Volume 10 - Our Five Favourite Netflix Movies
It's January and it's shit. The weather here in London is grim and we're all poor.
A very negative start I know, but there's one shining light for me over winter. And that's the lack of guilt I feel when I bunker down indoors for a day and watch a film. A day off from work, warm inside your home, watching movies is a blissful thing. I had a day of this bliss recently, and was all ready to watch 'I, Tonya'. This movie has been on my watchlist for months but I'd never got round to watching it. Turns out it's no longer on Netflix and I'm still yet to watch it. Great.
So that brings me to this volume of Flaash Fuckeries. We talk movies a fair bit on Instagram and it seems most of you enjoy a good film as much as me. So here are my '5 Favourite Films Currently Available on Netflix Right Now'. Or FFFCAONRW for short. Nothing groundbreaking here but each one of these are definitely worthy of a rewatch if you've seen them before!
5. The Lighthouse (2019)
So listing this movie as one of my favourites is a stretch, but oh boy it's definitely worth a watch. Although it's definitely not for everyone, I can guarantee the imagery and symbolism will stick with you for days. The Lighthouse is superbly shot in black and white and marvellously acted by Willem Dafoe and Robert Patterson. The intense storyline places the two of them on a tiny island outpost off the coast of New England. The whole movie pretty much just features the two of them and captures the madness of isolation. It's really weird. But beautiful. If you love film then definitely give it a watch.
4. Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)
From the weirdly creepy and intense 'The Lighthouse' to the weirdly hilarious and lighthearted Fantastic Mr Fox. I love this movie, it's the perfect hangover cure. Wes Anderson brings the classic Roald Dahl book to life in the way of stop motion. Like every Wes Anderson movie it features his classic dry humour and picturesque shots. Featuring a star studded cast including George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray and our boy Willem Dafoe again. The story revolves around Mr Fox (George Clooney) breaking his wife's (Meryl Streep) promise and raiding local farms for chickens. The stop motion, talking animals and dry humour is such a great combo. Lastly, just the way the civilised family of foxes eat crack me up every time.
3. Nightcrawler (2014)
Can Jake Gyllenhall put a foot wrong? He's easily hands down my favourite actor at the moment. And like always he's great in this. He plays creepy social outcast 'Lou Bloom' (great name) who wheels and deals his way through life. Lou discovers there is money to be made by selling footage of grotesque accidents to news stations and makes this his passion. Lou Bloom's intense personality and absolute disregard of any ethics line will leave you scarily worried about the world media. It's a fast paced wild ride. A real fascinating watch.
2. Spirited Away (2001)
You can't have a Netflix list without at least one Studio Ghibli film being included. When Netflix announced in 2020 they would start showing Studio Ghibli films, I was stoked. I'd only seen a handful at the time and they were always enjoyable and the animation better than anything I'd seen. I've now made my way through most of them, which made choosing which Ghibli film to include in this list super difficult. (In fact we should probably do a whole Flaash Fuckeries post on Studio Ghibli.) In the end we settled on Spirited Away, arguably the most famous of the lot. I actually watched this again last night, and each time there's something else to marvel at, or some new spirit that cracks me up. The storyline follows Chihiro a ten year old girl who enters the spirit world of Kami to rescue her parents who have been turned into pigs by the witch Yubaba. It's weird, wonderful and if you don't enjoy subtitles the English voice acting is great.
1. Arrival (2016)
This movie blew me away. Maybe it was because I was expecting so little but it really did take me by surprise. I've watched it twice over the last month, and every time the topic of movies crop up in conversation I recommend it. Starring Amy Adams as a Linguistic expert, the film centres around 12 alien crafts landing on Earth. Adams' character Louise Banks is tasked with the job of establishing communication with the aircraft owners and the difficulties involved. Kind of like a race against the clock, Bank's needs to establish why the aircrafts have arrived on Earth before the world powers declare war. It's such a great twist on the alien movie genre and although it moves at a fairly slow pace, I was on the edge of my seat from start to finish. I think a lot of this is due to the haunting soundtrack and unreal cinematography.
So there you have it.
These are my favourite films on Netflix right now. Check them out before Netflix takes them away and let us know what movies we should have added!