Netflix’s New Approach to Content Rotation
Netflix seems to have adopted a kind of “aim small, miss small” policy when it comes to their monthly rotation of content on their streaming platform. Gone are the days of the company swinging all-out for the fences: with big name, must-see movies and TV series coming and going in a dizzying, revolving door.
While it’s easy to celebrate the fact that very little of great importance is leaving Netflix in February, the opposite is also true: very little of actual note or substance is arriving over the same period of time. Granted, the holidays are over, it’s early in the year and the company is still trying to get as many people to see the Best Picture-nominated Roma (2018) before Oscar night as humanly possible. Now’s not the time for sudden deluges of top-tier television. At the same time, however, it certainly means that there’s a lot less to talk about regarding them than usual.
Jaws (1975) — A Timeless Classic
One this is easy to say about these incoming Netflix movies for the month: you really can’t go wrong watching Jaws. It’s actually pretty safe to say that nobody has ever gone wrong in watching this movie, as it is safely both one of the best movies of director Steven Spielberg’s career, but of the entire last century of the medium. A rip-roaring horror / adventure hybrid on the open seas, it functions as both an intimate character drama of three men on a boat and a harrowing quest to put down nature’s perfect predator.
At the same time, though, it’s hard to muster any real sense of urgency when it comes to watching Jaws again for the umpteenth time. The movie is a regular around the Netflix library and it is as assured to rotating out again after a couple of months as it is of coming back again before year’s end. It’s not going anywhere in other words, or, at least, nowhere all that far away. Still, it’s never the wrong time to watch a classic, so you might as well make a point of doing so while it’s so damned convenient.
Personal Shopper (2016) — A Worthy Indie Pick
Historically, Netflix has been a rather mixed bag when it comes to older, independent and foreign-produced movies. They make a point of putting on what’s popular and well known — after all, that’s the kind of thing that keeps people paying them month after month — but it’s a rather dicey prospect to bet on what else they might get in the meantime. It used to be that you could get movies as varied as Peeping Tom (1960) and Let the Right One In (2008) on the platform, but nowadays you have to settle for the occasional Roma.
While Personal Shopper is hardly exotic fair — it does, after all, come from celebrated French genre director Olivier Assayas, stars Kristen Stewart and very nearly won the Palme d’Ore a few years back — it is considerably against the grain of Netflix’s usual streaming catalog, and that makes it a worthy movie for its subscribers to seek out. Beautifully shot and engrossingly filmed, it clearly represents the thinking person’s gold-star viewing pick this month.
Velvet Buzzsaw (2018) — A Divisive Festival Favorite
And then there’s Velvet Buzzsaw: an arty oddity that hit the festival circuit last year and divided nearly everyone who saw it. Like Mudbound (2016) a few years back, the movie was too strange for the usual cadre of distributors, and seemingly nobody but Netflix wanted to take it off of its filmmakers’ hands. Now we not only can get our hands on a copy and see what all the fuss is about, but do so from the comfort of our living rooms.
This is the only big question mark when it comes to Netflix’s new movies this month. They’re mostly certified classics everybody’s already seen (e.g., Jaws), well-known, if short-lived, quantities that won’t really surprise us when push comes to shove (e.g., Personal Shopper) or random dreck that nobody can be bothered to care about. Velvet Buzzsaw is, if nothing else, something different, and that alone is worth checking this movie out over.