Please share good films/docs that you have watched via streaming that others may have missed.
Blancanieves, a Spanish retelling of Snow White, featuring bullfighting dwarves.
It’s also a silent film and is just amazing from start to finish.
We have a separate thread for the UK show Black Mirror, but it just popped up in the last few weeks and is really great in a Twilight Zone/Outer Limits kind of way.
Mary and Max was an absolutely wonderful film! Perfect really. Don’t let the Claymation fool you, it is a very mature, adult story. Also starred the voice of the late great Phillip Seymour Hoffman (though he’s hard to recognize).
Mr. Nobody (though if the recommendation engine was for everybody else the way it was for me, then it would have been hard to miss).
Headhunters - A Norwegian crime/murder suspense thing.
Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. 1920 Australian female detective with snappy dialogue and wonderful costumes. Popcorn watching, not at all serious.
Advanced Style, a documentary from the blog/book of the same name, following some older women who have their own sense of style. Very charming.
Some of the following titles are the English titles of foreign language films, hence I have provided links to prevent confusion.
I’m not a sports fan, but ESPN’s 30 for 30 series of sports documentaries have been uniformly fascinating. I particularly liked Run Ricky Run about Heisman trophy winner, NFL-dropout-turned-yoga enthusiast, perpetual pothead, possibly-mentally-ill-but-maybe-crazy-like-a-fox, Ricky Williams. And Brian and the Boz which is about Brian Bosworth and how his “80s bad boy football persona” pretty much took over and destroyed his life, until he changed himself for the better. Oh and the one about Jimmy Connors, I can’t remember the name, was great. There’s a crazy one about a guy who pretended to be rich and “bought” the NY Islanders hockey team, and the whole time it was just an act.
Again, I’m not a fan of any kind of pro sport, and I’ve watched a good dozen from the series and enjoyed them all.
I’m a little over halfway through Black Mirror and it is very dark and interesting. I also watch The Dark Matter of Love which is about a very idealistic family and their adoption of not just one but three Russian orphans. Some of the parent’s clueless behavior made me angry but it was interesting to watch the (very slow) process of becoming a cohesive family unit.
We are loving this series! Total fluff, but visually pleasing and just plain fun to watch.
Frankenstein’s Army. A found-footage, Nazisploitation/Sovietsploitation action-horror flick. With hideous puppets!
(Hey, you want “classy,” watch Tim’s Vermeer. I mostly do “[blank]-punk” stuff.)
We watched The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec on New Years Eve.
We thoroughly enjoyed it - even with subtitles it was very watchable.
Just to toss in a something that wasn’t a gem, last night I watched Women Aren’t Funny.
It should have been really good but I thought it was awful. It was really low budget and she had clearly been working on this for many, many years (interviews with Patrice O’Neal and people recognizing Rich Vos as ‘you’re the guy on Last Comic Standing’).
What should have been discussions with industry people about the myth that Women Aren’t Funny was basically her pulling out a camera back stage with male comics around and saying ‘Are women funny?’ and they’d say ‘no, I can’t think of any funny women’. The problem was, she’d leave it at that instead of challenging them (what about Lisa Lampanelli, Joan Rivers, Amy Schumer etc).
I mean, there were some counter points and it was well balanced. In once scene, where she (well, her husband) actually got a discussion going they managed to agree that it wasn’t that Women Aren’t Funny but rather that there’s just fewer women in the industry and therefore if seems like women aren’t funny simply because they don’t have a presence. Taken a step further, if there’s 1 female comic for every 30 male comics, if a male comic isn’t that good it doesn’t do as much damage to his gender as bad female comic.
Anyways, the premise was good, but it was executed poorly, it needed to either be done by someone like Sarah Silverman or Chelsea Handler or Jane Lynch or she needed to get her ideas down on paper and hire a writer and director to help her put this together to make it into something cohesive.
Why it’s got 7/10 on IMDB and 3.5 stars on Netflix, I don’t know.
I also watched The Interview (on youtube), I thought it was pretty good.
She got comics on camera saying women aren’t funny? Honestly I’m surprised by this. How can any comic working today not think women can be funny?
Were they famous comics, ones I would recognize?
Here’s the trailer for it. The first thing you see is Patrice O’Neil saying that women aren’t funny. (He was a successful stand up comedian as well as the ‘flamer’ in Arrested Development).
Blue Ruin was sort of under the radar. It’s worth a look.
Definitely see the music documentaries Muscle Shoals and Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me if you haven’t already.
Another vote for Adele Blanc Sec (directed by Luc “The Fifth Element” Bresson) and Miss Fisher
A third season is being made right now, and I’m single handedly trying to get as many people as I can to watch it. If it brings in enough money for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, they might keep making it.
Small Apartments, a wonderful independent film that really stands out due to its unique story line and quirky characters. If you haven’t seen it yet you are in for a treat.