Good Month to Stay Inside

April 2018 was one of those months on Netflix where the catalog actually felt like someone had thought about it. A few things arriving at once that I genuinely wanted to watch, plus a back catalogue drop that made no obvious sense and was therefore perfect.

The one that surprised me most was Aggretsuko—a Sanrio anime about a red panda who processes workplace misery through death metal karaoke. The premise sounds like an elaborate joke, and the first two minutes do nothing to change that impression, but the show earns it completely. It understands the specific exhaustion of being a competent person surrounded by bureaucratic nonsense with absolutely no sanctioned outlet for it. The karaoke scenes are cathartic in a way that’s both genuinely funny and uncomfortably accurate.

The Lost in Space reboot arrived with enough visual ambition to make the first few episodes work, even if it would eventually lose the thread. The Fullmetal Alchemist live-action film came too—I wanted it to be better than it was. Condensing that much story into a single film without gutting everything that makes the source material function is essentially impossible, and the result proves it, though not without some interesting attempts along the way.

The classics were the real find. The Truman Show has only become more resonant since 1998, which is one of those obvious observations worth making anyway. Monty Python’s Life of Brian alongside it felt like a licensing miracle. The Hateful Eight belongs among Tarantino’s better work—excessive, stagy, completely on purpose. Not every month on the platform lands like that.