Explore the mysterious genres of Netflix

Netflix seems to have taken over everyone’s life. From reviving beloved shows like Full House, Gilmore Girls, and Arrested Development to their addicting original content like Orange is the New Black and Making a Murderer. Even sitting and watching your favorite shows can take up most of the day.

So what about those days when you want to watch an obscure movie or a random genre that you don’t want anyone to know about? Well, believe it or not, Netflix offers more genres than you can imagine. Genres that are appropriately called “Netflix’s Hidden Genres.”

Genres that range from the everyday stuff like ‘drama’ and ‘action’ to ‘cult comedies’ and ‘faith and spirituality.’ ‘Disney’ has it’s own category too, with classics like Lilo and Stitch and Tarzen to the new stuff like Jessie and Good Luck Charlie.

To get to the genre, all you have to do is insert a specific genre’s numerical sequence into the url http://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/### (where the pound signs are). It is fantastic.

Dramas based on Books: 4961

Read a good book recently? A book that may or may not be a movie? There’s a Netflix hidden genre just for that!

There are some newer ones, like Silver Linings Playbook and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and the classics like Forest Gump and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. But what about yet another movie for which Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t win an Oscar for?

No, not The Titanic or The Wolf of Wall Street. In this movie, DiCaprio plays a developmentally disabled child whose older brother, played by Johnny Depp, is in charge of take care of the entire family. A family in which the mother can barely make it to the the bathroom by herself because of her weight which she gained after her husband killed himself and two teenaged sisters who tend to be too annoying to handle.

Although made in the early 90s, this movie is anything but boring. It’s a little weird, with a random affair, DiCaprio climbing water towers, and how the kids end up dealing with their mom’s death, but DiCaprio and Depp’s characters make this movie anything but boring.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape may not be the most popular Depp or DiCaprio movie, but that doesn’t take away from its greatness. DiCaprio, who was 19 while shooting the movie, really knew what he was doing. Not only was he convincing, but this really was his best performance. The Academy Award snub really did start his career, though.

Late Night Comedies: 1402

Everybody has bad days. Those days where you want to lock yourself up in your room and ignore the world. Oh, and maybe watch a movie. A movie that’s so stupid it’s funny and so bad that it’s good. This is exactly that genre.

White Chicks, Scary Movie 3, American Pie, and Dude, Where’s My Car are the best the representations of this category. Apparently Glory Days and Meet the Fockers fit into this category too. But what really doesn’t fit, a movie that’s both stupid and bad, yeah, that has to be Behaving Badly.

This movie is basically Spring Breakers 2.0 for Selena Gomez, trying yet again to remind everyone that she’s no longer a Disney kid. It’s basically the same story, too. A good girl surrounded by a bunch of immature, gross people.

The difference between Spring Breakers and Behaving Badly is that Gomez doesn’t leave halfway through. No. In this one, everyone gets to see how gross teenage guys are, and apparently, how naive girls are, too. Because after Nat Wolff’s character makes a bet with some guy about how he’s going to get with Gomez, and after all the dumb stuff that happens, she still gets together with him.

“Aside from a few lines of juicy bad language, Gomez plays the innocent in this fast-paced screwball farce, which is full of cheerful vulgarity but dangerously low on wit, charm or narrative logic,” wrote Stephen Dalton, writer for The Hollywood Reporter.

If Gomez’s whole message is to teach girls to respect themselves and not have guys define you, well, she’s doing an awful job with this movie. Breaking away from a Disney image shouldn’t involve changing your values, not matter how many Disney kids do.

Teen Comedies: 3519

Score! We have our own category! A category with movies that probably shouldn’t be in it, but still, our own category. But who knew that the movie about a girl changing her whole life around just to get a guy (that’s Grease by the way), was a comedy? Or that the cinematic masterpiece that is High School Musical was one too?

13 Going on 30 might count. Maybe even Clueless. But the one that is the most confusing in this category has to be Struck by Lightning.

It’s a movie about a kid who wants to get into Northwestern and be the youngest editor of The New Yorker. To get there, he needs to make a Literary Magazine to show the school that he left a mark on the world. Except no one is interested in helping him because teenagers are mean.

So to get what he wants, he starts blackmailing people, which may or may not be funny, depending on how you were raised.

In between all the blackmail and sadness, Carson has to deal with his Grandmother who has Alzheimer’s, his mother who is probably addicted to something illegal, and his deadbeat dad who comes back into the picture. It’s the same old narrative, except it starts with the main character literally being struck by lightning. It really isn’t all that funny.

“His home life features the usual suburban dysfunction. Here we smirk at the characters’ cluelessness,” wrote Omer M Mozzaffar, contributor for rogerebert.com. “They are deeply unhappy, but would rather live a shallow life of television talk shows than face their demons.”