Netflix Picks 29th May 2015

After a brief hiatus Netflix Picks is back!

The weekend has finally rolled round again, and we have picked out a selection of films and TV from Netflix so you don’t have to spend half your precious time choosing what to watch.

 

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – Seasons 1 – 10

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is consistently one of the funniest and best written shows on television and luckily for us the recently aired Season 10 is new to UK Netflix.  A show that has been described as “Seinfeld on crack”,  It’s Always Sunny… consists of five conscience-free, despicable characters, that week-after-week sees them hatch a plan where they can either become rich quick, or get one over on their enemies. Sharply written from the offset and with some interesting character development along the way, this is really one to watch right from the beginning. Sunny is a perfect antidote to the overly touchy-feely popular American sitcoms (and consciously so, see The Gang Tries Desperately to Win an Award in Season 9), the characters don’t ever learn from their mistakes, and it will certainly leave you without any warm and fuzzy feelings.

 

Clueless

Clueless is, in my opinion, the best high school film of all time. Forget the work of John Hughes and Tina Fey (sorry Tina), and even the delightful Emma Stone/Stanley Tucci/Patricia Clarkson combo in Easy A, Clueless is smarter and funnier than all of them. Loosely adapted from Jane Austen’s Emma, Alicia Silverstone plays Cher – a rich high school student who helps to boost a new pupil’s (Brittany Murphy) popularity, whilst trying to manage matters of the heart, namely some confusing feelings about her ex-stepbrother Josh (Paul Rudd). Aside from providing evidence of the fact Rudd hasn’t aged in twenty years, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless is no po-faced teen-romance. Instead it’s characters are in on the joke, playing up their rich-kid, Beverly Hills, personas to the nth degree whilst delivering endlessly quotable lines.

 

Fish Tank

Made by the incredibly talented Andrea Arnold, Fish Tank centres on an angry and isolated 15-year old Mia (Kate Jarvis), and how her life changes when her mum brings home her new boyfriend (played by Michael Fassbender). Living on a council estate, Mia is out of school and nothing but hostile towards her mother, her sister, and anyone else that dares to come near. On the day her mum introduces her to the charming Connor (Fassbender) she also acts angrily towards him, but we later come to realise that this is mainly to gain his attention. Arnold shows everything exclusively from Mia’s point of view, leaving to us to wonder about some of the motives behind Connor’s  actions, a decision that works purely down to Jarvis’s fantastic performance.

 

The Queen of Versailles

Excess is key in this eye-opening documentary. The Queen of Versailles tells the story of the Siegel’s, one of America’s wealthiest families, in 2008 they set about building America’s largest single family home, inspired by the famous Palace of Versailles in . At first the documentary appears to be in the vein of a reality TV show, a behind-the-scenes, Kardashian-esque look at the life of billionaires, however around half-way through events take a turn. Due to the economic crisis at the time, the Siegel’s almost lose everything, and the second half of the documentary shows a not unsympathetic view of the family trying to scale back their lavish lifestyles. A fascinating portrait of what happens to the rich when they lose (almost) everything.