Hi! Here's FIVE titles FOR your Tubi Watchlist | September 2020
As I announced last month, I’m going to be highlighting 5 quality watches from my Tubi Watchlist every month — partly as a recurring blog content idea for myself and partly in case anyone else out there is looking to make the most out of Tubi’s FREE streaming service.
Why highlight stuff from Tubi and not a more popular streaming service with an objectively better catalogue, say, like a Netflix or an HBO Max? Well, as I mentioned before, we actually got rid of our Netflix account about a year ago as we were finding ourselves getting too easily pulled into wasting way too much time watching things on Netflix that we didn’t even really want to watch, it was all just so easy and tempting to keep falling into binge mode. So, rather than trying to work on our self-control while paying a monthly subscription for something that challenged that self-control, we just cut the chord altogether.
But since we still like having a movie night every now & again, eventually our searching the internet for other ways to stream tv/movies led us to the free & legal option of Tubi, which manages to provide viewing options at the click of a button while still getting rid of a lot of the ‘binge temptations’ that came with Netflix, as a large chunk of the Tubi catalogue is stuff that you won’t really be tempted into wasting your time watching, no matter how strong the urge to veg out in front of the telly is.
Which doesn’t sound like the greatest endorsement of Tubi, but, if you’d let me finish, the nice thing is that there are still enough gems to be found — you just have to do a bit of digging (and having to actually dig for things to watch appeals to my thrift store / bargain bin / crate digging tendencies anyways, as it feels more special when you finally do come across a diamond in the rough).
And on that note, I’ll stop with the rambling introduction and just get to the 5 films I’ve picked out for September. A couple of my picks I’ve seen before many years ago (and perhaps you have too) but I was pleased to find that they are still engaging on a re-watch + a few were films I watched for the first time on Tubi. Which is kinda what the Tubi experience is like — you’ll uncover a few titles you’ve never got around to before + you’ll find a few titles that you’ve already seen but remember fairly fondly and don’t mind watching again because, dammit, sometimes it’s nice to not always be chasing one new thing after the other.
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So, here’s my FIVE picks FOR September 2020:
Requiem For The American Dream is a concise documentary on Noam Chomsky’s 10 principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power, providing a very good breakdown of how our broken society works + how we got to the sorry state that we’re currently in (aka: Trump as a reality show president, possibly to be re-elected, a global pandemic that a large percentage of the population refused to believe in because ‘economy’, civil rights protests being violently stomped on by militarized police, and all the while the western side of North America is engulfed in smoke from another summer of climate change amplified forest fires — to name just a few of the issues).
It doesn’t really matter that this doc came out about half a decade ago, as all the same tricks of the upper class grifting trade that Noam discusses here (and has been trying to warn everybody about for ages) continue to be used mostly unabated. And maybe that sounds like a depressing watch, but I promise it is very much worth investing the very friendly run time of just 1 hour and 12 minutes, because we really need way more people getting on the same page of what’s really going on. Turns out ignorance isn’t as blissful as we’ve been told.
Even though Akira came out in 1987, I think me attending high school in a small pre-internet Canadian farm town didn’t really stack the odds in my favour that I would get exposed to the world of Japanese animation—and then the older one gets, the less one tends to reach for animated films, especially when your main experience with animated films always left you feeling like they were meant for kids—which I guess explains why I’ve never really watched a proper anime film before now.
But Akira is definitely not intended for kids, and I bet that if I would have seen it when I was a teenager, I probably would have checked out a lot more anime films over the years. The animation is just so well done & very cool (reminds me of that great 90s Batman series that I loved so much growing up, except done without any worries of having to appease Warner Bros tv censors) and the story is a pretty grown-up sci-fi thriller, with blood and violence and even a flash of hand-drawn nudity. The dubbing dialogue is not super great at times, but dubbing dialogue usually never is that great (and I think having to read subtitles would have taken away from enjoying the visuals, so I guess I’ll take dubbing over subtitles when it comes to animation).
All in all, for my first attempt at checking out a proper anime film, I was pretty impressed and intrigued to try out some more (and there appears to be a decent collection of anime available on Tubi, although I’m sure Akira sets a pretty high bar).
I may have missed the anime train as a teenager growing up in rural Canada in the 1990s, but I definitely didn’t miss the Oasis train. Sure, I did kinda miss out on most of the Britpop media madness that a teen growing up in the UK would have experienced at the time (Oasis vs Blur wasn’t really breaking news on my airwaves), but I remember taping Wonderwall off the radio and ordering What’s The Story Morning Glory through Columbia House and becoming a pretty big fan of the laddish lads from Manchester.
And yes, they may have peaked fairly quickly with their songwriting (bound to happen when you keep trying to write the same song), but those first 2 albums (maybe 2.5 albums) still hold a special place in my headphones and heart, and Oasis: Supersonic does a great job of capturing Oasis’ rocket ship climb and come-back-to-earth + Noel and Liam are some of the best at blokey banter, so unlike your usual ‘rock stars that flew to close to the sun’ tale, this one is full of a lot of great one-liners and pub-style wit. Plus, some good choons.
It’s been close to 20 years since I first watched Memento and then immediately re-watched before having to return the video to Blockbuster (which was the style at the time) and I was really looking forward to seeing just how well this film would hold up in 2020 now that the newness of seeing a movie work in reverse chronological order and all the plot twists had already been spoiled by my past self. And, I gotta say, it still holds up pretty good. I guess the premise of a guy who has to tattoo notes on his body because he has no short term memory is still quite interesting and Guy Pearce is still quite good playing a man who can’t form new memories, but who also can’t shake his fuzzy old memories.
After re-watching, I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone had put Memento together in the correct chronological order. So I took to Google and wouldn’t you know it… of course somebody did (and the film still pretty much works in reverse reverse — with the alternate viewing really making the motives of the other characters a lot more clear / easy to follow than in the original cut).
Sometimes—especially during the dark timeline that is 2020—you just need to put something on that is simple and easy, something like a documentary about people who are passionate about raising chickens to compete in the poultry version of Best In Show. And that’s literally exactly what Chicken People is about. The three main characters are just the right kind of vulnerably imperfect oddball humans, where you don’t quite feel like laughing at them and you don’t quite feel like crying for them, in the end you just hope that maybe they’ll find some piece of mind—and who are we to judge if their path to happiness happens to be through raising a prize-winning chicken or two?
Also, some chicken breeds are actually pretty cool looking + bonus points for being a documentary with a runtime under 90 minutes.
OK, and that will do it for the 5 things I recommend you add to your Watchlist this month if you’re also trying to get the most out of Tubi’s pretty stellar—especially given the $0 price tag—alternative streaming service (just keep in mind that I’m working with the Canadian catalogue + Tubi is currently only available in Canada, US, UK, Australia and New Zealand).
I’ll be back around this time next month with another list of 5, but if you have any Tubi recommendations yourself, please feel free to drop them off in the comments or go shout at me on the socials. And if you’d like a look at my full Tubi Watchlist (containing stuff I’ve seen before and stuff I’m planning on maybe getting around to), I’ve recreated my current Tubi Watchlist over on Letterboxd.
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