The Watercooler for Netflix

Sorry for the spam posts (now deleted). I know it must be Tumblr’s fault because I’ve been busy diligently ignoring this blog so it couldn’t have been a mis-click on my part. 

Ignoring may be harsh. I got burned out. Maintaining this blog took close to 20 hours per week. 

I still make occasional recommendations on the Twitter feed @NWatercooler but not often. Unless people start knocking my door down wanting to discuss or have recommended stuff on Netflix, I don’t see that changing. 

So, for now, I’ll keep this blog encased in amber in case I ever way to resurrect and clone it and build a doomed theme park around it. 

Ta. 

Doing Two Things Is Confusing
The year is 2000, Amazon, the burgeoning internet book seller, splits off their new music department into a website called Nile.com. By 2011 every river has a .com address and is a commerce portal operated by Amazon.com. Over the next 10 years the internet is entirely dominated by single serving sites. Subdomains don’t exist and more than 8 characters after the .com is considered obscene. As Netflix’s streaming catalog threatens to overshadow it’s classic DVD by mail program a bewildered public and confused stock market force Netflix to spin off it’s flagship productline into a new company for clarity’s sake. 

Netflix is Run By Sadists
Fuck you for using our service. No seriously, fuck you. Oh you were just about to finish that streaming movie? NOPE. Expired. Fuck off.  Oh, you want another DVD? NOPE. Slow your roll, asshole. Oh hey, do you want to connect with friends and privately share ratings and recommendations? NOPE. Maybe try Facebook instead? OH NO WAIT FUCK THAT SHIT. And hey, our way of saying thanks for those years of thoughtful reviews you wrote: STRIPPING ATTRIBUTION. No one want to know your name, bitch. Hey at least our website is easy to use. Do a search and if it’s streaming watch it now, iif it’s on DVD add it to your queue. HAHA FUCK YOU SEARCH TWICE. 

Netflix is Run By Masochists
What do you mean you like my variety? I hate that about myself. The future isn’t in discs and my present streaming selection sucks. My core business model is a joke. Spank me on the stock market, abuse me in my comment threads. I deserve it. I don’t know why you keep giving me money anyways. I know everyone is mocking me when they call things “the Netflix of whatever”.  I know they just mean the new failure. I’m going to go cut myself. 

Netflix Is Having An Identity Crisis
I’m chopping off my hair, kicking out my core business, and uprooting myself to a different domain. You can call me Starchild Qwikster.  Netflix is my slave name. 

All of These Domains Were Already Taken
Flix.com
Redenvelope.com
Netdiscs.com
Netdisx.com
Maildiscs.com
Quickflicks.com
Quickfliks.com
Quickflix.com
Qwikflix.com
Quickdiscs.com
Quickdisc.com 
Netfix.com
Netster.com
Entertainmail.com
Playitbymail.com
Discter.com
Quickster.com
Qwickster.com
Quikster.com
Quixtar.com
NotNetflixForContractualReasons.com  

Netflix: White Collar Squatter
Unhappy with their business model, Netflix decided to follow Google’s and go into web ads. The choose an impossible to remember company name then buy every spelling permutation to show ads against. 

Qwikster: Pawn in Corporate Chess
Netflix puts Qwikster up for sale. Amazon buys Qwikster. Netflix buys Hulu. Apple files anti-duopoly lawsuit.  Amazon merges with Netflix, hostilely takes over Apple. Government breaks up iFlixzon. Qwikster only viable model after internet razing war. 

An Offer Netflix Can’t Refuse
In exchange for rights to stream high quality movies, the studios extracted certain measures from Netflix. 

1. Reed Hastings’s must visit each of the studio heads personally and sing “I am a little teapot.” 
2. The studios kidnapped Reed Hastings’s daughter and if he didn’t comply they’d sign her to a three picture deal with Eddie Murphy. 
3. In a fit of Scrabble induced pique, the studios demanded that Netflix must spin off it’s DVD by mail service into a new website that uses a Q, W, and K, but only two vowels. 
4. The new site cannot use any of Netflix’s APIs and must be coded by out of work humanities PhDs given an HTML For Dummies book. 
5. Netflix is not allowed to blame or even mention the studios in its rationale for these changes.

New To Streaming

 Star Trek

Capt. James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and the crew of the starship USS Enterprise keep intergalactic danger at bay and delves deep into the exploration of space. Leonard Nimoy co-stars as Spock.

 Sports Night

Aaron Sorkin’s critically acclaimed series follows the offbeat cast and crew of a sports news show as they deal with professional and personal challenges in their pressure-cooker work environment.

 The Worst Week of My Life

Murphy’s Law is an ongoing theme in this quirky BBC comedy series that finds seemingly cursed couple Howard and Mel in the midst of premarital chaos — and, later on, in the throes of labor pains.

 Ip Man 2

Centering on Ip Man’s migration to Hong Kong in 1949 as he attempts to propagate his discipline of Wing Chun martial arts.

 Cinema Paradiso

A filmmaker recalls his childhood, when he fell in love with the movies at his village’s theater and formed a deep friendship with the theater’s projectionist.

Expiring Soon

 The Rocky Horror Picture Show

A newly engaged couple have a breakdown in an isolated area and must pay a call to the bizarre residence of Dr. Frank-N-Furter.

 Super Size Me

While examining the influence of the fast food industry, Morgan Spurlock personally explores the consequences on his health of a diet of solely McDonald’s food for one month.

 Lady Chatterley 

Joely Richardson is Lady Chatterley, who — at the urging of her paralyzed, impotent spouse (James Wilby) — finds a lover in the form of her husband’s handsome gamekeeper.

 X-Men 

Two mutants come to a private academy for their kind whose resident superhero team must oppose a terrorist organization with similar powers.

 Doc Martin

Crippled by a sudden fear of blood, flashy surgeon Dr. Martin Ellingham (Martin Clunes) abandons his bustling London practice and sets up shop as a country doctor in this British sitcom. 

Or: The One Where Crichton Blows Up His Phallic Substitute, But D’Argo’s Shoots Lasers

In the first Farscape piece I wrote on here, I described John Chricton as a Star Trek hero forced to exist in a world with very little patience for that breed of non-violent idealism. There’s a narrative arc implied by that idea, a Gene Roddenberry story about one good man uplifting a fallen universe through sheer decency and rationality.

This isn’t that story.

This is a story about growing up. About realizing that there’s a point where idealism has to stop, because now you’re the liability who keeps blowing up your gun and everyone rolls their eyes when you say you have a plan. Because you’re so obsessed with impressing people that it gets you kidnapped and killed. Because you want to save people (and save them YOUR WAY) so badly you’re willing to kill them to do it. Because you keep pushing your brother or your sister away with words like “barbarian” or “coward” so you don’t have to look at how similar you are.

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Or: The One Where We Learn the Farscape Euphemism for Testicles

This is basically Groundhog Day, except that Groundhog Day is fun, and this is boring. The whole POINT of a Groundhog Day scenario is to show a) the fun of consequence-free actions, and b) how a simple situation can turn out differently based on a few simple choices.

Instead, what we get is Shouty D’Argo (have I mentioned my distaste for Shouty D’Argo?), super-simple characterizations, and (ugh)… Matala.

Look, I have no problem with the idea of the femme fatale. And it’s actually pretty clever to have a character who combines D’Argo’s desire for a home with the fact that he hasn’t had sex in 8 years. But the whole subplot where Crichton wants to or does not want to have crazy alien finger sex or whatever with her feels like padding with no point except to get D’Argo jealous, and a red herring to make us think she might have sexy mind control powers or something.

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“Moya is invaded by spawning space bugs, which produce clones of the crew. To complicate matters, a Peacekeeper retrieval squad arrives and Aeryn begins to suffer heat delirium.”

I’m glad to see that Netflix is using the airdate order for Farscape instead of the production order, both because the second produced episode, “I, E.T.” works much better slightly later in the season, and because this one is such a good re-entry to the world of Moya and her crew. It introduces several important plot points, relationships, bits of mythology and themes that we’ll be making extensive use of as time goes on.

For instance, and most prominently, we have Sebacean Heat Death, one of the least believable but most plot-important bits of the show’s often plausibility-challenged approach to biology. While I find it hard to swallow that a race with such a huge, glaring weakness (it seems to reach fatal levels at, what, 100 Fahrenheit?) could be as dominant and widespread as Sebaceans and Peacekeepers are, it does have a certain lyricism to it - the ultra-repressed Peacekeepers being portrayed as literally cold-blooded. More importantly, it puts Aeryn in a position of weakness and vulnerability, something the character probably needs at this point in the series.

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Veronica: We want to weaponize a pumpkin.
Ted: Then so do I. (pause) Because? 

The short version: Do you miss Arrested Development? Watch Better Off Ted. 

The long version:
NBC Thursdays have a creeping nice-ification happening. In it’s first and second seasons, Parks & Rec used to have it’s character meet actual challenges of small town politics, now it’s twee. The Office, fresh from the BBC’s Xerox machine, was much rougher and ruder but has mellowed out over the years, into an equally feel good comedy. And Community and 30 Rock have always centered around the oddball but happy relationships of friends-of-circumstance becoming close. 

So in Better Off Ted, it’s nice to see a sitcom with a bit of bite to it. Reminiscent of how Arrested Development made fun of the rich and backbiting families, Better Off Ted makes fun of evil corporations and the different ways its employees have to kowtow to its desires. 

In the first 7 minutes of the pilot, each of the 5 main characters gets a solid introduction and a minor plot is developed and completed: the invention of an office chair so uncomfortable it prevents daydreaming or boredom (until the user snaps and does who knows what). The other 16 minutes of the episode deal with the personal choices each character must made when the company, Veridian Dynamics, asks of it’s employees ‘to cryogenically freeze or not to cryogenically freeze?’ The pilot is well plotted and enjoyable on both fronts. 

And now for the critiques: 
The pilot pushes the Linda/Veronica love triangle pretty hard for the outset. This could have bubbled up showly over the course of a few episodes, but instead Ted basically beats them both back with a stick. It’s just laid it on a bit thick for a pilot. 

Also, for me the character of Ted, played by Jay Harrington, is too much of an unfunny straight guy. But I have the same gripe about Josh Radnor who plays the “I” in How I Met Your Mother. Is it a rule that the titular character has to be boring? Or just characters named Ted? Michael Bluth/Jason Bateman handles the straight man role well while still being a funny & an interesting character. 

One glaring and, at times, annoying crutch is the show’s reliance on letting Ted talk straight to the camera as a way to push through exposition. It’s telling, not showing, which makes me feel like I’m being shortchanged by the series. It’s forgivable for the pilot but overuse later on will earn tsks. (Though AD & HIMYM have similar crutches so its not that unusual.)

But, bottom line, the series is incisively funny either standing on it’s own, or while watching it through the lens of someone fed up with greedy corporations. 

(The full series of Better Off Ted is now streaming on Netflix.)  

“I’m on another planet.”

That’s how he gets me. That’s the moment I fall for John Chricton. Not his pop culture wisecracks. Not his bravery or his resourcefulness (which his vast ignorance of the situation he’s in never stops him from making use of). It’s that, on a squalid commerce planet covered in burning trash barrels and rejects from the Mos Eisley cantina, John Chricton’s first reaction is one of awe. He’s on another planet.

Chricton is a different kind of sci-fi hero, and Farscape a different kind of show, despite its shopworn “Lost in Space” premise. In another show, John would be the captain, the two-fisted action hero. But Moya doesn’t have a captain - the crew makes most of its decisions by yelling at each other until things get so bad there’s only one, insane choice left to make, and John Chricton’s not a warrior, not a leader. He’s a scientist. An explorer.

Pay attention, as you watch the first season. Count the number of times Chricton fires a weapon. He’s a guy raised on Next Generation, always favoring diplomatic, non-violent solutions. The difference is, he’s not traveling through the universe on a mission of peaceful exploration with a crew of Federation-raised utopianists. He’s sharing a ship with an anarchist priestess, a rage-filled warrior, a lifelong solider, a greedy-driven royal, all of them desperate to survive.

One of the (many) joys of Farscape is watching that idealism warp, change, evolve, mature under the pressures that are coming.

And to see whether, when it’s all over, John Chricton can still look at the universe with awe.

“Space. The final frontier.”  That’s probably what astronaut John Crichton is thinking in the opening scene as he stares up at the NASA space shuttle at dawn. And he doesn’t have to wait long to go boldly where no man has gone before. Five minutes into the pilot, before the credits roll or the first commercial break, our hero is already thrust into a big alien space battle. Five minutes after that and he’s being accosted by weird, rude aliens on a freaky prison ship. And oh yeah the ship is alive. Welcome to Farscape! 

Did you know all aliens have an Australian accent? Or maybe it’s a fault with the translator microbes John gets injected with. 

As a sci-fi show made in 1999 it’d invariably be judged on it’s special effects, which happily still hold up today. But it’s the Jim Henson Production Company’s puppets and prosthetics that really sell Farscape’s aliens in a way not previously achieved in the Star Trek school of “mostly human with some forehead ridges” aliens. 

Most sci-fi stories take place from the perspective of humans expanding out and discover/fighting The Other, but Farscape flips that on it’s ear. Our protagonist is a fish-out-of-water human in an unfamiliar galaxy full of aliens who’ve never ever heard of Earth. 

There’s a deft two minute scene in that pilot that gives some nice exposition (and flirting) between two of the main alien characters. It’s a valuable chunk of time to spend in the pilot in a scene without our human protagonist, but that’s part of the point. That scene really humanizes the characters for the audience and shows it’s an ensemble show about aliens, with a human providing audience perspective. 

It’s a well crafted pilot. Small seeds of character & plot bloom naturally later on in the episode and the season. In 44 minutes the show manages to get us up to speed on the universe, characters, their relationships, and desires. And it does so in a light-hearted, thoughtful way. And the show is funny! With all the unique characters comes a lot of grounded, relatable humor. Also fart jokes. 

Of all the great scenes in the pilot my favoriate would probably be the reveal of Aeryn. A masked warrior jailed along with John, she takes off her helmet and proceeds to tackle and interrogate him about who he is and why he’s not in uniform like her. Zhann reveals that after doing some tests, while he may look like Aeryn, he’s definitely not the same species. So with even human-seeming characters not being able to be taken at face value, the pilot really leaves the door open for the series to ask a lot of interesting questions. 

John: How do i know i can trust you? 
Aeryn: That’s just another thing you don’t know. 

(The full series of Farscape is available to stream on Netflix.)

New To Streaming

 Pulp Fiction (Trailer)

The lives of two mob hit men, a boxer, a gangster’s wife, and a pair of diner bandits intertwine in four tales of violence and redemption.

 Killers (Trailer)

A vacationing woman meets her ideal man, leading to a swift marriage. Back at home, they discover their neighbors could be assassins who have been contracted to kill them.

 Dark Shadows (Trailer)

The rich Collins family of Collinsport, Maine is tormented by strange occurrences in this ’60s classic series.

Expiring Soon

 Zombieland (Trailer)

A shy student trying to reach his family in Ohio, a gun-toting tough guy trying and a pair of sisters trying to get to an amusement park join forces to travel across a zombie-filled America.

 Company (Excerpt)

Raúl Esparza stars in this 2006 revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Tony Award-winning musical comedy recorded live for PBS’s “Great Performances” 

 Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (Trailer)

When two brothers organize the robbery of their parents’ jewelry store the job goes horribly wrong, and they, their father and one brother’s wife are sent hurtling towards a shattering climax.