Leaving the Queue: "Wow... this... this actual hurts that these are leaving. Like, real physical pain."

While everyone who uses Netflix has to resign themselves to the fact that not every title one puts in the queue will last forever, streaming into infinity, it's hit me a lot harder since I've started the Couchbound project.

I've come to terms with the fact that my queue will never end, as there are always things that seem interesting enough to put in it but that I may never get around to due to mood or timing, but still... this month hurts...

...REALLY hurts...

...thanks to the fact that I actually want to watch these movies/series not only for my own pleasure, but for the blog. Now that they're leaving, I lament that I spent so much time on other things, with other (subpar) films and shows, mainly because I wanted to be fair and not always go for the overly supportive fluff pieces that I know I'd write about them (as I've done it before).

*sob*

Alright, let's get on with it. If they gotta go, they gotta go.

Downton Abbey

Everyone and their mother (including my own) loves this show. It's gotten so popular that it gets tons of live tweets by many, many people (including plenty of celebs) when each new episode airs in America. The fact that it airs first in Britain causes much spoiler-fear in the hearts and minds of pretty much everyone on this side of The Pond.

A upstairs/downstairs period piece about a flagging family of aristocrats in England, the series is filled with gossip, intrigue, propriety, and going against said propriety... which is, I think, the main draw for most folks.

Regardless of why people have flocked to the show, it's a veritable phenom... almost single-handedly revitalizing interest in PBS and Masterpiece Theatre.

Totally worth it... and, as of July 1, totally gone.

True Grit

Nominated for ten Academy Awards (and, to my dismay, winning none), the Coen Bros. update of True Grit threw out the campy, Disney-adventure style of the John Wayne "classic" and thrust Jeff Bridges into the role of the irascibly dogged and racist U.S.Marshall, Rooster Cogburn.

Where Wayne was a somewhat unbelievable grumpy old drunk, I was and ever shall be dazzled by Bridges' portrayal. The same could be said for Matt Damon (taking over for the buffoonery of Glen Campbell) and Hailee Steinfeld (who was certainly more believable than Kim Darby).

The film is so much more brutal and satisfying in portraying the "Grit" of the novel, giving the West not the rose-colored shading of Wayne's family adventure, but a real mean and utterly more believable feel and pathos.

So good... so worth getting to own (which I have), so sorry it's going away.

Death Race 2000

Cult Camp amped almost to eleven, Death Race 2000 (not to be confused with the 2008 remake that sucked all the satire out of it) is a truly odd, truly classic treatise on media violence, sex, and America as a whole.

Set in a dystopia where America is a fascist dictatorship, the government puts on a coast to coast road race where the drivers get more points for killing each other and however many pedestrians they can runover than for actually racing.

Starring Keith Caradine and Sylvester Stallone, this Corman film is so utterly bad that it's actually pretty darn good. With cheesy lines and confusing, superfluous interlude scenes to break up the horrifying violence, Death Race 2000 actually manages to successfully lampoon everything from post-Vietnam America to Spectator Sports, Healthcare and so much more.

I was introduced to Death Race 2000 by a very dear friend of mine almost a decade ago, having never, ever been exposed to it before. I don't know how I managed that, but I thank him for showing me the terrible, terrible light.

So long, Frankenstein... you deserved so much better than what Jason Statham did to you.

The Game

Personally, I think David Fincher is one of the greatest directors of our time. He and Chris Nolan are tops in my book when it comes to powerful cinema that takes you places you were really never expecting to go... but are ultimately glad for it.

In this film he takes Michael Douglas on a joyride of conspiracy and existentialism where he can't trust anyone, not family or even seemingly unconnected strangers who couldn't possibly be tied to the network of identity-thieves trying to ruin his life.

Given an invitation to Consumer Recreation Services by his black sheep brother (Sean Penn), wealthy Nicholas Van Orten (Douglas) is put through the ringer as his world is turned upside-down as he approaches his 48th birthday... his own father having committed suicide at the same age.

The Game is a smart, creepy thriller that keeps you wondering right up until the very last moment. The lengths that CRS goes to in punishing Nicholas is insane and almost unbelievable, but there's never any doubt that what he is put through is vicious and full of meaning.

I love James Rebhorn as the bit player with so much to reveal... and Deborah Unger plays her part beautifully.

I own it on DVD... I just wish I could share it via Netflix. Alas, no longer.


Finally, there's...

Snow Falling On Cedars

Set in post-World War Two Puget Sound, Cedars tells a tale of love, racism, and murder as a Japanese-American fisherman is put on trial for killing a white man and it seems that only the white ex-boyfriend (Ethan Hawke) of his wife (also, Japanese-American) can save him by looking past race and finding out the truth.

It's a depressing tale, but the thing that really works for me about the film is the star-crossed love that Ishmael (Hawke) and Hatsue (Youki Kudoh) share before they are torn apart by duty, culture, and the War. It's a bitter story that mixes love and hate very freely. Perhaps its a little heavy handed, but the drama and quality are both there.

James Rebhorn is here again as the prosecutor, but we also have greats like Richard Jenkins and Max Von Sydow along for the ride.

On a personal note, back when VHS was still a thing, my Mother bought a copy of this film... and, by some strange factory mishap, we got the Spanish-language version. The cover was just the standard English-language copy that everyone else got, just that it was dubbed in Spanish.

This fact is relevant to absolutely nothing, but I just thought I'd mention it.



And, with that, I think I'm done. I love all of these films and I am so very sad to see them go. Hopefully their license-holders will negotiate them back onto Netflix in the near-future, but you never know. Granted, I own several of them (or know people who do) should I ever get the itch... but it's nice to have them on the stream, for convenience sake if nothing else.

Still, they're all quality, for one reason or another.

See you, Space Cowboys.

Day Sixty-eight - School Ties, or "The 90's called... it wants its teen hearthrobs back."

My parents took me to see School Ties in theaters.

I don't know if they did it as a kind of preparation for sending me to a Catholic private school (which never happened) or to broaden my horizons more as I'd never really dealt with religious discrimination before. At least, not obviously.

Being an Army Brat, I'd had plenty of exposure to all sorts of folks from all sorts of both religious and cultural backgrounds. One thing about the Army in the 80's and 90's... it was definitely a huge melting pot.

It also helped that I got kicked out of the Catholic school that my sister was already going to down the highway. I was just in kindergarten and already had problems with the catechism classes. It forced my parents to ship me across the wire to the local public schools close to the base which were 99% African-American.

If I hadn't woken up to religious discrimination thanks to the wide variety of families on base, I certainly learned about racial tensions early.

But, enough about me... this post is about School Ties.

Starring Brendan Fraser and many rising male actors of the era (Chris O'Donnell, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck), School Ties tells a very simple story about the religious and class divide that, to a certain extent, still pervades American society.

David Greene (Fraser) is a top quarterback that a prestigious private school headhunts, in his senior year, to help them beat their bitter arch-rival in football. In order to entice him, they offer him an academic scholarship (though, he still has to work as a table server to pay for his other expenses). He accepts, though his coach recommends, without actually saying it, that he hide his Jewish heritage.

It's a choice David makes that works quite well for him as he assimilates into the WASPy elite (see, even I'm guilty of bigotry) of the school. That is, of course, until he is outed by his academic and love rival, Charlie Dillon (Damon).

The movies main themes hit me hard as there isn't a week that goes by where I don't hear someone say they "totally jewed" somebody or "don't be queer."

I'd like to say that I always fight the good fight and confront such nonsense... and, I do try to make my feelings known, but more often or not, instead of seeing it for what it is, the bigots I run into just offer excuses or blow it off and I become a bad guy for pushing the issue.

I don't think I got the full extent of what was happening the first time I saw School Ties. Revisiting it on Netflix, however, everything was as plain as day.

Whether it was the prayer that Alan Greene (Ed Lauter) offers to his son as he leaves or the perhaps not so subtle disdain that Headmaster Bartram (Peter Donat) offers young David as he tries to celebrate passover alone and in secret in the school's chapel, everything that was hidden by my innocence in '92 was laid bare now.

I think what angered me the most about the mentality shift when David is outed as Jewish in the third act is just how readily everyone assumes the worst about him. It's as if everything he had done, everything he had proved about himself as a student, an athlete... as a human being... goes out the window thanks to stereotypes and deep cultural prejudice. It's one of the things that I love about America, that we strive not to be this way... but it's also one of the things I hate, because it manages to be perpetuated.

Even here, in this town, which is, itself, a melting pot of many cultures, Anglo, Latino, and Native, do we still have it... where fire alarms are pulled to disrupt LGBT dances and folks decry "drunk indian" jokes as only harmless stereotypes instead of racism.

I want School Ties to be a required part of high school curriculum, just as much as I want kids to see Bless Me, Ultima and Schindler's List and Babel... and Dead Poet's Society... and Cloud Atlas.

Back to the film, itself, there's great pacing and good focus on the leads and their conflicts. Perhaps not enough time was spent on the side characters, who would eventually decide David's fate when he gets embroiled in a cheating scandal with the film's Iago character, Charlie, but it's still a great film.

Overall, I would very much recommend School Ties. It shows how far we've come and how very much further we have yet to go.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Sixty-three - Titan A.E., or "Come back down to Earth, oh yeah."

I have fond memories of Don Bluth's work in the 80's.

The Secret of Nimh, An American Tail, and All Dogs Go to Heaven were great films that managed to weave death and darkness in addition to basic heroism in children's tales in a way that both frightened and inspired me in my early years. He never really shied away from violence or despair and I loved him for that.

When I first saw trailers for Titan A.E., I was already an adult and thought it was great that he was tackling Science Fiction... especially considering most of his 90's films just hadn't done it for me.

This was especially important because it seemed to have subtle anime stylings as well. Now, that may have just been me projecting. I was just discovering anime as a medium despite having been exposed to it early through the Americanizations of Voltron and Robotech. In my late teens, though, I was finally beginning to realize that there were dozens of schools and styles across the Pacific that Americans were just discovering and spreading. Akima's obvious Asian heritage in Titan A.E. probably just triggered my Weeaboo button when it shouldn't have.

Either way, back then... I was excited for Titan.

Then I saw it.

I thought it was alright, and the grand majority of its CGI animation (the Dredge notwithstanding) was pretty good for the era, but there were better space opera alternatives at the time... like the ill-fated Invasion America.

Coming back to it almost fifteen years later, thanks to Netflix, I feel that my initial hesitance was justified. It's a fun little adventure, at times, but is mostly terrible thanks to puerile writing and predictable story arcs.

I mean, it's one thing to make a chosen one story in space... it's quite another to rely on a silly overly-menacing villain race, an unnecessary second act betrayal, and a love story that comes out of nowhere.

To be honest, I really wanted to believe the Kale/Akima romance, but there was nothing really there. They go from hostile to bosom buddies with little to no prompting and with absolutely no obvious chemistry. Not to mention the fact that when they are both captured and Akima is doomed to the vast expanse of space by the Dredge (the terribad CGI villains of Titan A.E.), she just happens to be picked up by slavers so she can be conveniently rescued by the rest of the crew?

Just how far does a tracking implant transmit, anyway? Yeesh.

Added to that cheese is the second act turn by the Han Solo-esque captain, Korso, and the laughable action sequences, where Janeane Garofalo and Drew Barrymore do nothing but spout inane one-liners and yell petulantly at incoming Dredge fighters, and they pretty much lost me completely.

Just a tip, Don... when you announce that all of the enemy fighters break off to return to the mother ship for a Death Star-like superlaser attack only to have two conveniently come back and attack in what has to be the single most obvious plot hole I've seen in months, you know things you should've known there were problems in the writer's room.

If Anastasia or Rock-a-Doodle hadn't done it, Titan A.E. definitely nailed the coffin shut on Don Bluth's career for me. You are so much better off watching Heavy Metal 2000 for silly space fantasy.

I'm serious... F.A.K.K.2 did a much better job with pretty much every single archetype that Titan A.E. used... but to much greater affect.

And with a better soundtrack, too.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~