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?
What It's About: Two parents still reeling over the tragic death of their young child find a genie and wish for cash.
Who It's For: Delusional orphans and Louis Gossett Jr. superfans.
While I rarely trust the opinions of the Netflix user community, sometimes the member reviews are exactly what draw me in. It certainly worked in the case of The Lamp. "5 Stars: They had me at Louis Gossett Jr! Wonderful cast, wonderful story and something the whole family can learn from." You had me at they had me at Louis Gossett Jr.! Mr. Gossett Jr. is a notorious deal-closer in Hollywood. They say only two men's names can get a project green-lit regardless of the content or the cost: Steven Spielberg, and Louis Gossett Jr. "Say no more. Sold." That is what the fat cats in Tinselwood say when someone pitches them a movie starring Louis Gossett Jr.
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?
My Fake Fiancé
What It's About: Two misanthropes stage a sham wedding in order to grift money and presents off everyone who has ever cared for them.
Who It's For: Men and women who hate either women or men. Melissa & Joey completists.
"Not another wedding!" This is the auspicious first line of dialogue in My Fake Fiancé, which should really be called We Are Both Fake Fiancés. I presume the reason it's not called that is because our society is not ready for the plural of the word fiancé. Or maybe because the title, like everything else in this film, was given only passing thought, the seeming product of an all-night don't-lift-your-pencils free-write with an attitude of outright disgust toward revision, logic or likeability. (I imagine many of the things I'll write about in this column will have a similar vibe, so I should probably make peace with it soon.)
