Netflix documentaries, mid and otherwise

Desperate to add a documentary to my in-progress 2025 rankings -- there was only one out of 32 movies seen, and that was a music documentary, which is in its own category -- I reluctantly threw on the Netflix documentary Con Mum on Tuesday night.

Reluctantly? Yes. I am wary of Netflix documentaries.

The ones with colons in the title, I pretty much universally avoid. You know what I'm talking about. Just taking two at random that are being spruiked when I go on Netflix right now, how about Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare and Into the Deep: The Submarine Murder Case. 

See, rather than Netflix creating a platform for documentaries that would otherwise have no outlet to our eyeballs, I feel like it is creating documentaries that would not otherwise exist. While this is also, on the surface, a good thing, it's not a good thing when they are Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare and Into the Deep: The Submarine Murder Case.

But Con Mum had no colon, so I went for it.

Mid.

I'm not going to say Nick Green's film is bad, but it's very mid, in a perfectly Netflix way.

What do I mean by that?

A lot of talking heads, shot straight on. A lot of archival footage, much of it repeated, sometimes more than once. A subject that is interesting enough to warrant a movie, only just, but might have just as easily never been filmed. 

Past examples of this? Sure, I've got 'em. And it doesn't mean I disliked these films. In fact, I was reasonably appreciative each of them:

Longest Third Date
The Tinder Swindler
Our Father
The Social Dilemma

Not a colon in there, but maybe there should be.

Speaking of colons, I am avoiding anything in this relatively recent Netflix Untold series, where everything is Untold:, and then something that, well, hasn't been told, and that I don't want to have told.

I get it. I am not your typical Netflix viewer. I don't gravitate toward true crime. Things that exist for purely salacious reasons don't particularly fascinate me (though don't get me wrong, I can get into the salacious when it's done correctly). I don't want what I'm watching to go in one of my ears and out the other.

But Con Mum did. 

Look it's an interesting enough story. A woman gets in touch with her son after 45 years and then starts to con him out of his money, claiming she is the illegitimate daughter of the Sultan of Brunei. She builds a convincing enough facade, as all good scammers are capable of doing, that he doesn't seem like an idiot for falling for a story that seems very much adjacent to the letters you get from a Nigerian price offering you a big financial inheritance if you just send some small amount of money for processing fees.

But I don't know, aren't these true crime stories a dime a dozen? And hasn't Netflix, with its relentless content fire hose approach, made us intimately aware of just how cheap and disposable and interchangeable they are?

The very next night, though, this perspective slightly shifted.

Perhaps wanting to get my lagging documentary content up overall, whether it helped me with my 2025 rankings or not, I put on another documentary that was playing on Netflix, from 2024, not perhaps realizing, when I first heard about it, that Netflix was also a distributor of this documentary, not just a service that happened to be streaming it.

Why didn't I make this connection, you ask, especially when I was so attuned to the mid quality of the Netflix documentary? And not just because there was no colon?

Maybe because I heard The Remarkable Life of Ibelin discussed briefly on Filmspotting, one of the oldest film podcasts and one I have been listening to and trusting since 2011. Their discussion of a film gives it a certain imprimatur, or at least distinctiveness beyond the sea of non-fiction content Netflix make available to us all. I think it's fair to say they have never mentioned a Netflix documentary that had a colon in it. 

What's more, I remembered that Ibelin was directed by Benjamin Ree, a filmmaker whose previous effort, 2020's The Painter and the Thief, was one of Filmspotting co-host Adam Kempenaar's favorite films of that year. Which seemed to remove it from the realm of the director-for-hire projects I am considering Netflix guilty of today. 

Well, it was a lot more than mid.

I'm not sure the subject matter of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin exceeds our most cynical expectations of a documentary, as it is quite sentimental in remembering a young man who succumbed to complications from muscular dystrophy. But the execution is what makes a film clearly surpass its own potential limitations, and Ree's film has that big time.

For one, it put me in mind of one of my favorite movies of last year, which wasn't available to most people until this year, though I got out ahead of them by seeing it at MIFF. That's Grand Theft Hamlet, the documentary that takes place entirely inside Grand Theft Auto as the avatars stage Hamlet during COVID. That movie mixes its comedy with profundity, while this one is much more skewed toward the profundity side. But like that movie, a lot of this takes place inside a video game, or at least, the animators' rendition of that video game, as Mats Steen, the young man at the center of the movie, escaped the limitations of his body by existing in a World of Warcraft game community that came to consist of very real friendships, even though they had not met IRL. There's something about watching video game characters engage in activities involving real pathos that really gets me.

Then there's the little details about how to handle the rest of it. Instead of every talking head interview being shot at brightly lit medium depth -- the kind of setup that engendered the dismissive term "talking head" in the first place -- I noted that some of these interviews were ata  side angle, and halfway across the room. If that seems like a superficial change for misguided reasons of artistry, or just intentionally breaking the mold of the typical talking head interview, that is not how I perceived it. Or even if that was Ree's thinking, then I congratulate him for it rather than faulting him for the choice.

Even lathering it on a little thick about its central character and his impact on others in the world despite the lack of likelihood that he would ever be in a position to do that, it's a really good film. 

So I guess I can't really prejudge the problematic subgenre of the Netflix documentary, even as I might like to -- which is probably a good thing, considering that Netflix is our only consistent source of access to documentaries out there.

Who knows, maybe I'll even watch one with a colon in the title. 

MIFF: My old ass ran, and Shakespeare profound

For the second night in a row on Saturday, I trained into the city for MIFF, though this time it wasn't a workday. That might have been a key factor in why I casually took the 5:42 train, for a movie that started at 6:30, when I clearly should have taken the 5:22.

Forty-eight minutes might seem like plenty of time to get there, if you didn't know where "there" was. I take a 7:42 am. train on the mornings I go into work to get there at 8:30, but I'm usually walking in the door right at 8:30 -- or was, before my office moved. Now it's more like 8:37.

And getting to Hoyts Melbourne Central requires as much hoofing, if not more, than getting to my old office. What the hell was I thinking?

So instead of enjoying a casual trip into the city, I anxiously watched the minutes count down and stressed over every perceived delay in service. When we finally arrived at Flinders Street around 6:12, I knew I would probably make it, but I also knew that the next decision was key. Do I take a tram up Elizabeth Street to Melbourne Central, or do I just walk? The former held the promise of a (potentially) faster arrival time, but the latter left the speed I got there within my own control, and the control of the traffic lights.

Well, I chose to ride the tram for those three stops -- and immediately regretted my decision. Because the intersection of Flinders Street and Elizabeth Street is a terminus point for all trams travelling down Elizabeth Street, that also means the tram operator can take an indeterminate amount of time -- up to a schedule or up to his or her own whims? -- before deciding that as many people who intended to board had boarded before leaving. And in this case, that was an interminable three minutes or so. 

When we were only at the second stop by about 6:24, I decided to bail. I got out and raced the tram up Elizabeth Street, now at a full run -- or at least a full jog. 

I did beat the tram there, but only just, or should I say, it was a tie, except I was already on the correct side of the road and didn't have to wait for others disembarking the tram with a lot less deliberation that I would have intended. In short, it was the right decision, but an even better decision would have been to walk the whole way. (But considering that this day already included the steps from the end of my MIFF outing the night before, several thousand of which occurred after midnight, I ended up with more than 19,000 steps for the day, so the short break on the tram was welcome in some respects.)

Scampering around people and up escalators, I actually made it before the MIFF pre-show advertising even began. I guess I was more worried about not scoring a decent seat than actually missing the start of the movie, but that turned out fine as well. 

Oh, the movie was called My Old Ass, hence the subject of this post.

And it was a charmer. The premise is pretty delightful: Aubrey Plaza plays the 39-year-old version of approximately 19-year-old Maisy Stella, an actress I'd never seen before who I found radiant with charisma. Both play Elliott, but we're in the younger one's current time. She's a lesbian -- or so she thinks, more on that in a moment -- who is meant to inherit the Canadian cranberry farm that has been in her family for generations, but would rather leave that to her keen brother and move to the big city (Toronto). She's enjoying a final three weeks of summer before this move with some friends around the lake, and when they take mushrooms one night, she is visited by, or possibly conjures, the version of herself 20 years in the future.

My Old Ass is not meant to be super high concept, as it toys with some of the possible conundrums of whether this is real or not and if so, how learning about things that happen in the future will affect the space-time continuum. Megan Park's movie is more of a coming-of-age story than anything else, and Plaza is not in that much of it -- only three scenes by my count. Which makes sense for an in-demand actress who was likely doing a favor for this small production. (There are actually a couple other recognizable actors, one being Maria Dizzia -- who I often confuse with Elizabeth Reaser -- and one being Maddie Zeigler, apparently still able to get work after her performance in Sia's Music was widely panned because she was playing a character with intellectual disabilities.) 

The movie has a light spirit, a lot of humor and some touching moments, but I have to say there was one thing about it that bothered me. I suppose this qualifies as a mild spoiler, but the central romantic relationship in the movie is not between Elliott and a woman. It turns out she is discovering she might not be gay, or that at least she might be bi. While I suppose that would certainly be some people's journey, I had to wonder if there was something about it that was a step in the wrong direction.

After My Old Ass I got a sort-of disappointing chicken burger from Oporto and made my way back to my favorite MIFF venue, The Capitol, for the second night in a row. This was a much shorter and much more easily travelled distance, and I arrived in plenty of time.

And here was where I had my first major MIFF discovery of 2024, my first of those moments that I've managed to find every year, even when I don't feel like the program is particularly great: The reminder of why I love MIFF to begin with.

I don't know what kind of exposure or release Grand Theft Hamlet is going to get, and in fact, there is a good chance I would never have come across it if not for MIFF. And it has quickly jumped to become among my handful of favorite films so far in 2024. 

In the subject of this post I teased "Shakespeare profound," which may seem like an obvious statement. I mean, it's Shakespeare, so of course it's profound, right? (Or whoever wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. A discussion for another time.)

But those of us who have lived to a certain age have seen so much Shakespeare that after a while, it might feel more banal than profound.

Enter Grand Theft Hamlet, which places the staging of Shakespeare's most famous? (maybe Romeo & Juliet is more famous) play within the world of one of the most popular and enduring online gaming communities.

I won't go into too much detail here, but rather, link my already-posted review here. But in case you don't want to follow that link, I'll briefly say that two out-of-work British actors (Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen) were playing too much Grand Theft Auto at the beginning of 2021, during Britain's third lockdown, when they got the idea that they could try to put on a performance of Hamlet within the game space, using other interested gamers who happen to have an interest in Shakespeare. (There's a funny moment when they acknowledge that the Venn diagram of online gamers and Shakespeare enthusiasts yields a fairly small result.) Without conventional stages being available, all this world could be their stage.

And in a similar mix of the funny and the poignant to what I experienced at MIFF with my #1 film of 2016, Toni Erdmann, Grand Theft Hamlet knocks this concept out of the park. The game mechanics themselves result in moments that left our audience screaming with laughter, but underlying the obvious humor was the profound undercurrent of sadness and dislocation -- both of the GTA world itself, where people are constantly killing each other, and of the real world at that time, when COVID and racial strife were tearing us apart. And then there is the profound of seeing these famous speeches from Hamlet set against this immaculately designed game space.

But now I'm starting to repeat my review, so I will just leave off there. Simply put: Seek this one out.