janimari garvon everard
Finnis Springer
Method 1:
If you used to have an Instant Queue and want to go back to using it, go to My List from the Netflix Web site or go directly to In the upper right-hand corner, click on the "Change order to: MANUAL" link.
Method 2:
If you've never had an Instant Queue, but would still like to manually order your list of saved titles, go to Your Account, then click on "Order in My List." Choose "Manual Ordering," then click the Save button.
Wes Anderson is just...not for me. I have had few movie-watching experiences more disappointing than that stupid "The Life Aquatic." So many people told me it was amazing, that this was going to be the movie that FINALLY made me see why Wes Anderson was a genius. And I really, really tried to enjoy it. But boy oh boy did I hate that movie. Boring, pointless, random, not funny OR dramatic, full of ruined David Bowie songs....geez that movie sucked.
This perfectly captures how I have felt about Netflix for a long time. The last thing we rushed to watch on the service was the last season of "Stranger Things". Even our last DVDs we got sat next to our TV for months because of no urgency of a due date attached to them (more power to libraries for having a set due date). Which is how we ended up keeping our last two DVDs after September 30. FYI, they are "Armegeddon Time" and Meg Ryan's forgotten directing debut "Ithaca" -- her remake of the classic and also largely forgotten "The Human Comedy" (1943).
To set the stage, allow me to say, first, that Wes Anderson is both one of the great filmmakers of this era and one of my personal favorites. I could pick a film of his from four different decades, and each of them would be in the running for my top ten of that decade.* Even if I didn\u2019t love his latest\u2014which I still saw twice in theaters, on nearly back-to-back nights\u2014I very much look forward to everything he does.
Furthermore, Roald Dahl was a defining author of my childhood years: I tore through the longer stuff like The BFG and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Witches; I read and re-read the short stories aimed at slightly older readers at probably too young an age. The most nervous I\u2019ve ever been when interviewing a filmmaker was when I got 20 minutes on the phone with Wes Anderson to discuss his stop-motion adaptation of The Fantastic Mr. Fox. I hope I can be forgiven, as it rather perfectly represented the collision of my childhood and my 20s (and, frankly, my 30s) into one rather pleasing whole.
So it was with some excitement earlier this year that I learned Anderson had already shot and was readying the release of four short films based on Dahl\u2019s work. The longest of the shorts, \u201CThe Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,\u201D debuted at Cannes this year alongside Asteroid City. In addition to \u201CHenry Sugar,\u201D we were also going to get takes on \u201CThe Rat Catcher,\u201D \u201CThe Swan,\u201D and \u201CPoison.\u201D What an embarrassment of riches! A Wes Anderson feature and an anthology of shorts, all in the same year.
Indeed, a couple of nights ago as I was trying to decide what to watch I opted not for the new Andersons but a decades-old John Carpenter picture. Judging by the chatter, or lack thereof, on social media, I\u2019d guess that I\u2019m not alone in this.
The thing about Netflix is that it creates a sort of anti-urgency: well, it\u2019s there, and it\u2019ll be there forever, I guess, so no reason to rush and see it. A Wes Anderson movie in a theater feels like an event, something to get excited for, something to go to. Hell, if this series of shorts had been packaged as an anthology and given a limited theatrical run, I probably would\u2019ve seen it at my Drafthouse the first night it was out. Instead, it\u2019s just kind of \u2026 there.
I don\u2019t mean to pick on Netflix, as this is a broader problem with streaming, perhaps even a foundational, conceptual problem: convenience breeds complacency. But given Netflix\u2019s size and spending power, the problem feels amplified when it comes to a Netflix original. A new Wes Anderson project should feel like an event and be treated as such. It shouldn\u2019t just show up as a tile amongst many on the app my kids use to watch Miraculous.
Anyway. The new Anderson shorts are, artistically and formally, pretty interesting projects. In each of the shorts, the characters read not only their dialogue but also their action, giving the films the feel of a visual audiobook. For instance, in \u201CThe Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar\u201D\u2014the story of how a wealthy Brit (Benedict Cumberbatch) came to be able to read through the backs of playing cards, enabling him to cheat at blackjack\u2014we hear, in flashback, Dr. Chatterjee (Dev Patel) discuss the strange case of Imdad Khan (Ben Kingsley), who can see perfectly despite having bandages over his eyes. Whenever Chatterjee says something, he says it and then turns to the camera and says \u201Che said,\u201D narrating also the action as when, for example, he and Dr. Marshall (Richard Ayoade) are running through the halls of the hospital chasing the blinded-but-seeing Khan.
Meanwhile, the staging is extremely stage-like, backgrounds wheeled in and out, Anderson\u2019s camera rolling horizontally from one flat set to another. As in Asteroid City, Anderson is calling attention to the artifice of storytelling qua storytelling, but I think the effect here is more congruous, giving greater weight to the metaphorical import of each of the tales. It works to best effect in \u201CPoison,\u201D which features a bedridden man, Harry (Cumberbatch, again), convinced an incredibly poisonous snake has come to rest on his chest. In a panic, Harry sends Woods (Patel, again) to fetch Dr. Ganderbai (Kingsley, again), who brings an antivenin and endeavors to get the snake off of Harry\u2019s chest without it biting him. But the true poison isn\u2019t in the snake\u2019s fangs; it\u2019s in Harry\u2019s words, his very soul, as we see when, in frustration, he uses a racial epithet against Ganderbai.
The relentlessness of the dialogue is what stands out, the constant chattering. It works to best effect in \u201CThe Swan,\u201D in which Rupert Friend narrates the torment of a young birdwatching boy by two older bullies. He tells the story as you might read it to a child\u2014the voice of the bullied boy, Peter, sounds tempered, even; the voice of the bullies sneering and high-pitched, a mixture of malice and smallness\u2014all the while pacing forward and backward as he plays out the suffering of young Peter. \u201CThe Swan\u201D is like many other Dahl stories in that it involves a smaller person made to suffer by a larger person, but the outcome is more surreal and less certainly triumphant than in, say, something like Matilda.
The nature of storytelling\u2014and, perhaps more importantly, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves\u2014has long been one of Anderson\u2019s main preoccupations, all the way back to Bottle Rocket and Dignan\u2019s (Owen Wilson) discomfort with his station in life. This particular formal conceit\u2014again, what we might call \u201Cvisual audiobook\u201D\u2014feels like the logical endpoint of what Anderson began toying with in The Royal Tenenbaums and used to more extended effect in The Grand Budapest Hotel, the whole story-within-a-story-turned-into-a-film thing. One wonders where he will take it next.
Hope to see you in New Orleans! I\u2019m going to be hosting a movie trivia contest at 6:30 in the bar/restaurant attached to the theater, is my tentative understanding, which is right before Tim\u2019s talk with Walter Isaacson. There will be prizes! Get your tickets now!
This Friday\u2019s Across the Movie Aisle about the decline of robot movies was a great deal of fun; I hope you check it out. And without spoiling too much, I think I manifested this Blu-ray into existence.
Zandy Hartig\u2019s essay on Oldboy and the nature of trigger warnings is pretty well done, I think; the issue when it comes to content advisories is less that they exist (the MPAA ratings and the content labels affixed to them are essentially the same thing) and more how dang condescending they can be. Don\u2019t treat people like they\u2019re too fragile to understand art!
A thing I think about more than I probably should: the conspicuous effort to airbrush the critically acclaimed and many-trophied Louie out of the history of prestige TV given Louis C.K.\u2019s fall from grace. It basically just \u2026 doesn\u2019t show up on lists like this anymore, despite making tons of year-end lists from critical groups, winning Emmys, etc. It\u2019s just funny, is all.
I do kind of wonder if we\u2019ve hit the point where society\u2014inundated with floods of videos of mobs ransacking stores and stories about white-collar criminals stealing billions\u2014has decided to embrace a cycle of Dirty Harry/Death Wish-style vigilante pictures. If so, I am here for it, let me tell you. Love me a good vigilante movie.
Criterion\u2019s running a couple of pretty interesting series now, a horror one and a technothriller one. As mentioned above, I watched this because it\u2019s one of the few John Carpenter movies I\u2019ve yet to see (I think the list is now down to the Chevy Chase Invisible Man movie, which sounds like an all-around disaster) and it\u2019s not always streaming. Fascinating picture, particularly given its release proximity to Wes Craven\u2019s A New Nightmare and Scream. Meta-horror was all the rage in the mid-to-late 1990s, and I am terribly fond of much of it.
Hackers are able to create Netflix accounts via Virgin's web portal, but for a email address and contact information that is completely different to your Virgin media account details. They then have a "free" Netflix account that you are getting billed for. Virgin don't even know the email address that has been used - so you will have serious trouble trying to get either Virgin or Netflix to cancel the account.
I was fortunate - my Virgin Tivo box had been logged into the Netflix account automatically so I could find out the account name and email address. Without that I'd have been screwed.
So - Virgin media then told me it was my problem and I had to sort this out with Netflix. Netflix told me the account was set up through the Virgin Media portal - so the fraud was perpetrated there.
Now, Netflix have stopped the account, but Virgin have still billed me for it. I've reported it to Virgin as FRAUD on the phone twice, and by email to their [REMOVED] address - which it appears no one actually monitors.