Netflix Watch Instantly Recommendation Thread

Maybe we need a general thread for crafty competition shows (bake-off, sewing bee, throwdown, blown away...) but The Big Flower Fight is pretty entertaining, some v impressive creations and um colourful characters on show.

That's a good idea.

Anyone else watching Snowpiercer S2? It's not worse than S1, maybe even better!

I've been enjoying Snowpiercer but maybe because my expectations were super low going into it after talk here and elsewhere. Binged season one a couple of months ago and have been watching this one as they're released.

Quite enjoyed the first season but not enough that I've felt compelled to pick this one up. I suppose I probably should.

Thought "Operation Varsity Blues" was mostly good and informative, a hybrid of footage 'n' talking head documentary and reenactment. As I was watching it I thought the music sounded pretty familiar. I guessed Nine Inch Nails, and indeed, it was by Atticus Ross, who it turns out can capably crank out his own evocative NIN-esque film scores even without Reznor's involvement.

I'm a few years late but I've been enjoying S1 of Halt and Catch Fire

xpost matthew modine was pretty great in the reenactment bits.

speaking of documentaries with "operation" in the title... it's going off netflix end of this month but anyone interested in wild crime capers should watch "Operation Odessa", about a hare-brained/genius scheme to sell a Soviet submarine to a Colombian drug cartel in the early 90s.

didn't know anything abt it going in but it was incredibly entertaining. All three main characters in this (a Russian mobster, a Cuban drug trafficker, and a Miami car dealer) were hilarious, engaging and likeable, and you have to keep reminding yourself that these are objectively bad dudes who you wouldn't necessarily want to encounter in real life.

also, Vanilla Ice makes an important, off-screen cameo.

Audrey Hepburn doc is wonderful.

oh I hated that. we rented it off amazon a few days before it showed up for free on netflix and I kicked myself. almost no focus on her movies per se, and that would be alright, but the run time is unforgivably padded out with those ballet re-enactments.

Wow, "Operation Odessa" was totally bonkers.

I haven't been on the site in a minute, but logged in today and saw I Am Not Okay With This as a featured attraction and got pissed off all over again about that cancellation.

Huh, I hadn't read this before. An interview with the creator at length about why Netflix dropped it.

https://www.insider.com/i-am-not-okay-with-this-jonathan-entwistle-cancellation-netflix-2020-10

"I think that one of the problems we faced with 'I Am Not Okay With This' is that in many ways I considered it to be a smaller, niche show and they considered it to be a replacement for 'Stranger Things,'" Entwistle said.

Thanks for that! Good read that answered some lingering questions I had.

My girlfriend is watching Ginny & Georgia and I think it is genuinely the worst tv show I’ve ever seen.

City of Ghosts is labelled a kids show but worth watching even if you're not a kid - like if Toca Boca made a show with the High Maintenance crew about occluded LA histories: cute and moving and even profound?

I watched I Am Not Okay With This, a show with a lot of potential which failed straight off the bat. Underpowered, underwritten, underdeveloped - there's so much in it that could have been good but they didn't achieve a fraction of what it could have been and it doesn't make much sense. I wouldn't have renewed it either, tbh, sorry.

boooo

Yeah, boooo

I guess I'm a bit late on this one, but Stranger Things is kind of good.

Sophia Lillis is good in Not Okay. That film on Prime that she's in, Uncle Frank, is really great if you don't mind sentimental things, which I don't. I think she's going to be a big star.

Take it from me, The oracle of what is good :D

Uncle Frank is in my saved list specifically because of her, but still haven't seen it yet.

My girlfriend is watching Ginny & Georgia and I think it is genuinely the worst tv show I’ve ever seen.

i haven't seen it but tempted to agree solely based on this clip going round a few weeks ago

I’m done with netflix pic.twitter.com/UxdknaPbw9

— s. (@lisasrina) February 25, 2021

they seem nice

How did Babysitters Club do in forks' tv poll? Because it is the first series I've watched in a LONG time that doesn't feel like work or obligation, with a palpable amount of love and generosity to everything you see onscreen.

it didn't place at all!

i finally got around to the first episode of Giri/Haji and it's great! Nimble and well acted and filmed with a script that feels like it's holding back. Will likely speed through it.

Ok that is borderline criminal!

i finally got around to the first episode of Giri/Haji and it's great! Nimble and well acted and filmed with a script that feels like it's holding back. Will likely speed through it.

Interesting. I wanted to check it out but the trailer looked terrible; maybe I'll give it a look after all.

I'm shocked with how much ground they covered in a single episode and how many open questions I was left with. It's pretty masterful so far.

not to be a dick about it but is babysitters club the kind of thing a man in his forties can watch without getting bored out of his mind or ending up on a watchlist somewhere?

That is me, and yes. It's helped by being very au courant (read: woke) about social issues, and the family drama is also well done.

has anyone watched bad trip yet? worthy or lame?

lame unfortunately. prob worth a watch if you're sufficiently baked or bored.

Eric Andre is undeniably brilliant but I feel his talents have been misapplied lately

i think his whole schtick deflates if he is rich and/or happy tbh
which is not to say he's not a genius and good at what he does, just that this chapter of his life and work are done and he's gonna have to move into being a movie/voice actor

babysitters club was totally awesome

Operation Odessa is pretty wild but there are so many things that are glossed over or don't add up. Also 'Tony' sounds like Tommy Wiseau, my partner (who lived in South America and has a good ear for accents) says his accent is completely non-sensical and not how a person from any of the countries he's lived in would pronounce things.

UK Netflix has Death Becomes Her on, so I expect to watch that about four times before they take it off.

Watched the first episode of BS Club and darn it if isn’t pretty good

I thought the first two episodes were pretty boring before it starts to pwn, so I think you're in for a treat!

I’ll put in a good word for Bad Trip, which distinguishes itself from other prank stuff I’ve seen in making an effort to show the humanity and humor and genuine niceness of the prank “victims,” and consciously incorporate this into the film’s appeal. Much better than the last season the Eric Andre Show.

i appreciate that it treats its almost entirely people of color candid camera victims as decent human beings but there's also an extended joke about eric being repeatedly raped by a gorilla while they watch so i dunno how humanistic i wanna say this is

From a new interview with Charles Forsman:

FORSMAN: The TV stuff, it wasn’t something I planned. I was not seeking it out at all. John Entwistle, who created both shows, reached out to me when The End of the Fucking World was a minicomic. I kind of didn’t take it seriously at first. But once I got to know him, we became friends. And he was sort of just starting out like I was. He had done some TV commercials and short films, but he had never done a show or a movie. And it just ended up working really well.

Sometimes people come to me for advice, about getting their stuff adapted. I have no clue. Part of me feels bad because I can't tell them the big secret of how to get a Netflix show. All I can tell you is to do what I did, which was just shut out the noise and try and tell a story that I liked. And for me, that meant doing it on a really small scale on a minicomic, for a dollar. And for me, that worked.

It's definitely changed my life. It's a complicated thing because it's so outside of me, all the Netflix stuff, and things haven't really changed much for me other than I have a little bit more money. There's also a disconnect. I think a lot of people don't even know they are comics when they watch those shows. I'll be set up at a comics convention and someone will walk by and see the books on the table, and they'll be like, “What, you’re ripping off the TV show?” It’s a weird thing.

--

TISSERAND: The adaptation of I’m Not OK With This really heightened the cinematic influences that are already felt in your work. The movie Carrie, among others, flashed before me as I was watching it. When you wrote the book, was Carrie in your mind, as far as being someone who has powers that she could not control?

FORSMAN: I don't know. I'm a huge Brian De Palma fan, and I’ve always said my book Slasher is my Brian De Palma book, but I can’t actually remember if I had Carrie on my mind for that. That imagery was definitely the folks on the show, they came up with the idea to sort of sample Carrie.

Just finished Behind Her Eyes and let me just say it was incredibly stupid.

i sensed the stupid vibes early with that one and dropped it after an episode despite a very winning perf from the lead actress

Yeah, her acting is solid, but couldn't save the ridiculous plot.

I watched Bad Trip last night and can't believe I didn't watch it earlier, it's super enjoyable, Andre and Haddish are amazing, great pranks, good marks.

Watched Cut Throat City this afternoon and it was going OK, but then it arrived at a perfect, dramatically satisfying conclusion...and there were 20 more minutes left. I bailed.