I don’t mean movies you’d heard of and expected to be good and just happened to watch that way - movies you’d never have watched any other way, but they turned out to be awesome.
When I was out of town a few months ago, my boyfriend for some reason watched this movie Gang Tapes on Watch Instantly (we call it Netflix On Demand, but I guess we should respect their branding.) He’s been pestering me to watch it for ages now, but whenever I think about it we’re watching something else. Finally I was here by myself and in a movie-watching mood, and let me tell you, this movie is fantastic!
It’s nothing at all like something we’d ever have chosen to watch! Hand-held camera about gang life - these are not words that make me say “Add to queue”, let me tell you. But the acting! The acting is tremendously natural - evidently the actors are mostly ex-gang members, which sounds like a gimmick because usually people who are “playing themselves” suck ass, right? Not these guys, I promise. I mean, don’t sue me if you watch it and don’t like it, but I found it to be very good. The conceit is that a 14 year old boy who’s sort of a junior member of an LA street gang gets a video camera in a carjacking and records pretty much everything in his life after that - it’s kind of a “slice of life” movie, obviously. I just thought it was really good, particularly since I expected to hate the hell out of it.
So, anybody else make surprise finds?