In which we tell you about awesome things that you must look into and enjoy.

WATCH COMPLIANCE ON NETFLIX STREAMING

There’s a lot of reasons why Compliance is a difficult watch, mostly due to its subject matter, but also watching stupid hillbillies act so fucking stupid. What’s so great about the movie is just how believably stupid they all are. The manager of a fast food restaurant (Ann Dowd) gets a call from a police man, telling her that one of her employees (Dreama Walker) has stolen a purse from a customer. He tells Dowd that she needs to take Walker into the back room and hold her there. The suspense doesn’t come from the question of whether or not the man on the phone is a real police man (he isn’t), but instead what he can make the other employees of the restaurant do to this innocent girl, just because they think he’s a police man. It’s not a fun movie to watch, and you may not even think it’s that great, but it will be impossible not to talk about the movie with whoever you watch it with as soon as it’s over. Sometimes that alone is what Netflix is best for. – RH

WATCH MAX HEADROOM

20 minutes into the future…Max Headroom was a show that aired on ABC from March, 1987 to May, 1988, and is considered the first cyberpunk series to air in the United States. It took place in a dystopian future in which television networks rule society and the government functions as a puppet state to the network executives. The only one who stands up to the networks is Edison Carter, a reporter for Network 23. Edison exposes corruption in the networks and including his own. With the help of his team, Theora Jones (Amanda Pays) who is Network 23’s star controller, who always gets Edison out of a jam, Bryce Lynch (Chris Young) who is Network 23’s teenage Hacker, and his producer Murray (Jeffery Tambor) who tries to support Edison’s stories while trying to keep the execs upstairs happy. There is one more member of the team and his name is Max Headroom. Max came into existence when, after Edison was thought to be mortally wounded, Bryce downloaded his memories into a computer and manages to create an artificial intelligence which is…Max Headroom.

The show was intelligent, daring, and bursting with social commentary. I’m not surprised it lasted two seasons and then died. I found a copy of the series at Comic Con and fell in love all over again (its available on DVD now). You need to see this show. It shows a frightening world where TV is the ultimate weapon and controller of our society… Oh wait.-GC