Every week at Movie Mezzanine, we pick some of the best films currently on Netflix Instant. Whether they are big releases or hidden gems, these movies make your subscription worth the price. Read on for this week’s picks.
…
With Gore Verbinski’s latest piece of live-action/CGI bloat justifiably floundering, it is comforting to know his best film is on Netflix to wash the bad taste of Tonto out of one’s mouth. As ultimately frivolous and outsized as the director’s other big-time work, Rango benefits from being fully animated. This permits Verbinski to indulge in his surreal tics to their fullest extent even as the results are more fluid than his mixes of live-action and gargantuan effects. But as silly as this referential Western is, it also boasts, strangely, his most human characters, as well as Johnny Depp’s most pleasing, nuanced performance in nearly a decade. With any luck, when people’s discuss Verbinski’s Western in the future, this is the film they will be talking about.
For those who managed this indie just before the end of last year, Starlet was an unexpected end-of-year discovery, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting it for months. The film concerns a friendship formed between a 21-year-old and an octogenarian linked to a sum of cash the young woman discovers in the older person’s sold thermos. This year’s surprising number of indies focused on older characters (This Is Martin Bonner, Museum Hours, even Before Midnight) has made the thought of Starlet even more appealing, and the promise of revelatory performances of Dree Hemingway and Besedka Johnson places it at the top of my queue.
Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995)
Strange Days’ appearance on Netflix is less a cause for celebration for those who’ve yet to see it than those who need to rewatch it to get their heads around it. This is especially true for this writer, who only ever saw it once in his teens on TV and has long needed to revisit it. Perhaps the best of the mid-’90s cyber movies (not that competition is stiff), Strange Days stands to have aged better than its peers for its reliance on spaces outside its VR constructions, thus freeing it from an overreliance on a technological future which already seems obsolete. Then again, I’m curious to see how those VR clips play now in the context of knowing about her early background in avant-garde art. — Jake Cole
One thought on “Netflix Instant Picks (7/12/13—7/18/13)”
Nice picks, Jake! Especially with Strange Days because I’m still of the opinion that it’s Bigelow’s best, and probably her most inspired. Then again, that’s just me.