March Expiration Watch: Hitting Where It Hurts

Welcome to the blog's 100th post. Combined with next month's 2nd anniversary and the recently added Amazon Prime page, these are celebratory times at What's On NETFLIX Now? (Cut to: an exhausted David dozing off at his keyboard). Would that Netflix itself provided greater cause for celebration: unless original series are your be-all/end-all, pretty much every category takes a sock to the jaw this month, from classic Hollywood's biggest stars to underappreciated comedies, cult indies, and, in a big blow to the kid in all of us, nearly the entire stable of Cartoon Network and Adult Swim programs. But let's start with the classics...

Goodbye, Norma Jeane

It's a rough month if you happen to be a Marilyn Monroe fan. On March 31, three of MM's more flamboyant 1950s productions are getting the hook: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), and There's No Business Like Show Business (1954). Over the last couple of years we've seen these titles come and go, but my faith in their return isn't terribly strong now that Netflix seems to have lost interest in maintaining its back catalog. In fact, at this rate I may need to rename this blog What's NOT on NETFLIX Now?.

These colorful, over-the-top spectaculars (two are musicals) marked an unofficial coming-out party for the former Norma Jeane, who emerged from half a decade of supporting parts, prurient publicity, and a couple of low-profile dramatic leads (Don't Bother to Knock, Niagara) to fully cement her blonde bombshell status and create an iconic persona for the Hollywood ages. So if you've ever wondered what the fuss was about, this trio of films—filled to bursting with star power and production value—makes a pretty good argument for Monroe's status as a larger-than-life sex symbol who could sing, dance, and play the dumb blonde to comic perfection. She was much more than that, of course, as a number of her more dramatic roles would prove (particularly Bus Stop and The Misfits). But these early flowerings of stardom are how a majority still remember her, before her personal and professional problems overtook the headlines and lent a lasting aura of sadness to the woman whose show-stopping performance of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" (in Howard Hawks' Gentleman Prefer Blondes) remains a joyful pop-culture touchstone.

March Expiration Watch: More Musical Chairs (2014)

I'm hard-pressed to find any rhyme or reason in the licensing agreements between Netflix and the studios and distributors who provide its content. You'd think that if you're going to pay for the rights to stream, say, an all-time classic like Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, you'd want it to stick around for more than a couple of months, right? And yet, after debuting in February, this brilliant Hollywood satire is now returning from whence it came (to some virtual equivalent of a studio vault?). The same goes for Play It Again, Sam (review) and Breakfast at Tiffany's, both of which reappeared in January after expiring last year and are once again exiting stage left. Finishing equally brief stays are the underappreciated Racing with the Moon and Catch-22—bringing to mind those on-again/off-again Coppola films last seen in January.

Olivia D'abo, Josh Hamilton

At least Darren Aronofsky's Pi (review) got to stick around for a full year before it gets the axe on the 31st [update: it's been renewed], which is more than can be said for 1995's Kicking and Screaming, which showed up less than 30 days ago and is already getting its pink slip. It's hard to believe the streaming rights to such a small film cost all that much, so why not pay for a longer-term license? Else why bother? After all, despite its many charms, Noah Baumbach's first feature is hardly the kind of prestige flick that will get people signing up for Netflix in droves. Such a brief visit seems far more appropriate (if cynical) for a recent blockbuster, no? Netflix could even build a marketing campaign around it: "Now, for one month only, catch up on all the X-Men movies before the new sequel's premiere!" Heck, do that several times a year prior to big summer and holiday releases, and it would boost business for all concerned (and Netflix might even be able to score a licensing discount in exchange for the joint publicity).

New April Titles, pt. 2

Continuing this month's rundown of notable flicks now available for streaming:

King of the Hill (1993)

(FYI, no relation to the Mike Judge cartoon series)

Following the success of sex, lies and videotape and the mess that was Kafka, Steven Soderbergh's third film received glowing reviews (it was nominated for the Palm d'Or at Cannes) but almost no audience. Based on a memoir by A.E. Hotchner, this coming of age tale set in the Great Depression follows a 12-year-old boy (played by a young Jesse Bradford) who has to fend for himself in a seedy St. Louis hotel after his mother ends up in the hospital and his salesman father has to hit the road to make ends meet.

Jesse (Taylor) Bradford

Granted, it sounds depressing, but it's enlightened by Bradford's spirited, fast-talking performance (think Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun, only less wide-eyed) plus a fine role call of supporting players including Spalding Gray, Adrien Brody, Elizabeth McGovern, and Karen Allen. As always, writer/director/editor Soderbergh knows how to keep things moving, but there's also that warmth and passion he's been accused of lacking in some of his more recent work. For some reason this title has never been available on DVD in the U.S., so this is a great chance to see a movie for which the words "criminally underseen" were invented.

Pi (1998)

And the magic number is...

Before he became known for directing Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, and Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky concocted this no-budget black-and-white yarn of paranoia, mathematics, supercomputers, Hassidic conspiracies, Wall Street and...well, I'm not really sure what else, even though I've seen the movie twice. I know it's intense and visceral and the very definition of old-school indie filmmaking. Shot guerilla-style on black-and-white 16mm film, it uses inventive camerawork and quick cutting to turn New York's Lower East Side into its own Kafkaesque playground. Reminiscent of an amped up, stripped down Cronenberg film by way of Jim Jarmusch, Pi is not for everyone. But if you like your movies fast, weird, dark, and borderline incomprehensible, you'll get a kick out of this. I'm hoping by the third viewing to actually figure out what it means.