Netflix Watch Instantly Recommendation Thread

Maya and the Three is so good. Obviously it looks very colorful but that extends to the writing and the story too. And at least thru the first three episodes it unfolds itself like a video game (not a criticism, just very tickled at the metatextual influences at play nowadays).

I stopped watching Squid Game after episode 8. Meant to get back to it but have had no desire.

lol there's only one more episode. you don't want to see how it ends?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbIxYm3mKzI

Anybody watching Arcane?

I just finished, it’s handsome and well made but mostly grim, hopeless, and humorless.

I just started it tonight because first I started the blade runner cartoon and it seemed really dumb and cheap and I read tons of terrible review of it many of which said "look at Arcane for what you can do" so I did and didn't even know it was based on a video game or whatever and while I'm not sure I'll keep watching it and if I'm interested in the story, it is pretty beautifully made and miles better animated than the blade runner one. And has that iranian actress from the Expanse which is kinda funny.

ugh yes the bladerunner cartoon was v boring, like watching extra characters wander around GTA or something

I’m about halfway thru Arcane. Came into it without any knowledge of the lore - I’m not really sure how Arcane relates to league of legends. Anyway the animation is excellent, story so far B maybe B+. I’ll keep watching.

I'm on my third HiGH&LOW film - they're all on netflix, Japanese franchise featuring assorted J Pop idols playing the different factions of youth gangs in a fictional shanty town district of Tokyo (I think?). Real live action anime bullshit, but very compelling in that "trying to keep tabs on a frankly excessive amount of different characters and organisations" way, reminds me of the Yakuza Papers in that regard. The action is pretty good, with some real "how did they do that?" camera work and the first two films both end with epic LOTR style battles featuring scores of extras instead of CGI so that's great. Some absolutely insane outfits as well, this last one had a dude sporting an awesome "MEMBERS AND NON MEMBERS ONLY" shirt. Very compelling.

reading some good things about Yeon Sang-ho's Hellbound.

yeah that sounds insane

Watched the first episode last night.

If you thought Squid Game was gory, this is not the show for you.

it's good fun!

although I did post this just before a character's elderly mother was beaten half to death by some Arrowhead disciples.

Did not expect BLACK SUMMER to be anything other than trashy cash-in, but it turned out to be a really well done, exceedingly terse clever little thing with a whole lot of astonishingly choreographed extensive one-shot scenes.

i was surprised to see MAN LIKE MOBEEN on netflix since it’s a BBC show (and is still on iPlayer).. is it available in the US? if so all you guys should watch it, it’s v v good

I love the premise of this show:

Each episode sees Arnett play Detective Terry Seattle, who appears, for the most part, to just be Will Arnett in a mustache. Seattle is teamed up in each episode with a celebrity partner (with this initial season naming Annie Murphy, Conan O’Brien, Ken Jeong, Kumail Nanjiani, Marshawn Lynch, and Sharon Stone as its roster of guest-gumshoes) to solve a murder. The twist is that, while the show is, for the most part scripted—with different scenarios pre-written, and a pre-determined solution to the crime—the celebrity actor doesn’t get the script, and must instead improvise along with Arnett, and, ultimately, name who they think the culprit is at the end of the episode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IBi7gN2THE

Has potential, given how often the celebrity guest on SNL breaking is the funniest part of *that* show.

ok i will def watch that

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_Successville

They've added Phantom Thread.

sic otm - surely they needed to license the idea from Endemol or whoever!

But regardless I would totally watch this. The guests are a serious upgrade on Murder In Successville

It seems like there's a lot of comic spins on the murder mystery genre either already out (Only Murders in the Building) or coming out soon. I'm assuming we can credit the success of Knives Out for this, and while I didn't love KO as much as others did, I'm happy with this development.

Ugh that looks terrible to me. Reminds me of that 30 Rock episode where Tracy realizes that people think breaking character is funny and starts doing it deliberately.

Looks fun for the actors though.

I'm enjoying Mobeen btw, very well written! I should prob have subs on tho.

Three episodes in and Archive 81 is pretty good so far - definitely quite unsettling/scary at times

Archive 81 felt like there was one element too many in it for me, although I couldn't tell you which one I'd drop.

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that every show you watched on Netflix that had a 2021 season is nominated in the ILX TV poll, with voting ending this weekend:

ILX's Best Television of 2021 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 31, 2022

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

Feeling like Archive81 could have been a better 105 minute movie than series.

I'm five episodes in now and still enjoying the pervading sense of dread

Just watched the first two episodes of All of Us Are Dead, the latest South Korean zombie offering, this time with an outbreak that starts at a high school.

They really are very good at these over there - nothing too original, but still really gripping and fun and incredibly well-made.

Yeah I started Silent Sea last night and it's just really well made, makes you wonder what's going to happen, the characters are all really clearly drawn and not always predictable. The main character is this mopey, cut-the-bullshit female scientist who you just instantly love.

No spoilers but I was disappointed with Silent Sea after the promising start

Starting All of Us Are Dead later. Does look fun

finished All of Us Are Dead - around the middle it starts to get bogged down by tedious teen soap drama which we ended up fast-fwding through a lot, but otherwise I thought it was good, if overstuffed. appreciate that they were trying to use the zombie outbreak to say something about teen bullying, the pressures of the SK education system, and all the myriad ways that adults inevitably disappoint, but I don't think they managed more than just surface criticism ("Extracurricular", another violent teen K-drama on Netflix, does this much better).

still fun watching the characters figure out 1001 ways to get past zombies within the confines of the school though

Yeah, I was surprised by how long it was. Was expecting maybe 6 episodes not 12

Holy shit this is like a parody:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTI6T5M8Fj0

For something designed to build hype, I couldn't even make it the full two minutes.

Didn't realise Knives Out 2 was going to be a Netflix film

knives out 3 will be too

Liking Murderville. It's cool to see a partially improvised show shot and edited like a drama, and there's some good laughs each episode. The guests handle the show in pretty different ways - Conan handled his episode so smoothly, you'd think he read the script!

Yeah it's very funny, although I kind of miss the weird/bad celebrity impressions of the original.

Original?

It's a remake of Murder in Successville, a british TV show.

It's cool to see a partially improvised show shot and edited like a drama

Did anyone else watch Bad Trip? I've never seen any of the Jackass movies so maybe this isn't as original as it seemed to me, but it's a hidden camera prank comedy movie (w/ Eric André, Lil Rel Howery, and Tiffany Haddish) where the prank scenes are part of an overarching narrative, and they never show the camera reveal to the participants bit. It's funny, def gets kinda gross, but it's almost worth watching just for the formal qualities

are today's biggest movie stars the ones who get comic book roles or the ones created by comic book roles

i liked the conan episode of murderville. series doesn't seem to be getting good reviews though.

Murderville was good. It wasn't life-changing but it was good.

I kept getting more and more agitated with Archive 81 because one of the protagonists is a nerdy Black man named Dan and I kept saying over and over "dude wtf I would never do that" to the TV

lol

Hmm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-sWlgFhUGo

I guessed that was jeunet in the first few seconds.

i'm not a fan of retrofuturism or of sexbot revenge stories.

iirc there's a Love, Death & Robots episode that has a very similar plot but is less than 15 mins long. watch that instead imo - you don't even have to switch streaming services