Rocko's Modern Life: Static Cling Delivers A Delightful Return To O-Town

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Holy heck, Rocko's Modern Life is back! That beloved animated cartoon that aired on Nickelodeon in the 1990s has returned for a 45-minute special entitled Static Cling that, after being put on a shelf for multiple years, finally debuted on Netflix yesterday. Like many classic Nickelodeon projects, the original Rocko cartoon was widely praised for how it managed to resonate just as much with adults as it did with kids, the plights of Rocko and pals typically involved filtering mundane parts of circa. 1990s adulthood life, such as doing laundry, through a highly wacky cartoony visual sensibility. Such a balance is maintained for Static Cling under the direction of Cosmo Serguson and original show creator Joe Murray.

Find A Better Place To Stay Than The Red Sea Diving Resort

Remember the movie Million Dollar Arm? It was a May 2014 inspirational sports movie from Disney about three young male cricket players hailing from India who are recruited to be baseball players in America. They now have to adjust to an unfamiliar culture and the pressures placed on them to succeed in this specific world of sports. Despite having some fascinating challenges to overcome, they are not the lead characters of Million Dollar Arm. The lead character is Jon Hamm as the guy who recruits the trio of cricket players to come to America. His main struggle is figuring out how to score a date with his next-door neighbor Lake Bell. It's clear which characters have the more interesting story in Million Dollar Arm, but Hollywood has made it clear time and time again that the character with the white skin is always the one that gets to headline the story no matter how boring their tale is.

A Handy Guide to All The Upcoming Streaming Services

An image from the musical number "I Wanna Be Like You", a song title that perfectly sums up every media companies attitude towards Netflix

Now that Netflix streaming has changed how we all consume entertainment, everybody is getting in on the streaming game. We all know Amazon and Hulu also have their own streaming platform but there's also CBS All-Access, IFC Unlimited, Shudder and so many more. It's a lucrative market that many high-profile companies will be attempting to enter in the next year. But it's not a foolproof one, just ask Yahoo! Screen or YouTube Premium. With so many new players entering the world of streaming, it's inevitable that somebody is gonna come up short.

Below, I've compiled the major upcoming streaming services, who owns them, what kind of content they'll host and what possible problems they'll have to face. Let's begin with one of the most high-profile of these new entries into the streaming game...

Knock Down the House Is An Inspirational And Humanizing Exploration of American Politics

Let's not sugar-coat it, the last week of American politics has been a particularly vicious form of disheartening, which is saying something given how the last two-and-a-half years have been the physical manifestation of a nightmare. We need an ounce of hope wherever we can get it and goodness knows movies have always functioned as a go-to format for providing stories that offer up some hope to the world in times of crisis. For the Rachel Lears feature film Knock Down the House (which is now streaming on Netflix), hope is offered through a documentary that follows a quarter of female politicians looking to shake the status quo in American politics.

Like Many of the Best Time Travel Tales, See You Yesterday Merges Sci-Fi With Intimate Human Experiences

There are plenty of drawbacks to Netflix's method of releasing its movies with little in the way of prominent promotion but it also has its benefits, most notably in how it can lead to the fun experience of a whole bunch of people across the world discovering and enjoying a new Netflix original movie and watching them spread the word about it across social media. Watching that word-of-mouth work to turn a previously unknown film into something everybody's talking is utterly fascinating to watch. If there's any justice in the world, the cleverly concocted time travel tale See You Yesterday will be the next Netflix film to receive that kind of treatment from audiences.

Triple Frontier, Thankfully, Evokes Treasure of the Sierra Madre More Than Lone Survivor

MILD SPOILERS WITHIN

According to Santiago Garcia (Oscar Isaac), it's time to get the band back together. By band, I'm referring to Garcia and his group of former soldier buddies which used to consist of Captain Tom Davis (Ben Affleck), Captain William Miller (Charlie Hunnam), Ben Miller (Garrett Hedlund) and Francisco Morales (Pedro Pascal). All five of these men, in addition to being the lead characters of the new Netflix motion picture Triple Frontier, served the U.S. during extensive tours of military duty that saw them all taking all kinds of injuries but now, with all of that in the past, all of them (sans Garcia, who's working in Brazil trying to track down a drug lord) have returned to conventional civilian lives full of woes ranging from financial issues to run-in's with the law.

Merging The Direction of Steven Soderbergh With An Excellent Tarell Alvin McCraney Script Make High Flying Bird A Winner

Steven Soderbergh may have "retired" for a brief period in the mid-2010s, but he's now managed to deliver three more directorial efforts in the span of 18 months starting with 2017's delightful comedy Logan Lucky. The newest effort in his return to directing see's Soderbergh going to the land that so many filmmakers are traveling to these days to get their movies made: Netflix. After his attempt to shake up theatrical distribution with is last two films and the Fingerprint Releasing label, Soderbergh's decided to just unleash his newest movie, High Flying Bird, as well as his next directorial effort (the Meryl Streep vehicle The Laundromat) for the streaming service that managed to really kick its original movie game into high gear last year.

Art Comes To Dangerous Life In Velvet Buzzsaw

The main characters of Velvet Buzzsaw are just not good people. With the exception of supporting players Damrish (Daveed Diggs) and Coco (Natalie Dyer), most of the people we meet here are utterly rotten, acting selfishly for personal gain in their quest to get ahead in the Los Angeles art scene. Most prominent among these characters are art critic Mort Vandewalt (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Josephina (Zawe Ashton), the latter of whom gets her big break after breaking into a deceased painter's apartments and stealing some paintings that the painter wished to have destroyed. Josephina decides to go in a different direction and proceeds to champion them as an exhibit that immediately becomes massively successful.

We Didn't Start The Fyre, That's All Billy McFarland's Doing

The Fyre Festival is a constant creator of turmoil, even when the saga behind this music festival sham is chronicled in documentary form, there must be chaos in the form of competing documentaries and valid concerns about the creative integrity of Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened A.K.A. the one Fyre documentary that's on Netflix. Said creative integrity pertains to how crucial behind-the-scenes individuals involved with this documentary are also those who had a stake in the company involved in the Fyre Festival, which could make this documentary more of a PR move rather than a glimpse into what informed the madness of this music festival gone haywire.

Shirkers Is A Fascinating Exploration of A Cinematic Passion Project That Never Was

I've mentioned before how Netflix really did just crush it in terms of the quality of their original movie output in the last three months of 2018 and easily rising towards the top of that stellar crop of movies (which really is quite the feat!) is the documentary Shirkers. Directed by Sandi Tan, the feature is named after a motion picture she made with her friends and a film teacher mentor, Georges Cardona, in Singapore in the early 1990s. She poured her heart and soul into this film, all of her passion for cinema drove her to complete something that hadn't really been seen before in the film industry of her home country of Singapore.

Bird Box's Better Aspects Get Let Down By An Overly Convoluted Script

Over the course of the last few days, Bird Box has become one of the most talked-about movies of the moment, with memes (which seem to be coming from genuine real-life people despite early reports to the contrary) centered around the movie popping up everywhere and Netflix bragging about their record-breaking viewership numbers for the film. Well, I guess since the internet is now so abuzz with so much talk regarding Susanne Brier's new movie Bird Box, I suppose now is the time for me to pen down my thoughts on the motion picture, which I never could have imagined generating so much widespread conversation, for good and for ill.

Roma Is A Showcase For Impressive Camerawork And A Similarly Superb Performance From Yalitza Aparicio

For his 21st century directorial efforts, Alfonso Cuaron has gone big in scale. He's helmed films about time-traveling wizards, a post-apocalyptic chase movie and also a struggle for survival in the vacuum of space. Though all of these films were heavily character-driven, they spared no expense in communicating the grandeur of the situations its protagonists had become entangled in. Though his newest movie, Roma, has its fair share of scenes depicting events like wildfires or revolts that are large-in-scale, this is a more intimate affair compared to what Cuaron has done in his 21st-century filmmaking career, one informed by his own personal childhood rather than fantasy worlds concocted by J.K. Rowling.

Character-Driven Thrills Make Cam Oh So Engrossing

What a difference a year makes, especially when it comes to the reputation of Netflix's original movies. This time last year, we were still a few days out from Netflix's big blockbuster Bright becoming one of the worst movies of last year, a miserable end to a year that primarily saw disappointments (like War Machine or Death Note) fill up Netflix's original film line-up. Flash-forward to December 2018 and Netflix, while not impervious to disappointing movies (remember that underwhelming Jeremy Saulnier film they released?) has been putting out high-quality films on a weekly basis, films like Private Life, Roma, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, The Other Side of the Wind and Cam.

Outlaw King Impresses With Its Production Value But Underwhelms With Its Characters

The Hollywood epic was a common sight in the 1950's and 1960's as Hollywood tried to combat the rise of television programming with a horde of movies that used gargantuan budgets to bring to life massive-in-scale stories that usually took place in ancient periods of history. How funny then to consider that the newest Netflix original movie Outlaw King, which reunites director David Mackenzie with his Hell or High Water leading man Chris Pine, is an obvious homage to those types of movies, complete with a $120 million budget that makes it the most expensive Netflix movie yet (Martin Scorsese's The Irishman is waiting in the wings for its chance to turn to Outlaw King and say "Hold my beer!"), yet it'll be seen by the vast majority of people on...televisions!

The Future May Be Uncertain But At Least One Can Be Certain That Private Life Is Exquisite

The way Private Life depicts the day-to-day life of a married couple feels so quietly revolutionary to me in a number of ways. Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti) have a number of issues to work through but they're mundane issues, the film doesn't drum up conflict by way of having one of them cheat on the other or have one of them go off and spend a whole bunch of money without discussing it with their partner. Private Life is far more interested in exploring the fascinating day-to-day struggles that crop up between the two and how they navigate them as they struggle to have a child and limiting the scope of the film to such a realistically intimate degree turns out to be one of Private Life's most brilliant decisions.

To All The Boys I've Loved Before Is A Charmer Of A Film And A Great Showcase For Lana Condor

2018 will be known as many things in the future, most of them bad (especially in the realm of American politics), but on a happier note, maybe 2018 will also go down as the year Netflix's original movies division finally took off? After three years of trying to getting people's attention with pricey star-studded duds, turns out all it took for Netflix to capture the masses was to create films that aren't getting made in large quantities by major American studios, like romantic-comedies (Set It Up) or in the case of To All The Boys I've Loved Before, High School dramedies. Pity the theatrical studios aren't making more of these since not only is Netflix making a killing appealing to these underserved audiences but they're also making charming movies like To All The Boys I've Loved Before.

Like Father Is A Sappy Extended Advertisement For Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines

Watching a movie that can't seem to quite figure out what it is is a fascinating experience. Every movie, from Mad Max: Fury Road to A Bulldog Christmas, is such a massive undertaking requiring the help of countless human beings that it feels tragic to watch all that effort be put into the service of a movie like Like Father that's so confused about its own identity. Is this supposed to be a light-hearted comedy about a father and a daughter reuniting after many years apart? Is this supposed to be a darker drama examining the struggles of the two interacting with one another for the first time in decades? Or is Like Father simple hawking the services you can find on a Royal Caribbean cruise line? Perhaps it is all of them in addition to being underwhelming as all heck.

Extinction Is Dreadful Science-Fiction Fare That Puts Dumb Twists Before Everything Else (SPOILERS)

MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR EXTINCTION

I assume Extinction is the result of two people having very different ideas for science-fiction thrillers, with one idea being about a guy who sees's visions of an impending disaster and the other concerning a family trying to survive an alien attack. So taken away with both of these ideas, the two people decided to merge them into one movie without figuring out first if the two separate ideas would actually work together properly as a singular property. Turns out, mushing these two concepts into one movie, along with shoving in a nonsensical climax overstuffed with big twists, results in a total dud of a movie, one that just gets worse the longer it drags on.

Set It Up Is A Delightful Romantic Comedy With Two Awesome Lead Performances

Netflix is coming up on the third year anniversary of their big push into creating original films, an initiative that began with Beasts of No Nation. In that time, Netflix has gotten a whole bunch of movie stars like Brad Pitt and Will Smith to headline their various high-profile motion pictures, but aside from Bright (which really became more of a cosplay staple and internet punching bag than anything else), none of these movies have really garnered all that much attention, a pity for gems like Blue Jay, Mudbound or 6 Balloons. But two weeks ago today, Netflix released their first original film to really take the public by storm and it was one not based on exceptionally well-known source material or starring big names or even carrying a bunch of splashy visual effects.

Alex Strangelove Is A Tragically Messy Coming-of-Age Comedy

Though the fact that Alex Strangelove, a movie about a high school dude coming to terms with not being heterosexual, could even exist as a reasonably budgeted feature film is very much something that could have only happened in recent years, the film's tone is more of a relic from the early 2000's when everyone was trying to rip-off the style of American Pie by making raunchy coming-of-age comedies about High School and college-aged dudes trying to "score". Though comedies starring older characters like the works of Judd Apatow and The Hangover put an end to that trend, here is Alex Strangelove, seemingly ripped straight out of that era of American comedy yet debuting on Netflix just earlier this month.