By: Chris Crespo of Cinema Crespodiso
Top Two Titles Coming to Netflix… August 2018
Like Father
Coming to Netflix August 3, 2018
Lakeland, Florida’s own Lauren Miller escaped the humid hellhole of cultural malaise that is the Central Florida Land of Lakes and found success in the not at all vapid and totally fulfilling entertainment world of Hollyweird, California, via acting and writing, and now Lauren Miller is expanding her directorial chops with an original comedy called Like Father, starring Kristen Bell as a bride-to-be stood up at the altar and who finds herself on her honeymoon cruise with her workaholic father (Kelsey Grammer). Of course if they got along right away and understood each other and just had a pleasant time then this would not be a very good movie at all, would it? So of course they are NOT going to get along at first, practically estranged from each other, so a multi-day cruise is the perfect opportunity to be forced to learn about each other and grow as a father-daughter relationship is supposed to grow. Along the way, Kristen Bell’s character meets a nice fella (played by Lauren Miller’s weed-loving beardo husband Seth Rogen), and surely by the end of the movie things will have worked out for everyone involved, right? Why else would we watch something like this? The whole reason romantic comedies exist is so that we the audience members can watch these relationships fail and then either be salvaged or watch the people in those failed relationships move on to bigger and better things, but in real life most of us are sitting around either stuck in bad relationships we can’t get out of, or we are wishing we could even get ourselves stuck in one of these bad relationships in the first place, and as we sit and look around at how everyone else seemingly gets it and knows how to play this game of love, loss and love again, we at least get to enjoy dumb little romantic movies like this in which even the hapless schlubs and the workaholic women get to find love and be joyous and live happily ever after. That. Is. The. Point.
Insatiable
Coming to Netflix August 10, 2018
Not immune to controversy, Netflix is already under fire for a show that hasn’t even debuted yet called Insatiable, and now in August we will all get to see what the big deal is all about. You see, what had happened was, Netflix released the trailer for their original series number 4,382, and in this show, a high school student named Fatty Patty (singer Debby Ryan) is overweight and insulted due to her appearance, but she loses weight when a homeless man (??) punches her in the face and breaks her jaw. So she can’t eat food. So she loses TONS of weight and becomes very attractive. Now that she lost all that weight, she can just go to school as a desirable person and not as a punching bag, and what a shocker, some people have an issue with this weird bit of body shaming. And it is indeed a little strange in 2018 to have a show with a premise that is straight out of 1988, in which a character’s acceptability to others and happiness with herself is tied directly into how others perceive her body shape, as if the only way a person can be happy is if other people think they are physically attractive. Then again, this is America, our culture is very real, and it has been built thoroughly on The Male Gaze, so perhaps the reason this show exists in 2018 is because plenty of people still think this way, and still believe their happiness in life is only related to how many people want to have sex with them and love them for who they appear to be as opposed to who they really are, so I guess Insatiable may be a little toxic in its themes but these are themes reflected from our own society in the first place.
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Everything Coming to Netflix in August 2018