This looks like the right kind of bananas. It’s like a buddy cop movie where one cop is actually Samuel L. Jackson playing the President of the United States and the other cop is a 13-year-old Finnish boy. If the movie can keep up a fraction of the over-the-top fun tone of the trailer, I’m game… Big game.
Dawn of the Croods (Season 1)
Netflix keeps on rolling with its proprietary animated series. This time, The Croods are back for a series of now-2D adventures, that have already earned a few nominations (for production design and voice acting) at the upcoming Annie Awards.
Seventeen senior citizens decide to hop on their scooters and drive around Taiwan. When their families express concerns about their safety, it’s not a question of the people at home being wrong, it’s a question of doing it anyway. It seems to be a story of risk, camaraderie, and life affirmation and will definitely be making its way onto my list.
This seems to be the kind movie that takes the abstraction out of war and focuses down to the level of the individual. I haven’t seen it yet to know whether it is critical of the very nature of war or just challenges the morality of new military technology but it seems to have the power to be a haunting exploration of drone warfare.
The Human Centipede 3: Final Sequence
We covered the first two Human Centipede movies a few months back, back in Episode 30 of the podcast. It was the first time I ever got reports of people stopping partway through one of our episodes because they just couldn’t stomach it. Well, Tom Six is back with the third and (hopefully) final instalment of the series. Just as the second movie seems to be answering a challenge no one asked after the first one, Final Sequence is trying to make a movie that no one will enjoy. Perhaps Jeremy Hobbs needs to make a return to give us his thoughts in person and put the series to bed forever.
Following acclaimed documentary The Invisible War about sexual assault in the U.S. Military, director Kirby Dick turns his camera to a similar epidemic on college campuses. The documentary explores not only the lives of victims who have their educations disrupted but also the institutions themselves, in their policies and practices of sweeping the problem under the proverbial rug.
Jimmy Goes to Nollywood
I’ll let Netflix themselves take care of this description. “Actor Jimmy Jean-Louis [The Haitian from Heroes] offers a tour of the raucous and fast-growing Nigerian film scene as he arrives to host the Africa Movie Academy Awards.” Searching Netflix for “Nollywood” brings up another 20 or so movies, so maybe Jimmy’s documentary will open people up to an undertapped movie mecca.
Marco Polo: One Hundred Eyes
It’s finally here: The 30-minute one-off special, detailing the history of a character from that Netflix show you forgot existed. I’ll actually be checking this one out, despite having never seen the show, in preparation for a guest spot on a cousin Netflix podcast, NetFreaks.
It sounds like a bit of a chore (Rotten Tomatoes describes it: Results moves stubbornly at its own deliberate pace, but the well-chosen cast — and writer-director Andrew Bujalski’s insightful observations — offer rich rewards for patient) but at the right time, in just the right mood, Results may prove to be the perfect thing.
What’s got me giving Two-Bit Waltz a second thought (after dismissing it at first, albeit unoriginally, for trying too hard to be Wes Anderson) is the fact that it is written and directed by its 21-year-old lead, Clara Mamet, daughter of yes-that-Mamet, David Mamet.