But Is It on Netflix? - Streaming Video Service Thread: Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Disney+, Peacock, YouTube TV, AT+T Watch, Philo, Playstation Vue, HBO Max, HBO Now, Facebook Live and many more

“My name is Patrick J. Pespas…”

^Just watched the first two eps of that, thanks to folks here for the rec. It’s really something…

Fire In The Sky is on Max! If you have never seen it you have to see it.

Totally generic-looking genre movie from 1993 that moves along slowly and surely and then toward the end *BLAMMO* one of the scariest alien abduction scenes that you have ever seen. and its not even a long scene! but totally worth owning a DVD of the movie for.

Talk about the slow burn reveal...there is about 25 minutes of movie left when they hit you with it.

Made it to the end of Giri/Haji and was already turning against it because it started out as a reasonably gritty crime drama but around episode 3 it was leaning into a bunch of goofily earnest, Inarritu-esque "we're all connected and here's how" stuff, and then the final episode had a literal dance number. NOT RECOMMENDED.

Now I'm watching Dark Winds, a Navajo crime series set in the early 70s starring Zahn McClarndon from Longmire and Reservation Dogs as a tribal police lieutenant investigating some murders and a bank robbery. Based on books by Tony Hillerman. It's normally an AMC show, but it's on Max until the end of October, or something.

i think i gave up on Giri/Haji around episode 3 but now I am intrigued!

the rooftop dance in giri/haji is amazing and wonderful.

yeah, i loved it, but i can see unperson being supremely unimpressed by it. i think i was in a vulnerable mood watching it.

Lol my husband is STILL haunted by Fire in the Sky

I imagine people either love or hate the ending of Giri/Haji. I thought it was great, my wife thought it was deeply stupid

yeah i think i said something similar on here. its gonna be a love/hate thing.

"Lol my husband is STILL haunted by Fire in the Sky"

it's genuinely haunting!!

i would have loved to see that in a theatre and not know it was coming.

I knew the Travis Walton story and saw Fire In The Sky in the theater on opening night. I think the entire audience (including myself) was traumatized

Fire In The Sky deeeeeeeply classic

fire in the sky traumatized 9yo me and therefore i love it. i think it was also where I first learned about lie detector tests - I remember being very fascinated by a machine that could tell if you were lying lol

Finally watched The Bear on FX Hulu. Liked it a lot - storylines, the acting, the music,

Painkiller. I didn't really know the details about the oxycontin scandal so this was pretty informative. Overall I might have preferred a straightforward doc, and yeah it was a bit silly (very silly at the end) and a bit drawn out in places but the dramatisations maybe helped stir the emotions a bit. I'm annoyed though that it posed a question at the start (how did they depose Richard Sackler), underscored it in the last episode when Edie's lawsuit was settled, then never answered it.

Dopesick is much better than Painkiller, but better again is reading Empire of Pain, by Patrick Radden Keefe.

yeah i figured, i'll add it to the list along with american prometheus!

"Dreamland" is also a really good book about the American opioid crisis, a good on-the-ground companion to Empire of Pain, which is of course primarily a supervillain origin story.

Thread got me checking out some of that abduction scene from Fire In The Sky on YT. Holy shit, glad I stuck by avoiding that film when it came out. Despite getting pretty into UFO/alien/conspiracy stuff at the time that film came out I had the feeling I should file it away with Communion as a hard No.

it would make a great double feature with Communion.

If you've read Dreamland, be sure to check out Sam Quinones' latest The Least of Us about the shift to fentanyl

"Tubi is now watched as much as a top 5 cable network"

Wild.https://t.co/ihDowjHUH5

— The Schlocketeer (@schlocketeer) September 6, 2023

A streaming service you don't have to pay for that mimics the format of traditional tv? It'll never work.

I listened to Quinones on Marc Maron's show last year, really liked what he had to say, def. need to read both of those books. I feel like he's been received with a side eye by some progressives, at least in the bay area; he came to SF recently and I know what aghast at what was going on downtown. there's a pervasive idea that addiction is a symptom and not a cause of homelessness and people seem to think he is firmly in the latter camp. I think it's more complicated than that.

I did find a critique of Quinones on UCSF's Homelessness and Housing Initiative site, which only looks at all this through housing and rent affordability. Implying that being a drug addict in West Virginia is easier than being a drug addict in California because the rents are less seems myopic. If you haven't read either book, I'd go directly to The Least of Us. The charges are against capitalism itself: Big Pharm of course, cartels, the global supply chain, and every institution that contributes to "shit life syndrome" - all of which contribute. If anything, folks should listen to Maron's interview.

Halfway through the final season of Top Boy and so far it's not falling prey to the usual flaws of final seasons. They've only killed off one character we were supposed to care about, and they've disposed of a Special Guest Star that I was fully expecting to develop into a Big Bad with surprising speed.

Bought a blu-ray set of Rockford Files, so I'm all good, better in fact. When it was on prime it was through some free streamer service (not Tubi, but something like it I guess) and there were commercials.

I have come too far in my damn life to deal with commercials, I am never going back to that if I can help it.

oooh bluray rockford? nice

Tubi is great, it doesn’t just mimic cable it mimics kind of shitty ‘90s basic cable with a wide array of sci-fi and horror movies you’d never think to watch otherwise.

I like Tubi for letting me swiftly ffwd to the end of a horror movie if the poster art is better than the film or if I just want the ending. Some other streaming channels have mandatory ads once a film has started.

Posted this on the Garner thread too... YouTube user Cosmic Iguana has been posting full episodes of Garner's 1971 series Nichols. Co-starring Margot Kidder and Stuart Margolin. It's set in the early 1900s so it's kind of a western but there's also motorcycles. There's a little of Maverick and a lot of what becomes the Rockford character. Cool show. Kidder is great. Here's the pilot, I think Iguana is up to episode 19 of the one and only season

I really like the way you can use Letterbox (with the premium tier - doesn't cost much) to filter your watchlist to individual streaming services you have, or all of them at once. I've tried to do this with free services but nothing's quite worked right so the £17.99 a year seems worth it). I hadn't used Letterbox a whole lot before that, and had no watchlist there, but it was easy to import mine from IMDb, where I had a longstanding one. The initial search of where they were all available revealed a whole load were on Tubi, so I've sorted out getting that through my VPN.

Letterboxd, not Letterbox - shows you how little I've been in the habit!

watched Band of the Hand on Tubi last night

I watched a movie on Tubi last night too! "Who'll Stop the Rain" -- very good IMO but violent and pretty unpleasant in other ways. Obviously CCR feature heavily in the soundtrack. And yall know how I feel about those boys.

Tubi ALSO has Cutter's Way, and 8 Million Ways To Die, which is a fine film even if not as good as the novel it's based on.

pretty good bummer crime trilogy right there.

still watching hal hartley on Criterion slowly. watched Simple Men and that movie is nothing like i remember it. i didn't really remember it much at all. martin donovan is the scene-stealer. so funny.

My brother obsessed over Robert Stone's book Dog Soldiers which Stone himself adapted into Who'll Stop the Rain - couldn't figure out what the deal was with his obsession until I found out that the lead character was based on Neal Cassady.

xp I remember it being fairly bad/awkward, even at the height of my teenage Hartley fandom.

Simple Men was filmed almost entirely in the Houston/Galveston Island area, which blows my mind.

Who'll Stop the Rain is a really good, grim post-Vietnam thriller. Fits right in with Cutter's Way, as ian said, but also Night Moves, The Conversation, a few others. I read the book, too. Very good; I've always meant to read more by Stone but haven't.

Two more big faves.

I can't remember if I've seen Simple Men before, I'll have to give it a try. I was in Galveston a few months ago and I could see it being a good backdrop for a film. The downtown area feels frozen in an earlier time.

Night Moves is great. sort of a Jimmy Buffett-ish Chinatown, at the end. i really admired the chutzpah of that ending, just only leading to more questions we'll never know the answer to.

I really like the way you can use Letterbox (with the premium tier - doesn't cost much) to filter your watchlist to individual streaming services you have, or all of them at once.

This has been a gamechanger for me. It took me a while to build out a watchlist, but once I got a few hundred titles on there, being able to filter by service was so useful. I hated scrolling through lists of "new this month on Netflix" or "50 best movies to stream on Hulu" bc there was so much shit I didn't care about, and finding something worthwhile to watch felt overwhelming.

Everybody in this thread do yourselves a favor and watch Cinnamon on Tubi. It's a rural crime thriller — kinda Blood Simple meets True Romance — with an almost all-black cast, including Damon Wayans in a not-really-comedic role (he's very good) and Pam Grier as a matriarchal crime boss (she's terrifying). One of the best things I've seen all year.

I was in Galveston a few months ago and I could see it being a good backdrop for a film. The downtown area feels frozen in an earlier time.

Check out Red Rocket. It's filmed in Texas City and Galveston and since it's a Sean Baker movie it's very you-are-there with the sound design (constant freeway noises, booms from the oil refinery)

I've watched 11 out of 12 episodes of the final season of Ted Lasso. I was really expecting this season to fully jump the shark based on the negative feedback I've read about it (including on this thread). Sure, it never reclaimed the level of season 1, but this hasn't been so bad other than rushing Nate's redemption at the end.

Honestly the fatal flaw of the whole series happened in season 2 when they turned Nate into the villain. That felt like a betrayal of season 1. But of course by s3 they're committed to navigating their way out of that pit. Perhaps if the show had gone for one or two more seasons, or if it had old-school 20-episode seasons, Nate's arc would have felt more believable. But his turn away from Ted was has jarring as is eventual return.

Of course I haven't actually watched the finale yet so maybe I'll come back here and say otherwise later tonight or tomorrow. But it sure seems like they've telegraphed all the final beats of the show and I don't really anticipate any major eyerolls to come. I'd be surprised if they were to, uh, surprise me.