Streaming Roulette, June: Nezha, Lucy in the Sky, West Side Story

If you're new to the site this is how we share new streaming offerings for the month. We select a handful or two of titles and just randomly hit a place on the scroll bar to see what the film looks like - no cheating.  Ready? Let's play...

-Maid of Honor?
-Oh, that color is bad for Anita!

West Side Story (1961) on Netflix
Silly, Maria. Anita doesn't have bad colors --she's Rita Moreno!  ICYMI I hope you'll read our huge three part retrospective of West Side Story. It was a joy to write. Netflix so rarely has 20th century movies  that you should always stream them (even if you own the picture, just leave it running in the background) to remind them that first century of the artform they make their billions off of is kind of important. Just saying...

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Review: "The Great" on Hulu

by Cláudio Alves

Most dramatizations of history have a difficult, often unbalanced, relationship with facts. Reality is notoriously devoid of narrative structure, which makes taking departures and creative license into an essential crime. The troubles arise when the parameters of adaptation aren't clear, when fiction dresses itself as truth, and confusion blooms from pretension. Hulu's biographical series about the early years of Catherine the Great in Russia is unencumbered by such issues, sidestepping them with irreverence. At the start of each episode, a title card points out that this miniseries is only occasionally based on things that really happened.

The rest of it is hilarious fantasy, a play on history that turns the rise of Russia's empress and reformer into the stuff of romantic comedy. It's a black-hearted farce that's unafraid and unashamed of being silly…

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Review: "Normal People" on Hulu

By Spencer Coile 

To adapt a work of fiction is to play with fire. I can only imagine that nimbly capturing the spirit of the original text while imbuing it with new levels of creativity is no easy feat. Discourse surrounding literary adaptations usually focuses on how the movie or series fails the original text - either it doesn’t cover everything sufficiently (like The Time Traveler’s Wife, a personal tragedy), it overstays its welcome (The Handmaid’s Tale), or an abundance of creative liberties are taken (recently Little Fires Everywhere). Comparisons are easy to make, and book lovers are quick to critique. 

On its surface, Normal People, now streaming on Hulu, masquerades as a straightforward adaptation. Born from Sally Rooney’s novel of the same name, it follows Connell (Paul Mescal) and Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones), two Irish secondary students who forge a connection despite their uneven social standings. The novel,  and now the BBC/Hulu limited series, chronicles their years-long relationship in all its complexities...

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Streaming Roulette, April: The Blazing Perks of Molly's Xanadu

by Nathaniel R

If you're new to the site this is how we share new streaming offerings for the month. We select a handful or two of titles and just randomly hit a place on the scroll bar to see what the film looks like - no cheating.  Ready? Let's play...

VO: And since I heard that having a girlfriend makes you happy I tried hard to love her like I love Sam.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) on Netflix
Sweet movie. Remember Logan Lerman? We had such a good interview with him for this movie. Sad that he's trapped on a tv series with bad reviews at the moment (Hunters). 

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Doc Corner: Hulu's Four-Part 'Hillary'

By Glenn Dunks (who is currently counting down his top documentaries of the decade over on Twitter. Follow along or swing by next week for the conclusion!)

It’s remarkable, really. Hillary—Nanette Burstein’s four-part Hulu biography of the woman who needs only one name these days—is so much like its subject, it’s just uncanny. Ambitious and by most conceivable marks of quality a perfect candidate for greatness.

And yet.

One almost has to admire the chutzpah of Hulu releasing Hillary when they did. Like Taylor Swift uploading her back catalogue to streaming services on the same day Katy Perry had a new album out, it feels like some sort of joke, even if it was more likely simply a smart and shrewd way of getting eyeballs in a tough market by utilising the political attention of another wild democratic primary race as cross promotional advertising...

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