Netflix is a great place to watch movies, provided the movies you like are from 2001 and starring Ryan Reynolds playing a character who is pretending not to be a homosexual. I was promised a vast selection of great movies by the Netflix advertising campaign, and I’m sorry to say that they didn’t deliver on that promise.
The problem is that Netflix is an American company, whose idea of a movie usually involves explosions, catch-phrases, and the ever questionable presence of faeces and vomit. It’s quite hard to find a movie you actually like on Netflix, they all seem to be films you’ve watched late at night on Channel 5 just pass the time and stop yourself thinking about your own miserable life during another lonely Saturday night on the sofa. I mean seriously, who actually creates the lists of films they want to upload to their website? It must have been written by a man who has never seen a film in his entire life and lives out his days carving pictures on the wall of a cave in the Himalayas, with a wooden spoon.
Around 83% of the movies on Netflix are films that no one with a brain has heard of. The person who directed them probably doesn’t even remember them. He may have even paid for some emergency therapy to help his brain forget such a terrible time in his life, but with no such luck, decided to have a lobotomy. After about 2 hours searching for a decent movie on Netflix, I resorted to reading reviews on the films I have never heard of. Most of the reviews appeared automated and generic, or typed by a chimp sitting at a desk with a laptop and every time he voted 5 stars he got a banana. It was incredibly hard to find a single film that I liked, nor a single review that showed some genuine literary capabilities beyond “It was good”.
The one thing I can praise Netflix for, though, is re-igniting my love for Woody Allen’s film “Annie Hall” (yes I finally found a film I liked). A masterpiece of cinema that I haven’t seen in years. The great thing, this time, was that I understood nearly all the references, really appreciated Allen’s nervy demeanor as an actor, and laughed at every anti-semitic joke that Allen made about himself. It was the movie that first included the audience in the film; for those who are unsure what I mean, Annie Hall was the first movie in which the main protagonist spoke directly to the camera, and the audience, informing them of his own feelings throughout the movie. The opening scene is a perfect example of this. With Allen’s long shots, with one shot going on for 5 minutes perfectly uninterrupted, and his relatable charm, this film became a piece of cinematographic history. It’s an utter shame that cinema has shied away from this, focusing less and less on letting the audience work out who the character is and focuses more and more on telling the audience who the character is supposed to be.
I supposed that is the future of cinema, people watching movies on the internet staring Channing Tatum as a hunky, yet sensitive murderer who kidnaps an exploding bus full of children, with lots of family fun and laughs for everyone throughout. I guess I can just fondly look back on the greats on cinema history (Hitchcock, Kubrick, Cassavetes) and weep into my popcorn, making it even more salty, as I watch A Clockwork Orange for the 19th consecutive time and reminisce about the good old days of film.
My Life in Annoyances 