Netflix Now: Swing the Bat Edition

Bob Muir

5 years ago

There is a lot I could talk about in this week’s installment of Netflix Now. For example, if girls are what you want, you can watch Emma Stone in Easy A or Angelina Jolie in Salt. I could point out how newly added films are not to be confused with ones you might actually like to see, such as the case of Le Professional, a French film that is not to be confused with Leon, known as The Professional in America. And there’s the usual b-movie magic represented by titles such as Scream, Blacula, Scream!

But all that pales in comparison to one of only two new TV shows added during the past week: FLCL, a.k.a. Fooly Cooly. Clocking in at only six half-hour episodes, this hallmark of anime from the studio behind Neon Genesis Evangelion is easy to finish in one night if you treat it like a long movie. It’s the story of a young boy hit on the head by an alien girl’s motor-powered bass guitar, which causes bizarre robots to shoot forth from bumps on his head, which he manages to fight by getting eaten/absorbed by the first robot that came out, in order to combat some mysterious alien — explaining it is quite hard, I suppose. An explosion of creativity drenched in LSD and backed by Japanese rock band The Pillows, FLCL is easily one of the best coming-of-age stories I’ve ever seen. You owe it to yourself to see what anime is capable of when it doesn’t pander to basement-dwelling introverts.

Even though I own the original DVD releases, I know what I’m adding to my Instant Queue. What are you adding?

_{New additions to Netflix Watch Instantly apply only to readers in the United States. For those in other parts of the world, your choices may vary.}