So my birthday was yesterday, making me almost a decade older than my teenage self ever really thought I would be.
I spent the day largely in bed, eating popcorn and drinking beer. My Netflix instant viewing option started working just this week (either because I started using my auxiliary laptop or because the DSL got fixed when the phone company came by), so I gleaned Netflix for the best, most cathartic birthday movies I could find.
Klaw, in his blog, has compared the Netflix instant viewing selection with the dollar DVD bin at Walmart, but there’s some good stuff if you’re willing to dig.
Last Boyscout
Although technically released in the 90s, this is a great example of 80s action flicks. Bruce Willis’ plays the "rumpled private dick with a storied past" character to the point of parody. Because it’s a Tony Scott film, every indoor space is packed solid with artificial fog. And the dialog is just plain silly. But there’s gruesome violence and macho posturing, which is all I really wanted.
Dragon Wars
When this came out, everyone competed to be the most insulting about how stupid this was. Sure, it has plot, dialog, and acting one would expect from a made for the sci-fi channel movie, but the giant snake eating L.A. scenes are awesome. The plot is particularly confusing because the evil monster is trying to eat some white chick in order to become a dragon, but to Western audiences the monster already looks a hell of a lot like a dragon. Hint: real dragons have legs.
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
A dumb but funny parody of all those tedious music biopics. If only it wasn’t as long as the subject of its parody. There’s a great scene where the hero is tempted to use pot, but his friend warns him against it, telling him that it’s non-habit forming, perfectly safe, and relatively cheap. A chilling lesson indeed.
Sukiyaki Western Django
I pity the poor Netflix copywriter who had to compose the summary for this movie. They did a horrible job. They should have just said "Takeshi Miike’s Western Movie." If the reader doesn’t know what that means, then they probably shouldn’t be watching.
Basically, it’s a standard western, with gunfighters and opposing gangs in a lawless town. But the setting is entirely in Japan and all the actors are Japanese nationals speaking English dialog phonetically. Except of course for Quentin Tarantino, who appears in a knowing wink to the arthouse trash cinema crowd. A salute both to Spaghetti Westerns and the classic cowboy flicks that inspired countless kung fu and samurai movies both. It’s an exercise in cultural synthesis and breaking the fourth wall.
Paprika
It’s disturbing that if you type "paprika" into the google image search, 75% of the returns are about this movie, instead of the spice. Paprika is an anime that trods the same ground as Dreamscape, but with all the surrealism that the latter never could have afforded. The title character is a perky redhead who everyone loves, but she’s actually just the dream alter-ego for a button-upped and serious woman scientist who scares the people around her. As a latent feminist I find much of this movie’s subtext appalling.
Street Trash
This movie was recommended to me by my co-worker Johnny Motard. Ostensibly this movie is about a production-recalled bum hooch called "Viper" that causes the bums who drink it to melt into techni-color goo. This is actually a small part of the movie. Most of it centers around a community of truly vile junkyard bums and the horrible things they do. Some of the scenes are just so appalling that I can’t help but love it. Like the scene where a cop beats the crap out of a mobster, dumps him in a urinal, and then sticks his finger in his own mouth to vomit on his defeated foe. Truly a jewel of a movie.
Le Jetee
The only movie that I watched on actual physical Netflix DVD. Yeah, it’s a classic. I should have watched it years ago when I was a "film student." To fluff out the DVD there’s an incredibly long and boring travelogue film by the same director.
