Streaming Roulette April: The Dirt, Monster House, and Now Apocalypse

As is our practice we've selected a couple handful of titles and frozen the films at utterly random moments without cheating (whatever comes up comes up!) for this quick preview. At the bottom of the page, check out full listings for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and HBO for April 2019. And please do let us know if you're dying to discuss any of the films. Maybe we'll select one to write up? Okay, let's go...

Holy shit. Barnabas!

Now Apocalypse, Season 1 (2019) on Hulu (with Starz add-on)
Pictured there are the four leads of Now Apocalypse all of them gorgeous / funny / frequently naked in the first TV series from Gregg Araki of 1990s new queer cinema fame. Araki's preoccupations haven't changed much (or at all!)  since the 1990s. A twinkish lead with floppy dark hair? Check. Constant drug use? Sex. Filthy language and explicitly sexual humor? Check. A preoccupation with supernatural kinds of rape? Check. A dumb but impossibly sweet and sincere straight hunk? Check. Impossibly hip but somewhat chilly woman with black hair? Check. Sexual fluidity for every character even those with a pronounced label or gay or straight? Check. Slutty female best friend with most of the best lines? Check. End of the world fantasies and paranoia? Check. Older predatory queers in abundance? Check. Aliens or supernatural occurences? Of course! The show is way too repetitive in the early episodes (lots of flashbacks to previous episodes which is weird for streaming shows since you've literally usually just been watching what you're now flashing back to) but about halfway into the season the short episodes start  to come together in fun ways, including a hilarious and much smarter way of folding back in on itself with an in-series webseries, wherein the characters are reenacting the early episodes and playing themselves badly or being played unflatteringly by actors hired to play them. 

She never blinked during the interview.

Click to read more ...

Doc Corner: 'Leaving Neverland'

By Glenn Dunks

Please note this review discusses topics that will be upsetting to some readers.

How long is too long for a film like Leaving Neverland? Not long enough, it would seem. Don’t get me wrong – watching Dan Reed’s four-hour document of the physical and psychological abuses heaped onto two underage boys in the 1990s by the most famous man in the world, Michael Jackson, is rough-going. It’s sickening, it’s confronting, and its hard to sit through. It’s also compelling and I, for one, believe them. --  I figure I should get that out of the way right at the top.

Reed does something great with with this material, which could so easily have been sensationalized or turned into cheap, ghoulish true crime fodder. His approach is elegant, refined and simple and yet holds the weight that such a discussion deserves...

Click to read more ...

Streaming Roulette, Early March 2019

by Nathaniel R

As is our practice we've selected a couple handful of titles and frozen the films at utterly random moments without cheating (whatever comes up comes up) for this quick preview.  Do any of these screencaps make you wanna watch the movie? At the bottom of the page, check out full listings for Netflix, Hulu, Prime, and HBO for the first half of March. Okay, let's go...

Ohmygosh, he is dreaaammmmy.

The Notebook (2004) on Netflix
Wait James Marsden is the other man in this movie? (You may recall I told you I hadn't seen it when Kim was writing up its famous kiss last month. Somehow I didn't know that Rachel McAdams had to choose between Marsden and Gosling? Tough life, that girl leads.) Oh and did you hear that weird story about how Netflix changed the ending to The Notebook in the UK? I wouldn't have known the difference but bizarre. How is that even legal?

[eery music]

What Lies Beneath (2000) on Hulu
You guys... never look at a pristine empty bathtub while holding a ouija board...

Click to read more ...

On a scale of 1 to 5 Audreys, how excited are you for Big Little Lies 2

And who are you most excited to see reprise their role and why?

Doc Corner: HBO's 'The Sentence'

By Glenn Dunks

If I told you The Sentence was a documentary about the frustratingly pedantic injustice of the American judicial system and how it directly targets minorities and in particular one specific mother of three in Michigan, you would probably think there is much ground to cover and any number of directions the film could go. Unfortunately for viewers intrigued by the subject, The Sentence isn’t that film. In its place is a documentary that too often feels like just a collection of home movies strung together with little insight into the processes and machinations of the system.

The Sentence follows the story of director Rudy Valdez's own sister, Cynthia, and the efforts that eventually lead to her pardon in 2016 on drug charges. Cynthia was jailed in the mid-2000s due to something of a loophole known as “the girlfriend problem” despite years apart from the man who actually committed the crimes and now living a life of domestic normalcy...

Click to read more ...