Stream and Stream Again

Where to Watch: Prime ***1/2 The cinematic equivalent of a warm hug, My Old Ass is a charming and intelligent low-key fantasy that manages to tackle a few pretty hefty issues without ever harshing your buzz.  The premise is pretty brilliant. On her eighteenth birthday, Elliott (Maisy Stella) and her two closest friends take a boat out to an island in the lake on the shore of which their tiny community is located. Once there, they proceed to brew up a pot of mushroom tea and get high. Now, these mushrooms are of mysterious provenance, possibly South American or South African, and the girls proceed to trip hard. Ro and Ruthie have more typical movie drug trips - full hallucinations and the like. Elliott, however, doesn't really feel any effects. Then she turns around and finds her 39 year old self (Aubrey Plaza) sitting next to her. The pair have a deep and meaningful conversation, and Old Elliott warns Young Elliott to stay away from guys named Chad. Of course once Young Elliott s...

**1/2 Where to Watch: Prime (rental); Google Play (rental) Approaching forty as I am, I've started to succumb to the temptation of nostalgia. So I thought it might be a good idea to revisit a film I have fond memories of watching as a child. Now, I am not one of those people who has an inflated opinion of their tastes as a child. I saw Battlefield Earth in theatres. I thought it was totally awesome and rented it several times when it came out on VHS. I'm pretty sure if you had asked me when I was 10 what the funniest movie ever made was I would have said In The Army Now .  The Golden Child is a movie I watched one hot Brisbane night in 1995 while suffering from a bout of gastroenteritis. I remember thinking it was both pretty cool and fucking weird. I also remember getting kind of confused by the end and possibly falling asleep. As it turns out, my impression of the film on rewatching it falls pretty much in line with my first, except that I would downgrade "pretty cool...

These days, there's more content available than anyone knows what to do with. People gripe about something or other not being available to stream, apparently having forgotten the dark days of the pre-high speed internet era, when if you missed a show on TV it was gone forever (or, at least, until it was rerun at one in the morning twenty years later), and where film fans were stuck in the position of either paying a small fortune for a shoddy DVD or VHS cassette or even (gasp!) resorting to piracy instead.  The modern streaming landscape being what it is, we've finally reached a point in Australia where I can discuss the sorts of films I actually enjoy without resorting to crime or bankrupting myself. I mean, Ms .45 is now free to stream on Plex! There's Shudder, too. So I thought, why not start a blog dedicated to discussing films (mostly genre films, as that's mostly what I watch) that are available to stream legally in Australia. Hence the title of this blog, which ...