First off, some sad news. The fine folks at Netflix reached out to tell me I’d been hoodwinked, bamboozled, the victim of chicanery. The rub? Neither Elizabethtown nor Bounce will be getting a Netflix streaming release. This is why you can’t trust the Internet. The Internet lies. It lies like a family member. However, like the intrepid families who took to the Oregon Trail, we owe it to ourselves to plod forward, hopefully only losing a daughter or two.
Top Netflix Streaming of the Week (streaming)
Rounders
Streamability: The film that launched a thousand poker addictions, this is the rare effort where a voice-over actually works. Damon and Norton have nice chemistry, and Famke Janssen does really good things in about fifteen minutes of screentime. I wish my debt collector looked like that. She’s super friendly, no chance anyone tells her to beat feet.
For actual fans of poker they sell the “tell” angle with Teddy KGB way too hard. Another terrible example of this happened in Casino Royale, where they basically held an unsubtle tutorial for people who had never played a hand of cards. Back in real life, great players don’t have obvious tells, and if they do, it might be a trap, like Vince’s mom. Texas Hold ‘Em, as a gambling endeavor, is a love letter to math, but that doesn’t play terribly well on camera. This is about as well as it’s been done in cinema, unless you count the scene Joshua Jackson is in for Ocean’s 11.
Streamability: If you haven’t seen, then absolutely. If you’ve seen it, maybe worth a trip down memory lane. Do it for Famke.
Top Netflix Cheese of the Week (streaming)
Evita
One could make the case I’m only embedding this because I want to foist “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” upon you, the reader. One would be right. You gotta turn it up to maximum volume and traipse around your house, singing at the top of your lungs. This will prove therapeutic. As for the film, it’s not as bad as you’d think, if you were thinking it was unwatchable. This and Who’s That Girl show Madonna can sort of act, especially opposite a tiger. Might have been the whole problem here, not enough tigers. Wasn’t Captain Lou Albano in that movie too? We’re getting sidetracked here. Musicals have gone the way of the Doo Doo Brown, but this one is an Oscar winner, and they never get it wrong!
If you want some extra special trivia you’ll have to earn, check out this Dan Bern song for some Madonna trivia. If it’s true, it’s awesome, but you’ll have to listen for a while to earn it.
Streamability: There’s no way I’m going to be able to convince anyone to see this.
Top Netflix Dog of the Week (streaming)
Airbud
Airbud is practically the FilmDrunk mascot, whenever we have team meetings he’s there, dunking, shooting the three-ball, and generally protecting the rim (the horrid six-foot long sub sandwich the Uproxx brass orders). No, it’s not a good movie, but good god man, this is a dog playing basketball! What more do you want? Although, come to think of it, I watch “Dog with a Blog”, so maybe I’m a biased ambassador here. I think it’s ranked like 5 out of 10 on IMDB.com, somewhere below the average “Mr. Belvedere” episode. Perhaps only for substance abusers.
Streamability: Super high, yeah.
Top Netflix Curio of the Week (streaming)
Face/Off
My recollection of this movie is that it’s completely bonkers, and yet fully awesome. I scratched my head a lot when I watched this the first time, even though it was a totally binary equation. “Okay, wait, so this is Nic Cage stuff that John Travolta is doing here. Got it. No, wait, hold on, is he double crossing … umm, himself? Or his face? Imma so confused, someone pass me that glue to huff!” That’s way my experience at least, and I enjoyed the living piss out of it. I like being confused. It’s less predictable.
Streamability: With the power of a thousand suns, yes!
Top Netflix Portender of the Week (streaming)
Mad Max
Might be time to get excited about Mad Max again, especially because the new Thomas Hardy version looks dope to the most. Re: the original version, I hadn’t realized prior how much Raising Arizona cribbed from “The Road Warrior” character. This was around the “peak oil” phase, before all those alternative energies were humming right along! Ha. I think most people agree that Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior held up a little better, but that’s not available on Netflix Instant. So we’ll all have to settle for this instead.
Streamability:
Top Netflix Spice World of the Week (streaming)
Spice World
Let me ask you this, did anyone else feel like the line, “If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends” was basically a three-way invitation? Make it last forever? Friendship never ends? But of course it does, Victoria went off to marry Beckham, and Sporty Spice is now a morning show correspondent of some kind. This is clearly one of the worst movies ever, incoherent, poorly paced, and lacking any semblance of vision, relying instead on your nonexistent love of the Spice Girls. It holds up about as well as my eyes after a marathon session of ice cream eating (I get sleepy). However, that’s probably what makes it a “watch”. You want to schedule good movies into your time slots (mmmm, slots) but you also want the other extreme as well. It’s the in-between stuff that truly grates upon your soul, neither enjoyable or mockable, merely there like a vase with dead flowers. That’s a longish was of saying I could see checking out Spice World this weekend.
Streamability: I just explained myself on this front. If we’re to continue top grow as a couple, you gotta start listening. [Vince’s Note: I ditched school to see this on opening day when it came out. True story.]
Please include your derisive comments below! Sometimes Vince reads them to me on the Frotcast, to the delight and merriment of everyone involved. In a way, the hate is a generator of mirth, which must please even the most curmudgeonly of Internet commenters. We salute you.
Laremy is on Twitter, like a goon.