They’re cool, calm, collected, clever, cunning, and—if they’re doing their jobs right—uncatchable. Meet some of the greatest spies on Netflix today.

1) Three Days of the Condor (1975)

Joe Turner (Robert Redford) is a CIA analyst whose job is on the books… literally. Joe’s job is to pore over books, magazines, and newspaper articles in search of patterns, hidden meanings, or even just ideas that dangerous people might decide to bring off the page and into reality. So he’s thoroughly unprepared when he returns from a lunch break to find all of his co-workers gunned down by unknown assailants. After his official rendezvous to bring him in “out of the cold” results in him nearly being killed by another assassin, Joe realizes he can’t even trust those within his own organization, and he’s going to have to piece together what’s going on or die trying. Faye Dunaway won a Golden Globe for her performance as an innocent bystander turned ally whose apartment Joe commandeers, and Max von Sydow steals scenes as a morally flexible hit man with an unfailingly pragmatic view of the world.

2) Marathon Man (1976)

I love the James Bond/Mission: Impossible style of action-heavy spy thriller as much as the next guy, but there’s a lot to be said for throwing an everyman protagonist into that world of intrigue and watching them just try to survive. At least Redford’s Joe Turner actually works for the CIA; Thomas Levy (Dustin Hoffman) is only related to a government agent, but the death of his brother (Roy Scheider) is still enough to put him on a collision course with a scheme involving Nazi war criminals, stolen diamonds, and non-elective oral surgery. Poor Thomas has the bad luck to be a guy who knows nothing but whom very bad people are convinced does know something, and one of those people is a sadistic former Nazi with a love of unanesthetized dentistry. The infamous torture scenes are both cringe-inducing and justifiably iconic, and Marathon Man earned Sir Laurence Olivier another in a long line of career highlights: a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his role as Dr. Szell. It’s safe to say Marathon Man is a must-see classic.

3) Top Secret! (1984)

James Bond has been known to keep his tongue in his cheek (when it’s not in someone else’s mouth), but for the most part, the spy thriller genre takes itself pretty seriously. As such, it’s perfectly positioned for lampooning, and the Airplane! team of Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker lampooned the hell out of it with their underrated classic Top Secret! (Those guys love them an exclamation point.) Val Kilmer plays Nick Rivers, an American rocker who travels to East Germany and gets ensnared in a Resistance mission to rescue a brilliant captive scientist. I know, I know, it all sounds like the plot of some bad movie [looks awkwardly at the camera]. The unstoppable barrage of jokes, puns, and sight gags will make you long for a time before parody flicks had been run into the ground by the Scary Movie franchise and its ilk, and there’s a solid argument to be made that the Zucker/Abrahams team was never better—certainly, Kilmer was never better (except for maybe in Real Genius). For whatever reason, Top Secret! never got the acclaim of Airplane! or the Naked Gun movies, but it’s absolutely worthy of keeping that company.

4-6) The Hunt for Red October (1990) / Patriot Games (1992) / Clear and Present Danger (1994)

Not every spy-thriller hero can spend their days gunning down parkour-running terrorists and bedding femmes fatale. Like Three Days of the Condor’s Joe Turner, Jack Ryan is a CIA analyst, more adept at using his noggin than a Walther PPK. Ryan is arguably the most famous creation of novelist Tom Clancy, all three of the original Ryan films are currently available on Netflix Instant. In The Hunt for Red October, an esteemed Soviet submarine commander (Sean Connery) goes rogue, planning either to defect or to unleash nuclear armageddon on the U.S.—and it’s up to Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) to discover which. In Patriot Games, an act of spontaneous heroism puts Ryan (Harrison Ford) in the crosshairs of a vindictive IRA terrorist determined to take his grudge out on both Ryan and his family. In Clear and Present Danger, Ryan (Ford again) takes on both South American drug cartels and disreputable elements within his own government. The Jack Ryan character has been rebooted twice in the years since—played by Ben Affleck in 2002’s The Sum of All Fears and by Chris Pine in 2014’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit—but nobody has yet topped Harrison Ford in the role.

7) Mission: Impossible (1996)

Netflix Instant is decidedly lacking in the big spy action icons at the moment: no Bonds, no Bournes, not even a Bauer. Thankfully the freshman outing of another venerable modern spy franchise is available, should you chose to stream it. Mission: Impossible could have been just another forgettable remake of familiar I.P., but director Brian De Palma and screenwriters David Koepp and Robert Towne provided enough twists and turns to relaunch a franchise that is still going strong nearly 20 years later. (The fifth installment, Rogue Nation, has earned nearly half a billion dollars worldwide since its release on July 31, and a sixth film is already in the works.) Based on the hit ’60s TV series created by Bruce Geller, Mission: Impossible stars Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt, a member of the Impossible Missions Force, a covert agency tasked with handling, well, impossible missions. When one such mission goes bad, Hunt’s entire team is killed, leaving him on the run and suspected as a mole by his own government. In order to clear his name and bring the true culprits to light, Hunt must form a new team of former IMF agents and stage a heist that seems… well, you know. Mission: Impossible II is also currently available on Netflix Instant, but you would be well advised to just pretend that entire film self destructed before it made it to screen.

8) Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)

Of all the films on this list, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is definitely the weirdest. And I say that with full knowledge that Top Secret! includes an entire sequence that was shot backwards. Based on a memoir by The Dating Game creator Chuck Barris, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind chronicles Barris’s life as a game show host, TV producer, and globe-trotting assassin for the Central Intelligence Agency. And yeah, that last part is pretty much why Wikipedia includes a “citation needed” option. Needless to say, Barris’s stories of moonlighting as a government hit man are considered dubious by many, and the CIA itself has given his claims the official governmental designation of “horse puckey.” Then again, who would you suspect of being a trained killer less than the guy who gave the world The Gong Show? If anything, I’d expect him to be the target of assassins. Either way, it makes for one hell of an entertaining yarn, and Confessions star Sam Rockwell is a hoot and a half in the role of Barris, with director George Clooney serving dual duty as the CIA agent who recruits him.

9) Inglourious Basterds (2009)

When it comes to assassination plots, it doesn’t get much bigger than trying to kill Adolf Hitler. And while several real-world attempts failed to take down the German dictator, Quentin Tarantino’s World War II epic spins a ripping good yarn imagining what could have been. The flick actually follows two separate plots to take down Der Führer: one by the so-called “Basterds” themselves, a group of Jewish-American soldiers led by the grizzled Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), and the other by a young French theater owner who’s nursing a very personal grudge against the Third Reich. Eventually the dueling conspiracies join forces, culminating in a truly unforgettable night at the movies and one of the most audacious film endings ever recorded. Basterds is easily one of Tarantino’s finest films, and the movie would be worth your time even if all it ever accomplished was to introduce the world to Christoph Waltz. The German-Austrian actor’s brilliant performance as the Jew-hunting SS agent Hans Landa provides both a screen villain worthy of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the genre’s best and one of the most nail-bitingly intense opening sequences I’ve ever seen.

10) The Debt (2010)

Like Inglourious Basterds, The Debt focuses on a team of crack Nazi hunters, but it takes place long after the final shots of World War II were fired. Director John Madden’s thriller opens in 1997 at a ceremony celebrating the release of a book recounting how, in 1965, a trio of Israeli intelligence agents tracked down and killed a notorious Nazi war criminal, the so-called “Surgeon of Birkenau.” After one of those now-aged Mossad agents meets with a tragic end, flashbacks begin to peel back the layers of the story and reveal the truth about what happened all those years ago—a truth that isn’t quite as neat and tidy as the official account claims. The story unfolds in both the past and the present, showing how young Rachel Singer’s (Jessica Chastain) capture of her target went wrong, and following older Rachel’s (Helen Mirren) attempts to set things right and finish her mission after many long years of spinning a lie. (The Debt is a remake of the 2007 Israeli film Ha-Hov.)

11) Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)

It took over three decades for John le Carré’s 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to make it to the big screen, but director Tomas Alfredson pulled out all the stops, assembling a frankly ridiculous cast that includes Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, John Hurt, Toby Jones, and Mark Strong. Oldman earned an Oscar nomination for his performance as George Smiley, a former British intelligence agent who was forced into retirement after the death of an agent and the international incident that followed. He’s called back into the game for a good old-fashioned mole hunt: Rumor has it there’s a traitor embedded somewhere inside British Intelligence, and it’s his job to smoke them out. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy also picked up a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for writers Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan. (Le Carré’s novel was previously adapted into an acclaimed 1979 BBC TV miniseries starring Alec Guiness as Smiley.)

That Ashley Madison is so hot right now. So hot, with the hack and subsequent release of multiple celebrity account holders and such, that production executives from OutEast Entertainment have decided to adapt the idea of the controversial website into a TV series.

“There are a lot of TV shows doing a great job of presenting marriage storylines in new ways, but what we’re positing here is, what if there is a third lane to run in and what if you were honest about it?” OutEast partner Courtney Hazlett wonders in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “What if you didn’t need a hack to have this conversation? Maybe this is where your life just is, and no shows on television are offering that.”

If Ashley Madison can be adapted for TV, this certainly opens the door for other Web-based companies. Here are five someone should adapt for TV ASAP:

1) Yelp

In a world… where restaurant owners have no control over manipulated reviews and extortionist customers threaten to leave bad reviews if they don’t get freebies, imagine a feel-good comedy set in a family-owned and operated cafe, bistro, etc. There, the proprietors fight off extortionists and the uptight Yelp overlords with tactics learned from real-life anti-Yelp restaurateurs Davide Cerritini and Michele Massimo of Botto Italian Bistro in Richmond, California. Cerritini and Massimo encouraged their loyal customers to write negative reviews—the bulk of which are hilarious.

2) Craigslist

This series is begging for the R-rated David Fincher-style treatment, a la his film The Social Network—something dark, mysterious, and dangerous that would air on FX, AMC, or HBO. It would begin with a deep-voiced narrator: “All Craigslist founder Craig Newmark ever wanted was to create a useful online tool for people to connect, barter, get rid of old furniture, and maybe find a new roommate. Little did he know that his ‘Craigslist’ would open up a whole new underworld for people to complain, become stalkers, and find sex partners.”

3) Yahoo Answers

This adaptation of the popular/frequently mocked user-submitted question and answer site deserves the Portlandia treatment. Actually, on second thought, please just get Portlandia masterminds Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein to write, produce, and star in this future hit show.

4) Ask Jeeves

In the spirit of getting everyone to be more service-minded and service-friendly and stuff, this will be a reality show starring Jeeves, an impeccably dressed, English-accented fake butler who shows up on people’s doorsteps—unannounced, of course—to perform good deeds. It can totally involve corporate sponsors if they supply the good deeds requested—new cars, appliances, etc.

5) Facebook

A brilliant young college student comes up with a peer-to-peer network for everyone to keep track of their friends, share ideas, news, nonsense… oh wait, that one’s been done.

Illustration by Fernando Alfonso III

New best friends Amy Schumer and Jennifer Lawrence took their friendship to the next level by dancing on top of Billy Joel’s piano during his concert in Chicago Thursday night.

The duo, who are currently working on a screenplay together, took a break from the writing process—or perhaps a cleverly disguised bit of “research”—to make an entrance onstage during Joel’s rendition of “Uptown Girl," a song prominently featured in Trainwreck, complete with a dance routine. 

Although rehearsed prior to the concert, they easily managed to surprise the crowd with a can-can alongside Kim Caramele, Schumer’s sister, and Inside Amy Schumer writer Kyle Dunnigan.

What's the deal? Jerry Seinfeld was probably asking that very question last week, after East Hampton Village Police shut down the comedian’s son’s lemonade stand following complaints from a neighbor.  

Julian Seinfeld set up the lemonade stand with his friends Xander and Jaden to raise money for Baby Buggy, Jessica Seinfeld’s nonprofit supporting families in need. “Lemonade dreams crushed by local neighbor,” she quipped on an Instagram post depicting Jerry and the three boys posing with their hands over their heads in front of the shuttered stand and a police car.  

According to an East Hampton Press report, the police originally “received a complaint about illegally parked vehicles at the location of the lemonade stand.” Once the officer arrived, however, he added that “village code does not permit lemonade stands on village property. The village prohibits all forms of peddling on its property.”

Sounds like “the village” runs a tight ship.

Luckily, the Seinfelds were able to raise the money they needed for Baby Buggy. Of course, if they happened to fall short, Seinfeld could sell one of his priceless antique cars to fund the organization for the rest of the decade. 

H/T The AntiMedia | Photo via david_shankbone/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

The Streamys honor the best in digital video entertainment, from YouTubers to Viners and, starting this year, Snapchat celebrities. Helbig has played host before, pairing up last year with Hannah Hart. She's also had experience playing host this year on her E! talk show.

"It’s amazing to be back hosting the Streamy Awards for the second year in a row," said Helbig in a statement. "There’s no one better to do this with me than Tyler Oakley as we take over VH1 on September 17. This year will be bigger, better and even more surprising as we celebrate all the Internet has to offer."

Co-host Oakley also voiced his excitement.

"I am so proud to be a part of such a wonderful night celebrating the talents and accomplishments of online creators and #TeamInternet as a whole," he said.

The Streamy Awards will air on VH1 live Thursday, Sept. 17.

H/T New Media Rockstars | Screengrab via Tyler Oakley/YouTube 

Ever since Michael Vick served 18 months in jail for dogfighting, he's become a productive member of the NFL, playing for the Eagles from 2009-13 and the Jets in 2014. He's also become a supporter of the Humane Society,  and he's spoken out against animal abuse and dogfighting.

But to some Steelers fans, his apparent contrition isn't good enough, and though he signed a one-year deal with Pittsburgh on Tuesday to back up starting quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, they want him off their team and out of their lives.

That, at least, is how the person who started this Change.org petition and the 26,844 people, as of 3pm ET on Friday, who have signed it must feel.

As Nancy Lindell, who started the petition just before the signing became official wrote, "Michael Vick is a convicted felon and no-class piece of crap. He is also a terrible QB which is why he has no team.  Let's unite as Steelers fans — as NFL fans — and stop him from playing on our team! Steelers fans united! Sign to keep Vick from ever wearing the coveted Steelers uniform!!"

What this petition might conveniently forget, though, is that Roethlisberger has been accused twice (though never charged) with sexual assault in 2008 and 2010 (he settled with a woman who claimed he forced her to have sex in 2008). The difference, of course, is that Roethlisberger never had to go to trial for any alleged assaults, while Vick served his time.

It's also worth noting that neither seemingly have been in legal trouble in the past half-decade.

This, though, isn't the first time Vick has been targeted by upset fans of the home team. When he was with the Jets last year, fans began a petition calling for the team to release him, and PETA wasn't happy about his inclusion on the New York roster either.

But the Steelers' front office most likely won't be impacted by the desires of a relatively small subset of the NFL fanbase.

"Obviously we're sensitive to those potential things but we are going to do our due diligence," coach Mike Tomlin said after the signing, via USA Today. "Rest assured that we've done that, but rest assured he's done a lot since he's gone through some of the things he's gone through and his track record at this point in that regard speaks for itself."

Photo via daveynin/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Kim Kardashian and Kanye West take their confidentiality agreements seriously. 

Chad Hurley, one of YouTube's founders, found that out the hard way this week after he settled a years-long lawsuit with the power couple for $440,000.

Hurley was invited to witness the the couple's engagement at San Francisco's AT&T Park in 2013. While attendees reportedly signed a confidentiality agreement, Hurley filmed and uploaded a clip of the event to his new site, MixBit—a move that many saw as a promotional stunt. West and Kardashian promptly sued.

Hurley said on his Twitter that he'll be matching the settlement with a donation in the same amount to his foundation. His statement included what could be interpreted as a jab at West and Kardashian, noting his foundation will reward "selfless individuals." 

We reached out to Hurley for details and will update the story if he responds. 

MixBit declined to and comment on the settlement.

H/T NY Daily News| Illustration by Max Fleishman

Fresh off her first silver screen directorial debut, it’s official: This is the year of Anna Akana.

After two years of making vlogs on her YouTube channel, Akana wanted to try a new challenge: filmmaking. So off she went, six short films in tow while simultaneously acting in Marvel’s Ant-Man and Michael Showalter’s new film My Name is Doris, venturing into the world of standup comedy, and launching her own clothing line, Ghosts and Stars. Oh, and still while making inspiring, kickass YouTube videos that celebrate women for being themselves.

“Work harder and smarter than everyone else.”

Shot in found-footage style, “Loose Ends” follows documentarian Alex Wong (played by Akana) whose project is to film Yale valedictorian Amy Holt’s pursuit of a position in the CIA. But the more Wong becomes entrenched in the story, the more Holt’s genius begins turning to insanity. Through the six short films she’s created, Akana has become known for breaking boundaries around taboo topics like mental illness and suicide with her multidimensional and dark characters.

“‘Loose Ends’ was an all-female crew, and one of the greatest on set experiences I've ever had,” Akana shared in an interview with the Daily Dot. “We were ahead of schedule every day, and there was a laid-back, calm, supportive vibe that was entirely new to all of us. I had a great talk with our gaffer about how she often loses jobs to men because it requires more physical labor and people don't think she's capable. Those are the kinds of things I'd like to change as a director.”

“I never went to film school, so creating six shorts last year (all under ten minutes each) was my education. ‘Loose Ends,’ being the longest thing I've made to date, felt like a graduation of sorts,” Akana shared post-premiere. Her talent as a filmmaker—and influence among the YouTube community, with 1.3 million subscribers and countless viral hits—hasn’t gone unnoticed. She’s even gotten the opportunity to turn her short “Miss Earth” into a full series with Ron Howard’s production company, New Form Digital.

Her advice for other women hoping to break into the filmmaking space? “Work harder and smarter than everyone else. Before I started, I thought that this industry was impossible to get into, that there were way too many talented people for me to even be considered. It's true, there are a lot of talented people, but there are rarely people who are both brilliant and hardworking. Don't be afraid to suck. It's all a process.”

Screengrab via Anna Akana/YouTube

It can be hard for a DJ to get noticed, especially when he's locked in a cage backstage at a music festival. 

This happened to British DJ/producer/Kanye West collaborator Evian Christ yesterday at the Leeds Festival, which is currently taking place in England. According to the DJ, security thought he was a fan trying to sneak past the VIP gate, despite the fact that he'd just played a set. So they placed in him some sort of holding pen. 

And he did what any DJ locked in a cage backstage at a music festival would do. 

H/T Gawker | Photo via afri/Flickr (CC BY ND 2.0)

Going back to school, whether you're entering the second grade or your junior year of college, can be a real bummer. Your days of staying up until 4am, doing whatever you want to do, and waking up the next day at half past noon are gone. Your brain will only function properly for two days out of each week now, and they're ironically the days that don’t require your brain to function at all.

From comedies, to musicals, and all the way into the realms of horror, here are six films currently streaming on Netflix that will bring you solace. 

1) Billy Madison (1995)

If you’re in your 20s or 30s, you probably remember how much Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore influenced the comedic scene of your school. Judging from the endless quoting of Adam Sandler flicks in the hallways, classrooms, and cafeterias, it seemed as if Madison and Gilmore were the only comedies that mattered in the world, and things remained that way until Austin Powers came out.

Oh, back to school, back to school,
To prove to dad that I’m not a fool,
I got my lunch packed up, my boots tied tight,
I hope I don’t get in a fight,
Oh, back to school, back to school

Billy Madison proves that, no matter what grade you’re about to start, there are two constants: Studying is important, and there will always be an O’Doyle around, whom you’ll need to learn to avoid. 

2) Mean Girls (2004)

While some people might lie about it, the truth is that nobody enjoys returning to school. But things could always be worse, like being a 16-year-old who’s attending a public school for the first time in her life. This is the situation Lindsay Lohan faces in Mean Girls, as she learns the complex ecosystem that exists inside of a high school’s walls and where an attractive girl fits within that system.

As a guy, my main concern in high school was that an attractive girl would catch me looking at her, which is a comparatively short list to the one above.

If you’re a guy, don’t let the title or the film’s posters and/or cover art scare you away from watching it: It’s hilarious, and despite a dragging third act that makes the film feel 20 minutes too long, I feel safe in referring to it as a “classic.”

3) High School Musical (2006)

High School Musical is certainly a back-to-school movie, and in the truest form of the genre: The movie begins with Zac Efron meeting Vanessa Hudgens at a New Year’s Eve party, held at a ski lodge, which leads to them singing karaoke together (and being really good at it), and then parting ways to go back to school (you guys, it’s like this movie was made for this list).

When Efron surprisingly sees Hudgens at his school, she tells him that her family had just moved into the area, which kinda makes it a modern take on Grease. True to that musical, Efron isn’t the same person at school as he is when he’s skiing over winter break: He might be sweet, sensitive, and sing very well while skiing, but at school he plays basketball, and it’s obvious that these two personalities will be nearly impossible to reconcile.

Outside of the ski lodge, Hudgens is also a very different person: She’s extremely intelligent and participates on scholastic decathlon teams, which society simply won’t accept from a singer. 

With a blooming love between a meathead and a nerd—two types of people that are strictly barred from dating until their early 20s—the plot adds in a little Romeo and Juliet to its Grease (although with two sequels out so far, the two lovers obviously don’t graduate at the film’s end, nor do they kill themselves due to a misunderstanding).

I’m a little unclear on the film’s overall message, but I’m pretty sure it’s that basketball players and geniuses can sing and dance, but singers and dancers can’t be basketball players or geniuses.

4) Scream (1996)

If the theme allows it in any way whatsoever, I believe that every Netflix roundup needs a horror film in it, even if its inclusion is a bit of a stretch. So, I’ll admit that Scream’s plot doesn’t begin with students returning to school, but I still maintain that it’s still a beneficial, cautionary tale for those who are doing so in real life. 

Think about it: If a serial killer starts picking off students at your school, there won’t be time to sit down and takes notes while watching Scream—you should have done that shit before the first tardy bell had ever rung.

That’s not to say that it wasn’t scary to me at all (it was), but it was like catching a glimpse behind one of the walls that led you through a haunted house. After Scream, I had a sense of a scary movie’s mechanics, and while I was still able to be scared while watching horror films, I stopping laying awake at night, preparing emergency strategies for dealing with horror villains.

Speaking of emergency strategies: Scream is, as earlier stated, a must-watch for anybody returning to school right now. It’s filled with great information, like the importance of safety in numbers and the fact that a school serial killer may very likely be in your group of best friends, so it’s best to immediately stop trusting all of them if one happens to come around.

5) Detachment (2011)

When Tony Kaye, the infamously difficult-to-work-with director behind American History X, directs a film that includes actors like Adrian Brody, Christina Hendricks, Tim Blake Nelson, Isiah Whitlock Jr., James Caan, Bryan Fucking Cranston, and Lucy Liu, that must, at the very least, be an interesting viewing experience. The fact that it was put out in 2011—and so quietly that only a few people are aware of its existence today—just ups the Interesting Factor exponentially. Plus, this list needs something from the teachers’ perspectives, and if you boil Detachment down its essence, that’s exactly what it is.

Shot primarily from the perspective of a substitute teacher, Detachment follows Adrian Brody over a month-long stay at one of our country’s many horribly neglected schools. Although it stays largely with Brody, the plot jumps around to show us how poorly treated each staff member is, at every level, and just how much the stress of their jobs is eating at their sanity. From the principal who’s on the verge of being fired for being unable to pull off the impossible to the students who have more pressing matters in their lives than passing standardized tests, the movie does a flawless job of showing how much things suck for everybody at the school it’s set in (which may as well be any of the thousands in our country that are just as bad or worse).

But while the accuracy is dead-on, it’s unfortunately directed with an über-pretentiousness that makes it almost impossible to watch. Every eccentric decision in the direction of American History X—which all worked brilliantly for that film—is transplanted into Detachment for no clear reason. The directing style doesn't only fail; it wraps itself around the film’s legs, and makes it face-plant right into the ground.

6) The School of Rock (2003)

If you take everything that just described Detachment, and imagine the exact opposite of that, you’ll be pretty close to imagining The School of Rock. Accuracy is tossed aside with this one: It has one of the most implausible plots to exist outside of the Mighty Ducks era of Disney films.

And when the plot involves Jack Black stealing his roommate’s identity to take a job as a substitute teacher and getting away with teaching a classroom of students for months without ever looking at the curriculum, you can only imagine how far-fetched the film’s conclusion must be.

Plus, you’ll probably need something to rinse the depression from your eyes and ears after watching Detachment, and this is the perfect film for the job. No, it’s not realistic, but it’s a damn fun time. If you're heading back to school, and you’re bummed about it, you’re gonna need some damn fun times, so go ahead and watch some fun movies; you’ve earned it.

Photo via King/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed

In 2009 T-Pain released the best mobile phone app ever made by a rapper. The “I Am T-Pain” app condensed the humongous supercomputers that went into Cher’s “Believe” by Auto-Tuning anything said in the cell phone’s microphone. You could choose from different musical keys or use the same personal frequency as Tallahassee Pain himself. There were a few free instrumentals and more available for purchase to sing or rap or make scatting noises over. 

It was three dollars, and much like T-Pain, painfully ahead of its time.

Rappers making their own mobile phone apps has finally started trending six years later. Whether people are getting inspired by Kim Kardashian raking in piles of money from her Kim Kardashian: Hollywood game or Dr. Dre possibly becoming a billionaire from selling his Beats Music company to Apple, there are now a couple of medium-profile rappers attempting to cash in on cell phone games. Ringtones have gone the way of voicemail (if you leave one, you’re trying too hard), so current laughingstock-with-a-point Meek Mill and Houston demi-legend Slim Thug have opened up shop in the app store and Google Play.

Meek’s game Bike Life seems especially cheap, though it did just get a small makeover with an update. The purpose is to drive an ATV through city streets to collect gold coins while avoiding all other vehicles, including cop cars and stalled trucks. It’s broadly like Temple Run, but it reminds me a lot of the game NBA Rush, which is an app where probably-active NBA players dunk on Earth-invading aliens. 

Unfortunately, there are no dunks in Bike Life, but a recent update did make the game incentivize playing longer to get new bikes, riders, and clothing, rather than being forced to pay for any upgrades you might not want. Now you can unlock Meek Mill as a rider by playing for hours on end instead of only being able to buy his character for two dollars. At the same time, the gameplay is oddly difficult and gets boring quickly. Meek made a couple of Instagram posts about the game like a month ago, but he seems to have forgotten it completely like any other product promoted on Instagram.

While Meek released his app as sort of a supplemental piece of marketing for his new album and tour, Slim Thug seems to have made his as a legitimate standalone business decision. Thugga does in fact have new music out with two albums having dropped in 2015 (news to me), but I think he’s already tweeted more about Roll Like a Boss, his 8-bit inspired phone game, than either volume of Hogg Life. The concept of the game is simple: pick up chicks and avoid the haters. That all the women the game allows to be picked up are dressed like streetwalkers and flop around in the car like ragdolls, or that the “haters” include police barricades and tanks, along with flying pigs and bouncing sports balls seems to be beside the point. Stuff flies at your Cadillac and you touch the screen to jump over that stuff.

If someone like Joe Budden–someone with a sizable fan base that obviously doesn’t care about what’s cool or good–made some type of street-fighting app, that would probably sell. 

Roll Like a Boss is better than Bike Life if only because it’s a little more simple and user-friendly. However, there are no real goals of the game—besides an online leaderboard you have to be connected to the Apple Gaming Center to place on. High scores don’t unlock anything. You can choose from five cities to “roll” through and the only difference is the background picture. There are eight other cars besides the default Caddy that can be unlocked, but they all cost a dollar and their only advantage over the Caddy is you can hit two more obstacles before the run ends.

Meek Mill and Slim Thug cashed in on this about as well as Soulja Boy did when he made the Flappy Soulja app, essentially the exact same game as Flappy Bird after the original was infamously removed by its creator. A mid-tier rapper is always going to have trouble promoting a product like this, but these weak attempts at profit likely show that there is a market for rapper apps, and not just bootleg voice modulators made by bootleg mobile app companies.

If someone like Joe Budden–someone with a sizable fan base that obviously doesn’t care about what’s cool or good–made some type of street-fighting app, that would probably sell. Anything like Def Jam: Fight for NY would work on an iPhone. Likewise someone as famous as Snoop Dogg could probably make a pretty penny doing his own version of Clash of Clans or that one app Kate Upton dresses up in costumes for. Someone needs to put the time and effort to make a game as addictive and profitable as Kardashian did. It could even be T-Pain, who re-released his “I Am T-Pain 2.0” app a couple of years ago with the ability to upload and share your Auto-Tune karaoke with the world.

There is money to be made in the app store, but it may still be a while before a rapper invents the next Minecraft.

Screengrab via Slim Thug/YouTube

Jen Statsky’s resume is impressive. At age 29, she’s written for Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, Parks and Recreation, and Broad City. Now, she’s a staff writer on Maria Bamford’s new Netflix show, Lady Dynamite, produced by Arrested Development’s Mitch Hurwitz.

Throughout our interview, she tells me again and again, “I feel super lucky to be where I am today.” Garnering success in the entertainment industry is, of course, somewhat based on luck, but Statsky’s comedic skill and intelligence is evident.

While most comedy writers came up through stand-up or involvement with UCB and Second City, Statsky had a more 21st-century path: She got noticed on Twitter, where she now has more than 77,000 followers.

How did you get your first TV writing job?

I went to NYU for film and TV, so I had an interest in writing when I got there. When I graduated, I worked in a coffee shop and did stand-up and random little gigs. I was an assistant at The Onion as well for about a year and a half, and during that time Twitter was getting popular. I signed up for it and started writing stupid, dumb jokes, and I did that until 2010. Basically what happened was that A.D. Miles, the head writer at Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, was following me on Twitter and he messaged me and asked if I wanted to submit a packet to the show, and that’s how I ended up getting the job.

Did you build a following organically or did it happen all at once?

I don’t know exactly how it happened. I think I got lucky, and there were a few people with big Twitter followings at the time who retweeted me, like Rob Delaney and Seth MacFarlane, and I think that helped, but it was pretty gradual. Nothing happened overnight.

I don’t think about it a ton at this point. It’s never been something that I’ve never felt is negative or something I should be embarrassed about. From my friends, I’ve learned that you have to do the thing that you’re having the most fun doing, and the thing you have the most fun doing is usually the thing that you’re the best at. For me, as I was coming up in comedy, I realized that the thing I like doing the most is writing quick one-liner jokes, and Twitter was the perfect medium for that. I feel super lucky that I happened to be starting my career at the time that Twitter was taking off. I don’t quite know how it is now. I think there’s probably an oversaturation. Like there are so many funny people on Twitter now. Sometimes you’re just capturing a moment in time where something all comes together and I feel like that happened with me when I joined Twitter.

It was great. Late night is truly like comedy boot camp because you’re doing a show every day. You don’t have time to think about the last show, you can only think about the show ahead of you. And I was a monologue writer, so I think for me, it was a great way to get trained at churning out a lot of material under a deadline. Every day you had to produce four or five pages of jokes. It’s really intense. The most challenging, and ultimately the most rewarding part of it, was being able to write jokes under a tight deadline and just getting better at churning them out.

Were you also working on your own projects at that time?

I stopped doing stand-up when I started writing professionally; standup just fell to the wayside because the job was so time-consuming. The second you’re done writing one monologue you have to start thinking about one for the next day. It was a pretty time-consuming gig.

The goal had always been to write for sitcoms. I grew up loving them. Late Night was a great first job, but it was never really the end goal. After two years, I wanted to try something new. I moved to L.A., and a couple months after moving I wrote on the show Hello Ladies, which was on HBO for three months. Right after that, I went to Parks and Rec. I was there for the last two seasons.

How was writing for Parks and Rec different from writing for Fallon?

When I first got to Parks and Rec, I was like, I might have well been a plumber before this, because the writing process was so different. When you’re writing for the monologues, you’re looking for the quickest possible punchlines, and when you’re writing for a half-hour show, so much of it is talking about story and character. You’re obviously trying to think of funny stories, but the jokes don’t come first. And at Late Night, that’s all it is. It was my first real time thinking about story, and it was awesome. I feel like I lucked out in the biggest way because it was the best show with the best cast. It was my favorite show before I got there, so getting the opportunity to write for it was a true dream.

You’ve also written for Broad City.

Yeah, I wrote for season 2 and season 3. I wrote “Mochalatta Chills.” Usually Abbi [Jacobson] and Ilana [Glazer] write about half the episodes, and the rest are divvied up amongst the writers.

One thing I thought that was a cool similarity between both shows is that both of them have a lot of heart. This is something I very much appreciate in the stuff I work on and watch. The characters on Parks and Rec have always gotten a lot of credit for being so funny while being super kind to each other and never mean, and I feel that with Broad City too. It’s a love story between Abbi and Ilana, and they’re never mean-spirited, and that’s something that I really appreciate.

The shows are obviously so different in tone. You know, Parks and Rec is this creation of this fictional town, Pawnee, and Broad City is based in this heightened version of New York, but coming from a super real place of New York being the best and worst place in the world. The similarity between the two is a lack of mean spirit, which I appreciate because I think comedy can so easily drift over to being a little harsh and mean, which is always a bummer to me.

Jimmy Fallon is also so fun to watch because he seems like such a charming, nice guy.

Totally. People always ask me: Is Jimmy really that nice? And he really is! He’s such a genuine kid in that he’s so excited about things and so positive, and I do feel that I’ve been super lucky in that I’ve gotten to work for things that have been positive.

It’s on Netflix, and it’s Maria [Bamford] playing a version of herself. The show is told in three different time periods: before she had a mental breakdown, during her mental breakdown, and then in the present day in Los Angeles. It’s an interesting experience: working for Netflix and working for Maria, who I have loved for years and years.

I guess for the Internet it’s awesome because you get such an immediate response to your joke. If I did standup, that would be another way to get an immediate response, but aside from that, if you’re just writing one-liners in a vacuum, you’re just wondering: Is this funny? Will this get a laugh?

The immediate response from Twitter was super helpful when I first started to write jokes. And then I transitioned to writing for Fallon: writing one-liners for someone else. What I learned was,  the shorter, the better; it’s punchier. I improved at it so much. I can go back and look at jokes I wrote for Fallon when I first started, and I’m like, that’s 60 words too long. The more you do it, when you write for someone else—and we had the benefit of Jimmy rehearsing the joke in front of an audience—and you hear it come out of his mouth, and you’re like, “Oh, that doesn’t work, that’s clunky,” or you’re like, “That’s perfect and succinct and great.” The response from the crowd is super helpful.

It goes through so many smaller test audiences. I think the first barometer is the writers’ room. If the room laughs, then it’s a good joke. Sitcoms are interesting because you’re pitching things in the room, and then it’ll go into a draft. Then you’ll do a table read. Sometimes when you hear the actors say it out loud at the table read, you’re like, “Oh, that’s bad.” Even if we laughed so hard at it in the room, it just didn’t work when it came out of the actor’s mouth. And it works the other way, too: Sometimes when you hear an actor say some small throwaway joke at the table read, it’s way funnier than you ever imagined, and you realize you should expand on that.

Even past that, when you’re on set and shooting the actual show, you realize that a scene is too long. A sitcom script is constantly evolving, whereas late night is quicker: You write the joke in the morning and by 4 o’clock that day, it’s either dead or alive.

Correction: Statsky wrote one episode for season 3 of Broad City, and was a creative consultant for that season. 

Photo via Jen Statsky/Twitter | Remix by Jason Reed 

Take a look and plan accordingly. And if you’re curious about the comings and goings on Amazon or Hulu, we’ve got you covered there, too. 

September

Sept. 1

Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London 

Better Than Chocolate 

Bratz: Rock Angelz 

Care Bears: Big Wish Movie 

Care Bears: Journey to Joke-a-Lot

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 

Curious George 2: Follow That Monkey! 

Doomsday Preppers: Season 1-3 

Electrick Children 

FernGully: The Last Rainforest 

Ink Master: Season 2 

Jackie Brown 

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels 

Mortal Kombat: The Movie 

Patch Adams 

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer 

Rugrats in Paris: The Movie 

Rules of Engagement 

Rumpelstiltskin 

Sarah's Choice 

School of Rock 

She's the One 

Sleepless in Seattle 

The IT Crowd: Series 1-4 

The Lost Boys 

Total Recall 

W. 

Sept. 2 

Cheech & Chong's Hey Watch This 

Sept. 3 

Dinosaurs: Season 1-4 

Sept. 4 

Delta Farce 

Sept. 5

Marilyn in Manhattan 

Sept. 7 

Ramsay's Best Restaurant: Season 1 

Sept. 9

Bratz: Friendship Is Always in Style 

Kicking It 

Sept. 10 

100 Below Zero 

Becoming Chaz 

Crash & Bernstein: Season 1-2 

War Witch 

Sept. 13 

High Fidelity 

Sept. 14 

Corky Romano 

Sept. 15 

Best of Teletubbies 

Bratz: The Video: Starrin' & Stylin' 

Coach: Season 1-9 

Spiral: Season 4 

Valhalla 

Sept. 16 

Hank: Five Years from the Brink 

The Slap: Season 1 

Sept. 20 

Reporter 

Sept. 22 

National Geographic: Inside Guantanamo 

National Geographic: The Battle for Midway

Sept. 26 

Indy 500: The Inside Line 

Lethal Force 

Ron White: A Little Unprofessional 

Sept. 27 

LEGO Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu: Season 1-2 

My Boys: Season 1-4 

Sept. 28 

Undeclared: The Complete Series 

Sept. 29 

Bratz: Desert Jewelz 

Comic Book Men: Season 2 

Coriolanus 

Sept. 30 

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues 

Apocalypse Now 

If I Stay 

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit 

Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa 

Nebraska 

Saved! 

Star Trek: The Motion Picture 

Star Trek Into Darkness 

The Expendables 3 

The Good Guy 

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire 

The Prince 

The Skeleton Twins 

The Wolf of Wall Street 

Transformers: Age of Extinction 

World War Z 

August

Aug. 1

Bad Girl Island 

Barbershop 

Beauty Shop 

Bulletproof 

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang 

Digimon Adventure: Seasons 1-3

Driving Miss Daisy 

Face/Off 

Fools Rush In 

Gangsters: Faces of the Underworld: Season 1

Hawking 

Hot Pursuit 

Houseboat 

Inside Fendi

Joe Dirt 

Kiss the Girls 

Pumping Iron 

The Pitch: Season 1

Shooter 

The Fifth Element 

The Longest Day

Titanic 

Unbreakable 

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea 

We’re No Angels 

Aug. 6

The Raven 

Aug. 8

Albert Nobbs 

Explorers: Adventures of the Century: Season 1 & 2

Aug. 15

Family Ties: Seasons 1-7

Immortalized: Season 1

The Forsyte Saga: Series 1-2

Aug. 23

Jiro Dreams of Sushi 

Aug. 24

My Fair Wedding: Season 5

Aug. 25

Petunia 

Aug. 27

LEGO Atlantis 

LEGO: Hero Factory: Breakout 

LEGO Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu: King of Shadows 

LEGO Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitzu: Way of the Ninja 

The Moth Diaries

Aug. 31

Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends: Seasons 1-3

Illustration by Max Fleishman

Flanked by Drag Race stars Shangela, Alexis Mateo, Jiggly Caliente, Willam, current title-holder Violet Chachki, and a slew of others from the show, Miley performed her anthemic ballad "DOOO IT" before shooting confetti out from between her legs with a little help from her friends in the fur onesie-clad Flaming Lips.

Channelling Vogue-era Madonna in a blonde high ponytail, Miley sang as the Drag Race stars around her kicked and death-dropped while performing a kind of puppetry with accessories shaped like giant eyeballs.

Yeah, you kind of have to just watch it.

MTV also offered a guide to all 30 of the drop-dead gorgeous drag queens that danced in the performance. 

Photo via MTV | Remix by Jason Reed

A popular animated series on YouTube wants to expand, and it’s looking to Kickstarter for its initial push.

Karo & Abo features two Armenian brothers who still live with their very old-school parents. Creator Hayk Manukyan wants to take his characters and create something bigger. He’s hoping his Kickstarter campaign can get him the necessary funds to make a mini-movie.

The Daily Dot reached out to Manukyan to ask him about his inspirations and what he's hoping to do next.

Can you give a bit of background on yourself?

When I was 8 years old I came to America from Armenia. Not knowing a single word of English made it extremely hard to fit in. Luckily for me, drawing helped me connect with the kids around me. I looked at a list and saw that the Pasadena Art Center was the closest to me so I sent them my portfolio. I was in the ninth grade when they accepted me into their high school arts program called Saturday High. I took my portfolio to a small animation studio called Cornerstone Animation; which was owned by a former Disney/Warner Bros. artist and animator named Larry Whitaker who hired me. I've worked on such films as The Incredible Hulk, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and TV shows such as The Ricky Gervais Show. Currently I work at Warner Brothers Animation on Teen Titans Go!

How did you come up with Abo and Karo?

Abo and Karo came about in 2007 when I was working on Alvin and the Chipmunks. We were doing a lot of overtime and working weekends, but I wanted to continue making my own shorts. On my YouTube channel I asked people to send in jokes that I could animate. A guy named Harut Balian sent me a joke and instead of animating the actual joke I decided to add my own twist to it by having one guy trying to tell the joke while another guy continuously interrupts him by laughing at all the wrong parts and then fails to laugh at the punchline. I created two simply designed and easily animated characters to act out the joke, and I named them Abo and Karo. Originally, my idea was that they were just buddies, but over time they evolved into brothers.

Almost every cartoon I've ever made comes from my real-life experiences and people around me: my dad, my mom, my sisters, my wife, my in-laws, my cousins, and even me. We all do weird things that make for great entertainment. It also helps that my wife and I live in a house behind my parents. I do not even have to travel far for the material. I just need to look out my window to see my dad fighting with a squirrel, or cops showing up to tell my dad he can't just capture a pigeon from a park because he wants to breed pigeons. This stuff writes itself.

What is it about your comedy that appeals to everyone, and not just Armenians?

I've thought about this one a lot and I think it's because the stories aren't focused on a family being Armenian, but a family who happens to be Armenian. Harut, the Dad, fighting with squirrels has nothing to do with him being Armenian.The Armenian part just gives the characters their unique flavor, but the family situations and characters are what people relate to, in my opinion. My stories also deal a lot with the older generation trying to keep up with the new generation in a new world; which again is not a Armenian-specific situation, but one that is going on in every household across the world.

I do worry about that and understand how some people might think we are asking for too much; but animation is expensive to do, especially if you are trying to do it the right way. To better help people understand, we created a pie chart to explain how the funds will be spent.

How will the mini-movie be different from other Abo and Karo cartoons?

I try to keep the Abo and Karo cartoons simple with very little animation so I can fit it into my busy schedule. The movie will have fuller animation, more complex camera angles, as well as a larger cast of characters and situations. Our goal with this mini-movie is to impress the right people and get this family their own TV series.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled the subject's surname.

Screengrab via Abo & Karo/YouTube

MTV’s Video Music Awards may celebrate the biggest names in music entertainment, but the non-musical video stars of today are beginning to make their presence known at the annual event.

The biggest splash for YouTubers in last night’s main show came at the close of the evening. Miley Cyrus’s performance was preceded by a lineup of transgender and genderqueer youth, including digital celebs like Gigi Gorgeous and Brendan Jordan, who spoke about the importance of all the “sticky, young, impressionable minds of our future” watching Cyrus' “Happy Hippie squad” on TV.

Screengrab via gogreen18/Twitter

We all know the Video Music Awards often fail to recognize top-notch achievements in rap and hip hop, but one group of musical legends in particular deserves a long-overdue honorable mention: the Muppets.

The Muppets may not do much of their own rhyming, but these Internet mashups and covers prove that they just might be the new kings of hip-hop videos—VMAs be damned.

From Miss Piggy serving the fiercest combination of attitude and glam with Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” to Animal’s boisterous drumming as he covers Kool and the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie,” one thing’s for sure—these Muppets know how to get down.

Here are some award-worthy Muppet-ized performances.

1) The Beastie Boys’ "So What'cha Want"

2) Biz Markie's "Just a Friend"

3) Shock G’s “The Humpty Dance”

4) Ol Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya”

5) Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money”

6) Kool and the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie”

7) NWA’s “Express Yourself”

Add them all together, and we have this summer's most chilling fan theory.

Joe Hill is the acclaimed writer of such works of horror fantasy as Horns (starring Daniel Radcliffe), popular comic series Locke and Key, and In the Tall Grass. The latter is a work he co-wrote with his dad—oh, yeah, his dad is Stephen King.

Obviously, Joe Hill knows a thing or two about horror. And he also has an attraction to crime and mystery that runs in his family. Last week on his Tumblr, he explained how the two had combined in a very raw way—one that will probably leave you freaked out for weeks.

Hill had been reading about the unsolved mystery of the Lady of the Dunes, an unidentified woman whose body was found on Cape Cod in July of 1974. Though many attempts have been made at reconstructing her appearance based on her remains, her case is still unsolved decades later.

The Lady in the Dunes was found the same summer that another horrifying phenomenon came to the Cape—the grandfather of the summer blockbuster, Jaws. Hill writes about realizing there might be an eerie connection between them:

In June, JAWS was unleashed on theaters once more to celebrate its 40th anniversary. Naturally, predictably, maybe inevitably, I was there. For the first time I saw the picture the way it was meant to be seen. On the big screen, baby, that shark’s mouth is just about wide enough to ride a bicycle into it.

I was watching in my usual tranced out state of dreamy pleasure… and then, suddenly, found myself half-lunging out of my seat, prickling with gooseflesh.

Now understand, I had only just finished reading The Skeleton Crew a few weeks before. The Lady of the Dunes is in many ways the centerpiece of the book, and unlike the other crimes Mrs. Halber explores, it remains infuriatingly unsolved. After finishing the book, I had spent a few minutes online, acquainting myself with the latest details… and studying the recreation of the Lady’s face.

And now, suddenly, impossibly, there she was… life-size and looking over her shoulder at me. There for a moment in a busy crowd scene, and then gone.

Spooky, right? Hill, convinced he had seen the Lady of the Dunes show up onscreen for only a moment, went back and rewatched the film's crowd scenes frame by frame with a friend. And then:

Blue bandana. About 30. Fit, 145 pounds. I don’t believe those are Wrangler jeans, but a lady presumably owns more than one pair of jeans.

Is the Lady of the Dunes in JAWS?

Her physical description loosely matches that of the lady in the dunes. Could it be her? 

Hill thinks so. He's seeking information from anyone who might have been extras in the scene that day or who has more information to share about the filming of Jaws on Martha's Vineyard.

 Though Hill admits his theory is far-fetched, his greater purpose is the master stroke of the horror writer: to get you thinking about the images you pass over every day. What kinds of stories could be behind the stories that live onscreen? Part of Hill's tale, after all, involves seeing his favorite movie on a giant movie screen for the first time. In the middle of the film's many revelations upon being seen that way for the first time was a moment of what-if horror.

What if? Indeed.

Screengrab by Aja Romano

While we’re sad to see content leaveNetflix each month, we’ll always have even more movies and shows to obsess over.

September

In addition to its usual round of film favorites, Netflix is adding a full slate of TV favorites in September, including new seasons of The Walking Dead, Parenthood, Portlandia, Gotham, and more.

Sept. 1

72 Dangerous Animals: Australia: Season 1

Arthur: Season 17

Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher (2014)

Battle Creek: Season 1

Blackbird (2014)

Capital C (2014)

Combustion (2013)

Da Jammies: Season 1

Divorce Corp. (2014)

Giggle and Hoot's Best Ever! (2014)

Hamlet (1990)

Hardball (2001)

Heather McDonald: I Don't Mean to Brag (2014)

Lawrence of Arabia: Restored Version (1962)

Los hombres también lloran: Season 1

Masters of the Universe (1987)

Mississippi Damned (2009)

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: Volume 1

Mouk: Season 1

Our Man in Tehran (2013)

Pandas: The Journey Home (2014)

Person of Interest: Seasons 1-3

Puffin Rock: Season 1 *

Rambo: First Blood (1982)

Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)

Rambo III: Ultimate Edition (1988)

Shake the Dust (2014)

Sleepy Hollow (1999)

Such Good People (2014)

The Adventures of Sharkboy & Lavagirl (2005)

The League: Season 6

The Monster Squad (1987)

Up in the Air (2009)

Zathura (2005)

Zoo Clues: Season 1

Sept. 2

Black or White (2014)

Miss Julie (2014)

Sept. 3

Drumline: A New Beat (2014)

Sept. 4

Baby Daddy: Season 4 (new episodes)

Bad Night (2015)

Madame Secretary: Season 1

Melissa & Joey: Season 4 (new episodes)

Sept. 7

Space Dandy: Season 2

Sept. 8

6 Years (2015) 

Love at First Fight (2014)

Sept. 9

Teen Beach Movie 2 (2015)

Sept. 10

Fugitivos: Season 1

Longmire: Season 4 *

Sept. 11

About Elly (2009)

God Bless the Child (2015)

Madame Bovary (2014)

Sept. 12

It Happened Here (2015)

Portlandia: Season 5

The Roughnecks (2014)

Why Did I Get Married? (2007)

Sept. 13

Comedy Bang! Bang!: Season 4 (part 2)

Pixies (2014)

Sept. 14

Call the Midwife: Series 4

Sept. 15

Closer to the Moon (2015)

Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014)

Kambu: Season 1

Rubble Kings (2015)

Sin Senos no Hay Paraiso: Season 1

The Bank Job (2008)

The Road Within (2015)

Zoobabu: Season 1

Sept. 16

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Reservation Road (2007)

The Blacklist: Season 2

The Fosters: Season 3

Sept. 17

The Mysteries of Laura: Season 1

Sept. 18

Keith Richards: Under the Influence (2015) *

Sept. 21

Gotham: Season 1

The Following: Season 3

Sept. 22

Person of Interest: Season 4

Philomena (2013)

SMOSH: The Movie (2015)

Sept. 23

The Loft (2015)

Sept. 24

Iris (2014)

Sept. 25

Blue Bloods: Season 5

Hawaii Five-0: Season 5

Parenthood: Season 6

VeggieTales in the House: Season 1 (new episodes) *

Sept. 26

The Canyons (2013)

Sept. 27

The Walking Dead: Season 5

Sept. 29

Bones: Season 10

Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013)

Monster High: Boo York (2015)

RL Stine's Monsterville: Cabinet of Souls (2015)

Sept. 30

Agatha Christie's Poirot: Series 12

Leafie: A Hen into the Wild (2011)

Midnight’s Children (2012)

Murdoch Mysteries: Season 4-7

Ned Rifle (2014)

August

With the newest season of Doctor Who, childhood favorite Reading Rainbow, even more Inspector Gadget, and the premiere of Narcos—which stars Game of Thrones fan favorite Pedro Pascal—there’s something for everyone in August.

Aug. 1

Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein

Asylum

Back in Time / Cong Cong Na Nian

Beneath the Helmet

Breakup Buddies / Xin Hua Lau Fang

Bride and Prejudice

Casting By

Dancing on the Edge: Season 1

Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood: Season 2

Dear Frankie

Dogs on the Inside

Electric Slide

Enemy at the Gates

Flex is Kings

Lost and Love / Shi Gu

Masha and the Bear: Season 1

November Rule

Odd Squad: Season 1

Outcast

Pants on Fire

Reading Rainbow: Volume 1

Russell Brand: End the Drugs War

Somewhere Only We Know / You yi ge di fang zhi you wo men zhi dao

Sorority Row

The Code: Season 1

The Golden Era / Huang Jin Shi Dai

The Hurt Locker

The Living

The Mind of a Chef: Season 3

Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns

Utopia: Season 1

Vexed: Seasons 1-2

War

Wing Commander

Aug. 3

Chronic-Con, Episode 420: A New Dope

Aug. 4

Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead

Aug. 5

Yellowbird

Aug. 6

Kill Me Three Times

My Amityville Horror

The Look of Love

Welcome to Me

Aug. 7

Club de Cuervos: Season 1

HitRECord on TV: Season 1

Motivation 2: The Chris Cole Story

Project Mc2

Transporter: The Series: Season 2

Aug. 8

Doctor Who: Season 8

Aug. 11

Fred: The Movie

Fred 2: Night of the Living Fred

Fred 3: Camp Fred

Two Days, One Night

Aug. 12

For a Good Time, Call...

Leap Year

The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death

Aug. 14

Demetri Martin: Live (At The Time)

DinoTrux

Ever After High Way too Wonderland: Season 3

Ship of Theseus

Aug. 15

Alex of Venice

Aug. 16

Being Flynn

Pariah

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Aug. 17

Lord of War

Aug. 19

Jerk Theory

Real Husbands of Hollywood: Season 3

Aug. 20

30 for 30: Angry Sky

As Cool As I Am

Strange Empire: Season 1

Aug. 21

Grantham & Rose

Transcend

Aug. 23

Girl Meets World: Season 1

Aug. 27

Byzantium

White God

Aug. 28

Inspector Gadget: Season 2

Narcos

Once Upon a Time: Season 4

Revenge: Season 4

Aug. 29

Ride

Aug. 30

Muffin Top: A Love Story

* denotes Netflix Original

Photo via Rob Bertholf/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Max Fleishman

Miley Cyrus did a decent job of being her own technicolor variety show at the VMAs Sunday night, but it was really just one big billboard for her new album, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz. 

Former Daily Dot writer Micah Singleton summed it up best.

That's a fair first-look appraisal.

The 23-song album, the majority of which was co-produced with the Flaming Lips, pivots quite a bit from the pop and rap posturing of Bangerz. Opener "Dooo It" finds a groove in the atmospherics, "Karen Don't Be Sad" has shades of the Flaming Lips's "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots," and "The Floyd Song (Sunrise)" is a tear-stained psychedelic ode to a dead pet. As an opening trinity, it establishes Dead Petz as a Flaming Lips album, but it doesn't set the tone. 

At 23 songs, there's certainly fat that could have been excised; there are some half-finished ideas and indulgent excursions. Most of the songs were co-written with the Flaming Lips's Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd and Coyne's nephew Dennis. The first three songs on Dead Petz mirror that influence, but deeper in the album, Cyrus starts digging out a more vibrant, experimental ditch: "Lighter," "Cyrus Skies," "Milky Milky Milk." 

Cyrus expanded on her friendship with Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne in a New York Times interview, saying she believes her deceased dog's energy was transferred to Coyne after she went to a Chinese healer. 

I really think, in a way, his energy went into Wayne’s energy. What he was to me, Wayne has become. 

Coyne's sticky fingerprints are all over Dead Petz, which could have been disastrous, but the album mostly amplifies both artists' better features. There's no brain-cleaving power ballad like "Wrecking Ball," but the 22-year-old is in a position where she doesn't necessarily have to push out another one. Cyrus remarked on her creative freedom in the NYT piece, explaining that her advisers "said they’d never seen someone at my level, especially a woman, have this much freedom. I literally can do whatever I want. It’s insane.”

We'll see what literally doing whatever she wants yields, but Dead Petz, an album released outside her RCA Records contract, is essentially Cyrus's transference of energy, an impulse-driven exploration of emotional extremes and musical accompaniment to her new role as generational adviser: smoke drugs, explore your gender and sexuality, embrace loss, and generally do you (just maybe don't call outNicki Minaj).

On closer "Twinkle Song," she offers, perhaps, a new generational mantra: "I had a dream that I didn't give a fuck. But I give a fuck." 

Photo via Miley Cyrus/SoundCloud