Netflix offers thrillers, goofy stories worth watching

Last week saw two compelling releases from Netflix, plus a friend's recommendation of a streaming release that premiered last year, in which the ghost story was the most lighthearted and family-friendly.

'The Strays'

The racial commentary of "The Strays" is as confrontational as "Get Out," but stripped of Jordan Peele's satirical edge, while also infused with a distinctly British flavor of internalized racism.

Ashley Madekwe plays a dual protagonist role that takes cultural code-switching to sociopathic extremes, as we gradually realize that she's far from heroic, even in her own life story.

The film opens with working-class Black woman Cheryl, who feels stifled for unspecified but hinted-at reasons of an abusive relationship and economic limits on her lifestyle, as she makes the remarkably brisk decision to walk out on her existing life and familial connections for good.

Flash-forward 20 years and we meet Neve, who has the same face as Cheryl but sports a posh accent and an affluent suburban existence, complete with a white husband and two attractive biracial teenage children who are students at the same private school where she's the respected deputy headmistress.

For all her fashionable liberal charity fundraising, the light-skinned Neve demonstrates clear discomfort when her kids show interest in Black hairstyles and music, as Neve constantly scratches at the wigs she always wears to conceal her natural hair.

When two young dark-skinned Black people - adults, but barely older than Neve's children - enter her life in working-class positions, her reflexively paranoid responses merely seem to underscore the privileged internalized prejudice we've already seen on her part.

But it's not long before it's revealed how much of Cheryl, and her obligations, Neve was willing to amputate to carve out an idyllic life for herself, which makes this flawed film's conclusion pitch-perfect, as our protagonist responds to Cheryl's life violently clashing with Neve's life by falling back on her favored last resort.

'We Have a Ghost'

After four seasons of "Stranger Things," it's a measure of how much America accepts David Harbour as our surrogate dorky dad that

Netflix can throw a bowling shirt, a bad combover and a see-through spectral sheen on him and audiences will say, "Hey, it's our dead Uncle Ernest."

The rest of the roles in "We Have a Ghost" are similarly typecast, just as the film as a whole goes for the easiest gags, characterization and plot twists; it's all very lazy, but still entertaining.

"Ernest" (so called because of the name inscribed on his bowling shirt) is the friendly ghost who develops an unlikely bond with Kevin (Jahi Winston), the younger teenage son of the family who's just moved into his haunted house, as Kevin tries to solve the mystery of how Ernest died.

Anthony Mackie is Kevin's big-dreaming dad with poor follow-through, who gets caught up in trying to commercialize Ernest's presence in his family's new home, while Jennifer Coolidge delivers a full-volume Jennifer Coolidge-style performance as the basic-cable diva spiritualist whom Kevin's dad recruits to document Ernest's existence, with disastrous results.

This attracts the attention of Tig Notaro as an outcast former CIA agent who'd previously headed up a discontinued agency project to attempt to capture ghosts, and she ultimately persuades her old boss - Steve Coulter, as amusingly disaffected here as he was as Jennifer Walters' boss in "She-Hulk" on Disney+ - to let her back into the fold.

It's not spoiling anything to reveal that both Mackie's hustling, money-minded dad and Notaro's dogged yet clinically dispassionate ghost-hunter experience sympathetic changes of heart toward Ernest, although Notaro's moment with Ernest is especially affecting, much like Peter Coyote's government agent sharing his childhood dreams of alien contact with Henry Thomas' Elliott in "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial."

Perhaps the most effective jokes in this film are its all-too-accurate depictions of how the internet would respond to such digitally documented ghost-sightings, right down to countless stupid memes circulating on social media.

'All Quiet on the Western Front'

I was in middle school when I saw the 1930 movie adaptation of the 1929 novel "All Quiet on the Western Front," which means I last saw it 35 years ago, but its cruelly random and undeserved twists of fate have stuck with me in all the years since.

The 2022 film adaptation distributed by Netflix diverges from its source text in both the specific fates of its core characters and the addition of a parallel plot chronicling the negotiations (or lack thereof) leading to the armistice.

While opinions can credibly differ regarding alterations to the characters' narrative arcs, the scenes illustrating the relative opulence of the top brass and bureaucrats add value to the novel's first-person perspective, by contrasting those higher-ups' comfortable conditions against the soul-crushing squalor suffered by the soldiers in the field.

The omission of Paul Bäumer's brief homecoming does detract from how the novel conveyed the alienation that such frontline troops felt when thrust back into civilian existence, but I can see how such a narrative intermission could feel, for viewers, like a tone-break within the film.

As it stands, this is an unflinchingly visceral film, that hammers home the grotesque inhumanities of war far more uncomfortably than any description by text ever could.

The ruthlessly grinding opening sequence sets the pace for the film that follows, as every character we first glimpse in the trenches, and on the bombed-out battlefields, who engages in enough action to catch the camera's attention, is cut down within seconds, before their bullet-riddled uniforms are stripped from their corpses, laundered barely enough to rinse out the blood they've absorbed, then stitched together to be reissued to the next crop of recruits.

The pounding soundtrack likewise reinforces the relentlessly dark mood.

As in the novel, Paul's mentor, the older soldier Stanislaus "Kat" Katczinsky, remains my favorite character - by the time I enlisted in the Navy in my early 20s, I was an "old man" among enlistees as well - and his fate remains poetically unjust in this film.

This adaptation is essential viewing, but mind what you eat while you're watching (spaghetti with meatballs and marinara sauce would be a catastrophically unappetizing choice), and whatever you do, don't make it the last thing you watch before you go to bed.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]