Netflix, a bargain Internet venue featuring a cornucopia of movies and TV series for a minimal monthly charge, is a craps shoot, a spin of the roulette wheel, what winning or losing card emerges from the banker’s baccarat shoe.
One thing you can depend on before a movie unreels, European or American, is a series of initial credits: Widget Cinema….in association with Piglet Productions….A Floyd Floozy Film….in cooperation with the Film Board of Patagonia….A Wholesome Fare Film…..a Cayman Island Entertainment Production….together with Melody Lane LLC…..in partnership with Howling Banshees Studios….Handcrafted Cinema Company….and on and on, each with its own animated graphics. One almost falls asleep waiting for the cast and directorial credits. For a person who grew up with the MGM lion, the Columbia lady, Paramount’s Mount Everest, and even the British Rank/Ealing Studios muscle man hitting a giant gong, and other signature production credits, the parade of entities responsible for most of the movies offered by Netflix is disconcerting. But, apparently that’s “progress.”
After a movie has been made, do these entities vanish like puffballs, or go airborne like dandelion seeds, or roll out of sight like tumbleweeds? Are they intertwined tax dodges, or cinematic pyramid schemes? I have yet to see a single “associated with” name reappear in the credits of any of the independent productions. Major producers, such as TriStar with its white Pegasus, limit such credits to one or two before introducing the major producer. And the older MGM and RKO credits, for example, put the “associated” entities in parenthetical positions somewhere around the major studio’s name. One never really notices them.
That complaint being lodged, here are some appraisals of a handful of Netflix’s offerings.
Barbara Sukowa plays a credible Hannah Arendt, released in 2012, as the German-Jewish author of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil ( 1963). This “docudrama” of her conflict with other Jews about the true nature of the men behind the Holocaust highlights her struggles as she attends Adolf Eichmann’s trial. She was not prepared for the bitter opposition to her covering the trial for The New Yorker, and was ostracized by many of her best friends. This is definitely worth watching qua docudrama, with great chunks of Arendt’s life left out or merely shown in passing, such as her affair with Martin Heidegger, the Nazi intellectual.
Also from 2012 is No God, No Master, a deceptive title because it has little or nothing to do with God or masters. The title is nowhere explained in the film. The phrase was an early anarchist slogan coined by French anarchist Auguste Blanqui in 1880. However, the film is just a very well done “docudrama” of the early years of the FBI’s first director (then known as the Bureau of Investigation), William Flynn, ably portrayed by David Strathairn, and is set chiefly in 1919. It chronicles the detective work of Flynn before he was appointed B.O.I. director. When he stepped down after two years at the post, he was succeeded by J. Edgar Hoover. The story begins with his trying to determine who is responsible for a series of package bombs left on the doorsteps of prominent Boston men or mailed to them.