THIS WEEK IN NETFLIX

"Pola X"

Try to imagine Catherine Breillat giving some dude a blowjob without making him feel intellectually guilty about it. Now picture Gaspar Noé toasting up a tasty little croissant and serving it to David Lynch on a cold steel plate. Lynch takes a bite, chews pensively for a moment and then swallows with visible displeasure. He snaps his fingers and the croissant fills with blood. He finishes it, because now it tastes better (I guess). If you have any idea what I'm talking about then you can probably infer whether or not you would enjoy this movie. I really hope you'll check it out and then let me know whether or not I liked it, too. Because I still have no fucking idea. Bonus points for the techno-industrial noise orchestra that practices in an abandoned factory and is also vaguely connected to a nondescript terrorist group. Wait, WUT??


"[Rec]"

A few months ago my girlfriend decided to dye her hair blonde. If you know my girlfriend then you know that she is already a tall curvaceous beauty with huge tits, a full shapely bottom, drool-inducing thighs and stunning facial features. Also, fuck you; don't talk to my girlfriend. She also tends to tan very easily and spends the majority of her summer evenings lounging around the apartment drinking beer in her underwear, giving me boners and then ruining them by farting. With the addition of this new blonde hair I cannot shake the impression that she now looks totally Latino. Latina? Either way I now like to pretend that she's either from some unknown coastal paradise in Brazil where semi-educated sexpots sunbathe nude on beaches and are always just bored enough to run a blow-train on a stand-up gringo like myself, or that she's a classy hard-working young professional from Mexico City who loves to work with children and secretly possesses a sex dungeon somewhere within her fantastic and criminally overpriced penthouse apartment. It's weird. My girlfriend is already a babe and my penis & I both agree that we're into her, but the dye-induced Latina fantasy has somehow upped the arousal ante significantly. I can't even watch normal American porn anymore; it's all got to be Latinas or NADA. I feel the same way about this movie. It's a fully functional and refreshingly entertaining 1st-person zombie carnival of jump-scares with more than its fair share of nicely earned tension-soaked setpieces. If it had come out a few years before the regrettable zombie explosion that we still seem to be mired in and before "Cloverfield" took the idea of the 1st-person thriller and immediately overhyped it into ineffectiveness, then I would even call this low-budget thrillride from Spain a landmark of modern horror. They say that timing is everything, and in this case I suppose that's halfway true. But what really seems to matter most is location, location, location; because Hollywood remade this movie less than a year after its completion as the rote and forgettable "Quarantine." Existing within the parameters of a surprisingly faithful remake, that film took the novel ideas of "[Rec]" and threw them into an American cocktail of bad actors, useless tweaking and "money isn't an issue" Hollywood budget-padding, resulting in the same tired pile of shit anyone would expect from a film industry seemingly bereft of a single original idea. Maybe something was figuratively lost in translation, or maybe we just can't get anything right. No matter the case, the facts remain clear: "[Rec]" is the low-budget Spanish underdog that still towers triumphantly over it's big-budget U.S. imitator, and even the hottest American girls would be way hotter if they weren't American.