned to watch movies with the subtitles on even when they are in English.  Netflix, however, made me feel a little more free to add the movies I had heard good things about to the queue (I was already filling it up with absolute crap), and this included two fantastic foreign language films.
     As these are – on the balance very – good movies, I know that my reviews of them will not do them justice.  I will make an attempt to explain what I saw in them that made them more than worthwhile, but I recommend taking a look at real reviews of them or (better yet) giving them a chance yourself.  I will also note that there are only a few titles that made this list, and that is one of the reasons why I feel that – even if Netflix is a good deal for the price – I wasn't using it correctly.

The DVD Gems
Winter's Bone (2010)

     Writer-director Debra Granik adapts Daniel Woodrell's 2006 novel of the same name into a tight, intense look at the determination of Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) to do right by her family in the wake of her father's disappearance.  There is no romanticism here; Granik presents the present day Ozarks as a criminalistic feudal society living on the fringe and sharing some trappings with mainstream America culture.  Family and lineage, no matter how worthless they may seem, mean everything in this land, and the sins of the father can and will be rained down upon the children if Ree cannot find a way to satisfy the forces on both sides of the law who are working against the Dollys.  While Jennifer Lawrence gives an Academy Award nominated performance, the true soul of the movie is presented in the powerful portray of Teardrop Dolly by John Hawkes. While Ree undergoes a more geographic hero's journey, it is Teardrop who takes the emotional journey from one brand of darkness to another, sadder brand of darkness.  To audiences born and raised in affluent suburbia, Winter's Bone may seem slightly overwrought in its portrayal of rural desolation and criminal activity as the norm.  It isn't.  And it story being told could easily fit into nearly any time period in American history. 

My Time with Netflix - Part Three: Streaming Mistakes

     I'll be up front and admit that all of the Watch Instantly activity of my now defunct Netflix account was done through my laptop; no gaming console or other device that allows the service to work with the television.  Because of that, I tended to view it as computer watching and not analogous to being a replacement to broadcast/cable television, and it occupied the times when I didn't want to watch 'television'.  It also had the benefit of being readily dismissible; if I had started watching something truly horrible [Moby Dick 2010 (2010)], I could abandon it early on and feel that I was still in control of my activity (unlike suffering through the disappointing DVDs).  Still, I managed to make it to the end of some movies that I wouldn't recommend to anyone; they are detailed below.

The Streaming Mistakes

The Alphabet Killer (2008)

     I guess I became aware of this movie because somebody, somewhere mentioned that Eliza Dushku has a brief "nude" scene  in it.  That isn't much of a selling point to me, but it did manage to keep the title in my head.  When I saw it in in the Watch Instantly category for Suspense movies – with Dushku, Timothy Hutton, and Carey Elwes – I thought it would be, at worst, a middling project.  It kind of is, but what makes it truly disappointing is that the script by Tom Malloy decides to use the trappings of the real-world "Alphabet Murders" as a framework for an underwhelming tale focusing on Det. Paige (Dushku) with quasi-mystical abilities...except that those abilities are really just the manifestations of psychosis.  There may have been a good movie idea in here, but it is hard to watch as Elwes and Hutton both give performances out of their standard repertoire (they may as well have been pulled from other movies and dropped in here) and Dushku plays emotionally troubled as even more detached and distant than her normal, limited range.  As for the "nude" scene, it is oddly superfluous.  Det. Paige is changing clothes and there is a millisecond shot of the side of one of her breast's.  Why is it included?  It doesn't serve to titillate (one of the primary reasons to include nudity), and it doesn't serve to soften and make to seem more vulnerable a hard or tough character (which I think is a better use of nudity in legitimate films).  Reading about the actual "Alphabet Murders" was a more rewarding experience, as I imagine watching the Discovery Channel documentary would be.

My Time with Netflix - Part Two: The DVD Mistakes

     One of the tasks I didn't like with Netflix was assembling a list of movies I wanted enough to see that I would be willing to watch them soon after they arrived.  At the beginning, I was just adding titles that I might want to watch under the right circumstances.  Then I started adding movies I knew I missed in the theatre, hadn't bothered to rent from Blockbuster or RedBox, and had a vague interest in seeing.  Neither of these strategies proved to be very good.  Below is a sampling of what I consider to be wasted viewing experiences.

The DVD Mistakes

The Reeds (2009)
     I had just finished reading "The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood and was somewhat hopeful that a horror film titled The Reeds would at least, even if by accident, embody some of the flavor of that short story.  Sadly, that didn't happen.  I want to stop short of calling The Reeds a bad movie, because somewhere within its complicated mythology and economy-level special effects there just may be an interesting story.  But what I remember is that it had a long and plodding build-up, one in which I didn't feel the audience was being introduced to the characters (so we can care about them and what happens to them) as much as we were witnessing them doing uninteresting things.  Then things happen in such a manner that we know that time isn't a set concept in the titular reeds, and that goes from being interesting to a cop-out used to end the film on an indefinite note.  The movie isn't scary, it doesn't evoke a consistent mood of impending menace, and the cast is quite unremarkable. All in all, I guess I consider The Reeds to be a mistake largely because it was the first DVD Netflix sent to me and I just didn't enjoy it.

My Time with Netflix - Part One: Bad for a Purpose

     The first thing I noticed after accepting a free month with Netflix was that I suddenly found myself much less motivated to read.  After all, I had one month to get as much viewing as I could before the charges kicked in.  So, I started looking for movies I might want to see...and was surprised that I wasn't that excited about the movies or television shows I had not seen.  Still – after some problems with Silverlight – I started to like the idea of being able to stream movies whenever I had the time and the mood struck.  I figured that the price, which was all of $7.99/month at the time, wasn't bad.  I would find some good movies eventually and if I ever didn't feel I was getting my money worth, I would just walk away from the service.
     That didn't take a year.  Mind you, I ended up with two months for free; the introductory month and a credited month as Silverlight needed to be re-installed every other day during my third month of service.  I found that in regards to DVDs, I was either fulfilling a near pathological need to see all of Katharine Isabelle's performances or just selecting titles I didn't make any effort to see up to that point.  While there were some titles I greatly enjoyed – I'll note them later in the post – I very much felt like I was wasting the DVD portion of the account.  Was it worth keeping Netflix just to watching movies and TV shows on the computer?  Well, once the User Interface changed, that answer was 'No'. When the ability to use other members' reviews – and I mean going to an individuals reviews page, not the anonymous reviews that were part of the change of removing members' avatars – it became 'No, and I'd like to make sure I don't get charged a cent more than I have to be'.
     So, what were the worthwhile selections?  What were the really bad choices?  What were the movies I found through other members or selective manipulation of the sortable function?  Well, I am going to attempt to answer that, but it will take more than one post here.  I have decided to start with the works of noted Canadian film and television actress, Katharine Isabelle, I watched through Netflix.

No, it is not...

How funny is it that almost immediately after I write my first post here that Netflix decides to eliminate the context in which it existed?  Maybe a little.

I wonder what I'll waste time doing now if I cannot identify who is writing what.

Is this helpful?

     If you have a fair amount of free time and don't want to spend it doing something worthwhile -- charity work, exercise, learning a craft, mastering an intensive hobby, reading something more substantive than Stephanie Meyer or J.K. Rowling -- you may find yourself, as I have, distracted by Netflix.
     However, I have become oddly fascinated (and, at the same time extremely frustrated) with the customer reviews of movies and television shows.  There are many things which could draw my attention here, but I tend to focus on three trends that make me wonder if I am part of the same viewing community as the people offering up their reviews.
     First, a good number of reviewers are all too happy to inform everyone that they were so frustrated/disappointed/enraged by the film or show in question that they did not watch it to conclusion (frequently mentioning that they turned it off within the first 5-10 minutes).  This seems, to my mind at least, to be an immediate disqualification for reviewing a subject.  I am not asking people to suffer through to the end, but if you gave up on the movie (or show), maybe you aren't qualified to speak to the overall value -- or lack thereof -- of the product.  If you abandoned the movie, give it the 1 star rating and be on your way. If you insist on writing a review that is essentially a grievance, there are ways to make it appear as legitimate criticism.  I would point to AS 1746221's review of Black Death (2010):
                 "Sadly, I cannot review this film on its merits. All I can say is that they 
                  invented the Steady-Cam for a reason. I haven't gotten this motion sick 
                  off a non-3D film ever. [Fifteen] minutes in and I had to shut it off."
Now, this isn't as much a criticism as it is an overstatement of a pet peeve, but it informs the potential viewer that there is shaky-cam in the movie and that it was handled in such a manner that AS 1746221 found it to be a major distraction from the story and action of the film.
     Second, many people feel the need to inform other Netflix subscribers how a movie falls inline with -- or is horribly opposed to -- their political and/or religious views, and little else when reviewing it.  Many people have somehow made it well into their adulthood without realizing that there are many people who do not subscribe to their ideologies, or they feel that the reviews on Netflix is the proper forum to champion their causes.  I would point to qqr 824293'sreview of Black Death (2010) as a prime example of this:

                  "Probably worth a look for those of you who are subtle readers. This in 
                   fact is a clear enunciation of a brutal truth: that the truest evil in the 
                   past 200-years of this world is religion itself. A elucidation, if you will, 
                   that nothing has driven more evil into the world; nothing has de-valued 
                   life to a greater extent than the worship of God...as well as the backlash 
                   to that cult. In all, a very deep treatment of a fact that our modern cults 
                   have happily brushed under the carpet. This movie is well directed, well 
                   written and well acted. Metaphorically speaking, the Black Death might 
                   be seen, in this viewer's humble opinion, as fanatical worship, itself. One 
                   might only complain that it ought to have been shot on film. S. Bean might 
                  have cost them a bit too many dollars, and that likely impacted the overall 
                  quality--but alas, that sort of thing is a well-known trade-off in itself. Props 
                  to these actors for sticking with a movie that ought to have been a film. 
                  Cheers"
What the other members are told here is that religion is a horrible plague born into communities by foreign (or at least, not-local) travelers and leaves only death an misery in its wake.  This may be an informed opinion (I happen to disagree with its simplicity), and it tangentially related to movie in question, but it is also an attack on what may be the core beliefs and inform the principles of the other members who are looking for some level of insight as to whether they may enjoy watching something.  This doesn't seem particularly helpful.
     That brings me to those little buttons underneath the reviews others took the time to write: You found this review [Helpful]  [Not Helpful]  [Inappropriate].  It would appear that many people understand this metric to mean [This agrees with my esteem for the movie], [This somehow runs contrary to my esteem for the project OR This disagrees with the rating I gave the movie], and [How dare you!].  Most reviews are only read by a few people, and even then only within the short window when they are displayed on the first couple of pages of reviews; nobody is sifting through 58 pages of TRON:  Legacy reviews to decide if they should see the picture.  It is, without a doubt, a bit of an ego-stroke to see that other people read what you wrote and agreed with you (or at least clicked the [Helpful] button).  For that matter, it is a little bit of an ego-stroke just to see how many people voted on what you wrote. Still, I really don't think people are evaluating the quality of the review as much as they are voting for the ratings that fall in line with their own estimation.
     At any rate, I have taken the time to write some reviews -- I think most of them are underwhelming, but honest efforts to evaluate both the product and my level of appreciation and/or enjoyment of it.  I think I am going to be cross-posting them to here, along with my musings on books, current events, and general outlook on a life that has been largely wasted up to this point.  But rather than change that, I can always go and watch something from Netflix.