Hidden Gems of Netflix's Watch Instantly

We watched A Castle for Christmas with the amazing-looking Brooke Shields and Carey Elwes. It's like they watched a lot of Hallmark and Lifetime Christmas movies and said, "We can do that with a bigger budget and better actors."

"What about a better story?" Someone asked.

"What? Who the hell are you? Security get them out of here with their crazy ideas!" Netflix replied.

Finally got around to seeing arcane. Good stuff

I found a bunch of the Arcane soundtrack music on Youtube and it's been mixed into my work playlist.

Lost in Space has returned for its final season.

I really liked the first two seasons. It's neither as silly as the original nor as self-serious as the film version, and the Robinson family cast is fantastic. The very first episode is not kind to anyone who's claustrophobic, though.

AcidCat wrote:

Nobody seems to be talking about it but the latest season of Narcos Mexicois really good, aside from the new narrator, her character in the show is fine but when she speaks English for the narration she has a very bizarre accent and tone thats pretty distracting.

I stupidly looked at Amado Carrillo Fuentes' Wikipedia page before watching the final episode of this season, so that got spoiled.

But, on a related note...

Spoiler:

Don Neto is still alive! Somehow.

ZombieCoyote wrote:

I found a bunch of the Arcane soundtrack music on Youtube and it's been mixed into my work playlist.

I listened to the OST for like a week straight before changing off to something different.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

After a bit of time has gone by netflix will remove shows from your continue watching list if you don't watch them. Looks like they just added all of them back on to my list. This is nice for shows I didn't really stop watching but now I have a megaton of shows in my continue watching list that I don't care about.

You can tap on the sais you aren’t interested and select “remove from row.” That will do the trick.

Eleima wrote:
Baron Of Hell wrote:

After a bit of time has gone by netflix will remove shows from your continue watching list if you don't watch them. Looks like they just added all of them back on to my list. This is nice for shows I didn't really stop watching but now I have a megaton of shows in my continue watching list that I don't care about.

You can tap on the sais you aren’t interested and select “remove from row.” That will do the trick.

Thanks!

Spoilery spoilers below.

Spoiler:

The Powder as Arthur Fleck descent into madness thing was really well done without turning her into a stereotype or trivializing the seriousness of mental illness. The ending was pretty predictable as the trope of "I am not the same person anymore" was bound to happen, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

After a bit of time has gone by netflix will remove shows from your continue watching list if you don't watch them. Looks like they just added all of them back on to my list. This is nice for shows I didn't really stop watching but now I have a megaton of shows in my continue watching list that I don't care about.

Netflix will add them back to your "continue watching" list if new episodes come out. I actually like this feature.

You can also manually remove shows from "continue watching" through the Netflix web app or iOS app.

Yeah the web browser version of Netflix let's you do a lot, delete history and such. Several things you can't do in apps.

Masters of the Universe: Revelation

This show certainly asks the unasked questions about the franchise, like...

Spoiler:

... what happens if Prince Adam does the speech without the sword in hand. The answer: he turns into a really big white dude with the physical restraint of a Hulk.

Just watched the front half of Cowboy Bebop. It's not the revelation that the original was, but then again I'm no longer a college kid watching fan-subbed imports on the projector in a university lecture hall alongside a large, enthusiastic audience. The "baby's asleep, don't wake her" vibe of the evening is going to make anything play differently.

I'm digging the music, new and old, though I kind of wish it was louder in the mix.

The three leads are excellent, and I like that they're given more time to play off each other here.

The character backstories are woven into the ongoing narrative rather than revelations to be sprung on the audience. Given that I already know (or at least kinda remember) them, I think the change suits the adaptation. I can understand how others might dislike this approach though.

I like the story they're trying to tell with the crime syndicate side of things, but the two main actors there aren't quite rising to the occasion.

Overall I'm enjoying it so far. It's much better than I expected based on some of the preview articles I saw.

I watched Arcane as soon as it came out, but I wanted to put some distance to tamp down the hype I felt as soon as the ending credits started rolling.

Yeah, no. Hype is still up. I'm not sure what they're doing, but Fortiche's Arcane is a showpiece of animation. It's not perfect by any means, but it has everything folks love about anime grounded in Western themes and stories. Furthermore, the visual vocabulary and finish is astounding. This is what 2D animation always wishes it could be but can't. It's the animation version of whatever Arc System Works is doing for 2D fighting games.

How?

It preserves the character, the flair, and the dynamism of 2D animation, but instead of playing limited animation tricks in order to make the funding work, it just animates every frame. Because it can. Instead of anime's emotional syntax of tropes and facial symbolism, it just portrays microexpressions. All of them. The non-verbal communication in Arcane is next-level. Amazingly, this appears to NOT be motion-capture. They apparently just animate every microexpression in every frame exactly as they want it. It's some kind of animation wizardry we've been working up to since the 2000s.

Not everyone will like the story. A lot of people actually really like Arcane, but it's probably not for everyone. But if you like animated works, you need to see this series. It's going to be a pivotal work in what we consider good for this sort of medium.

Finished the back half of Bebop. I'm interested to see where they take the second season, since they've used up a lot of the plotting that the anime handed them.

Was it predictable? I suppose, but I didn't care. I'm a pretty savvy viewer about such things and I don't really feel the need to limit my enjoyment to stories that can outsmart me. The fact that I saw things coming just meant they were well set up.

Also tragedy isn't about a surprise; it's about the inevitable doom that you see coming but the characters cannot escape.

Although I enjoyed Vicious and Julia's roles in this season, I hope their tale is finished. Maybe one of them shows up from time to time, but I don't want to follow them in their own plot like this season did.

They did Ein a disservice, but that's only a problem if they don't cross paths with him again. I imagine the logistical difficulty of working with an animal is what kept him off screen a bunch.

Whenever we saw a sky with Jupiter in it, it was gorgeous. Probably super unrealistic, but I loved it all the same.

Faye Valentine was a perfect adaptation of the original animated character to live action. Radical Edward felt like she was peeled right off an animation cell and deposited directly into the show. I don't know that I can handle that for a whole season. I hope they figure out how to adapt Ed just as they did Faye.

LarryC wrote:

I watched Arcane

[...]

It preserves the character, the flair, and the dynamism of 2D animation, but instead of playing limited animation tricks in order to make the funding work, it just animates every frame. Because it can.

I'd not noticed that when I watched the first episode. I'll have to pay closer attention when I finish it out. I find that particularly interesting given the Across the Spider-verse trailer just dropped. Into the Spider-verse deliberately did a lot of stuff at a low frame rate. They even did a bunch of stuff at 12 fps that would have been done at 24 when done traditionally by hand.

What is Arcane's frame rate, anyway? 24 frames is traditional "full rate" animation. 30 is in the same ballpark but suits American televisions better. 60 is what 1080p is "supposed" to be. But if they're shooting for 4k then did they go as high as 120? I don't know if there's a reason to actually go that high--TVs do because it cleanly displays 24 fps movies and 30 fps TV shows--but if anyone would do that as a flex it's Netflix and Riot...

Vargen wrote:

Finished the back half of Bebop. I'm interested to see where they take the second season, since they've used up a lot of the plotting that the anime handed them.

Was it predictable? I suppose, but I didn't care. I'm a pretty savvy viewer about such things and I don't really feel the need to limit my enjoyment to stories that can outsmart me. The fact that I saw things coming just meant they were well set up.

Also tragedy isn't about a surprise; it's about the inevitable doom that you see coming but the characters cannot escape.

Although I enjoyed Vicious and Julia's roles in this season, I hope their tale is finished. Maybe one of them shows up from time to time, but I don't want to follow them in their own plot like this season did.

They did Ein a disservice, but that's only a problem if they don't cross paths with him again. I imagine the logistical difficulty of working with an animal is what kept him off screen a bunch.

Whenever we saw a sky with Jupiter in it, it was gorgeous. Probably super unrealistic, but I loved it all the same.

Faye Valentine was a perfect adaptation of the original animated character to live action. Radical Edward felt like she was peeled right off an animation cell and deposited directly into the show. I don't know that I can handle that for a whole season. I hope they figure out how to adapt Ed just as they did Faye.

It's been awhile since I watched the anime, but I don't remember Ein having much of a role (outside of the episode they get him in) before Ed joins the crew and they pair up for hijinks. I think them planning to keep that is why he didn't get much screen time this season.

Vargen wrote:

I'd not noticed that when I watched the first episode. I'll have to pay closer attention when I finish it out. I find that particularly interesting given the Across the Spider-verse trailer just dropped. Into the Spider-verse deliberately did a lot of stuff at a low frame rate. They even did a bunch of stuff at 12 fps that would have been done at 24 when done traditionally by hand.

What is Arcane's frame rate, anyway? 24 frames is traditional "full rate" animation. 30 is in the same ballpark but suits American televisions better. 60 is what 1080p is "supposed" to be. But if they're shooting for 4k then did they go as high as 120? I don't know if there's a reason to actually go that high--TVs do because it cleanly displays 24 fps movies and 30 fps TV shows--but if anyone would do that as a flex it's Netflix and Riot...

I think it's 24. Into the Spiderverse evokes that animated feel by intentionally dropping or freezing frames. You can actually perceive that as a jerk-like motion or unevenness that you would be used to as a limited animation money-saving measure in 2D animation. But the odd thing is that Into the Spiderverse is otherwise fully 3D and otherwise evokes that 3D sensibility.

I specifically linked this to Arc System Work's workflow in their 2D fighters because that is also a work that you would swear are 2D sprites until they start doing weird things with the camera and then you realize it's been 3D the whole time.

So, from what I've been able to gather from Arc System Work's statements, Youtube content of known animators dissecting the 2D fighter, and articles on how it's done, it's more insane than what Into the Spiderverse did. Into the Spiderverse introduces limited animation quirks into its 3D animation in order to make it seem like it's hand-drawn. Arc System Works does it the other way around. It does also use limited animation tricks, but that's the start, not the end. Their workflow STILL creates the entire animation frame-by-frame as if it were hand-drawn. They're just using 3D tools and 3D models to enhance the process. So they not only introduce limited animation tricks, they also intentionally introduce little imperfections of angle and perspective that a 2D artist would do, sometimes unintentionally, and sometimes as part of a style diary.

It looks to me like Arcane just does away with limited animation tricks. They just produce the entire thing frame-by-frame, period. It looks like a literal animated French comic because that is literally exactly what it is. They use the computers to enable brute-forcing the process.

LarryC wrote:

It looks to me like Arcane just does away with limited animation tricks. They just produce the entire thing frame-by-frame, period. It looks like a literal animated French comic because that is literally exactly what it is. They use the computers to enable brute-forcing the process.

They've been doing and iterating on the process they do for almost a decade now. Arcane and future shows is the culmination of all that work.

The visual spectacle of Arcane was amazing, but honestly, the best part about that show was the LITERATURE. It really was a masterpiece of storytelling. The story arcs of all of the characters are believable, even the ones that are over the top.

This is very spoilery, so only watch it if you have seen it already.

It had a real feeling of Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo to it.

You're selling Spider-verse short, but I'm not sure this is the thread for that conversation as it isn't on Netflix any more.

Arcane also has the best gym playlist.

Vargen wrote:

You're selling Spider-verse short, but I'm not sure this is the thread for that conversation as it isn't on Netflix any more.

I think it's still on in my region, so you're free to discuss.

Watched Kate and loved it. I did get a little lost at the end but I still liked it. Loved the look, loved the fights, and even liked the car scene nobody else will like. It was almost a cyberpunk movie without being a cyberpunk movie.

I enjoyed Red Notice for the silliness and fun, but it could have used 3 or 4 more double-crosses to be really interesting.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

Watched Kate and loved it. I did get a little lost at the end but I still liked it. Loved the look, loved the fights, and even liked the car scene nobody else will like. It was almost a cyberpunk movie without being a cyberpunk movie.

I really enjoyed Kate and I think MEW sells the grizzled fighter better than lots of action stars. It's in her eyes. And combined with the action stuff she did for Gemini Man--an otherwise hamfisted movie--I really want to see her in more of this kind of stuff. (I may rewatch Birds of Prey.)

---

I watched The Platform and I don't know if this already made the recommendation rounds but I really dug it. It should be said that (trigger warnings spoilered):

Spoiler:

- a dog is murdered
- several humans are murdered
- there is a suicide

and it is very gruesome. It doesn't feel gratuitous, because it's all in service of making the movie's unsubtle points. This isn't an Eli Roth venture.

Selling Sunset is a show about a guy named Jason Oppenheimer playing with his Barbie dolls.

Since season 1, I've felt like I was missing a piece of the puzzle. In season 4, the underlying nature of what's going on becomes much more apparent.

Netflix cancels Cowboy Bebop. Guess it shouldn't be too surprising.

Rat Boy wrote:

Netflix cancels Cowboy Bebop. Guess it shouldn't be too surprising.

I gotta be honest, Netflix have cancelled better shows than it, so it's not unexpected.

They've also let worst shows have extended runs so what do I know.

That's too bad. People complaining about this show are why we cannot have nice things. I am glad we got what we got at least.

IMAGE(https://c.tenor.com/wIxFiobxxbIAAAAd/john-jonah-jameson-lol.gif)

...yeah, that must be it.