Netflix Recommendations 2.0 *READ FIRST POST*

War Machine
It's always something of a pleasure when Brad Pitt remembers he can be a decent actor, especially when he picks a good script at the same time. I wasn't sure what to expect of War Machine but it was a lot wittier than I might have guessed, and Pitt's physical acting was at the same level as in Burn After Reading. Definitely worth a couple of hours of your time.

The 9th Life Of Louis Drax
I'm not really sure what to make of this. On the one hand it's pretty well-made, it looks good, the performances are pretty good, but on the other...there's a fundamental flaw to the entire thing that got under my skin all the way through and was never adequately resolved. Jamie Dornan plays a doctor treating a child who is described as "accident-prone" after the child falls, in suspicious circumstances, from a clifftop and ends up in a coma. The film uses a magical-realism gimmick to have Louis narrate aspects of his life and history while in a coma, interspersed with both Dornan's efforts to treat Louis (because he subscribes to some poorly-elaborated nonsense whereby a medical practitioner can suggest ideas like telepathy without being laughed out of town) and the police investigation into the disappearance of Louis' father (who they suspect pushed him off the cliff).

The problem the film has is that Dornan's character is a contradiction - on the one hand he's supposed to be a well-regarded doctor who gives TED talks, but on the other hand he's apparently ignorant of some fairly basic questions that he ought to have been asking in the context of the patient (questions like ).