Netflix Prescription for Cold and Flu (Canada 2015)

I've been really sick for the past four days. I got a cold and developed a bad cough. I am prone to bad coughs.

It has been a rare year in the past 30 that I have not gotten bronchitis or an "atypical chest infection" whatever that means. And once I even got pneumonia. 

So, when I started coughing with this cold, I decided to go to bed and stay there, hoping to avoid a secondary infection with the antibiotics that would entail.

So far, so good.

Unfortunately, I am not a fan of lying in bed, doing nothing. Especially for days on end. I get stiff and sore. And sleep has been elusive – partly because of the coughing and partly because after lying in bed all day and all night, I am never really tired. I've been sleeping for 1 or 2 hours at a time during the day. And have felt very lucky to string four or five hours of sleep together at a stretch during the night.

So, what do I do, when I can't sleep, but don't have the energy to work or read or do jigsaw puzzles?

Well, given that I have high-speed Internet access and a Netflix account, the obvious answer was to watch movies, lots and lots of movies.

In fact, 15 of them in the past four days.

I had a friend ask me for my opinion of the ones I had seen, so I thought I would write a blog post about them. Here they are, broken into groups by dominant theme:

Relationships:
Boyhood (2014)+*
The Invention of Lying (2009)°+
Broken Flowers (2005)+*
A Late Quartet (2012)+*
Raising Arizona (1987)†+*
Reign Over Me (2007)
Let's Make Love (1960)

Art (Ego and Achievement):
Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014)°+*
While We're Young (2015)
Match (2014)+

Violence:
The Guvnors (2014)
Seven Psychopaths (2012)

Action/Adventure:
The Aristocats (1970)†+*
Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
Gravity (2013)

* passed the Bechdel Test (though some of them just barely)
+films I thought were actually good movies (Aristocats is mostly marked due to nostalgia)
°these films were recommended to me by friends
†Although I'm a big re-watcher, these two were the only ones I had seen previously

Selection was fairly random. A couple were recommended. I also used Netflix keywords (my favourites are "Cerebral", "Understated" and "Quirky"). I searched some favourite actors and directors, like "Christopher Walken", "Joel Coen", "Phillip Seymour Hoffman", "Frances McDormand" and "Marcia Gay Harden." The Disney cartoons totally happened in the wee small hours of the morning. Often, one film led to another, as I frequently selected a film from the suggestions Netflix gave me at the end of viewing the previous film.

Reviews:

Boyhood (2014) 

Richard Linkletter has done something truly interesting by shooting a film over a number of years so the cast age naturally and the kids in particular "grow up" through the course of the film – and some of the adults do some growing up too. This is a portrait of a typical broken American family – broken and blended with step- and half-siblings. A custodial mom who seems largely disconnected from her kids selling them out to her relationships with a second husband and later a boyfriend, both of whom turn out to be alcoholics, and a weekend dad who tries hard to connect with his kids, offer them guidance and talk about the tough stuff, like sex and relationships.

The Invention of Lying (2009)

SPOILER ALERT: This film was recommended to me by a friend. I enjoyed it – in spite of myself. I mean, it has Ricky Gervais acting his little heart out and he's a damn good actor. He made me sob like a baby (not that that is all that hard to do, but still). It was the premise of the film that ticked me off. In a world where everyone always tells the (often harsh and brutal) truth, the protagonist is frankly informed by the woman with whom he is in love that he is an unsuitable mate because he is chubby with a snub nose. Despite her repeated rejections, he hangs in, waiting and hoping that she will change her mind. It being a movie, she eventually learns, grudgingly, to recognize the value of his inner beauty. It frankly annoys me that someone so persecuted by lookism doesn't have enough sense to find someone to fall in love with who has inner beauty instead of (or even as well as) outer beauty.

Broken Flowers (2005)

I've been wanting to see this movie since it came out. I am a fan of Jim Jarmusch movies. And this is a good one, one of my favourites of the films I watched during this fevered marathon. The way Jim Jarmusch captures the hollow emptiness of his main character, played by Bill Murray, is absolutely chilling, and also SO INTERESTING. I once saw an interview with Gabriel Byrne in which he says that he believes film is actually able to capture thought, and I felt that happening in this movie. Murray's performance is subtle and nuanced. He conveys so much: just sitting silently or driving. I found it fascinating to see how Jarmusch portrayed how his protagonist's selfish visits to the lives of his past lovers affects each one of them.

A Late Quartet (2012)

Another of my favourites from this bunch, this is an excellent movie about a string quartet starring Catherine Keener, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Christopher Walken. Christopher Walken's character is ill and he needs to retire from the quartet, leaving his younger colleagues to continue – if they can survive the unraveling of their relationships in the face of this major change. I wept and wept and wept. Phillip Seymour Hoffman is particularly good.

Match (2014)

I'd never heard of this movie before. It came up as a Netflix suggestion, probably after A Late Quartet. It's one of those movies that is very obviously based on a play. There are few location changes and almost everything is dialogue. Patrick Stewart plays the main character and he is excellent. The movie is about art, ambition, fatherhood, responsibility, love, anger, rejection. It's good stuff.

Raising Arizona (1987)

This is one of the two films I had seen before, but I hadn't seen it since 1988. If you haven't seen this, and you like madcap comedy, I can't recommend it highly enough. It is absolutely charming. The young Nicholas Cage is at his quirky best and Holly Hunter is magnificent. It is also the best use of a book (Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care) in a supporting role that I have ever seen.

Reign Over Me (2007)

Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler in a post 9/11 buddy movie. Compelling, despite being sort of boring, over-written and preachy about PTSD in particular and mental health in general (boundaries, communication skills, emotional intelligence, etc). It is compelling because of the performances and also the loving cinematography of New York City. Though I thought the film was seriously flawed and lacking in depth, I enjoyed the acting – and essentially getting to spend a couple of hours in NYC.

Let's Make Love (1960)

It was strange how I selected this movie late one night. One of my friends had posted a video of tap dancing on Facebook. That inspired me to search for Fred Astaire on Netflix, which came up with nothing. No Ginger Rogers, either, but a search for Gene Kelly came up with this film (Gene has a cameo). The film is a typical sexist bullsh*t movie from the sixties, but it is worth watching for Marilyn Monroe's performance: she plays one of the most generous and kind-hearted characters I think I have ever seen portrayed on film: interested in education and helping out everyone she encounters. I fell madly in love with her character in the first 10 minutes she was on screen and that helped me forgive the arrogant male protagonist for falling in love with her too.

Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) 

This is another film that was recommended by a friend. I found it thought-provoking – It's about a washed-up, Hollywood star of a super hero film series (Birdman – bearing a striking resemblance to Batman), whose mental health is rapidly deteriorating while he tries to mount a play on Broadway – a terrible play that he has adapted from a Raymond Carver story. Michael Keaton plays the over-the-hill Birdman and Edward Norton shows up as a last-minute replacement for a bad actor. Edward Norton plays a great actor, but a deeply-flawed human being. Emma Stone does a fabulous job as Birdman's daughter, Sam, who is just out of rehab and working as his personal assistant. While this is a play-within-a-play set-up, the judicious use of special effects makes it feel like a movie and not like a "filmed play".

While We're Young (2015) 

SPOILER ALERT: I liked this movie, right up until the ending. It's about a middle-aged couple: he's a stalled-out documentary filmmaker and she is a film producer who works for her father, who is a famous and successful documentary filmmaker. All of their friends in their mid-to-late-thirties are having kids, but they are not - she's had a couple of miscarriages and feels like she has missed her chances. They start hanging around with a couple of kids in their 20s – an aspiring documentary filmmaker and his gourmet ice-cream-making wife – and they feel enlivened and rejuvenated by these new influences in their lives. Until it all goes sour and it turns out the young documentary filmmaker has been using them and is a completely disingenuous opportunist. The solution: make up with their old friends and adopt a baby from Haiti. BLARG.

The Guvnors (2014)

I'm not quite sure how I wound up here or why I decided to watch this one. It's a mediocre film about generations of violence on a British housing estate: power struggles, revenge and karma kicking people in the ass. Yawn.

Seven Psychopaths (2012)

A second-rate attempt at the Pulp Fiction genre: a movie about a guy writing a movie about seven psychopaths. The film tries to be cleverly self-referential: there a couple of nice moments when we realize how several of the psychopaths' stories overlap, and there are some memorable performances: Tom Waits shows up as a psychopath stroking a white bunny and Woody Harrelson and Christopher Walken play two of the other psychopaths with style and grace. Christopher Walken delivers an excellent critique of the script-within-the-script's wooden, one-dimensional female characters, but no attempt is made to remedy it in the film (although I did like their joke about a prostitute discussing Noam Chomsky). The film totally fails the Bechdel test. And basically fails at everything else – except being gory, explosive, blood-spattered eye-candy. 

The Aristocats (1970)

This is one of the two films from this set that I had seen before, but I hadn't seen it since I was a small child in the mid 70's and I thought I would revisit it for old times' sake. It's actually pretty cute. I hadn't remembered that Maurice Chevalier sings part of the theme song in French. I mean, really? When did Disney think that a bilingual English-French theme-song would be appealing? In 1970, I guess. Duchess is a loving mother, the kittens are cute, artistically-talented and well-mannered – obviously early influences for me. Also, I think Thomas O'Malley, the bad-boy alley cat, may have been an early influence of Harrison Ford's, coming in handy when he got the role as Indiana Jones. I especially noticed the similarity between Madam smoothing down Thomas's fur and Ford's attempts to do the same thing at the behest of a Nazi officer on the deck of a U-boat.

Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)

This was one of the suggestions the came up after the Aristocats. It's one of several Disney films I had never seen before. The topic appeals to me; I thought Atlantis was pretty cool when I was a kid. And the protagonist of this film is a linguist, which is a major point in its favour. Other than that, it's pretty typical Disney clap-trap, but at least it promotes knowledge, courage and teamwork ahead of beauty and material success, so it could be a lot worse than it is.

Gravity (2013)

SPOILER ALERT: So badly written. Clooney and Bullock are competent, charming actors, and I watched to the end because I wanted to know if Bullock was going to make it. However, after listening to her deliver all of those terrible lines, I started rooting for her to burn up on re-entry. And how many times is Hollywood going to cast Ed Harris at Houston Mission Control?