Tag: Netflix

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

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: Three 2-hour films
Synopsis: Kanye pesters his way into becoming one of the biggest pop culture figures of the early 21st century
Recommendation rating: 5/5

What I like about it: invaluable early footage, a must-watch if you have even a slight interest in the subject matter (my wife’s review: “I have far more respect and sympathy for him now”)
What I don’t like about it: it’s a showcase of candid footage rather than a complete picture of the subject, it isn’t didactic in drawing conclusions and people will see what they want to see in him

Review:
I’ve always wanted to understand Kanye West, an inscrutible enigma whose talent in music production is overshadowed by his talent for controversy and publicity-seeking. This documentary finally helped me feel like I understand ye to the extent I’ll ever be able to and met my high expectations of being his ‘Rosebud’. It was filmed by an old friend/associate of ye, Coodie, who wanted to make ‘Hoop Dreams for MCs’ but found himself following his first subject longer than anticipated, only for that subject to pull his co-operation about 5 years into production. This footage finally sees the light of day in this trilogy, split roughly into ‘Kanye tries to make it’, ‘Yeezy makes it’ and ‘ye isn’t well’.

A particular highlight is every single moment that Donda West is on-screen and learning how foundational she was to her son getting not just a start in production but most of his early friends. The clearest statement made in the films, in my opinion, is that Donda was Kanye’s ‘rock’, his tether that kept him grounded while chasing his dreams, and that her early and tragic death was the catalyst for Kanye’s descent into hedonism then religious fanaticism, mental illness and sadly increasing irrelevance. Other highlights are Kanye invading the Roc-a-Fella offices to play his mixtape to any receptionist who will listen and generally pestering his way into the industry, candid home video of him telling jokes to his friends, socially-awkward clashes with his mentors as he finds success and early moments of ego-driven behaviour that range from inconsiderate, like being offended by Dame Dash calling him “one of the best rapper/producers ever” because he felt it was qualified praise, to downright cruel such as when he big-dicks Coodie at the My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy launch party.

Due to the circumstances of the footage and how Kanye shelved the project, it could never be complete. The 2010s are pretty much missing from this documentary because the producers didn’t want to use too much archive footage, they instead assume that you lived through the decade and know about his temporarily-stabilising marriage to Kim Kardashian and his unhinged foray into politics. The final episode catches up with Kanye in 2020 and is the most heartbreaking of the bunch: having come to see a smart, talented and political young man who lost his way, the final episode shows how little hope there is of him regaining it. We find Ye shopping for thousand-dollar pottery, flying pop stars into his ranch to uncomfortably lecture them about abortion, and ranting with a paranoia not seen in a producer since Phil Spector as business executives schmooze him into licensing his name yet again. Several times, Coodie turns off the camera because he feels exploitative filming obvious breakdowns. Overall, the level of access given to a man who keeps the world at arm’s length makes this one well worth the investment in hours.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): death, big feelings

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: Eight roughly 1-hour episodes
Synopsis: Teen sisters investigate a creepy company and their own mysterious origins
Recommendation rating: 4/5

What I like about it: good themes, music, young actors
What I don’t like about it: zombies, often too dark (visually and metaphorically)

Review:
Netflix wisely takes a free hand in adapting the horror franchise, creating an interesting and relevant plot to fill the space in between fights with CGI zombified creatures. It opens in the zombie apocalypse of 2036 before flashing back to the far-flung past of 2022 as a young Black family moves into an all-white company town in South Africa, building the creeping dread more than the promise of a zombie virus outbreak. The show has a broad and worthy list of targets; the biopharmaceutical “Life Sciences” corporation at the heart of events is pure evil and there are swipes at NAFTA, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, among others. The soundtrack is particularly great, utilising up-to-date hits like Billie Eilish and Dua Lipa, indie picks like Reuben and the Dark and considered pulls like a zombie massacre accompanied by Feels Just Like it Should by Jamiroquai.

It’s a very well-made show but the main issue (for me) is its constant insertion of action sequences to hold attention, the action is very competently handled but has no real stakes for the most part and is there to make teenaged boys yell, “Cool!”. If 90% of the zombie sequences were removed, you’d end up with a much better and cheaper six-episode show.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): excessive gore and body horror – this show will try to disgust you, blood, vomit, violence, death

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: About an hour and a half, cut into 9 episodes
Synopsis: A man housesits a mansion, where he becomes obsessed with killing a bee
Recommendation rating: 2/5

What I like about it: delivers on Mr. Bean-esque calamity
What I don’t like about it: never quite comes together, very predictable, cruel to animals

Review:
Rowan Atkinson is following the time-honored tradition of British comics: funding your latest divorce by returning to the material you swore you were done with. This is a Mr. Bean movie in all but name; Atkinson plays a middle-age divorcé named Trevor Bingley who signs up to a housesitting app and finds his first job at a mansion where all expensive items are pointed out in the pilot ready for him to destroy in the coming episodes. And so it goes.

Content notes (may contain spoilers): he gasses the family dog and falls in its excrement, fire

Where to find it: Netflix
Length: Nine one-hour episodes
Synopsis: Young woman looks after creepy orphans in spooky manor house
Recommendation rating: 2/5

What I like about it: occasionally has excellent unsettling sequences, the child actors were great, as were the characters
What I don’t like about it: completely lost the plot by halfway, has an entirely skippable uninteresting penultimate episode

Review:
Mike Flanagan has a great formula for horror but there are better examples of it than this. What starts out promising, albeit with plenty of filler, soon evaporates and there’s an episode at the end that seems designed to kill the goodwill of anyone who invested their time in it

Content notes (may contain spoilers): general horror tropes, animal abuse, it’s very dark