It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Season 1-11 — To me, Netflix’s best feature was never its vast movie catalog. Nor is it its growing library of original programming. Even its mailing service paled to its crowning achievement as a content streamer. Netflix has what is perhaps the best collection of TV series commercially available to stream.
And while it’s natural and expected for program licensing to expire and content to be gradually replaced over time, it’s always disheartening to see entire series — especially critically acclaimed, long-lived ones — rotate out to make room for something inherently less impressive. But unlike American Dad‘s slow death on the streaming service, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is being excised all in one go: 11 seasons in their entirety gone in the blink of an eye. I don’t know which way is worse, but it does leave one with a madcap desire to marathon as much of the series over the coming days, while it’s still an option to do so.
Super Size Me — Like comedies, I’m not often one for Documentaries. While I love non-fiction — and The Big Short, a dramatization of the 2007 Subprime Mortgage Crisis, might just be the best movie of 2015 — I always preferred reading it to watching it. Documentaries are stuffy things: over-long lectures that quickly out stay their welcome and get shelved more often than they get finished.
For whatever reason, though, I have always loved Super Size Me. It’s gimmick is obvious on its face and it’s clear from the first scene exactly what’s going to happen to the guy making it, but it nevertheless makes for compelling viewing. Mixing informative exposition with memorable digressions, it’s maybe the best kind of documentary: true to the facts, but not so strictly beholden to them that it sacrifices audience engagement for their sake.
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl — I’ve made no secret my overall distaste for this franchise or, rather, what this franchise has become: a blatant, semi-annual cash-grab that Disney puts out whenever it needs to build an extension on one of its theme parks. I’m only so hard on the franchise because of how amazing the first film in the franchise was, and how well it still holds up today (despite some obviously dodgy, early 2000s CG).
Despite what the Disney marketing machine turned it into, the first Pirates of the Caribbean was a refreshing take on both the pirate and action-adventure genres (the former having long-since disappeared and the latter having started to grow noticeably stale). From Johnny Depp’s bizarre, not-yet-overdone affectations as Jack Sparrow to the chilling villain Barbarossa to never quite being able to put a finger on where every shifty character’s loyalties truly lay, it was an riveting, hilarious and incredibly memorable romp whose exact formula Disney has never since able to reproduce, no matter how many times they tried.
Young Frankenstein — While I’ve never been an especially big fan of comedies, my already slim appreciation for them shrinks dramatically when the subject of parodies comes up. Far too often, what should be easy riffs on low-hanging fruit turn into Disaster Movie or Meet the Spartans. Even supposedly “classic” spoofs like Space Balls just fall flat for me.
But sometimes the stars align for an unquestionably perfect movie. Sometimes you get the perfect director, perfect writer and perfect cast laser-focused on the perfect subject matter. That’s what happened with Young Frankenstein: a fiercely intelligent and intensely funny take on classic, Universal monster movies. And for my money, it is easily the funniest movie ever made.
Nightcrawler — That Nightcrawler never quite captured the popular audience it deserves has always puzzled me. Sure, it’s a dark, off-putting tale of a sociopath destroying those around him to achieve his twisted aims, but so was The Silence of the Lambs. It’s a darkly compelling series of events that inexorably sees the social sheep fall to the urban wolves, and is undoubtedly one of the unsung classics of this cinematic generation.
Jake Gyllenhaal gave what is undoubtedly the best performance of his storied career: slipping seamlessly into the skin of an ambitious videographer who is willing to do anything it takes to get to the top. It’s a deeply unsettling film that many may not even find themselves able to finish, but those who do will have earned an unforgettable experience that will chill them to their marrow.
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