Netflix Minute: Zach Galifianakis Live

Netflix Minute is a weekly feature highlighting a title from Netflix's catalog of instant view films. If you want to spend a night snuggled up with a bag of popcorn and don't want to drive to the video store, this is for you.

As a type of review, I have to warn you that this edition of Netflix Minute is highly dependent on viewer taste. Zach Galifianakis: Live at the Purple Onion will obviously appeal more to fans of his prior work and could put off people who aren't familiar with his brand of comedy. This movie isn't going to evangelize you to his cause if you've had trouble watching him in movies like The Hangover. That being said, Live at the Purple Onion does a couple of interesting things that set it apart from the more conventional recorded stand-up routine.

Movie Review: It's Kind of a Funny Story

I can respect a movie that focuses on characters far more easily than I can one that focuses on plot. There's something intrinsically pleasing and human about getting to know someone through the lens of a projected screen. It gives you a baseline to build a foundation of a movie experience, whereas a focus on plot tends to have several points of friction. Of course, almost any effective piece of cinematic art depends on both characterization and plot to capture the attention of its viewers.

It's Kind of a Funny Story tells a... kind of funny story about a teenager who checks himself into a psychiatric ward after contemplating suicide. While this one sentence introduction might suggest something like a black comedy or tragic drama, directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck approach the topic with varying degrees of levity and gravity with a fair amount of success.