We need a netflix streaming thread.

I watched MI:GP and thought it sucked. Apparently I'm in the minority compared to the rest of the interwebs. I think quality television shows are ruining so-so movies for me.

Yeah, I put MI:GP as just mediocre, not terrible, but not great either.

I watched Occupation: Fighter. A documentary following a MMA fighter. It was interesting, reminded me of the days when I used to go to a MMA gym regularly. Closest I got to anything was being one of the many grunts the trained fighter spars with for endurance, where they pretty much line'em up against everyone in the gym.

Decided to finally watch this! And Wolverine and the X-Men! (I was too stung by the decision not to renew XMEvo to ever watch Wolverine.)

It's pretty funny so far, but man, it's gonna be hard to get over the fact that Peter Parker looks so goddam much like Ethan from Ctrl+Alt+Del.

Hahah, that got me at first too, because I hate Ctrl+Alt+Del so much.

I guess they added Miller's Crossing and The Usual Suspects.

You should go watch them if you haven't.

Awwwww yiss. Time to cross another one off my Coen Brothers list.

This said while the fighter in question nods knowingly right next to the chiropractor.

Jesus. One thing I really appreciate about that documentary (I'm only halfway done with it right now) is that it's refreshingly non-macho. For a documentary covering a sport where two men beat the shit out of each other, it's surprisingly thoughtful & down to earth. Everybody involved seems to be aware of the dangers, and the fighter even has the good grace to praise his opponent in an upcoming fight.

Yeah, fighters who no longer fight are full of crazy injuries. My Thai instructor, his knee just started to swell up something fierce for like a month, and he swapped to crutches. His response, "Oh yeah, it does that sometimes."

I re-signed with Netflix for another free 30 day trial to see how things have changed since I dropped them when they went to their split pricing plan. They seem to have changed, but not necessarily for the better. There are scant few movies to be streamed on Netflix, so it appears unless you're looking for a documentary or a TV series, Netflix isn't all that great. Don't get me wrong, I've watched a handful of movies since signing up (Downfall, The Fighter, some Transformers thing with my kid), but I'm surprised at how little there is on streaming. Chrismas Vacation? No. Ferris Bueler? No. 300? No. So on and so forth. I doubt I'll keep it more than the free 30 days, but is there anything I really must see during this trial period?

This, at least, was up during, well, Christmas. When Quackers and I did a bunch of Christmas movie nights in the week leading up to the holiday, this was actually the only goddam Christmas movie Netflix had that I was in the slightest bit interested in seeing. I was surprised they didn't even have Elf or Home Alone. They're all over the place. I'm pretty sure that during the Christmas season the Weather channel shows Elf a few times.

Drive, Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol, Adventures of Tin Tin, The Man From Nowhere, Goon, Batman: Under the Red Hood, Trollhunter, 13 Assassins, Town Called Panic, Bronson, Tucker and Dale v Evil, lots of other stuff too.

I'm mostly rewatching Red Dwarf right now though, man I forgot about Kryten being played by a different actor at first.

This will always make me think of clitoris.

I've discovered I can't go in to Netflix to watch a movie if I have something specific in mind. Usually I'll try and put things I either eventually want to watch in my queue, or just start browsing and discover something new. (Oh hello there MI:3 directed by JJ Abrams, I missed you back when you came out. Sure!) If I look for specific things I end up watching nothing, but if I'm open I find a good new movie usually. That and a lot of TV episodes of various shows.

I have whittled my way down to a mere 120 items in my queue, only about 10 of which are TV shows. Yeah, it doesn't have everything, but I supplement it with occasionally getting something from Redbox (mostly when they send me a free movie code). But yeah, if I sat down with a list of movies that I wanted to see specifically, chances are Netflix wouldn't have many of them.

We watched the first of the Doctor Who Classics. It was really bad. By the end we were both playing handheld games and only listening with one ear. They even left it on a cliffhanger, but neither one of us cared enough to watch the next one.

Then we tried My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic to see what this brony thing is all about. Again it left off on a cliffhanger, but neither of us cared enough to watch the next one.

I've been watching Archer episodes for a week or two when I can. My wife hates it. I laugh.

Is anyone watching House of Cards, the US version? I'm midway through the first episode and it's really good so far.

I really, really wish Netflix had a filter to just not show me anything I've already seen through their service. Especially anything in "New Releases" or "Recently Added". Speaking of which, what happened to that latter category, it seems to have disappeared, which is a shame.

That's good to hear, I'm interested in watching it my own self. :)

I still have the Recently Added as of the last time I checked, which was maybe a week ago.

Mine seems to give me a random set of categories, sometimes I don't even get my Instant Queue among them, which is always the most annoying.

Same, but I almost always get "Newly released" and "Popular"

Just started the second episode. It's decent, being carried by some solid performances so far.

One of the worst things about Netflix is the lack of a standardized interface. Your experience depends on what your content box gives you, and some of those guys suck hard at designing that intelligently.

I just want more options, how hard would it be for them to filter the "Recommended for you" section so that it at least doesn't give me 10 movies I've already seen, which makes it a useless category to ever look at. I would also love the option to have it never show me any WWE wrestling stuff, and the stand-up comedies really should be in their own damn category.

Strangely enough, I hate not being able to see where exactly I am in the movie. Sometimes I'll take note of a scene I want to rewatch later, and I have to hover over the time bar to get the time, because the only thing the interface shows me otherwise is how much time is left in the movie.

It also does a really shitty job of tracking which shows in a series I've already seen, which is pretty annoying, thought this may be due to my browser clearing all cookies on quit.

It shouldn't have anything to do with cookies, since it tracks across devices (useful since I also watch stuff via XBox and NDS).

Then I guess it's just a little fucked.

This is very true. For example, the Netflix app on our 'smart' TV just dumps all available episodes into one long list rather than sorting them by season. If the show has more than 100 total episodes, you're only shown an arbitrary subset of 100 episodes, apparently picked at random. WTF.

So, I finished Ultimate Spider-Man season 1. Wow, that show is awesome. The comparison to Family Guy seems like an insult, but it really does have a similar format, where Spidey is perfectly willing to address the audience and the show regularly goes to completely kooky shorts detailing hilarious situations. Hell, it even has its own version of Mayor Adam West in the form of janitor Stan Lee. And the show pulls deep. It's a love letter to Marvel Comics written by a group of lunatics. You'll have an episode which references Ultra Man, Forbush Man, Galactus and Doop all in a row. And despite the fact that the big regulars, Peter, Harry, May and MJ are all white, most of the rest of the main cast, including Nick Fury and the rest of Spidey's hero team are pretty multi-ethnic. Additionally, not a one of the female characters is a damsel. White Tiger is the most capable member of the team (even though at the end of the day Spidey's always the main character), MJ can defend herself and even old Aunt May has more to do with her life than sitting at home and worrying about Peter. The show is fantastic. My highest recommendation for anyone, but especially for Marvel fans who can deal with some (a lot of) comedy in their stories.

I'm following it up with Wolverine and the X-Men, a show I refused to watch out of bitterness for the show it replaced having been canceled. I loved X-Men Evolution and even though it got three seasons, I wanted it to get more! It was certainly better than the 90s X-Men cartoon, goddammit. W&tXM is a pretty okay show. The animation isn't up to DCAU levels and Wolverine does a lot more snarling than he should, but I'm about halfway through and I'm enjoying it. It's no X-Men Evolution or Ultimate Spider-Man, much less Batman TAS, plotwise, but it's a surprisingly dark show that pulls from Astonishing X-Men and Days of Future Past and creates its own continuity. Hell, they even create a reasonable explanation for why Cyclops isn't leading the team. I'm disappointed that there's no season 2 of this one, apparently Havok was going to be in it, but I've got another ten episodes or so before the end, so hopefully they wrap it all up.

Thanks to Brian Rubin, Quackers and I have been rewatching the West Wing. It's funny how regularly we think to ourselves 'man, this show is still relevant'. Especially when gun control comes up. Then out of the blue they have an episode with a health care act where they are upset that the Republicans want to push an agenda where doctors have to teach about adoption as much as they talk about abortion and the cast are all 'oh, this is draconian!' and I think 'Jesus, those were the good ol' days.' Also, watching this show on a big screen with the show in wide screen (despite the fact that it originally aired in 3:4) really demonstrates how bad their stock footage is when they do a flyover of DC or an external shot of the White House. Still, this show is fucking fantastic and my memory is right. We just finished season 2 and I know it's all downhill from here. Even if season 3 is still high quality, I think the finale of season 2, Two Cathedrals, has two sequences that could easily make my top ten list for best moments in television history. I had the first two seasons on DVD and have seen them in the past few years, but haven't seen anything after that since it first aired and nothing after the middle of season 4 or so, so this is mostly new. I know Sorkin leaves and it all kind of goes downhill, but even so it's all new and it's Josh and the President and I love this show.

Wolverine & The X-Men was surprisingly good. And you've convinced me that it's about time to give Ultimate Spider-Man a shot.

Yaaaay! And don't fret, season 4 is still great, season 5 is the rough patch, but it picks back up around the last 3rd of the season (keep an eye out for Glen Close and William Fitchner, their episode is AWESOME), then seasons six and seven are pretty great. We're in the midst of season 7 now and holy shit is it amazing. :) Enjoy!

If you are hard core set on what defines spidey, it's definitely off-canon and can be a bit jarring. It totally felt like a PG Deadpool series to me.

I'm a comics fan, therefore I'm flexible on what I enjoy and don't stick to fanboy conceits of "what defines a character" as if it's invariable.

This is an odd caveat. Every single non-comics entity based on the comics is 'off-canon'. Young Justice. Wolverine and the X-Men. Batman TAS. Teen Titans. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2. Hell, The Avengers and Spider-Man 3 and The Dark Knight Rises.

Spidey has been in seven different cartoon series (eight if you count Spider-Man as separate from Spider-Man Unlimited) a live action show and two different film series and none of them are in the same continuity. USM is still about a kid who gets bit by a spider and becomes a superhero. Nick Fury is still the leader of a super-espionage force, even if he's played a bit more for jokes. Spoiler alert, Norman Osborne is still the Green Goblin.

I wish USM had the Shocker running gag that the comic did. Though it basically has the same with the Trapster. I just wish they'd called him Paste Pot Pete. I mean ... so many jokes!

West Wing season four isn't as good as the first three and the fifth season is a pretty rough ride. I think Leo never really recovers, the writers give him an overnight personality change. However it gets back into its stride in season six, especially when the writers move the drama away from Sorkin's space and start doing their own thing. I think season seven is the equal of the early seasons, if different in tone.

Probably too late now, but they just put up Ferris Bueller.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is up on streaming now, in the US anyway, dunno about anywhere else (link).



Netflix describes the movie this way:
"Inner-city dweller Ghost Dog rises above the chaos that surrounds him by adopting the strict lifestyle of the samurai warrior."

It's a hitman movie, starring Forest Whitaker. Fans of hitmen, samurai warriors, Forest Whitaker, and cool soundtracks should consider giving this one a spin.

You forgot pigeons.

I didn't want to give everything away.