Once a week, Procrastinate Better will feature a peek into the Netflix queue of one of our staffers or critics. No tampering with the results to make ourselves seem more or less erudite, we swear! Just the brief opportunity to explain (or defend, as the case may be) the choices. This installment comes from Slate ’s movie critic, Dana Stevens. Click here for more Candid Queues .
1) Keeping the Faith : This 2000 comedy was scripted by Stuart Blumberg, who also wrote a film I’ll be reviewing next week, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right . So renting this is half for research, half because it looks sort of fun. It’s about a rabbi (Ben Stiller) and a priest (Ed Norton) who both love the same woman (Jenna Elfman). No word yet on whether the three of them walk into a bar.
2) You the Living : Every once in a while, a person whose taste you not only trust but revere takes you aside, fixes you with the ” glittering eye ” of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, and tells you that you must—absolutely must—see X movie. That’s happened to me twice in the past year with You the Living , the fourth feature from the utterly sui generis Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson. Into the queue it goes.
3) Syndromes and a Century : I have never seen a film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the young Thai director whose work made a few of my favorite critics’ “best of decade” lists earlier this year. This is a lacuna that must be addressed.
4) I’ve Loved You So Long : This French drama falls under the unglamorous Netflix-queue rubric of “movies I keep meaning to catch up with.” Its principal selling point is what’s said to be a searing lead performance from Kristin Scott Thomas in a role that’s a far cry from the patrician characters she usually plays.
5) The Last Detail : For some reason, Netflix doesn’t carry Hal Ashby’s The Landlord , a black comedy about race relations that has come up in many a glittery-eyed bar conversation. (See above, No. 2.) So I’m getting my Ashby fix with this bleak-sounding road movie in which Jack Nicholson plays a dissolute sailor escorting Randy Quaid to a Navy brig.
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