Flak's Netflix Picks
essay by Flak Staff
graphic by Derek Evernden
Netflix is, of course, of one of the great waggers of the long tail, a company built on making millions of DVD platters available to the mailboxes of Americans who might be a hundred miles from a great video store, but still hunger for cinema — or perhaps five miles from a great video store, but are lazy. Through competitive pricing structures, savvy marketing and a generous dollop of Web cool, Netflix has succeeded to such a degree that they even quashed a lookalike service from Wal-Mart. (On the other hand, competitors offering niche services such as GreenCine seem to be doing fine.)
Netflix's latest bit of cockery-of-the-walk was a show of self-aggrandizement disguised as a $1 million prize — imagine Arthur putting Excalibur back into the rock so that the public could give it a hopeful tug. The cash prize is offered to whomever can find a way to improve the site's recommendations by 10 percent. The way the site's recommendations currently work is to look at how every customer has rated every movie and run them through an algorithm that suggests because your rental history is somewhat similar to another person's, and that person loved Big Daddy, mightn't you also love it? (This is, of course, leavened by Netflix's business need to promote those films that don't get viewed a lot while decreasing pressure on hot titles with "very long waits," so the fact that your soulmate renter gave five stars to Snakes on a Plane may not affect your recommendations for awhile.)
We at Flak are not algorithm wizards, although we've had our eye on this phenomenon for some time. And neither are we dedicated enough to rate every movie they've got. But rather than pursue some soulless Deep Blue approach, we want to offer the human touch. The Flak touch. Below is a sample of the tens of thousands of recommendations we'd be happy to write for Netflix, choices that dive into the back catalog and are designed to capitalize on Netflix viewer habits. We offer them as an enticement to the Netflix folks to send that million bucks our way so can set up our special recommendations research lab in St. Lucia.
If Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter has been stuck on "very long wait" for months …
The ruling class of Earth is actually made up of disguised aliens who've been hiding subliminal messages in advertising and mainstream media messages! That's the shocking discovery made by professional wrestler (and actually really good actor) Rowdy Roddy Piper in They Live when he discovers special sunglasses that reveal the true appearance of the aliens who are tricking this world's workers into maintaining an economically segregated society.
A vulgar Marxist treatise starring a professional wrestler? Yep. But along with being heavy handed on the day-to-day battle between rich and poor, They Live is full of good old-fashioned shlocky entertainment: dummies fall out windows, Piper has a no-holds-barred fight scene that lasts an incredible five minutes and twenty seconds, and there are several standard action movie one-liners including, "I've come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass … and I'm all out of bubble gum." — Taylor Carik
If the only movies to which you've ever given more than two stars are Eraserhead and Strange Brew …
The Saddest Music in the World, Guy Maddin's masterpiece of the Great White North, bridges the vast distance between Eraserhead and Strange Brew. Filmed in black and white through a Vaseline-smeared lens, the story revolves around an international competition sponsored by an embittered Winnipeg beer baroness (who happens to have legs of glass — filled with lager, naturally) whose tortured family history would make Jonathan Franzen blanch. Surreal in its most coherent moments, fantastically self-indulgent from beginning to end, the movie nonetheless comes through with genuinely affecting characters, knife-twisting irony, star-crossed romance and jokes drier than hefeweizen. The competition itself is as suspenseful and dramatic as anything this side of Hoop Dreams, and its denouement will stay with you long after your eyes have stopped watering from the blurred cinematography. — J. Daniel Janzen
If you gave Bird or Round About Midnight four or more stars …
A little-known feature-length biopic of the mercurial, brooding, charismatic jazz master,
Charles Mingus — Triumph of the Underdog features interviews with both of his wives, his son, and all manner of bandmates, which all add to any appreciation of his genius. Archival footage from throughout the USA and Europe show a thoughtful, powerful and oddly poetic survivor of all types of struggles — race, class, history and spirit. Jazz anecdotes and home footage abound, and the compilation of a musical epitaph tragically too far out for its original time and place rounds out the portrait. Espcially dig the disembodied wails of the paralyzed composer as he stares out over the city skyline. — Matt Hanson
If you gave five stars to Amelie and really wish the narrator was available for private parties …
With a dance sequence that inspired the one in Pulp Fiction and the sort of whimsical narration that pleased fans of Amelie, Band of Outsiders is a guy/girl/gun-centered black-and-white love letter from French New Wave stalwart Jean-Luc Godard to his then-wife Anna Karina, who stars in it. Lacking a rigid plot, Band of Outsiders is simply a collection of terrific scenes loosely organized around the story of a budding love triangle and a planned heist. There are some extended on-location driving scenes, but what better way to take a tour of early-'60s Paris? Quentin Tarantino named his production company after this movie's French title. — Eric Wittmershaus
If you gave five stars to both The Big Lebowski and Adaptation …
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is an underwatched black comedy/detective caper, and the directorial debut of Lethal Weapon scribe Shane Black. There's a lot to love here for Chandler geeks, as it's rife with implicit and explicit winks to Marlowe's misadventures. But much of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang's charm has to do with the sparkling chemistry between its principals: Robert Downey Jr. as a small-time NYC hood turned LA actor and wannabe PI, Val Kilmer as a cool-headed brother shamus and Michelle Monaghan as a washed-up ingénue out to unravel the mystery behind her sister's suspicious suicide. K2B2 navigates disparate tones effortlessly, moving between breezy banter, slapstick bordering on body horror and a dead serious plotline involving incest. Tie it all up with some neat nonlinear narrative trickery, and, puzzling coda aside, it's a hilarious and thrilling first outing from a Hollywood veteran. — Wayne Lewis
If you gave five stars to both Wings Of Desire and The Third Man …
Girl On The Bridge is atmospheric, moody, erotic, dark and sultry. Two people who have no luck in life meet in passing and begin to create their destinies. He throws knives in a carnival show and she becomes his model. The lost world of France in the '30s reforms itself and settles in the screen. Vanessa Paradis (Mrs. Johnny Depp to you) makes an ethereal, wipsy goddess out of her despairing yet quietly hopeful character. Daniel Auteil (who won the Cesar — think Oscar, but French — for best actor) plays her savior and world-weary partner. — Matt Hanson
If you gave four or more stars to L.A. Confidential and Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season Two …
Brick is a lingo-heavy noir with a labyrinthine plot relocated among the high school set in a sunny, moneyed Southern California exurb — what could go wrong? In the hands of first time writer-director Rian Johnson, not much. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lukas Haas headline a fine young cast who cover, ably and with the right touch of teen angst, the hard-boiled archetypes: the acid-tongued outsider, the damaged damsel in distress, the brutal thug, the burnt-out skell, the self-impressed kingpin, the femme fatale you suspect and the femme fatale you don't. It's smart, it's fun, and it's exquisitely and lovingly made — pretty much every shot is wonderfully composed without feeling at all fussy. — Wayne Lewis
If you gave Ghost Dad five stars and gave Inherit the Wind zero stars …"
Unfairly panned by critics as an unwatchable piece of garbage, Gigli is, in fact, an eminently watchable piece of garbage. The beauty of NetFlix is simple: you can take a chance on a film like Gigli being a giddily bad good time, and simply slip it right back into its red sheath if it fails to delight. Two things will greatly enhance your enjoyment of this film: friends and alcohol, preferably something tough like boilermakers or caipirinhas. Is Gigli a cult classic? Not yet. Will it be? If enough people watch it while under the influence, yes. — James Norton
If you gave My Dinner With Andre four stars but felt it lacked fist-fights, belly laughs, and psychotic racist Danish people …
The first of the Dogme films,
Festen (The Celebration) is also probably the best realization of the genre's potential to be great entertainment as well as great art. Shot with hand-held cameras using natural light, the film follows the course of a mind-blowingly disastrous family reunion at a large Danish country hotel. As a viewer, you become so emotionally swept up in the action that you quickly begin to feel like an anonymous member of the throng of relatives who have driven out to the country for an entertaining weekend only to be confronted with a family in a full-on melt down.
The Celebration is gut-wrenchingly angst-inducing at times — at the movie theater screening that I attended, gasps were audible at least two different moments of the film — but it never bogs down or becomes a series of emotional body blows culminating in terminal depression, a la Breaking the Waves. It's a beautiful film, acted superbly by actors who show so little evidence of their craft that they feel entirely "real." — James Norton
If you gave Network and Taxi Driver five stars and have your movies delivered to an "apartment" at the same address as your parents' account …
Lost in the shuffle of Scorsese's superproductive '80s, The King Of Comedy is an overlooked but underrated exploration of the mania of celebrity obsession. Featuring the unlikely pairing of a Carson-esque Jerry Lewis and Robert De Niro as a manic, spangle-suited, mother's-basement-dwelling whackjob named Rupert Pupkin who is obsessed with getting him to hear his audition tape. High comedy and pathos result, as Scorsese and DeNiro play both the desperation and the utter cluelessness to the hilt. Enjoy Sandra Bernhart and The Clash in cameo apperances. — Matt Hanson
If he keeps renting John Wayne westerns and she keeps renting The Philadelphia Story and Kiss Me Kate …
Best known for Westerns, John Wayne and director John Ford elegantly played against type with
The Quiet Man, a sweetly comic, epic romance. Wayne stars as a disgraced boxer who returns to his quirky Irish hometown and courts the village spitfire (Maureen O'Hara). But O'Hara's brother (Victor McLaglen), angry over losing a land deal to Wayne, refuses to pay her dowry; debate about tradition and a half-hour-long slapstick fistfight ensues. Ford, who won his fourth and final directing Oscar with The Quiet Man, brings the same sweeping cinematic sensibility to the Irish countryside that he instilled in Monument Valley with such films as Rio Grande and, later, The Searchers. The lush cinematography does, however, deserve a better print than what's currently available on DVD. — Stephanie Kuenn
If you gave The Piano Teacher and Y Tu Mama También five stars but still want more subtitled depravity and nude continental bodies …
If ever a pair of breasts could carry a movie, those breasts would belong to Eva Green, and that movie would be The Dreamers. Still, Bertolucci's typically gutsy, glorious ode to complicated love in complicated times hardly suffers for those blessedly few scenes in which Green remains fully clothed. The legendary director subtly and masterfully showcases flawless turns by relative unknowns such as Green (hypnotic as Isabelle, a Parisienne movie freak with various libidinous compulsions), Louis Garrell (as Theo, Isabelle's adoring twin, who shares her intense beauty and depravity), and Michael Pitt (Matthew, a sweet American virgin, the cutest fly who ever wandered into such a sticky continental web). The result is brutal, haunting
and lovely: perfect. — Eve Adams
If you gave To Kill a Mockingbird five stars and you don't mind a good old-fashioned cry …
Based on the Tennessee Williams play of the same name,
The Night of the Iguana stars Richard Burton as a disgraced former Episcopal clergyman acting as a tour guide in Mexico. His charges include a busload of incredibly unappreciative middle-aged Baptist women and a hot, barely underage teenage girl with a priest fetish. Burton's caustic worldview and palpable self-loathing would get tiresome were the film not so goddamned funny and tellingly honest; nearly every exchange of dialogue rings true. Moreover, Burton's cynic-with-a-heart-of-gold routine is made both fresher and more powerful by his character's tumultuous religious background. Those nostalgic for the era when movies had real writing and real acting would profit greatly from checking out this sorely underappreciated and strange little gem. — James Norton
If you gave Trainspotting five stars, still haven't returned Dig! and routinely lose your pre-printed red envelopes …
Even if you've never heard of Madchester, the Happy Mondays, or Factory Records (shame on you!),
24-Hour Party People, the true-life story of hyper-educated hack journalist and post-punk impresario Tony Wilson, will keep you on the edge of your seat, if not dancing across the floor. Structured as a classic rise-and-fall, the film captures the inspired chaos of Manchester's exploding music scene in the late 1970s, as well as its inevitable implosion amid hard drugs, mismanagement, mental illness and plain bad luck. Steve Coogan's Wilson is a revelation of insufferable charisma; Danny Cunningham as Shaun Ryder proves that even rotten bastards can be musical geniuses; and Sean Harris turns in a singularly heartbreaking performance as Joy Division's Ian Curtis. A wealth of postmodern quirks add to the fun without ever quite descending into gimmickry. You'll be glad you came to the party — and glad you didn't have to clean up afterwards. — J. Daniel Janzen
If you thought Tampopo didn't go far enough …
In East Asian mysticism, sex is associated with water; it follows that a fishing collective of raft huts on a Korean lake has some hot stories to tell. Ki-Duk Kim (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring; Samaritan Girl) writes and films Seom (The Isle), one of the most wrenching, poetic romances since Hwang's "Sonagi"; Jung Suh as a manipulative, mute fishing groupie and Yoosuk Kim as her remote, slavishly devoted lover take pains to animate it faithfully, sparing us nothing. In Korean folklore, bleeding in someone's presence is a sign of profound desire; sometimes you have to swallow fishhooks to impress a girl. — Eve Adams
If your most recent rentals include Trois couleurs, Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis and The Five Obstructions, it's time to cleanse your palate …
Imagine the wacky 1983 versions of Bill Maher, Mr. T, Paul Rodriguez, The Barbarian Brothers and Gary Busey — all in the same film. In DC Cab, they're running a ragtag cab company in Washington, DC that gets threatened with being shut down by the crooked city cab inspector and can only keep their motley crew intact — and defeat the richer rival cab company — by collecting a reward on a missing violin and saving one of their own who's been kidnapped. You'll cringe at the contrived comedy and wonder how any of these yucksters became semi-famous, but you'll also have a ton of fun trying to place all the young faces (like Adam Baldwin and John Diehl) and laugh out loud at Busey's seemingly unscripted cracked-out antics. — Taylor Carik
