Welcome to a new column about the week in streaming titles, though maybe we’ll consider a few physical titles as well. Life is crazy like that. This column will continue, in perpetuity, until I think up a life insurance scam.
Now, I don’t have to tell you guys how important streaming is. That’s a given. But it’s my hope that we can learn some things together, and through this growth, change the world forever.
Let’s begin.
Top Streamer of the Week
Mitt
New on Netflix this week, exclusively, is Mitt. I’ve read “Game Change: 2012”, so I already knew some of this stuff, but it’s amazing to think that up until the final moments of the election Mr. Romney thought a) he was going to win b) no one had written a concession speech (you know, just in case?) and c) Mitt didn’t have El Presidente’s number in his phone. All of that’s awesome, and it happens in the first thirty seconds of the trailer. It even looks as though, behind the scenes, Mitt was cracking wise. Sign this guy up.
Streamability: (patent pending) Very.
Old Movies for the Recently Born
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Long before Matt Damon was winning all the accolades for “Behind the Candelabra” work, he foreshadowed a little bit of his crossover gay/straight appeal in The Talented Mr. Ripley. This movie is creepy and great, because it features super young person skinny Matt Damon, a weird voice affectation, and him playing a fellow crazier than an indoor outhouse.
Streamability: Do, on Netflix.
Physically New Media for Netflix, Streaming Elsewhere
Don Jon
For just about five buckaroos you can watch this one, it’s the story of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a porn addict. It’s like Shame, but without all the existential despair. I think Vince (from FilmDrunk.com) may have liked this one [Vince’s Note – I never saw it], but I found it slightly off-putting, at least tonally. The film wanted to point out that JGL wasn’t “fully” committing, but it made the woman he wouldn’t commit to, Scarlett Johansson, seem pretty awful. So you kind of saw his point (except for all the chafage he was clearly inflicting upon himself). Still, the redeeming quality is Levitt as what he imagines a Jersey Shore guy to be, and every scene where he’s in a car singing or yelling at people is legit. But it is NOT a rom-com, unless your rom is really messed up. It’s a trag-com.
Streamability: Maybe, on GooglePlay.
The Bad, The Bad, and the Ugly
The Bling Ring
Sofia Coppola’s latest film is laughably bad, and that’s coming from a fella who liked Marie Antoinette AND Somewhere. The problem with this little “based on a true story” ditty about some thieving rich girls is that it’s soooooo repetitive. In the first ten minutes Emma Watson and her brat compadres rob some people. In the next hour, they do that six more times, ten minutes later every time, like that AM station you tune into to hear “traffic on the 4s”. Pretty solid soundtrack though. [Vince’s Note: I concur, one of the worst of the year, easily.]
Streamability: Never ever, though it’s free with your Amazon Prime account.
The Fifth Estate
How you mess up a movie about the WikiLeaks story, and starring Benedict Cumberbatch, is beyond me, almost to the point where I actually pondered whether the government was capable of releasing this terrible one so no one made a solid version. We live in morally grey times, but the great failing of The Fifth Estate is that it paints everyone involved as a bastard and then says, “Well, what do you make of all this?!”. Ugh. What a dismal film.
Streamability: Not really, but $4.99 on Amazon Instant.
And Finally …
Blue is the Warmest Color
I loved this film, though that pretty much makes me a beret-wearing, cigarette smoking, malcontent. Eeees a Franch film, eeess about three hours, and it is all about young lesbians finding out who “they really are”. I mean, c’mon. And I’ll cede that it feels like the type of movie most people wouldn’t bother with, but I found it to be a remarkably interesting portrait of the relationship life cycle. The lesbian angle wasn’t really that germane to anything, except for the fact that the film sports a couple of five to ten minute scenes of super boisterous lesbian sex. That oddness makes it almost feel exploitative, but then they shoot right back to a balanced drama for another hour. Perplexing, it is. Still, I recommend it to fellow peoples who hang out in coffee shops and decry the state of cinema / humanity.
Streamability: Yeah, but at $6.99 on Amazon Instant you might want to see if the trailer interests you first. Seven dollars is a fair amount of cash.
Laremy wrote the book on film criticism and hasn’t ever engaged in lesbian sex.