Netflix/Amazon Prime Recommendations Thread

The best that Netflix and Amazon have to offer, reviewed for you by real people.

Recentlyish I've watched:

Ozark (Netflix) top notch, well worth a look

Halt and Catch Fire (Amazon) again, excellent stuff

Godless (Netflix) not bad, a bit drawn out in places but worth seeing.

Anyone seen anything decent recently?

 

Both look like good shouts tbh

 

Ozark is a great shout. Only 1 season so far on Netflix, they've just been given the green light for a second.

US TV dramas tend to have the compulsion to make the male characters jump through hoops to keep the female characters happy, for example in Breaking Bad a lot of the tension is derived from the main character needing to perform all kinds of antics in order to hide his activities from his wife, but Ozark completely pulls the rug out from under the female character from the get-go.

She couldn't just order him around, guilt-trip him or bend him to her will, she'd been completely compromised and was in the shit just as much as he was and they both knew it.

The talk they have in the car together at the start of episode 2 was one of the finest written in TV drama history, it set up their dynamic brilliantly. It's just a great show, well worth a watch.

 

I saw this film on a recommendation as well, the first thing I was struck with was the similarities between this and the 2011 film "Drive" with Ryan Gosling.

2011's Drive was about a highly talented young male getaway driver, a quiet and moody person that keeps himself to himself until he meets a nice young waitress (played by a British actress) who gets him to open up a bit.

He agrees to "one last big job" but the job goes wrong and he ends up getting himself and his girlfriend embroiled in a terrible life-threatening maelstrom that requires some super driving skills to avoid being killed or captured by the mob and/or the police.

Whereas "Baby Driver" was about a highly talented young male getaway driver, a quiet and moody person that keeps himself to himself until he meets a nice young waitress (played by a British actress) who gets him to open up a bit.

He agrees to "one last big job" but the job goes wrong and he ends up getting himself and his girlfriend embroiled in a terrible life-threatening maelstrom that requires some super driving skills to avoid being killed or captured by the mob and/or the police.

Joking aside, Baby Driver is a clever film, with a unique style and a cool soundtrack and a bunch of good performances from some fine actors.

I just wonder when we'll stop making films about young men who think that driving like arseholes all over town is a thing to aspire to.

 

Just finished Season 1 of MINDHUNTER on Netflix and I have to say it is brilliant, one of the best shows out there.

Based on the true crime book Mind Hunter: Inside The FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, it's not action packed, not even particularly gory considering the subject theme, there's no gay sex scene half way into the first episode and no 20-something Chinese girl inexplicably kicking the arses of a dozen henchmen either.

What you get is finely crafted writing on an interesting topic, well cast and acted. You might even consider it slow-paced but that's all part of it, this is one of the shows where it really pays to pay attention.

These days we take for granted the idea of an horrific murder being investigated using behavioural sciences to build a profile of the killer in an attempt to prevent them from killing again but in the 60's and 70's it was completely unheard of.

Convicted killers weren't assessed in any way to discover their frame of mind or to see what could be learned from them until this unit was set up by the FBI to do exactly that.

What follows is a steep learning curve for the FBI agents, having to devise an entire branch of investigation as they go, where the term "serial killer" isn't even coined until halfway through the 9th episode (of 10)

It also chronicles the effect that this line of work has on the agents and how they handle skirting the thin line between having a theory about who and how a person was killed and coercing a confession from a suspect that may not be guilty.

Well worth a watch if you're interested in this kind of psychology and seeing the first tentative steps of a new science being created.