Day 5: Nothing

Yeah it only took 5 days, but I'm not gonna be doing an update tonight.  Just got called out of town, maybe I'll do two tomorrow to make up?

Day 4: Growing Op

Yo, it might just because I'm super smart and all, but I think this movie might be about drugs.  I'm not sure which is worse, the fact that this movie has the girl that played Cher in the Clueless TV show, or that I KNEW she was the girl who played Cher in the Clueless TV show.   I'm so fucking gay, I might as well just line up for the dicks now.

Haha goddamn, this kid lives in a weed fucking house.  Growing all over the place.  It's like someone threw some furniture in there to try and legitimize it.   Aaaand it turns out his parents are the ones growing it, they're the basic ultra-liberal hippies who hate the outside world movie parents to the point where they keep their kids inside all day home schooling them.  However they do get points for offering to get their son a hooker.  Only parents that TRULY love will offer to pay for your dirty prostitutes.

What the fuck?  The movie starts to take off when Clueless moves in next door, along with her ultra-conservative parents.  Cause you see, she playing a high schooler.  IN TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHT.

This is what all high schoolers look like

So the son Quinn is the main character in the movie, and he just desperately wants to get out and be "normal," while nobody else in his family sees the problem in how they live.  Eventually he gets his parents to agree to let him to go to a regular high school and starts drooling all over Clueless after chance he gets.

Ok, if anyone reading this is Canadian, I need you to leave me a comment.  Do Canadian schools work differently than American ones?  As the main villain character is walking down the halls with his posse, talking about how Quinn is already messing up his plans for prom (by being all up in Clueless' face) one of the kids assures him that his popularity will make him a shoo-in for Valedictorian.    .....wha?  Yeah that's not exactly how that works.

Maybe she just flunked a few grades.  Or all of them.

Quinn eventually gets popular with some of the kids at school by doing what he knows best, being a genius at getting these kids high.  But of course that costs him Clueless, blah blah blah big dramatic high school life choices, that kinda thing.  At that point it turns into the generic high school movie with him trying to win the girl back and his parents not approving, that kinda stuff.  It does go off the regular script for the last 15 minutes or so, which was really appreciated.   

Final conclusion:  It is just a typical high school movie, but, I dunno, I LIKE typical high school movies, they're kind of my guilty pleasure.  Plus the ending gives it an extra boost, so I'm gonna go 4/5 on this.

Seriously, doesn't ANYONE remember what an 18 year old looks like?!

Day 3: A Feast at Midnight

So, we've gone from a Futurama movie, to a porn documentary, and now to a mid 90s British kids movie I've never heard of.  Why do I have a feeling this is going to be my best entry yet?

Less than 90 seconds into the movie we get a nice lingering almost pornographic shot of nothing but this kid's Converse All Stars.    I don't know what this movie's about, but I'm already lovin it!  Turns out he's getting dropped off at a boys boarding school.  By the driver.   Without his parents there, immediately this made me think the parents were shit parents.  Turns out his dad is in the hospital with an illness that we either never found out or that I forgot already.  His mom isn't home because she's "doing shoots" all the time.  I read into this that mommy does porn, just my guess though. Also, this movie is so fucking British isn't not even funny.  The kid who 5 minutes in was obviously gonna be the "asshole jock" stereotype is a jock star because of cricket and tennis.

6:36 in and we get our second product placement of the movie!  This time for I Can't Believe It's Not Butter. I've decided that I'm going to keep a tracker of these, and point out how many there are.  Ok the sign outside the school clearly said it was for kids 7-12, but so many of these kids in this pillow fight scene look 14-15 at least.  Am I nitpicking?  Obviously, but I have to since the movie has shown me NO SIGNS OF PLOT, other than "Kids are dicks, yo."

So, it turns out our lead character, Magnus Gove is getting picked on and bullied by basically everybody in the school.  He's also a giant bitch though, so he pretty much deserves it.  He eventually starts to get on the other kids' good sides when he shows the kids how to cook some food that they like, since the boarding school only serves uber-healthy foods.  Magnus and the other kids at the school form the "Scoffing Club" and feast after lights out at the school, hence the title of the movie. The majority of the movie is based around the kids sneaking around at night to cook, trying not to get caught by the chef in the kitchen or their teacher, played awesomely by Christopher Lee.

One other thing I should touch on is the very odd romantic subplot going on between Gove and the daughter of their teacher, who, according to Wikipedia, was 21 years old when this movie came out.  It'd be one thing if he just had a crush on the older girl, but it's also played where she shows interest in him as well.  Also, I guess British kids movies get away with alot more than American ones do.  All sorts of sexual innuendos between the teachers, and a scene where the daughter is down to her bra and dancing around.

Despite the creepy subplot though, I actually had a REALLY good time with this movie.  It was really well written and really fun and lighthearted kids stuff for the most part.  There are certainly scenes that show more depth and I think they excel because of the change in pace that they bring.  I literally groaned when I saw this come up on my recommendations list, but I'm glad it did.  I might go back at some point and bring it down to 4 stars, because it's really close in the middle, but as of right now I'd have to give it 5/5 stars.

Oh yeah, I forgot to add this earlier.  Final product placement count:  8.   8 different times.   That's actually less than I thought with how it started out.

Day 2: Inside Deep Throat

So in just 1 day we go from Futurama to a porn documentary.  This is certainly an interesting change of pace Netflix, let's see what you have in store for me.

[Yo.  Spoilers.  Duh.   But it's a freakin documentary anyway]

As the title implies, this movie is a documentary about the making of and fallout from Deep Throat, the most successful porn movie of all time.  Dennis Hopper narrates the tale, and it's full of interviews, both newly taped and using old stock footage, with just about everyone involved in the movie from the director, stars, distributors, people whose houses they used for filming, etc.  The first and most prominent person they talk to is Gerard Damiano, the director of Deep Throat.  I REALLY wish I could find a good picture of him to put up here, cause he's in classic old man pants-around-the-nipples garb.   Seriously his pants might have been the highlight of the entire documentary for me.

The movie starts out talking about the sexual revolution in the 70s, and how that made it even possible for a movie like Deep Throat to become mainstream, with sex and sexuality being more acceptable to be talked about publicly.  It opened in Times Square, back when Times Square was Times fuckin Square, and not this overly neutered version that it's become.  Obviously New York and federal legislators had a huge fit over a porno movie being shown in an actual theater, and theaters that showed it kept getting raided, but all that it did was cause the movie to get more and more exposure, really causing it to become the phenomenon it was.

After seeing how big it was becoming, theater owners in other states wanted to show it as well, and according to the documentary, that's when troubles really started to happen for the movie.  The adult theaters all had mob ties, and people went mysteriously missing after not making payments, or theaters started burning down. But the real problem was that they had now started to distribute pornography across state lines, giving federal judges a legitimate case against them.  For reasons that were undisclosed in the documentary, Gerard Damiano and Linda Lovelace, the lead female star of the movie, had immunity, so they went after Harry Reems, the male lead of the movie in order to make an example out of him.  After just a few hours, the jury found him guilty of all charges.  However after less than a year, he was cleared of the charges, seeing as how the laws they were using to persecute him weren't in place when the movie was made.

Eventually it gets to the point where Linda Lovelace joins the feminist movement in the late 70s and turns on the movie as well, claiming she was being held captive on set and basically raped in the movie.  The documentary, however, has a huge pro-Deep Throat bias and makes her come off like a crazy bitch.  So I don't know how true her claims are, but I'd be willing to bet there's more to them than the doc wants you to think.

The movie then goes into a ridiculous sequence, complete with shots of the American flag in the background, talking about how Deep Throat revolutionized America and essentially says that NONE of pop culture today would be possible without it.  It then ends with a hilarious crazy old man rant talking about how porn today isn't what it used to be.  There's no art!  It's only about the money and the sex!    .....shut the fuck up.  It's PORN.  That's all it was EVER about, there was never any fucking art in it.    I was actually willing to give this 3/5 stars, but that last stupid rant knocked it down to 2/5

Day 1: Futurama the Movie: Bender's Big Score

[Warning:  There will be spoilers in this and probably every post on here]

The very first day into this project, and I already ran into a snag.  All of my top 10 were TV shows or TV based.  I had to go with Bender's Big Score, because technically it's a movie, I guess?  I'm about 99% positive I've never actually seen this before.

I'm going to assume that everyone reading this already knows the basics behind the Futurama universe, so I won't take the time to explain that.  This is the first of four straight-to-DVD movies created after Fox had cancelled Futurama and while Comedy Central was bringing it back.

The story is based around Planet Express being brought back after getting cancelled by the Box Network, only for the crew to all fall victim to spam, giving away personal information building up to Professor Farnsworth giving away the ship itself to the scammers.  The scammer aliens find a code for time travel tattooed on Fry's ass, and send a mind-controlled Bender back in time to steal stuff for them.  Eventually Fry uses the time travel code to go back to the year 2000 and Bender is sent back to kill him.

Eventually the aliens (pictured above) take everything of value on Earth and the Planet Express crew wind up homeless on the streets, which eventually leads to a war against the scammers.  There's a pair of substories about Leela and another guy, and Fry back in the 2000s.  Both of these are pretty boring and feel like filler, until they eventually do reach a conclusion that ties back into the main story.

Overall, I basically came to the conclusion that Futurama just doesn't need to be a movie.  It just felt way too long with its 88 minute runtime, and I was just waiting for it to end.  I'm a fan of Futurama as a TV show, but this just seemed to drag on.  I'd have to give it 3/5 stars, and can only marginally recommend it to fans of the show.  I'm sure if I had seen it when it was new, and people were desperate for ANYTHING new Futurama related, my opinion on it would be higher than it is now.  But as it is, I won't be in a hurry to watch any of the other 3 direct to DVD Futurama movies.

Day 0: The Startup

I don't know if this will get read by anyone or not, probably not, but here we go.

I've decided to spend the next 30 days watching one movie per day off Netflix.  The catch is that I won't have any input whatsoever on what I watch, it'll all be left into the hands of Netflix.  I'm going to take the first movie that appears on the Top 10 row, and watch that, to see how well Netflix knows me.  The only rules are that it has to be a movie, not a TV show, and it has to be something I've never seen before.  I'm sure along the way I'll probably wind up watching some really crappy movies, but I hope I'll wind up with more good than bad.  I'm cautiously optimistic heading into this, and the first post should be up later today.