you've been netflixed!
When I first opened the envelope and held the DVD in my hand I felt totally duped. The documentary film I'd "randomly come across" on Netflix was distributed by Red Envelope Entertainment, which proudly boasted on the disc face that it was "a Netflix company." You mean I "randomly found" a movie that Netflix owned? How random is that? And I'd been sold by its synopsis, and I'd added it to the queue, and I'd bumped it up to near the top. Now here it was, this film which had sounded so unusual and so potentially cool, and all I can think is, Netflix tricked me!
But I held out hope, and I pushed play. Not even to watch it just now, but to see what it was like.
Jump ahead ninety minutes. I watched it straight through. Jessica Yu's Protagonist was actually pretty rad. I might have called it amazing, if I hadn't already seen Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, which was structurally so similar but notably more sublime in its storytelling. What Protagonist has going, though, is a more emotionally engaging (rather than intellectually engaging) story, and a connection to a deeply and personally exciting place to me: storytelling. It's like if Errol Morris's portrait-of-four had been made by a woman who was obsessed with dramatic structure and artistry. Which is actually very, very close to what it is.
It also reinvigorates my interest in Yu's other documentary, In the Realms of the Unreal, about Henry Darger, a movie I've been sitting on for a long, long time and have never sat and watched.
Still, on principle alone, I'm not entirely sure I feel good about Netflix being both distribution company and retail/renter.
But I held out hope, and I pushed play. Not even to watch it just now, but to see what it was like.
Jump ahead ninety minutes. I watched it straight through. Jessica Yu's Protagonist was actually pretty rad. I might have called it amazing, if I hadn't already seen Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, which was structurally so similar but notably more sublime in its storytelling. What Protagonist has going, though, is a more emotionally engaging (rather than intellectually engaging) story, and a connection to a deeply and personally exciting place to me: storytelling. It's like if Errol Morris's portrait-of-four had been made by a woman who was obsessed with dramatic structure and artistry. Which is actually very, very close to what it is.
It also reinvigorates my interest in Yu's other documentary, In the Realms of the Unreal, about Henry Darger, a movie I've been sitting on for a long, long time and have never sat and watched.
Still, on principle alone, I'm not entirely sure I feel good about Netflix being both distribution company and retail/renter.