“We don’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone” is a line familiar to us all, and despite exhausting its usage, it still rings true. Its meaning is commonly applied to the loss of a dearly departed loved one or pet, or it may signify the breakdown of a romantic relationship. Yet, plausibly, the phrase is most applicable to the majority of people these days when they’re scrolling through Netflix in search of their next favorite movie, only to find it hasn’t survived the latest Netflix cull; that is the true definition of not knowing what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
Unless it is a Netflix Original, no film is safe from the Netflix purge, and there’s a variety of great films being taken off of Netflix starting July 1st. These include - The Last Samurai, I Am Not Your Negro, The Other Guys, Stand by Me, Midnight in Paris, Looper, How to Train Your Dragon, Her, and Crazy, Stupid, Love. To give you more of a heads-up, though, these are some of the best films set to be discarded by the streaming service next month, and they’re some of the best of all time…
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
7 Into the Wild
Paramount Vantage
Adapted from the 1996 novel of the same name, Into the Wild is a biographical tale of the dramatic adventures of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch). Christopher, a decorated student having graduated from Emory University, is disillusioned with the ways of the modern world and is dismayed by family revelations. Donating his life savings to charity, Christopher embarks on a cross-country exploration, with little plan other than to live both in and off natural reserves.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
His nomadic lifestyle brings encounters with a wide variety of people, who provide Christopher with a greater understanding of why he elected to essentially become unattached from modernized society. Sean Penn’s direction gifts a lesson in the most extreme ways of self-discovery and reflection, providing a remarkable insight into a disenchanted individual’s mind and how the world’s deviance from purity drives him to the extreme.
6 My Fair Lady
Warner Bros.
1964 was a milestone year for British musicals, with My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins released within just two months of each other. Starring the emblematic Audrey Hepburn as a working-class Cockney, Eliza Doolittle is taken on by a phonetics Professor, Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), who makes it his mission to transform Eliza into a well-respected and well-spoken member of the upper-middle class.
5 Saving Private Ryan
DreamWorks Pictures
It’s been 24 years, so if you haven’t seen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan yet, you may never will, and it seems to be on terrestrial television every other Sunday night anyhow. Few films seem to encapsulate the movie’s quintessence within a singular scene, but Saving Private Ryan might be personified by its opening 10-minutes, one of the best opening scenes of all time.
Hellfire rains down on the oncoming American troops, where guts and gore are quite literally cradled by screaming legless men as their compatriots, down on elbows and knees, drag themselves through a real-life or death assault course, ridden with shells and booby-traps, precariously weaving in and out of the beach defenses of Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall.” It is, in every sense of the word, epic. Sent on a morale-saving mission to locate and bring home Private Ryan, whose three brothers have all perished during their service, Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) and his battalion venture through the treacherous war zone of Nazi-occupied Normandy.
4 The Exorcist
Warner Bros. Pictures
Suggesting you watch The Exorcist is a little like suggesting you pick up a red balloon emerging from a drainpipe, knowing full well it’s leading you down a path (or sewer) of torment, distress, and excruciating suspense. 1973’s The Exorcist is not just a defining film of the horror genre, but film in general, and is still one of the scariest movies of all time.
3 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Columbia Pictures
Daniel Craig teams up with Rooney Mara and director (and king of the thriller) David Fincher for this Nordic-turned-neo noir, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the screen adaptation of the book (and Swedish film) of the same name. Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Craig) and the mysterious computer hacker, Lisabeth Salander (Mara), embark on a 40-year-old search for a missing teen in this chilly, dark crime thriller. The film has the distinct accomplishment of turning an Enya song into a moment of intense menace.
2 True Grit
Skydance Productions
A remake of the 1969 Western with John Wayne, the immensely talented and diverse writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen deliver their take on the original with True Grit. Starring two favorites of theirs, Jeff Bridges and Josh Brolin, True Grit traverses the Wild West in the early 1870s as Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld), a 14-year-old orphan, recruits the help of a US Marshall and Texas Ranger to help track down her late father’s killer.
1 The Social Network
Sony Pictures Releasing
The Social Network is essentially about Mark Zuckerberg and his crack team of nerds who revolutionized the social media landscape as we know it with their creation of Facebook, but ti feels like something much bigger. David Fincher’s film picked up three Academy Awards, including Best Adapted Screenplay. Jesse Eisenberg has undoubtedly fallen victim to the “geek” typecast, but in The Social Network, his portrayal of the socially inept and emotionally-cold computer-whiz Zuckerberg was a stroke of genius. The film follows the early years of Facebook’s conception, from being an exclusively Ivy League social media site to the worldwide phenomenon that we now know. It’s a masterful document of the dawn of our digital era.
