Netflix Movie Roundup: The Social Dilemma; Love, Guaranteed; Enola Holmes

If you’ve been missing your movie theater, never fear, Netflix has you covered with every possible genre. Whether you’re seeking a mystery adventure, a lighthearted romantic comedy, or an apocalyptic documentary drama, there’s something for everyone this month!

The Social Dilemma: Ironically, everyone on social media has been buzzing about this movie. Which is a documentary about the evils of social media. Go figure. Featuring interviews with people who worked at various prominent tech companies, they all share the same fear: technology has been designed solely with revenue in mind, and as such, has led to our current divided world of fake news and disinformation. We aren’t the users of social media - we are the product, with our data being sold to advertisers to generate trillions of dollars. The movie outlines the numerous tips and tricks companies use to hook you in: one that really struck me was the development of photo tagging, which Facebook uses to compel you to log back onto Facebook and get sucked in. That’s why you only get an email notification that a friend tagged you in a photo, but the email doesn’t include the photo: you absolutely have to click the link and go to Facebook to see it. Us humans are such suckers. In parallel with the documentary interviews, there’s a fictional storyline depicting a teenage boy (Skyler Gisondo) from a typical suburban family and how social media pervades his daily life. Things escalate from the innocuous to the insane pretty quickly but it is all perfectly plausible.

The Social Dilemma is a disturbing and wise movie about how much harm social media has caused in our society, delving into such dark topics as escalating teen self-harm and suicide rates and the spread of misinformation during the pandemic. Or, the potential for civil war, which is the bleak answer the former President of Pinterest provides when asked what he is most worried about as a result of the divisiveness caused by social media. That was his answer for what worries him in the short term. The filmmakers didn’t event bother to ask about the long term. While the movie focuses a lot on young people and their unprecedented exposure to all this harmful content, I would make a plea for older folk to watch it too. Lord knows my grandmother and parents could benefit from understanding that the endless Whatsapp texts they read everyday need to be carefully researched and evaluated and not simply forwarded on as though they were gospel truth. So watch this movie and then pass it on to all the teens and conspiracy theory-loving seniors in your life. Maybe it is not too late to get them to make an informed vote in the upcoming election. 

Love, Guaranteed: Don’t want doom and gloom? Don’t worry. Rachel Leigh Cook produces and stars in this movie as Susan Whitaker, a lawyer who has taken on a new client, Nick Evans (Damon Wayans Jr.) who wants to sue a dating app because he hasn’t yet found love. The app’s fine print guarantees love if you go on a thousand dates so he has been on a grueling quest to date a thousand women so he can file a civil suit against this app and get a settlement. Is it a hokey premise? Yes. Is it thoroughly delightful? YES.

Cook and Wayans are charming actors and have loads of chemistry, which is all you want from a slight romcom. Given what a huge fan I was of She’s All That as a kid, it was a joy to see Rachel Leigh Cook back on my screen, playing a badass lawyer who has been so focused on her work that her love life has passed her by. All the tropes about the awfulness of online dating are spot on, and while this movie is hardly going to win any awards for its screenplay, it is the low-key, frothy, fun film that you crave on a weekend after another soul-crushing week of 2020. So, veg out on the couch and pull up this movie for some much-needed cozy escapism. You’ve earned it.

Enola Holmes: Do you prefer your escapism to come with more mystery and feminist adventure? Then let Millie Bobby Brown take you into the world of Enola Holmes, the hitherto unknown teenage sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes. When her mother (played by the fabulous Helena Bonham Carter) disappears, Enola has to deal with the overbearing Mycroft (Sam Claflin), who thinks she is a nuisance who has to be sent off to boarding school, and the disinterested Sherlock (Henry Cavill), who does find her very smart and capable, but cannot be bothered to deal with her care and upkeep in the absence of their mother. So, our enterprising heroine decides to escape to London and search for her mother herself. But on the way she encounters a fellow escapee, and much mayhem ensues.

Based on the series of YA novels by Nancy Springer, this is a cute movie, and Brown is engaging and winning throughout. Like most Sherlock-based films, the emphasis is more on action scenes than compelling mysteries, which is why I will always prefer the BBC Sherlock that leans more towards the cerebral, but this is still a well-done movie with a surprisingly stacked cast. Cavill is an odd choice as Sherlock since he looks so muscular that he might pop out of his clothes at any minute, but thankfully he is not the focus of the film, which has a much more feminist bent. There’s a lot of oddly relevant emphasis on the important of voting reform and how every vote matters, so even though this is set in Victorian England, it still resonates in 2020. So watch this film to enjoy some thrills and a fun retelling of classic literature. And then remember to register to vote and come up with your voting plan. Because, no matter how much pop culture we consume this year to get away from reality, we keep having to face it.