The great thing about Netflix is that it gives you a lot of TV and movie watching options. The bad thing about Netflix is that it gives you…a lot of TV and movie watching options. So many that it can be overwhelming. I’d guess around ninety percent of our time spent on Netflix is scrolling through thousands of movies and TV shows, before finally deciding on something three hours after you’ve first logged on. The aim of this column is to provide easily accessible Netflix suggestions based on a different focal point each week.

  PAIN & GAIN (Michael Bay, 2013)

Full disclosure: this is one of my favorite films of 2013 (perhaps of all time), due in no small part to my unabashed love of Dwayne Johnson. If you didn’t know that The Rock is one of America’s living treasures, just Google him and read an interview or two. You’ll note fairly quickly a striking level of ingenuousness, a quality that similarly defines Pain & Gain. Michael Bay ostensibly made a black comedy about a blackly comedic episode in true crime history, in which several personal trainers at a Sun Gym in Miami, Florida hatch a ridiculous kidnapping scheme, based solely on their belief in their own weight-lifting and thereby life-changing abilities, that turns quickly, messily, and stupidly deadly. The actual achievement of the film is its representation of a much broader crime: the bankrupting of the so-called “American dream” via its re-inscription in the production of spectacle that looks like the American dream. Does Bay know and embrace how thoroughly his particular style of filmmaking exemplifies the nature of the problem in the main characters’ thinking? Who cares? If not, it’s a brilliant coincidence of form and content. Whether it’s an accurate portrayal of the crime or criminals themselves (as some critics contend it is not) is made irrelevant by the larger truth it communicates, and, as other critics have leveled, if the film plays for laughs beyond what taste and good conscience would allow, all the better for it: you don’t have to laugh at the ease with which our society forgets death, injustice, shameful behavior – but it might help you get through the day with a little perspective, jabroni.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (William Friedkin, 1971)

Most fans of The French Connection love it because of either the stellar performances, particularly from star Gene Hackman and his onscreen partner, Roy Scheider; or the supremely effective score from Don Ellis; or perhaps for the sequence in which Hackman chases an overhead train with a commandeered civilian Pontiac LeMans, filmed on the streets of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, oft-considered one of the greatest car-chases on film. Rarely are these fans aware that it’s actually a true story: the “french connection” was the nickname given a drug smuggling scheme, particularly successful in 1960s and 1970s New York, by which heroin made its way from Turkey to the United States’ East Coast via France. The film is a constantly moving, insanely suspenseful representation of the sort of “globalization” aimed at by the “spaghetti plots” of films like Babel or Crash, a postmodern depiction of a network society in microcosm. It’s like watching The Wire, fast-forwarded to fit within a 104-minute timeframe. If you haven’t seen it yet, what are you even doing, watch it right now; if you have seen it, guys, it’s even better than you remember and it’s on instant watch.

AILEEN WUORNOS: THE SELLING OF A SERIAL KILLER (Nick Broomfield, 1994)

This documentary is not about delivering the “back story” behind a notorious criminal, with its attendant tear-filled lack-of-explanations or capitalization on a sordid or faulty upbringing (“He was always a little bit too close to his mother…”); rather, it shines a light directly on the tawdry dealings and predatory behavior that lies behind such tabloid treatments of our contemporary American villains. Wuornos was a prostitute in Daytona Beach who murdered seven men and was one of few women to receive both the “serial killer” title and death by the electric chair; viewers will recognize her freckled visage and dry blonde mop of hair from Charlize Theron’s portrayal in the fictionalized version of her story from 2003, Monster. While that film was most concerned with portraying Wuornos’ victimization at the hands of her johns as well as her lesbian lover – which, the film suggests, drove her to kill – Broomfield’s interest is in the manipulations that came after her crime spree and arrest, by her supposed friends and supporters as well as the media, of which Broomfield is, complicatedly and critically, a part. Seen mostly in courtroom and news footage, Wuornos herself appears briefly, in prison uniform and with a medicated-looking stare, and though her persistence willingness to maintain hope for her own future and survival inspires real pathos, she has a certain magnetism that somehow shines through. This expose on the creation of a television-melodrama from so many layers of personal tragedy is a must-see for fans of Investigation Discovery and other prime-time true crime, who are willing to face the ethically dubious machinations behind the scenes.

SERPICO (Sidney Lumet, 1973)

If there was ever a time when folks needed to be reminded that truth can be spoken to power, that justice can be brought to bear, even when facing the NYPD of all institutions, it’s right now, and Serpico can serve as just such a reminder. With his long hair and dreamy, sleepy eyes, a young Al Pacino plays Frank Serpico, an aspiring detective who insists on plainclothes assignments (presumably so he can keep wearing his bellbottoms) and whose belief in the rectitude demanded of the police force – and the responsibility inherent in such a role – protects him from the temptations of a deeply, thoroughly corrupt department. Behind the calm facade that Pacino maintains throughout runs a raging river of righteous anger; thoroughly disturbed by the bad money and blind eyes that reach from Bay Ridge to the Bronx, Serpico’s insistence that the “thin blue line” must be broken forces him into a very precarious, life-threatening position. Providing a fascinating look at a very different era-New York (a cop living in a garden-access apartment on Minetta Lane? Get outta town, seriously), it’s an inspiring film, whether we believe the changes Frank Serpico wrought have lasted.

ALL GOOD THINGS (Andrew Jarecki, 2010)

Fans of HBO’s recent miniseries The Jinx, on “alleged” serial killer Robert Durst, will appreciate this veritable companion piece from director Andrew Jarecki. Starring Ryan Gosling as the young Durst, All Good Things offers a moving imagining of what may have happened to his wife, played with just the right degree of WASP by Kirsten Dunst, who disappeared in 1982. This film presents a persuasive portrait of a man whose inability to meet the expectations of his wealthy family or to cope with the pressures of a proper socialite life led to his eventual mental and emotional disintegration – and suggested eruption in violence. Whether viewers find this “explanation” compelling, the film is particularly interesting for the insight it offers into Jarecki’s obsession with the woefully under-known, under-investigated case. The film’s hesitancy in revealing actual moments of violence become especially telling within the context of the miniseries, in which the real revelation may not be Durst’s supposed slip-ups but Jarecki’s initial unwillingness to accept that the man he is interviewing really is the monster the evidence (or, in turn, lack thereof) suggests. And whether we will ever know what truly happened to Kathleen, the story of the Dursts is undeniably fascinating.

HEAVENLY CREATURES (Peter Jackson, 1994)

A completely unique, compulsively watchable true crime film, Heavenly Creatures represents a sort of bridge between Bad Taste-era Peter Jackson with the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Though the film features a talented cast (including a young Kate Winslet in her break-out onscreen role) portraying the story behind a real tragedy, it maintains a sort of whimsical, just-short-of-black-comedy attitude in its playful inhabitation of the minds of these folie-a-deux-infected tweens. The real Parker-Hulme murder case took place in 1954 New Zealand; that two teenage girls should murder one of their mothers captured the imaginations and inspired the nightmares of many. Heavenly Creatures takes up the speculation with a real attempt to explore the killers’ motivations, while using fantasy and the fictionalizing capabilities of film to respect the ultimate unknowability and mysterious nature of other peoples’ inner lives. Jackson shows a laudable deftness in tight-rope-walking the taut line in teenage friendships between devotion/dependence and sexual obsession. Whether you feel that the film brings any new understanding to an unbelievable crime, it is an absolutely one-of-a-kind film that Peter Jackson and true crime fans alike must see.

Follow Silver Screen Riot on Facebook
Follow Silver Screen Riot on Twitter