Christopher Nolan
Mark Duplass, who stars as Pete in The League, recommends Netflix picks on his Twitter account on a fairly regular basis. Tonight he pointed to the first feature by Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight, Inception), Following. That got me wondering what other Nolan films were available for streaming, so here’s a Nolan Mini-Mega-Post featuring Following, Memento, & Insomnia.
Following, uh, follows a young writer with a penchant for stalking. He falls in with another stalky type, and they get into some trouble. The black and white, noir-style photography suits the subject matter well. Remarkably, Nolan made this movie over the course of a year, filming on weekends, for a ridiculously low budget.
Memento follows Leonard, who has lost his ability to retain short-term memories and has to piece his existence together out of clues he’s left himself via Polaroid pictures. Kind of like Dana Carvey in Clean Slate except, you know, not terrible. Is is one of those movies that you can’t watch the same way the second time, like The Usual Suspects or Fight Club, so if you’re watching it with someone who hasn’t seen it, don’t be a jerk and ruin it for them.
Insomnia is a remake of a foreign film staring Al Pacino and Robin Williams. But, despite all of that, it still has a 92 on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s not my favorite Nolan film, but it’s definitely Queue Worthy. Besides, what else are you going to do when every channel on your TV is showing football?
Logorama
This short film won an Oscar last year, and it’s pretty fabulous. You can watch it in its entirety right here:
Thanks to Jason Kottke for sharing.
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Hey look, here’s one that’s available on both Hulu and Netflix. It’s written and directed by Jim from The Office, John Krasinski and based on David Foster Wallace’s short story collection of the same name. It’s a bit slow, and given that it came out just last year and is already available on both services tells you all you need to know about how successful it was.
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men on Netflix
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men on Hulu
