With the growing popularity of Netflix instant streaming in the U.S. and its most recent arrival into Canada, we at Row Three would like to highlight some of the great choices available at the press of a button.

To Die For (Gus Van Sant)

One of those little films that I’d been meaning to catch up with and had yet to find the time for, I finally sat down and while cruising through the recommended titles, came upon Van Sant’s crime comedy about a woman with too many aspirations. Starring Nicole Kidman in the lead role of Suzanne Stone, the weather girl with dreams of bigger things, I was surprised to find a supporting cast of stars in the making including Joaquin Phoenix and Casey Affleck. I really didn’t know what to expect and was surprised by the amount of comedy splattered through the film but Kidman’s cold determination is the main appeal and she pulls it off beautifully.
MARINA
 

it! (Canada)

Red Road (Andrea Arnold)

Being blown away but Arnold’s Fish Tank, the time seemed ripe to check out her previous film. I remember when Red Road had a theatrical run in Vancouver a few years ago – the poster was haunting but there was always something more pressing to see and it came and went before I had a chance to see it. If I’d only known that I was missing out on one of the best new voices in film. Arnold’s thriller is magnetic. From the opening scene, it’s clear that Arnold is working on another level and her control of the story, characters and pacing is extraordinary. At every turn she reveals another piece of the puzzle and yet, when Jackie comes up with a plan, it’s not clear how that plan will unfold until the actions appear on screen. I love that Arnold plays her cards close and has faith that the audience is following along on the edge of their seats, waiting to see how things will play out and when they do, it’s a devastating, emotional blow. Brilliant.
MARINA
 

it! (USA & Canada)

Rodan (Ishiro Honda)

Two years after unleashing Godzilla on the world, Ishiro Honda gives us the story of the Rodan – a prehistoric species similar to the pterodactyl. Unfrozen from the depths of the Earth due to the silly humans testing their atomic explosions, the flying Rodan had a leg up on their cousins the pterodactyls by being able to fly at “supersonic” speeds and destroy pretty much anything it came across just by passing over it. As you can imagine, that presents a problem to the puny humans. The Rodan (a pair of them hatch in deep coal mines and make their way to the surface) are terrorizing the entirety of SouthEast Asia so the military pull out the big stops to crush the beasts. But wait! There’s more! Along with the Rodan, the atomic testing has also kickstarted huge centipede-like creatures that also enjoy creating havoc above ground. They’ve snacked on dozens of people before the Rodan even hatch from their monstrous eggs, so its like a double creature-feature packed into 72 minutes. Over 50 years old, the special effects in these Toho monster films are still wonderfully inventive and fun. If they occasionally fail to hide the “guy in a big rubber monster suit” aspects, they still manage to integrate them well enough into the miniature villages and vehicles that you easily go along with it while also being amused by it. The effects are particularly strong during several long shots of the caterpillars and the Rodan hatching from its egg. Without these scenes, though, “Rodan” would pretty much crumble into terrible cheesy B-movie territory. The version available is the American dubbed version which apparently also adds useless narration, cuts out several special effects and pads in extra filler to make up the lost time (including some sloppy usage of the same footage in forward and reverse).
BOB
 

it! (USA & Canada)

We Live in Public (Ondi Timoner)

To whet your appetite for Ondi’s recent documentary, Cool It!, take a moment and watch her prior work on the greatest internet pioneer you never heard of, Josh Harris. We Live in Public is not merely a chronicle of a dot.com internet guru, but something more tantalizing: a social experiment within a social experiment. On one level we are shown the ‘social experiments’ that Josh Harris inflicts upon himself and those following in his wake, experiments which are part performance art, part prophecy, all hinging upon the heightened potentials of surveillance and exhibitionism posed by the arrival of the internet. The film itself becomes a social experiment, indicting its audience as they voyeuristically take part in Josh’s life, and by calling to mind the ways our commonplace social networking habits are nearly as insidious as his. Would work nicely as a double feature with Fincher’s The Social Network.
MIKE
 

it! (USA & Canada)

Mammoth (Lukas Moodysoon)

There is a palpable agitation in cinema these days over the state of the global market, and the dissolution of the American Dream (everything from Up in the Air, Capitalism: A Love Story, Collapse, and Wendy and Lucy). Mammoth fits squarely among them. I like me some melodrama, and I like me some Iñárritu melodrama, but Babel took it too far (the nanny in the desert played like parody). Mammoth cuts that fat off and gives you the straight drama along with an incredible soundtrack and convincing character development with strong performances by Michelle Williams and Gael García Bernal. Mammoth is not just about a couple characters, it is about an entire way of life (spanning an apartment in Soho to a Filipino dumpsite). This can all too easily become condescending or pretentious (a high-wire act that fails more often than succeeds) so it is all the more surprising to me how well Moodysoon pulls it off. From the Walmart-ification of society to the shallowness of the “American Dream”, the characters of Mammoth are all feeling this con, like a sixth sense they know they are in a cosmic imbalance, even if they cannot fully articulate it.
MIKE
 

it! (USA & Canada)

Triangle (Christopher Smith)

I suppose it’s best not to say too much about Christopher Smith’s gem of a sci-fi thriller since its strengths lie in the little surprises around each corner and the many breadcrumbs it drops along the way to allow the viewer to find their way around. You can see many of those surprises coming after you’ve established the basic idea of what’s happening, but I still found each one satisfying and enough to string me along until the next one. Melissa George does a fine job playing the mother of an autistic child who is caught in a “situation”…It’s a treadmill of sorts and she can’t find a way out. Her struggle is palpable and made more so due to the nature of her daily existence. It’s an enjoyable ride and a prime example of how to make a movie that will prompt you throughout to think “what would I do?”.
-BOB
 

it! (Canada)

Contact (Robert Zemeckis)

One of the more thoughtful Science Fiction films I can recall of the past fifteen years. Partly because the fiction postulated here (through most of the film) is mostly based on a very real possibility. How might society react to the first positive proof of life on other worlds? And not hokey flying saucers or little green men with laser beams, but the proof lies in a simple retransmitting of one of Earth’s first broadcasts of any real strength. Carl Sagan’s novel comes to devastatingly and fantastically close to realism on the screen with one of my favorite opening sequences of all time, a bevy of philosophic and scientific conundrums and ideas, all backed up by a fantastic cast that includes Tom Skerritt, William Fichtner, James Woods, Angela Bassett, David Morse, John Hurt, Matthew McConaughey and of course the great Jodi Foster.
- ANDREW
 

it! (USA)

Punch-Drunk Love (P.T. Anderson)

Probably overlooked at first by a lot of people based on the lead being played by Adam Sandler. “Probably another Little Nicky,” they said. Well it couldn’t be further from the truth; this is a refreshing remedy to the dismal tide of mediocre romantic comedies that permeate our multi-plexes. Sandler puts on the performance of a lifetime and Anderson directs this “quirky-is-an-understatement” picture into a best of the year level masterpiece. PDL is a difficult film to put into a box; it unwinds at a rather slow pace as phone-sex lines are used imprudently and empty pudding boxes begin stacking up. The lead takes many of the insecurities and eccentricities we find in all of us, multiplies them by ten and amps them up to eleven creating a reflective art film reflecting the lives and thoughts of the alienated, unloved, and unknown members of society living among us. Creativity in Hollywood rarely reaches these heights.
- ANDREW
 

it! (USA)