Although not quite as untouchable in the streaming wars as it once might have been — what with the presence of Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+, the Criterion Channel and even Shudder all now directly competing with it for a finite amount of subscribers — Netflix is still dominant in this industry precisely because it’s put in the work to make them a ubiquitous, must-have product in the same way that we just call them Kleenexes and Xeroxes now instead of facial tissues and photocopies. They have first-rate original programming, enough must-have third-party content to round out their rosters and a much more chronologically and especially geographically deep set of offers than anybody is willing to give them credit for having. So even though Netflix seems to be nobody’s favorite streaming service, it is the baseline against which everything else is measured and consistently puts out must-watch content that you have to subscribe to have access to in the first place. And this month, there’s some real doozies to queue up and watch.
Rosemary’s Baby (1968) — Going forward, Rosemary’s Baby is always going to be a hard recommendation for me to make and a tough sell to a considerable number of potential viewers. The fact that it’s a movie that is explicitly about rape (and its physiological consequences), whose director is an at-large convicted rapist who continued to rape women while hiding out in extradition-unfriendly European countries and who also won a high-profile industry award this year for a movie that serves as an unequivocal metaphor for how he thinks that he’s done nothing wrong about any of that… yeah, that’s a bitter pill to swallow, even if the guy seems to be corporate-engineered with the most sympathetic backstory possible otherwise (being both a Holocaust survivor and a Manson Family victim widower) and is as unquestionably talented a filmmaker as he is. But, for those who can stomach it, Rosemary’s Baby is a phenomenal horror film and a deservedly recognized classic of both its genre and the emerging New Hollywood scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Following a woman who discovers that a coven of witches living in her stately New York City brownstone secretly impregnated her with the antichrist, it’s a gripping tale of misogyny, paranoia and the body horror of pregnancy all rolled into one.
Blade Runner (1982) — Blade Runner has always had a fascinating, rocky history between iterative bouts of studio interference that kept it from finding a lasting audience for years after its release to the brilliant but non-starter sequel it received from acclaimed Canadian director Denis Villeneuve of Arrival (2016) and soon-to-be Dune (2020) fame. But the original film — or, rather, the Final Cut of the original film, which very much is the version that director Ridley Scott tried to release originally — is a righteous classic of the hyper-niche tech noire genre. Following Rick Deckard, the titular Blade Runner whose job it is to hunt down rogue Replicants (robots that are generally indistinguishable from the humans that make them), on his latest mission, the films sees him butt heads with a dark femme fatale who doesn’t realize that she’s a replicant at all and the dawning possibility that Deckard himself might be one. It’s a mesmeric experience rife with endless possibilities that will haunt your dreams long after the credits roll at the end.
Candyman (1992) — With a new entry (a possible remake?) in this long-running horror franchise coming later this year from director Nia DaCosta and writer-producer Jordan Peele, this is the perfect time to catch up with the movies you may have missed ahead of it. Basically riffing off of Bloody Mary, Candyman is the murderous spirit of a wronged black artist who kills you if you summon him by saying his name five times while looking into a mirror. Filled to the brim with (complicated, to say the least) the modern-day legacy of slavery, racism and racialized violence, this first film from director Bernard Rose and based on the short story by Clive Barker is a fascinating portrait of race and horror in the last decade of the twentieth century, held together by a spine-tinglingly iconic performance by terrifying genre mainstay Tony Todd.
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) — If you’ve been around movies for the past three decades, odds are pretty good that you’re a Guillermo del Toro fan. Monstrously popular among genre aficionados for his horror, sci-fi and superhero movies, del Toro has gradually built up a reputation for being a one-of-a-kind auteur whose style emphasizes elaborate prosthetics, sympathetic monsters and omnipresent notes of gothic dread. Having recently won an Oscar for The Shape of Water (2017) and whose production of Nightmare Alley is currently on hold due to the present pandemic, now is an excellent time to work your way backwards through his notable filmography. And while I might prefer something like The Devil’s Backbone (2001) to this on most days, Pan’s Labyrinth — a Franco-set fairytale about a young girl struggling to negotiate the twin terrors of a snarling faun and her Nazi father-in-law — is ground zero both for del Toro’s artistic stylings and his popularity in the US. Dark and grisly and unremittingly unique, the film starkly depicts del Toro’s monstrous sympathies and his escapist fantasies all in one incredibly well-polished production that’s sure to fascinate everybody from the Disney Princess-alike to the curmudgeonly “Get off my lawn” Eastwooder in the family.
Okja (2017) — Parasite (2019) is, now and forever, THE movie of 2020 for its historic Best Picture Oscar win and for how it united the entire culture into an acute love of South Korean cinema (before the Caronavirus sadly shifted out priorities away from that). Thankfully, there are so many great South Korean movies to go around that we can still come back to them month after month despite everything going on around us. This Netflix-backed production, from Parasite director Bong Joon-ho and featuring a cast that includes supporting roles from Jack Gyllenhaal, Tilda Swinton and Paul Dano, follows South Korean farmgirl Mija who tries to rescue his elephantine “super pig” Okja after American eco-industrialists take it away from her to be ground into super sausages. A bleak and occasionally Miyazakian parable of environmentalism, capitalism, industrial farming, corporate greed and well-meaning (if ultimately ineffectual) climate activism, there’s nearly as much here to dig into as here was in director Bong’s 2019 magnum opus, making this the mindful romp that will fuel late-night conversations with you and yours for the remainder of the current crisis.
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