Tiger King is a cross-section of so many genres that its impact on the zeitgeist was perhaps a foregone conclusion.
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There is so much care, thought and detail put into the show it’s mesmerizing even on second watch. The era-specific cars, restaurants, technology and social issues is compelling television. This is absolutely Fincher’s doing, whose characters are often investigators, and by extension pays a lot of attention to details in his scenes.
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The show isn’t all bad because at the very least I felt compelled to finish it. I appreciate its ambitious international slant, speaking Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian and Gaelic, and the fight choreography is fast and vicious, mostly thanks to Uwais, perhaps the closest thing we have to a Jackie Chan or Jet Li in western cinema. The food looks good, too.
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True North Streaming is a semi-regular column highlighting some of the best new additions to Netflix’s Canadian service. Like many of you, every so often I get a pleasant surprise when I discover a cool movie or TV show that’s just popped up on Netflix’s often-maligned sister platform. These posts will help you filter through the often quirky mix of Netflix Canada’s offerings and find the most valuable ways to waste some time.
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Now with its new season (or “part”, as Netflix bills it) available after a three-year hiatus, the show remains an impossible-to-classify item in the platform’s catalogue, a show that makes you sound a bit crazy when you try to describe it.
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Triple Frontier, with its all-male cast of ex-special forces operatives who decide to rob a drug dealer's stash of cash, made you believe with its marketing that it was an action shoot 'em up with cliched one-liners about duty, honour and how their own society has rejected them as a bunch of marginal contributors.
That's not this movie.
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True North Streaming is a semi-regular column highlighting some of the best new additions to Netflix’s Canadian service. Like many of you, every so often I get a pleasant surprise when I discover a cool movie or TV show that’s just popped up on Netflix’s often-maligned sister platform. These posts will help you filter through the often quirky mix of Netflix Canada’s offerings and find the most valuable ways to waste some time.
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It’s hard to intuit much of a thought process behind any of this, and Claire’s opponents are no better organized in their attacks. Claire claims this is all intentional, an effort to obscure her true plan, but instead it just reads like the writers losing track of things.
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True North Streaming is a semi-regular column highlighting some of the best new additions to Netflix’s Canadian service. Like many of you, every so often I get a pleasant surprise when I discover a cool movie or TV show that’s just popped up on Netflix’s often-maligned sister platform. These posts will help you filter through the often quirky mix of Netflix Canada’s offerings and find the most valuable ways to waste some time.
And with that, in no particular order…
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Now, after another five years and a controversial and largely ineffective re-edit of Season 4 by Hurwitz, Netflix has brought eight new episodes of Arrested to the masses, forming the first half of a two-part Season 5. Out of due diligence, I decided to re-watch the entire series from the beginning before tackling the new episodes, including the remixed 2013 block. And while I came away feeling slightly better about the overall state of the Netflix revival than I had before, Hurwitz and his team have yet to recapture the manic energy and densely layered stories of the first three seasons.
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And just as venerable franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars adapt to the changing times, Lost in Space has launched on Netflix in a shiny new production, looking to mirror the progressive ideals of the current cultural landscape. And even though some may argue that sci-fi is a saturated genre, Lost in Space – whose original version actually predates the original Trek by a year, hitting CBS in 1965 – does try to set itself apart. It keeps the focus not on the intrepid crew of Starfleet-esque officers, or on a rag-tag group of rebels taking down an evil empire, but on a family unit.
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True North Streaming is a semi-regular column highlighting some of the best new additions to Netflix’s Canadian service. Like many of you, every so often I get a pleasant surprise when I discover a cool movie or TV show that’s just popped up on Netflix’s often-maligned sister platform. These posts will help you filter through the often quirky mix of Netflix Canada’s offerings and find the most valuable ways to waste some time.
And with that, in no particular order…
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Sadly, despite the potential, what Jones delivers with Mute is a classic example of a passion project that should have stayed on the page. The film is admirably small-scale, when a lot of futuristic science fiction aims to make big statements about humanity. But taking a narrow, Black Mirror approach to the story can’t save it from an emotionally distant main character or a repetitive, fractured plot. At times, you can almost feel Jones waffling over what to include in his story: more of Alexander Skarsgård gazing listlessly at reused sets from Blade Runner 2049, or more of Paul Rudd’s obnoxious mustache.
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Such is the fate of The Cloverfield Paradox, a stunningly well-cast sci-fi based on a Black List script, which seems to have undergone so much re-tooling, at every stage of production, that it barely resembles a completed film. There are plenty of ideas on display here (literally: the film crams in quantum entanglement, meeting your doppelganger, outer-space espionage, an energy crisis, mind-controlling worms, and more). But most of the concepts are hurriedly introduced and then abandoned, leaving behind an experience that feels like a generic mashup of every sci-fi release from the past thirty years.
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True North Streaming is a semi-regular column highlighting some of the best new additions to Netflix’s Canadian service. Like many of you, every so often I get a pleasant surprise when I discover a cool movie or TV show that’s just popped up on Netflix’s often-maligned sister platform. These posts will help you filter through the often quirky mix of Netflix Canada’s offerings and find the most valuable ways to waste some time.
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