Tag: Netflix

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: Two hours
Synopsis: He made another antifascist fairy tale
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: visually stunning, some clever scenes
What I don’t like about it: generally miserable, target-audience confusion, tonal whiplash, songs

Review:
This career-defining passion project for del Toro is definitely a well-crafted stop-motion animation but is alienatingly hard to connect with. Certain scenes seem very unsuitable for children, while others – especially a “poop and fart” song – seem entirely unsuitable for adults. Like all his works, it’s a beautiful masterpiece that I had no fun with and am in no rush to watch again.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence, war, grief, peril

Wednesday (2022)

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: Eight 50-minute episodes
Synopsis: Teen drama about a dramatic teen
Recommendation rating: 1/5

What I like about it: good visuals and FX
What I don’t like about it: awful writing

Review:
Wednesday Addams is a teenaged girl who says exhaustingly edgy things to scare people away from her, an exasperating presence anchoring what is a deeply boring Riverdale-esque teen drama. Tim Burton makes it look pretty but 55-year-olds Miles Millar and Alfred Gough have no business writing Gen Z teens and their script is outdated, flat and just terrible.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence and gore

Blockbuster (2022)

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: Ten 25-minute episodes
Synopsis: Workplace sitcom set in the last Blockbuster Video
Recommendation rating: 2/5

What I like about it: easy, J.B. Smoove
What I don’t like about it: weak laughs, kinda cringe

Review:
A sadly forgettable and unfunny sitcom. It’s hard to find much to hate about it but harder to find much to love.

Content notes (may contain spoilers):

Wendell and Wild (2022)

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: 105 minutes
Synopsis: Orphan girl seeks to raise her dead parents, gets conned by slacker demons
Recommendation rating: 4/5

What I like about it: great characters, very left-wing, lovingly crafted, imaginative and cool
What I don’t like about it: story isn’t great, ending kinda fizzles

Review:
Henry Selick is a beloved stop-motion animator whose previous classics include The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach and Coraline. Since the latter in 2009, Selick has had several projects disappear on him and relationships with many of the larger Hollywood studios sour but with the help and patience of Netflix and Key & Peele, we get to see another great film from a master of visual imagination.

Kat is a punky orphan who runs afoul of authorities and is sent from care home to juvenile detention centre to discipline-heavy Catholic private school. There, she meets the school’s perky Greek chorus and a quiet, capable and artistic trans boy named Raúl. Alongside this, we’re introduced to a pair of demons, the eponymous Wendell & Wild (Key & Peele) who live on a bigger demon and are responsible for replacing his thinning hairline. Together they resurrect the dead and fight against property developers trying to turn their post-industrial town into a private prison.

It’s very strange and honestly, confusing and hard to connect with at times but the imagination and fun pervading the whole movie – along with the dedication and craft involved in its creation = makes it easy to overlook the weaknesses and just be awed as it moves at a consistent fast pace and shows off some great visuals and ideas. Suitable for gothy older kids and teens.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence, drugs and alcohol, grief and trauma

Inside Job (2021)

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: Ten 25-minute episodes
Synopsis: Adult animation in which all conspiracies are true and engineered by the Deep State
Recommendation rating: 2/5

What I like about it: sometimes funny (especially when satirical), Lizzy Caplan, good opening titles and theme
What I don’t like about it: juvenile gags, uninteresting characters

Review:
I’ve disliked ‘adult animation’ for as long as I’ve been an adult – there’s better content for adults in masterful children’s cartoons like Bluey and Steven Universe; while the obligatory gore, swears and cynicism that separates them from animation’s traditional target audience seem more adolescent than adult. This show from Netflix isn’t the worst example of the genre (that would be their latest offering, Farzar) but it’s far from the best (which is Tuca and Bertie).

The core gag is that all conspiracy theories, from Roswell to ‘crisis actors’, are true and organised by a shadowy corporation called Cognito Inc. Main character Reagan (Lizzy Caplan) is the daughter of Cognito founder Rand (Christian Slater) and is passed over for promotion to Big Boss in favour of a bland young executive named Brett (Clark Duke). Reagan and Brett’s relationship is the familiar cat-and-dog dynamic of a smart, aloof woman and an active, unthinking man. It isn’t strong enough to carry any interest beyond the gags, which are a handful of good historical/political jokes filled out with four hours of standard adolescent animation fare.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence, drugs, sexual references, anti-autistic bullshit in episode 3

Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles (2022)

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: Twenty 20-minute episodes
Synopsis: Funny animals do action comedy
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: funny, continuing plot, fun setting, pretty digitally-painted flashbacks, imaginative and cool
What I don’t like about it: janky animation, ugly character design

Review:
Inspired by but not really based on the long-running comic Usagi Yojimbo, this cartoon for tweens follows Yuichi Usagi, an anthropomorphic rabbit living in 24th century ‘Neo Edo’, Japan. He battles adorable demons with his friends, each with a similarly predictable name based on their species, and tries to come to terms with the legacy of his ancestor (the one from the comics). Creator Doug Langdale’s familiar ‘voice’ is present, at once light and edgy, cynical and positive, sarcastic and genuine. The humour is its best quality; it’s a funny show and the plot should be enough to keep kids entertained, though the violence and weapons make it unsuitable for younger children.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): violence, swords and other weapons

Thoroughbreds (2017)

Throughout September I will be raiding my collection of favourite movies to review one a day, with a focus on overlooked and underappreciated films.

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: 92 minutes
Synopsis: Anti-social young woman makes a friend and they plan a murder
Recommendation rating: 4/5

What I like about it: the acting, the ending, the best depiction of antisocial personality disorder in film
What I don’t like about it: grim and slow

Review:
Amanda (the wonderful Olivia Cooke) is a teenage loner who doesn’t feel emotions. Her mother pays another young woman, Lily (the brilliant Anya Taylor-Joy), to socialise with Amanda under the guise of tutoring sessions. Lily is abused by her stepfather and Amanda, who has experience killing a horse, has a suggestion how they can deal with that. Together they rope in drug dealer Tim (the late, magnificent Anton Yelchin) to get rid of him.

The ending of this one really distinguishes it as, far and away, the best thriller I’ve ever seen featuring a ‘psychopath’ – and there are so many. It raises many questions about empathy and feeling and lying to oneself, becoming the quintessential film on ASPD, in my opinion.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): blood, gun, drugs, implied abuse, haunting end, personality disorder

Lost Ollie (2022)

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: Four 50-minute episodes
Synopsis: A grimdark tragedy for children
Recommendation rating: 1/5

What I like about it: VFX, sometimes unintentionally funny
What I don’t like about it: deeply unpleasant

Review:
Who is this for? The target audience appears to be children, due to the animated elements and plot of a lost toy trying to reunite with his child, but it seems designed to end a childhood on sight. Ollie, voiced by Jonathan Groff with a bad Missourah accent, finds himself in a second-hand shop being roughly handled by the shopkeeper and longing for Billy, the boy who loved him. He meets other toys abandoned by their owners and they set out on an adventure, just like in Toy Story. Unlike Toy Story however, this story intersperses live-action footage of Billy’s mum dying of cancer and his alcoholic father trying to neglect him into growing up. Billy goes to hospitals, funerals and bars while Ollie and company hop freight trains and swap trauma stories, including the time one of the toys committed a violent murder. If this is children’s media then Richard Thompson’s The End of the Rainbow is a lullaby.

Maudlin, depressing and disgustingly unpleasant throughout, the tone may be consistent but it’s an ugly car crash that makes all other effort in this series pointless and the actors who choose to phone it in seem wise by comparison. ILM’s visual effects are the most impressive part; the animation is only passable but the lighting, blending with the live-action backgrounds, really is indistinguishable from magic.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): death, loss

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: 134 minutes
Synopsis: “Give it a rest, Charlie Kaufman, some of us have work in the morning, damn!”
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: Jessie Buckley, the writing (sometimes), themes connected hard with me
What I don’t like about it: almost indecipherable, lost entirely up its own arse

Review:
You know how sometimes an internet movie review will say something like, “This is a really good movie when you watch it the second to twelfth time!”? Well I’m gonna try to save that first painful nonsense viewing for you by providing some context upfront, even though it’ll spoil the ‘reveals’ along the way. If you really want to go in knowing nothing – I assume you have time for the extra rewatches – this is not the review for you.

Most of the film consists of a young woman going to meet her boyfriend’s parents even though she’s unsure about the relationship. As is typical for Kaufman, strange things happen and get increasingly surreal as it goes; for instance the young woman doesn’t seem to have a name or occupation that sticks for more than ten minutes before being changed without any acknowledgement from the characters. The main story is inexplicably intercut with scenes of a quiet janitor cleaning a high school. By the end of the story, we learn that the janitor is an older version of the boyfriend and the only ‘real’ part of the whole film – the story that takes up most of the movie is in fact him daydreaming about what life would have been like if he had ever actually talked to a woman.

If you’ve ever seen one of these before (Being John Malkovich; Synechdoche, New York; Anomalisa) you’ll understand the kind of pretentious surreal symbolism you’re in for if you take this one on. Has a 4:3 aspect ratio, characters quoting poetry at each other and an extended Rogers & Hammerstein dream ballet. But if you can tolerate all this, it makes more sense than most of his back catalogue, possibly due to being an adaptation. Has a far better treatment of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope than his earlier Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): suicide, relationship trouble, sudden loud bell sounds, the “autistic guys die alone” trope

The Sandman (2022)

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: Eleven 50-minute episodes
Synopsis: Sleepy emo wants his stuff back (it’s a difficult story to follow and more difficult to explain)
Recommendation rating: 3/5

What I like about it: genuinely impressive visual effects, cool concepts, great British cast, Dave McKean’s distinctive collages on the end credits
What I don’t like about it: they said it was unfilmable… and they were right!

Review:
The conventional wisdom among TV programmers is that we’re all just waiting for the next Game of Thrones, with several nine-figure investments coming to fruition and chasing that *ahem* throne this year including a GoT prequel from Warner and a newer, Thrones-ier take on Lord of the Rings from Amazon. Netflix seem to be the only ones who understand that the lesson to take from that earlier show’s great success (the last of the traditional TV era) wasn’t that people love medieval fantasy.

This $165,000,000 production – the world disgusts me, by the way – comes the closest I’ve seen in a while to an engaging potential franchise, and the budget shows in its incredibly ambitious and generally beautiful visual effects. The literary and visual ambitions of the original comic are preserved and it’s a first-rate adaptation but there’s a huge lack of humanity to the tale; as character after character is thrown at us it becomes increasingly obvious that none of them have any actual… well, character. The pace is fine for comics but dreadful for TV.

Adapting the Neil Gaiman comic with too much reverence, this first season covers roughly 1/8th of the total source material but that eye-watering cost, combined with a comic-book plot too densely fantastical to connect with audiences at large, mean season two (at least at a comparable scale) may remain but a Dream…

Content notes (may contain spoilers): awfully gory violence, sex