movie recommendations

[adrian_turtle]

What would you recommend, if you had a week to catch up on almost 30 years of visual media? I have been carefully avoiding movies and TV since the end of the 20th century. I sometimes read fanfic, or listen without watching, or look at isolated scenes of The West Wing or Babylon 5 or Sherlock or so I have some idea what everyone is talking about. But I am more or less clueless.

I will be in the hospital for a week, bored and sleep deprived and deliberately removing all my usual anti-seizure precautions. I expect I'll have plenty of migraines, because so many of my migraine triggers are also seizure triggers. Ick. There is no need to seek out movies with strobe effects. The EEG techs will shine a strobe light in my face every so often just to see what happens. But while I am staying up all night, I will be free to watch movies on my laptop as well as read or crochet.

What should I watch? I have library cards from the Boston Public Library and the Minuteman Library Network which might give me access to movies but I haven't tried to use that feature. Which commercial service should I subscribe to for the next month? I want to only buy one month service, from one dealer, rather than watching 3 movies from Netflix and 4 from Apple and 6 from someplace else. Murderbot and Black Panther are on the maybe list, but I don't want to buy two subscriptions.

My favorite movies are Muppet Christmas Carol and Princess Bride.
I watched Star Wars the week it came out in theaters and hated it.
I quite liked Star Trek:TNG, even though many of the episodes gave me headaches.
I liked the first Superman movie and Galaxy Quest.
I like movies where people talk to each other, and hate that thing where it looks like the cameraman is riding a trotting horse.

Comments

[gingicat]

I certainly recommend setting up Hoopla through your library card. The Minuteman network has an excellent selection.

[otter]

Netflix is what I have available:

I recently watched The Green Glove Gang. It's a Polish series about 3 middle aged/older women who are thieves and hide out in a home for the elderly and get up to all sorts of shenanigans. I watch listening to the Polish with English subtitles, but it might be dubbed in English.

The Extraordinary Attorney Woo is a Korean series about a lawyer who is autistic, and though they don't say the actress is autistic herself, I read her bio and it seems rather likely. There's a sweet love story threaded through, and as an autistic person, I think the show does a reasonable job of representation. Dubbed in English, or Korean with English subtitles.

I've enjoyed the first two Knives Out movies, and want to see the third soon.

[mrissa]

The Good Place. There is nothing like it, it is amazing, and some of its focus on how we treat each other makes me think of Muppet Christmas Carol: like that, only completely different.

[mrissa]

I also love The Green Glove Gang and the Knives Out movies.

[anne]

BPL switched from Hoopla to Kanopy, which has a wide selection of world movies, plus documentaries and a few series, and Biblio+, which seems closer to what Hoopla had. Those and Netflix fill all my non-Asian media needs...

[anne]

Seconding!

[liv]

I really hope that hospital investigation is less grim than it sounds! My absolute favourite movie of the past 30 years is Everything everywhere all at once. It is good in similar ways to The Princess Bride, both very very silly and very innovative and deep, with really well-portrayed relationships (not just or even mainly the romantic kind).

[magid]

I adore The Extraordinary Attorney Woo!
The movie that feels a bit similar to it is Amelie

I also love the Firefly series, despite what we now know about the producer (1 season plus 1 movie to deal with some of the unresolved stories due to premature cancelation due to all sorts of jiggerypokery).

I don’t know which services have these streaming; I assume the library has at least some.

Sending strength for that week.

[lcohen]

murderbot is one of the only two series i've watched in the past decade and it's a good choice in my world. i love the movies of john sayles--but none of my recs would be recent--that might mean they show up at your library, though. top pick: "lone star." two more i love: "brother from another planet," and "passion fish." all of them exceed their genre.

[redbird]

It looks like the Arlington library has both Kanopy and Hoopla. It says "Arlington residents only," but they probably think Adrian still lives there.

[adrian_turtle]

I managed to lock myself out of both Hoopla and Kanopy, unfortunately. I got far enough into "create account" that I can't create a new account, and not far enough to recover a password because I was not able to create a password the system approved of. Fortunately Biblio+ looks promising. And I hope Netflix will be easier to work with.

[adrian_turtle]

Thank you! I am fretting most about having glue and electrodes in my hair for a week, but I hope it will be worth it. "Everything everywhere all at once" sounds wonderful and I hope I can find it.

[conuly]

What would you recommend, if you had a week to catch up on almost 30 years of visual media?

Jesus.

Um, I'm gonna throw a lot of suggestions at you. If you don't like one, you can move on to the next. I have no idea where these all are, but I do know you can probably stream most of them for free:

The Good Place
Babylon 5
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Scrubs
Malcolm in the Middle
Severance