The Dirt. Jeff Tremaine. 2019. ☆☆★★★★

This doesn’t start off well, but once it gets going there’s one funny scene after another. It’s not even the most OUTRAGEOUS scenes that are funniest — there’s like the scene where they dump the blond guitarist. Ramsay Bolton totally deadpans his way through it, and that drummer guy who beats up his girlfriends is ditzily pretending to look the other way and it just kinda works.

I don’t care about these people and I don’t like their music. Perhaps that even helps enjoying this movie? I especially appreciate the “on stage” scenes — they convey what must have made their fans adore them.

The movie kinda collapses when they get into the serious interpersonal stuff, and the car crash stuff is beyond offensive, and then we go into snooze-town with the heroin scenes.

Wasn’t this movie supposed to be one funny anecdote after another? I feel let down, because less than a third of the movie is that, and the rest is like Snoozetown Drama. If they’d edited this down to just the funny scenes, I’d have given it a ☆☆☆☆☆☆, but the boring bits are really really boring.

The script for this movie was kicked around between studios for a decade before Netflix picked it up and made it happen, which seems to be a recurring theme.

This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.

Triple Frontier. J.C. Chandor. 2019. ☆☆★★★★

Oh deer. You’ve seen this movie a gazillion times before: Cool military guys doing cool military things with a roaming, restless camera (steadycam and helicopter footage). Every single shot is a cliché and there’s metal music to underscore how cool it all is.

I mean: War is hell. That’s what this is about. Yeah. That’s the ticket. That’s how you get to shoot all the cool scenes.

Heh heh:

Gets a little credit for not being quite as troop porny as these kinds of movies usually are.

This is basically a heist movie, so we go through all the usual plot points: First we gather the gang of people (who were out of the game, of course, but one single more heist I mean adventure), and then the build-up, and then (I’m assuming, I typing as I watch) it all goes belly up for an ending with the proper gravitas and everything is going to be so deep, man.

Let’s see… is there anything about this movie I don’t find offensively boring? Hm… the cinematography sucks… the actors do their macho thing… the footage has been colour-coordinated to a grey/teal/green tedium… the audio is murky: even pumping the volume up to 11 I can only make out about two thirds of the lines… the soundtrack consists of things that sound quite like metal and or country tracks but is like totally bad (perhaps from the Now That’s What I Call Metal & Country Non-Hits vol IV… it’s about fourteen hours too long for its plot (which is moronic)…

OK, the costume department is OK? The actors wear clothes that seem plausible for the characters?

I think that’s all I’m coming up with here.

*time passes*

After the first nine hours of exposition where I literally died from boredom (this is the ghost typing), and the (stupid stupid) heist starts… there are scenes in there that aren’t totally tedious.

But, OK, it’s probably just me. If they had purposefully designed a movie to annoy me, this would be that movie. If you like this sort of movie, I think it’s quite likely that you’d like this movie.

This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.

Juanita. Clark Johnson. 2019. ☆☆☆☆☆★

Oh, I haven’t bitched about the Netflix UX yet, have I?

Let the rant commence:

I loathe it. I go to the Netflix app and it says DOUUUNNG as loud as possible. Then I start thinking about what I’m going to watch and it starts auto-playing, with full sound, whatever Netflix product it’s decided I should watch. Then I search for what I really want to watch and select the movie, and I look around for some snacks… and it starts auto-playing, with full sound, the trailer for the movie I’m about to watch, because apparently I really enjoy having all movies I watch spoiled before I watch them. And then I hit play and I get the Netflix DOUUUUNG again and then the movie starts and I’m relatively safe for the duration of the movie. Almost, because three milliseconds after the end titles start rolling, while I’m digesting what I’ve seen, it shrinks the titles to a post stamp sized window and shows me a picture of what it wants me to watch next. I hit PAUSE in desperation, but that just makes it start playing whatever that was, DOOOOUNG, and we’re off on a Netflix Original TV series and I’m AAAAAAAAH

Using Netflix is like having an enthusiastic retarded deaf hillbilly shovelling manure into my every orifice given the slightest chance.

ANYWAY.

This is a really sweet little movie. I guess you could say that it, too, like many of these Netflix flicks, seems a bit calculated to service a particular demographic. And, once again, it’s got road trip elements, as several of the previous movies.

But it’s fresh and original and has some great actors. I totally buy into the protagonist, and her fantasies about Blair Underwood (played by Blair Underwood) are hilarious.

Oh, right! Now I know what this reminds me of: Percy Adlon’s Out of Rosenheim/Bagdad Cafe with Marianne Sägebrecht and CCH Pounder. It’s got the same mixes of fantasy and reality and the same basic plot of a woman leaving home and going to a random restaurant in the middle of the middle of nowhere, where she’s the catalyst for changing the lives of the people there.

I adore Out of Rosenheim so I love that they’ve taken that as an inspiration. But Adlon is a master of heaping on the emotions without getting maudlin. Clark Johnson isn’t, so we occasionally tip over into So Much Drama. And there’s some pacing problems in the last third of the movie.

No biggie: This movie is a delight to watch.

This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.

Walk. Ride. Rodeo.. Conor Allyn. 2019. ☆★★★★★

Oh deer. This is based on a true story?

At the start here I thought this was a quite funny parody… but then… I slowly realised… that it’s a real Based On A Real Story movie.

I don’t like to use hate speech so I’ve avoided using this phrase so far in my sojourn into Netflix Originals, but this movie, as several of the other ones, is a Made For TV Movie.

I mean, literally literally.

Netflix is TV, and the movies they produce are cheap, uncomplicated and not very ambitious.

The main difference between Netflix’ movies and, say, The Hallmark Channel, is that they make these movies for several distinct audience groups.

I’m not part of the audience group this has been extruded for. It’s maudlin and obvious and the soundtrack is awful.

On the positive side… uhm… let’s see… Oh! The cinematography’s kinda interesting. And the way the movie insists on some scenes is pretty unusual: It’s like the entire movie is just text; no subtext.

The last nine hours of this movie were the worst.

The over-sized titles are nice even if the drop shadows look janky.

This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.