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further experiments in driving writers insane

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QUEUE REVIEW

We Found It on Watch Instantly: Death Race 2 With Ving Rhames

By Max Silvestri at


Each week, Netflix Watch Instantly adds hundreds of new titles. Four or five are movies you want to watch, some are bad TV shows or camp classics, and most make no sense at all. Those in the latter category are puzzling: not bad enough to be good and certainly not good enough to be interesting. In this column, comedian Max Silvestri will review a new film on Netflix Watch Instantly and ask, what is this?

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We Found It on Watch Instantly: Emmanuelle Chriqui in Waltzing Anna

By Max Silvestri at

What It's About: A corrupt elderly caregiver is sentenced to give more care to the elderly at a nursing home, which is filled with different types of characters and lessons.

Who It's For: The guy who has to cut the sizzle reel for the writer/actor's funeral video.

When I first spoke with the Grantland folks about Netflix Watch Instantly, I stressed that I wanted to focus on a very certain kind of title. Yes, campy genre films offer many things to talk about, and so too do terrible mainstream movies, but nothing interested me as much as the profoundly and deeply mediocre things I write about here. They exist in a spooky Middle Place. (You'd need a tesseract to travel there alone.) Movies, from everything I've read, are very hard to make. Not difficult necessarily, but they absolutely require many different people saying yes, many different times. "Is this script good enough? Should we cast the guy whose face and neck look like that to play someone handsome? Can I please have more money so we can do a scene near a lake?" Mediocre movies are fascinating, because why would anyone bother?

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