Once every few years, a prophesied sci-fi property arrives to upend our expectations of what’s possible. Our understanding of linear criticism is challenged as the spectrum of good to bad is made meaningless. It’s more like a rhombic polyhedron anyway. “Halo” is based on the vaunted and lore-filled video game franchise, and watching the series premiere is like watching that episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” where all the timelines collapse and thousands of Rikers are left hungrily eyeing each other up.
But you’re not watching it, no. Instead, you’re the Rikers themselves. You’re the disheveled Riker and regular Riker, and probably that caveman Riker and the one with the fake sideburns, too. Tie that loose end up, DS9.
My point is you can love “Halo” while wondering aloud, “Someone spent money on this?” You can desperately think it’s the low point of science-fiction while eagerly anticipating the next episode. You can find its political themes evocative and wryly satirical while also identifying that they manage to be diametrically opposed with themselves in under an hour’s time. “Halo” is good. “Halo” is bad. It evokes a thousand parallel yous at once, each with a different opinion, angry at the next, upset because the Borg stole your razor yet giddy because someone’s finally making those in-universe TV shows from “Futurama” in our universe.
Behold: a bunch of rebels are talking about being rebels. They’re all like, “Oh yeah, those guys the show’s about are total badasses, I hope we don’t have to face any of them today.” This is what we in the business call foreshadowing.
But then! Aliens! Rebel kids are all like, “Let’s do drugs,” but then aliens are like, “We’re going to shoot your limbs off,” and I’m like that’s a dark goddamn turn. So the aliens plod at 3 mph because they’re really bad CGI and attack the somehow unsuspecting city on foot despite having a ship that could just vaporize them from the sky.
The rebels forget how to fight, so surprised they are by the aliens’ unique strategy of remaining almost stationary because their CGI is that bad. I suspect this is a metaphor for lag spiking in multiplayer, but either way the rebels are slaughtered. All is lost, but hark! What ship in yonder Unity-asset skybox breaks? It’s those guys wot we were talking about not moments before: the Spartans led by Master Chief!
Master Chief’s all like, “I know how to fight stationary targets” and his team does some awesome reverse side kicks and picks up the rebel’s chaingun. And I’m like, “Don’t do it, Master Chief, the rebels fired hundreds of rounds and couldn’t take down one alien,” but it’s clear I was wrong and the bullets just weren’t being fired by enough of a badass so now so he takes down three aliens with ease. I mean, shit Master Chief, I’ll be waiting for you above the saloon.
You could stick the best writers in a room together and still not come up with something like this because they’d be begging you to copywrite blogs about why Millennials don’t buy diamonds instead. There’s nothing like “Halo.” Maybe “Waterworld.” Other than “Waterworld” there’s nothing like “Halo.”
The best character in all this is Dr. Halsey, in large part because she’s being played by Natascha McElhone. She’s the only one who recognizes exactly what kind of highly produced B-material this is, where one neither takes themselves overly seriously nor chews the scenery wholesale, but rather nibbles at just enough of it for the audience to notice. You ask her, “Hey, is that scenery safe?” and she hints a smile back that suggests, “From becoming Starship Troopers? Not a chance.”
Master Chief is a member of the Spartans, who are supersoldiers at the beck and call of the UNSC. He’s the creation of Dr. Halsey, but why is the UNSC terrible? Because it enables people like Dr. Halsey to perform experiments and create supersoldiers willing to perform genocide. Luckily, people like Dr. Halsey and her supersoldiers pursue their own goals and undermine the UNSC, which is a big fuck you to the UNSC for allowing people like Dr. Halsey and her supersoldiers to pursue their own goals, which the UNSC is terrible for allowing but luckily is happening to them for allowing them to happen in the first place what even is this. The point is that I don’t fucking know, and you won’t either, but McElhone acts like she knows enough for the other people around her to go, “Hey, one of us knows, I guess that’s enough,” except some of those people are the showrunners.
Most series would look at their CGI budget and say, “Let’s film this in the evening so some shadow and color can distract from our lack of detail.” Most shows wouldn’t replace gun props in cutaway close-ups with an untextured CGI model. Most shows would study how practitioners of Parkour move or at least know how people jump or run or get up from a chair or put their heads in their hands and wonder what they’re doing with their lives before showing, like, any of the Spartan CGI. Most shows would study how people in armor fought before showing people in armor fighting. But like “Barbarella” before it, “Halo” explains this all away with the hand wave that none of it matters because it’s the future in sexy space, except “Halo” isn’t sexy and lacks any sense of irony.
Look no further than “The Mandalorian” for a show that creates consequential aliens and choreography built around how things like armor and gravity and limbs work without suddenly becoming strangely elastic. Yet “Halo” is clearly self-conscious about not being “The Mandalorian” because both shows’ characters wear helmets, which is like me being self-conscious about not being Henry Cavill cause we’re both known for playing The Witcher. I even played the DLC; he told reporters he hasn’t gotten around to it yet.
Master Chief is even unmasked in the first episode, something that’s never been done in the “Halo” games. They utterly land the shock of the moment when it’s revealed that it’s not Kevin Costner inside. It’s a good thing “Halo” strives so hard to differentiate itself from “The Mandalorian”. How else is the audience supposed to tell two helmets apart?
Sure, you could say its understanding of sci-fi is different, that its filmmaking is far more 90s network TV, an impressive choice considering the first game didn’t even come out until 2001. You could be upset its design aesthetic evokes “The Matrix” sequels without the cool leather daddy fashion sense. You could criticize its stop-and-start pace, the fact that everything feels too much like a set, its over-reliance on subpar CGI, and its inability to fuse close-ups and wide shots into cogent sequences, as well as its complete lack of humor, plus bad choreography.
You could rail about how every piece of character development needs to be spoken out loud by each character and acknowledged out loud by another. You could wonder what they were thinking by oscillating between 10% flashes of dismemberment of children and 90% totally bloodless PG action. You could compare its awkwardly inserted brief POV shots to “Doom” 2005 starring Karl Urban and wonder why this doesn’t star Karl Urban or have as good CGI as “Doom” 2005 which was made in 2005 with CGI from 2005. But if you didn’t make jokes while doing it, then you’d just be some jerk.
I like “Halo” because it’s clearly influenced by Paul Verhoeven’s visuals, ideas, and the themes behind them, evoking the anti-fascist concepts behind “Starship Troopers” and “RoboCop.” I also like it because it only half-knows how to communicate them before turning into a Paul W. S. Anderson movie like “Resident Evil” or “Resident Evil.”
The wider lore of “Halo” holds some exciting sci-fi possibilities that are hinted here, while the execution of the series keeps alive the enduring promise of making them super lame.
Do I like “Halo?” Damn straight. If forced to make a choice, would I rather we get a second season of “Earth 2?” Of course, but Clancy Brown hasn’t come knocking.
At the end of the day, “Halo” could be “Con Air” if it had the Nicolas Cage film’s capacity for abstraction, which is the first time anyone’s ever said that phrase. But it also could have dipped into being “Battlefield Earth,” and I’ve never seen anything before that veered so close to such disaster and yet pulled away so surely. It’s like watching a man almost fall into a volcano, but then defy the odds and clamber away safely. Maybe there’s nothing special about that man, but you can be sure as shit I’m gonna watch if he tries it again. In the immortal words of Thane, “Entropy wins. Entropy always wins.” But it also has a weekly audience.
You can watch “Halo” on Paramount+. New episodes arrive weekly and it’s already been renewed for a second season; I was worried there for a minute.
If you enjoy fever dream stream of consciousness brought back from the abyss of watching this brilliant mess, subscribe to Gabriel Valdez’s Patreon. It helps with the time and resources to write more like it, but you know, also the regular stuff, too.
This week contains one of my most anticipated series of the year, “Pachinko”. The South Korean co-production premieres its first three episodes on Apple TV today, and it looks stunning. If you aren’t watching series from other countries and in other languages, I really urge you to start – whether it’s with this or something else that catches your eye.
When I named my choices for the top 10 shows from 2021, I highlighted series from France, Japan, Turkey, and two from South Korea. If I’d done a top 11, a series from Jordan would have found its way in, too. So much of our boredom with watching the same thing every day arises from the majority of our viewing coming from the same perspectives every day. Switch up those perspectives, and film and TV become a lot more exciting and unexpected.
NEW SERIES
Pachinko (Apple TV) showrunner Soo Hugh
“Pachinko” tracks a Korean family’s course starting from the Japanese occupation of Korea, and their lives in both countries. It stars Yuh-jung Youn, who won an Oscar last year for “Minari”, and is based on the novel by Min Jin Lee.
Showrunner Soo Hugh wrote on “The Killing” and wrote and produced on “Under the Dome”, “The Terror”, and “See”.
You can watch “Pachinko” on Apple TV. The first three episodes are available right now, with a new episode arriving every Friday for a total of eight.
NEW MOVIES
You Are Not My Mother (VOD) directed by Kate Dolan
Char’s mother goes missing near their North Dublin home, so she sets out to investigate what’s happened to her.
Writer-director Kate Nolan started out as a photographer, and later a music video director. This is her first feature film.
Deep Hatred (VOD) directed by Daniela Carvalho, Ale McHaddo
In this Brazilian horror movie, the death of her father calls Cindy home. Her boyfriend and friends join her, but they find that her father’s home holds a secret and a threat.
Ale McHaddo has directed a few Brazilian movies and series. This is the first feature film as director for Daniela Carvalho.
If you enjoy what you read on this site, subscribe to Gabriel Valdez’s Patreon. It helps with the time and resources to continue writing articles like this one.
The Oscars tend to latch on to specific films and focus all attention on them. There are 17 categories a feature film can be nominated in (since it can’t be nominated for both adapted and original screenplay). Of course, certain categories can see two nominations, such as two supporting actors for the same film. There are 18 possible if you’re an animated film, but at that point several of the other categories are realistically shut off to you.
This year, “The Power of the Dog” has 12 nominations, “Dune” has 10. They’re both extremely good films, but I’m not so sure that both excel past so many other films this year in the vast majority of categories. The record for nominations is held in a tie by “All About Eve”, “Titanic”, and “La La Land”. “All About Eve” saw nominations in 14 of the 16 categories for which it qualified. “Titanic and “La La Land” saw nominations in 14 of 17 categories. That tendency to boil the industry down to only a few films is counterproductive – not because of the quality of the films, which are very good, but because it necessarily overlooks technical, writing, and acting achievements in smaller films, genre films, and sometimes otherwise average films.
A movie that’s good-but-not-great might have superb editing that deserves a nomination. An intentionally cheesy horror film could deserve a nod for its jaw-dropping production design. A black-and-white film might deserve a costume nom, and there might be a whole host of brilliant smaller films that simply got overlooked (this entire paragraph is foreshadowing).
More than any other awards show, the Oscars are built as an advertisement. The Academy harnesses the preferences of its membership to create zeitgeist around a limited number of films. If dozens of films each have a few nominations apiece, the ad doesn’t work because audiences aren’t really pushed in a specific direction. There’s too much choice for the advertisement to direct you. If a very few films have a mountain of nominations, then those movies become must-see.
I’d argue that this is counter-productive because it sells to a limited section of your audience. Horror and science-fiction films that break new technological ground get ignored; independent films and non-English language movies compete for a limited range of nominations; and many of the bravest directors taking the most chances are overlooked. While the recognition for Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” this year, Chloe Zhao’s “Nomadland” last year, and the films of Asian and Hispanic directors the last several years is long overdue, this limited focus in nominations is a big part of the narrowing that barred entry for including these perspectives in the first place.
There are ways to celebrate the entire industry without losing focus – especially when you’ve got three hours to do it – but hammering a few films into mind over and over again is a more risk-averse strategy. Again, these films deserve it; they’re just not the only ones that do. I’d suggest the repetition and lack of focus on the accomplishments of the industry at large is a big part of the reason the Oscars keep losing viewers. Audiences have the entire world of filmmaking at their fingertips now; their nominations still don’t consistently reflect that.
I don’t mean to treat this in a cynical way. You can still like watching an ad. Hell, I’m writing this whole article about one. I’ve enjoyed the Oscars a number of times, though I think it took a wrong turn when it shifted away from Hugh Jackman, Neil Patrick Harris, and song-and-dance numbers and instead pursued James Franco and – at least an improvement from him – no host at all.
And while I’m excited for Regina Hall and Wanda Sykes hosting, I’m also wary of host Amy Schumer given her history of racist jokes. That includes some that are basically Trump lines about Latines. Yes, she apologized in 2016. It must’ve been difficult to write that single Tweet before she went straight back to making even more racist jokes, including the racist cluster of clusterfucks that is “Snatched”. And…actually, you know what, I just wrote nearly the same intro about Ellen Rapoport last week. Maybe let’s find comedians who don’t build their careers off of posing Latines as inhuman, untrustworthy animals. You have no idea how tiring it is and, if you do, wouldn’t it be nice to write and talk about what we love without having to feel that hatred sucking away our soul when we come to these parts of it?
Let’s circle back. The Oscars offer a well-recognized lens through which to look at which nominations struck and what movies and accomplishments were overlooked in the past year:
Best Costume Design
Nominated: Cruella, Cyrano, Dune, Nightmare Alley, West Side Story
Forgotten: Marci Rodgers, Passing
A black-and-white film can have trouble standing out in this category, but the costume design in “Passing” is astounding. What’s most remarkable are the places where it isn’t flashy, where we see the clothes people dressed in on a daily basis. Our central characters are socialites to a degree, but they’re not ridiculously wealthy. What they wear is nice, but unlike so many period films, it looks like the clothing that characters from that period would actually wear more than one time.
There was a focus on avoiding flapper fashion tropes, which didn’t define that era yet is routinely recognized for doing so on film. As Costume Designer Marci Rodgers says, the film’s characters were “more likely to adhere to respectability politics than to flout sartorial strictures of that era”. After all, part of passing as white is fitting in without calling too much attention to yourself.
In other words, the costume choices make the period film feel lived-in instead of simply giving us idealized examples that look nicest being worn once for the camera. That alone should put Marci Rodgers’s work in “Passing” ahead of certain other films that prioritize cinematic showiness over period accuracy and practicality. You may’ve seen Rodgers’s work before in Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” and Steven Soderbergh’s “High Flying Bird”.
Best Make-up and Hairstyling
Nominated: Coming 2 America, Cruella, Dune, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, House of Gucci
Forgotten: Eldo Ray Estes (makeup head), Cliona Furey (hair designer), Mike Hill (special makeup effects designer), Nightmare Alley
The exclusion of “Nightmare Alley” from this category is astounding, especially when you consider that the film tracks across several years and shifts characters through different social classes and styles. To my mind, only two of the nominations approach the sheer amount of work that “Nightmare Alley” accomplishes, representing a carnival in the 30s, high society in the 40s, shifting characters in and out of hairstyling, wigs, wigs on top of wigs. I’d even say the hallmark accomplishment of the film – making Bradley Cooper unrecognizable in two wildly opposite directions – stands alongside the best individual make-up jobs of the year.
Best Production Design
Nominated: Dune, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, The Tragedy of Macbeth, West Side Story
Forgotten: Desma Murphy, Malignant
The Academy has a habit of overlooking stellar technical achievements in films that aren’t otherwise great. “Malignant” is more complex because it’s actively created to be ambitiously, consciously…I don’t want to use the word “bad”, but it has a serious investment in schlock horror and why we connect to it. “Malignant” succeeds so wildly at evoking shocking slasher films because it’s so knowledgeable and precise about their history. I didn’t imagine “Malignant” had a chance to be nominated for anything, but it does some remarkable things with its production design, and how that design is purpose-built for so many other elements of the film – such as its cinematography, special effects, and choreography.
For its production design, “Malignant” draws from 60s/70s giallo and pop art, the wide gamut of 80s horror, more specific sci-fi like “Blade Runner”, and especially 90s gothic action movies like “The Crow”. It also pulls from much more recent horror films, although this is harder to separate from director James Wan’s own style considering he’s created so much of this newer aesthetic himself.
“Malignant” introduces a surprising amount that’s fresh in horror filmmaking from a technical standpoint. The production design is outstanding, even if the rest of the film’s ambitions lie in giving us a grisly creature feature that doesn’t really care how good or bad it is, so long as it keeps your attention.
Best Visual Effects
Nominated: Dune, Free Guy, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, No Time to Die, Spider-Man: No Way Home
Forgotten: The Suicide Squad (clip contains major spoilers)
I’ve long hated this category because it prizes the greatest amount and fidelity of visual effects. It tends to lean away from how those effects are actually used in an artistic sense. I’m not sure we’ve seen an action movie that so effectively translates comic book sensibilities through visual effects, and that’s saying something considering how competitive and well-funded the genre is right now.
It’s tough to see “The Suicide Squad” snubbed here when it introduced a more playful and character-focused use of visual effects than superhero movies think we deserve. If I name my 10 favorite moments of visual effects this year, at least four come from “The Suicide Squad”. From Harley Quinn’s Disneyfied vision of violence and Polka-Dot Man’s lo-fi powers and high-strung anxieties, to King Shark’s entire existence and the cartoonish horror and beauty of the film’s dementedly heartfelt climax, no other movie’s visual effects this year actually served the characters inside of the film better than in “The Suicide Squad”.
Best Sound
Nominated: Belfast, Dune, No Time to Die, The Power of the Dog, West Side Story
The ticking of a watch as it passes by the camera. The strike of high heeled shoes on marble. The lively bustle of a carnival. The empty white noise of a city. The strange sound absorption of snow, a sensation rarely captured so well in a film. I loved the sound design of “Nightmare Alley”. It has a number of nominations, so it’s not exactly lacking, but I would have loved a nomination here.
Best Original Score
Nominated: Don’t Look Up, Dune, Encanto, Parallel Mothers, The Power of the Dog
Forgotten: Natalie Holt, Fever Dream
Natalie Holt garnered a lot of attention this past year for composing the music for “Loki” (and years before that for hurling eggs at Simon Cowell). Her work in Claudia Llosa’s “Fever Dream” is a pulsing thing centered on breathing strings and a sense of profound isolation. Magical realism on film is extremely reliant on its music because it’s the element that can most immediately mirror a character’s emotional state. The score connects the inner experience of being in that moment to a form that’s defined by a far more abstract and disordered sense of time and place.
Holt’s score is yearning and lonely. It reflects the finality and fatalism of this particular kind of magical realist storytelling. It’s consequential and dramatic without ever feeling overbearing. It’s quiet and lurking, but sympathetic at the same time, just like the threat of tragedy that’s understood too late even though it begins and concludes “Fever Dream”.
Best Cinematography
Nominated: Dune, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, The Tragedy of Macbeth, West Side Story
Forgotten: Oscar Faura, Fever Dream
As a piece of magical realism, “Fever Dream” needs to blend the suggestive and abstract to the everyday. Landscapes themselves become animist, and homes that interrupt the farmland create a progressive layering of what’s perceived as safe giving way to field and copse and finally wood.
There’s a consistent use of backlighting, natural evening light, and shallow focus that is generally avoided in film but here highlights the woman at the center of its story as unable to see the full picture even as the audience recognizes it. That’s a central tenet of magical realism: that the audience already knows the what, but we need to learn the why and how. To find ways that evoke this through cinematography is remarkable, and this is all before taking into account the film’s shades of horror and beautifully filmed hallucinatory elements.
I’d also strongly push “Titane” and “Passing” here because I can do so and quickly move on to the next category without explaining how I’d still get it down to five nominations:
Best Film Editing
Nominated: Don’t Look Up, Dune, King Richard, The Power of the Dog, tick, tick…BOOM!
Forgotten: Fred Raskin, Christian Wagner, The Suicide Squad
This shouldn’t come out of left field if you’ve seen the film. Every bit of personality, comedy, and emotional resonance in “The Suicide Squad” is underlined by its extraordinary editing. What’s most impressive is the sheer range on display here: action movie, comedy montage, noir, drama. There’s a full rotation of different editing rhythms that James Gunn’s film cycles through for its various characters and their different emotional states.
It fuses title screens into the environment, flashbacks within literal windows, and a host of stunning tricks that you’d expect to see in something far more experimental than this genre usually gives us. I’d place this as one of the most difficult jobs for an editor out of all the superhero movies we’ve seen, but it doesn’t just hit that mark – it excels beyond it on every front.
Best Adapted Screenplay
Nominated: Coda, Drive My Car, Dune, The Lost Daughter, The Power of the Dog
Forgotten: Rebecca Hall, Passing
Hall’s adaptation of Nella Larsen’s novel brilliantly discusses the co-optation of culture and identity. I’ve seen a lot of reads on the film that talk about how it rejects a Black woman who’s long passed as white and is trying to return to being Black, but I think this risks overlooking a central conversation in the film.
Clare isn’t someone returning to being Black, she’s someone who’s still passing as white, returning to a Black community as a white tourist in the fashion protagonist Irene and novelist Hugh discuss mid-film. This redefines “Passing” into a far more complex consideration of privilege, co-optation, and whether someone can embrace who they are while still hating it. It’s one of the most wrenching discussions of race I’ve seen in narrative filmmaking.
Best Original Screenplay
Nominated: Belfast, Don’t Look Up, Licorice Pizza, King Richard, The Worst Person in the World
Forgotten: Emma Seligman, Shiva Baby
Emma Seligman’s debut film lands an audacious number of risks. It tells the story of Danielle, a college student who bumps into her sugar daddy at a Jewish funeral service. She navigates her parents’ expectations, a passive-aggressive ex, and a number of realizations about the lies her sugar daddy’s told her. As it touches on feminism, sexual empowerment, Millennial and Gen Z angst, and generational lies, “Shiva Baby” becomes an unflinchingly tense navigation of both personal and cultural truths that still aren’t wholly deciphered.
The screenplay is equal parts funny and horrifying, and manages to make us laugh even as things grow more uncomfortable. At times, I even found myself comparing the quickfire theatrical pacing and claustrophobic use of a single location in “Shiva Baby” to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Best Supporting Actress
Nominated: Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter), Ariana Debose (West Side Story), Judi Dench (Belfast), Kirsten Dunst (The Power of the Dog), Aunjanue Ellis (King Richard)
Forgotten: Ruth Negga, Passing (CW: clip contains racism, use of the N-word)
This is one of the biggest oversights of the year. One of the most complex roles in recent years asks Negga to portray a Black woman passing for white. Through a friend, she returns to the Black community – but not as someone re-embracing or relearning who she is or the violence she’s done to her identity.
Instead, she returns as white, entering this sphere as a tourist, assuming centrality in a community she still rejects from her own identity. She does this in a way that’s outwardly kind, soft-spoken, and often plaintive, but also reads as manipulative, in full use of the white privilege she’s learned. Rarely has someone portrayed the insidiousness of cultural co-optation so completely.
Best Supporting Actor
Nominated: Ciaran Hinds (Belfast), Troy Kotsur (Coda), Jesse Plemons (The Power of the Dog), JK Simmons (Being the Ricardos), Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Power of the Dog)
Forgotten: Willem Dafoe, Nightmare Alley
The Oscars have a way of overlooking some of the best genre performances. Unless someone’s playing the Joker, the most precise and chilling performances in genre work go without a nomination. Dafoe’s carnival boss Clem Hoatley sticks in your brain as a hideously abusive, yet nonetheless chummy man. He’d love talking to you and showing you the ropes, but he’d just as soon stab you in the back if it served his purposes. What communicates for all his toothy, slithering presentation is just how banal and workaday he makes abuse, how he can discuss it like any other work procedure over drinks and a meal. As housed within horror fantasy as Clem Hoatley is, we’ve all met many managers and supervisors who are just like him.
Best Actor
Nominated: Javier Bardem (Being the Ricardos), Benedict Cumberbatch (The Power of the Dog), Andrew Garfield (tick, tick…BOOM!), Will Smith (King Richard), Denzel Washington (The Tragedy of Macbeth)
Forgotten: Nicolas Cage, Pig
Nicolas Cage movies are often B-grade flights of nonsense, but you can’t dismiss all of them. That risks overlooking some of the most interesting independent work of the last several years. None stand out as strongly as “Pig”, a quiet and understated testament to gentleness housed within the framework of what would be a revenge film with any other script.
Cage plays Rob, a man whose truffle pig is stolen. Truffles go for thousands apiece, and he seeks the pig out amid Portland’s cutthroat restaurant scene. Cage delivers the performance of his career. Rob is an aggressively guarded misanthrope, shut off because he remembers every bit of empathy throughout his life. A towering, bearded, bloodied hermit, he navigates confrontation through a gentle understanding of others. Rarely have characters so overwhelmed by their empathy and desperate to shut it off been portrayed with such human nuance.
Best Actress
Nominated: Jessica Chastain (The Eyes of Tammy Faye), Olivia Colman (The Lost Daughter), Penelope Cruz (Parallel Mothers), Nicole Kidman (Being the Ricardos), Kristen Stewart (Spencer)
Agathe Rousselle in “Titane” stands out as one of the most chilling and soul-emptying performances of a psychopath in cinema. As Alexia, she goes through every emotion there is as if performing a shell of expectations for others. She spends most of the film hiding in a guise that begins to accept elements of her psychopathy – under that of a man among other men. The male privilege that accepts and prizes aggression is one she can find a comfort in, and the ability to create such a cold character who still evokes our empathy – not because she’s changed but because her environment has – is a performance that challenges our understanding of the norms we use to demarcate gender and its privileges.
Many times, the best performance in a year is something you’ve seen done before in an exceptional, unparalleled way. This year, it’s something exceptional and unparalleled that I’ve just never seen done before.
(I want to be specific – hers is not a performance of a trans character. She is hiding out, disguising herself as a young man because it prevents police from finding her. She remains a woman throughout, even if she hides this from others. This allows writer-director Julia Ducournau to investigate the masculine tendencies that are discouraged among women, and the feminine aspects in men that we’re trained to psychologically self-mutilate out of ourselves).
Best Directing
Nominated: Paul Thomas Anderson (Licorice Pizza), Kenneth Branagh (Belfast), Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog), Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car), Steven Spielberg (West Side Story)
Forgotten: Julia Ducournau, TitaneandRebecca Hall, Passing
Rebecca Hall’s “Passing” and Julia Ducournau’s “Titane” both leap toward the front of my list of the best films of the past decade. “Passing” requires a precise realization of its smallest moments and gestures, whereas “Titane” is a visually evocative tour-de-force. Both feature an exquisite pairing of actors directed with purpose: Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga in “Passing” and Agathe Rousselle and Vincent Lindon in “Titane”.
Both directors fit stories into worlds both recognizable and related to our own, yet at the same time stylistically removed so that story can bite deep when the time comes. Both films had me thinking for days, falling asleep in a fog of their implications and waking up with a deep desire to tackle them anew. Both offer questions and challenges to my perceptions that I’m not sure I have the answers to, and that’s exciting art that I know I’ll return to again and again.
Ask me whether Hall or Ducournau did a better job and the answer will change day by day, depending on which one I’m thinking about. They’re my 1-2 for best film of the year, and neither saw a single Oscar nomination.
Best Picture
Nominated: Belfast, Coda, Don’t Look Up, Drive My Car, Dune, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog, West Side Story
Forgotten: Passing
So why choose “Passing” over “Titane”? There’s a precise answer, and it’s that the screenplay for “Passing” elevates it above “Titane” in how it speaks to me. Even if both are precise creations, “Passing” cuts into me where “Titane” extrudes something from me. Nine times out of 10, I’d choose what’s more evocative, but I’m not sure I’ve met a film that cuts so deep as “Passing”.
The Black and Hispanic experiences for those who aren’t both can be very different, but both face some similarities in the systemic constructs that ask us to internalize racism against ourselves. That separates us from our communities, and even makes us reject them or repeat to them the very same racism practiced on us. I spent much of my childhood learning from my environment to hate the Hispanic half of who I am, and much of my adulthood learning to accept it. That requires coping with the trauma that was inflicted on me and that I was taught to inflict on myself.
At the same time, as Rebecca Hall says in the clip above, I have to reckon with the aspects of privilege I have embodied or used. What benefits have I enjoyed that others who can’t pass haven’t? What aspects of that system have I propagated?
Oh, but that’s all subjective? How else would we watch film? Saying the best film of the year is any film says that it speaks to us in some subjective way. Few films have bothered with concepts of passing and internalized racism, despite racism against oneself being one of the most widely repeated messages in the history of American media. There needs to be more that speaks to this section of the audience, and frankly, there needs to be more that speaks like “Titane” as well. The reason it’s right next to “Passing” is because it speaks to vicious and hateful reinforcements of binary gender constructs. I think we all could’ve used a bit less of that growing up, too.
Frankly, the difference between what I’d call the best and second-best film of the year, or even fifth-best film of the year isn’t really that much. They’re all worth seeing. The nominated films are all worth seeing. I just don’t want to let the moment pass without highlighting so much else of what made last year special in film.
“Cracow Monsters” boasts that rare sense of pairing the macabre to the magical. As dreary, rainy, cold, and weirdly flaking as the Polish city of Cracow is in the series, it’s also a place where the colors are rich, the shadows inky deep, and the sense of mystery in the world still feels like a promise. It seems like a funny thing to say about a horror show when the genre’s become decidedly bleaker, but it’s that sense of a world that holds mysterious promise that makes this new Polish series such an involving watch.
Barbara Liberek plays Alex, a medical student who’s recruited by an inscrutable professor into a strange band of supernatural investigators. She’s their ninth, which holds a significance she doesn’t understand immediately. You could say they each have a very precise power, but in some cases ‘curse’ might be the more appropriate word. They research and autopsy creatures and demons out of Slavic folklore.
The list of horror projects “Cracow Monsters” evokes feels beautifully selected. The aesthetic richly calls back to “Jacob’s Ladder”, “The X-Files”, “Flatliners”, “Dark City”, “The Thing”, the “Silent Hill” series, and the Prague horror boom of the 2000s. That city was a favorite shooting location for Guillermo Del Toro, used in “Blade 2” and “Hellboy”, and Eli Roth, used in the “Hostel” series (meh). Like Prague, Cracow boasts an Old Town district with buildings, cobblestone streets, and fortifications that are hundreds of years old.
(A quick note: Cracow is the anglicization of Krakow, pronounced ‘krakuf’. The series translation uses “Cracow”, so I’m using the C-version to avoid confusion.)
It’s hard to envision that “Cracow Monsters” wasn’t informed at some level by Andrzej Sapkowski’s “The Witcher” novels (and of course the subsequent games and series). I’m sure there’s also a ton of foundation in other Polish fiction and folklore here that I don’t recognize.
“Cracow Monsters” takes its time delving into its horror aspects. It wants you to learn about Alex first. She’s a diagnosed schizophrenic who sees visions and self-medicates with drinking, drugs, and sex. She’s a student with good marks, but she’s also at the age where symptoms of schizophrenia like hallucinations become stronger. Of course, we’re clued in early that she may not be schizophrenic. What she sees as hallucinations may be visions.
The series’ action scenes don’t follow this slow-burn approach. They explode with sudden and undeniable strangeness. There’s a beautiful sense of motion to the cinematography throughout. Even quiet scenes feature the camera investigating multiple characters’ moods and faces so that we can draw our own inferences. It allows “Cracow Monsters” to subtly foreshadow details, and builds our curiosity for who everyone is.
Directors Kasia Adamik and Olga Chajdas also love to sneak in continuous takes that start on a precisely edited action. This fuses continuity to motion in ways that are superbly focused on character. When this sense of motion meets the staging of its action, “Cracow Monsters” sings. One desperate chase scene in a building made my jaw drop as I thought, this is what every zombie movie misses. The terror is the loping undead, sure, but even worse is figuring your way through the winding hallways of an unfamiliar building, hoping to avoid running yourself into a dead end. As Alex runs in a desperate circle of hallways in one continuous shot, it becomes apparent the only thing more frightening than being caught is screwing up and catching yourself.
One other choice I love in “Cracow Monsters” is its reliance on live special effects over CGI visual effects. There’s an abundance of heavily CGI monsters in horror right now. They come straight out of comic books, digital comics, manga, and other drawn sources, so they don’t always have to sync up with what looks real. As Karina Adelgaard points out on Heaven of Horror, it’s what allows a series like South Korea’s “Hellbound” to go over the top in its visuals. When series-budgeted CGI doesn’t have to look realistic, you can go for volume over fidelity.
That opens up a lot of new doors, but I don’t want the old ones closed. I tend to prefer live special effects, and “Cracow Monsters” does a lot with its creatures, makeup effects, and staging. The CGI it does use is rare and well utilized. If I have one complaint it’s that it can lack a little weight in its movement, but when used for a singular monster here or there, you’re not really comparing it to other things. The way it’s folded in is so creative, strange, and sudden that I’m already sold on what it wants to show me.
The acting here is solid, and aided by that sense of continuous motion in the filmmaking. A few scenes center on simultaneous conversations weaving in and out of each other. Alex’s group features eight others who are already used to living together, so this is natural. That can be difficult to track in a translation, but the filmmaking makes it easy to follow. It adds to Alex’s sense of being overwhelmed, and it provides a foundational layer of realism that a horror fantasy like this has to establish first.
On a cultural note, Alex is openly bi, and she’s seen kissing women as well as men. The cast of mostly young characters are perfectly comfortable with this, treat it as normal, and don’t assume anyone’s sexuality. An early shot shows Alex taking birth control. This is all meaningful to see given Poland’s governmental and religious situation, in which an increasingly theocratic Catholic government has established “LGBT-free zones” that occupy a third of the country. Their stated goal is banning public displays like marches and events. As if that’s not bad enough, the unstated yet understood goal is the enabling of harassment and violence against LGBTQ+ people. The Archbishop of Cracow himself has railed against what he calls a “plague” of LGBT ideology for years. This has served as just one example for recent hateful legislation pursued in the U.S. by evangelical state governments in Florida, Texas, and numerous other states. The series embracing LGBTQ+ representation and pro-choice stances is important both there and here.
“Cracow Monsters” isn’t perfect. I have a quibble or two. There’s a photosensitivity warning on the first episode because the opening scene absolutely needs it. That one scene is doused in an aggravating amount of flashing lights and while it’s well done, I do think artists in general need to think twice before using this visual approach. I don’t have photosensitivity triggers, and watching in a dark room, I had to consistently shield parts of the screen throughout the scene. I can’t remember doing that with anything else. You might need to watch the very first scene with the lights on, and if you do have photosensitivity triggers, be extremely cautious with it. After that first scene, the effect doesn’t return, and you can turn the lights off to enjoy the rest of the series.
A few scene transitions early on can feel unintentionally sudden, but once “Cracow Monsters” has set its different story branches into motion, it finds a good rhythm.
I do feel like some precision in the dialogue is lost in translation here or there. It’s nothing that’s distracting, but you may notice it once or twice. The series does an impressive job with its visual storytelling, especially when it doesn’t want you to immediately know what’s happening, so you never feel lost from the storyteller. I just wonder if some occasional connection in the dialogue or a more poetic turn of phrase may’ve been dropped here or there.
I don’t know that “Cracow Monsters” will appeal to everybody. It recalls 90s and early 00s psychological and supernatural horror, and those are genres that have a lot of misses and half-successes. The storytelling is defined through a sumptuously cinematic atmosphere, with tone becoming more important at times than the characters themselves. The editing shifts more traditionally between deep areas of focus that feature extravagant location shooting and set design, and close-up moments for the performance in dialogue scenes. This can feel stodgy or “of-an-era” in some projects, but the sheer quality of those locations and sets, the complexity of the staging, and the camera’s sense of movement elevates “Cracow Monsters” into finding that genuinely cinematic feel.
This all stands in stark contrast to more recent horror branches: art horror’s unnerving brightness and actor-centered focus; retrowave (or vaporwave) horror’s neon-and-shadow evocations of a style that never was; and pop horror’s preference for the bleak, washed out, and heavily foregrounded.
These are all different ways of presenting horror, and it’s awesome we have so many popular ways of conveying “why am I making myself watch this” right now. Some of these can miss that dark sense of promise, though – that horror can ultimately be an attempt at greater understanding, and that there’s beauty within this even if it scares us. This lends a vitality to the storytelling. It creates a connection to the storyteller and how the story’s being told that can even supersede the story itself. There’s a sense of sharing the excitement for a certain atmosphere and aesthetic rather than being told it or presented it.
For example: in a bleak horror backgrounded by shadows, I’m often terrified for the character because I can’t see what’s behind them. Here, there’s time to gaze more deeply into every scene. I can see where the paint is flaking, where the tile changes, what the light suggests, I can see everything behind them and be deeply excited to be in that moment alongside them. There is a trade-off – it’s scary instead of terrifying. You’re not going to find the most intense horror here, and that can make things feel a little too funhouse for some viewers. For others, that depth of texture becomes a sort of worldbuilding through tone that feels excitingly participatory in nature.
They’re different kinds of horror. Some like both, some only one or the other. Which kind you like will tell you whether you can get invested and excited for “Cracow Monsters” or if you want something less consciously cinematic in nature. “Cracow Monsters” won’t convince you to like a kind of horror aesthetic you don’t, but if this kind of horror fantasy is a style you’re already into, it’s a very strong entry.
You can watch “Cracow Monsters” on Netflix. All eight episodes are available immediately.
I have a lot to say about the first series and its creator’s history. It’s important for me to share as much as I can find, but when something intersects with racism, that’s also important to highlight. A big part of the way I write this feature is to highlight the names of women behind these shows and movies, but when one of these names has a history with a racist project, I find myself not always knowing what to do. I also find myself nervous about the specific kind of racism. If I talk about someone being racist toward Black or Asian people, I’m not Black or Asian. I don’t feel doubtful for saying something’s racist because there’s no internal monologue telling me I shouldn’t. There are Black or Asian voices I can point to; I can follow their lead.
When a creator has been racist toward Mexican people in their work, that is something I’ve endured. It is something that has targeted me. It’s a pain I know and have inhabited. Discussing it opens up vulnerability and trauma I’ve experienced. Because I’ve so often been told by the people applying that racism that I’m overreacting or that it doesn’t exist, even bringing it up makes me terrified that no one will take it seriously. I can’t follow someone else’s lead because it’s my lead. My work as a Latino writer isn’t just in reckoning with it, it’s in proving to others that it exists, proving to others that my voice is legitimate to talk about its existence. I have to prove to all that vulnerability and trauma stacked up in me that I’m able to do it even as that ingrained self-doubt tells me in countless ways I can’t possibly do it right. I’m supposed to be one of those voices. If I don’t speak, I know I’m repeating the marginalization that expects me as a Latino to be too exhausted and afraid to do so. If I do speak, I have to wade through all that marginalization I’ve internalized to just get to the first word.
It’s like this with all marginalizations; this moment it’s just my turn. But whoever’s ‘turn’ it is, realize they’re terrified to be taking it. It’s unfair that the work of proving it – whether for Black, Asian, Latine, indigenous, women, disabled, LGBTQ+ writers, the list goes on – that the burden of all that work is on the shoulders of whoever is facing the bigotry aimed at them in that moment. It is an unfair critical structure that our culture assumes as its default. To speak is needed, and the burden of that is it demands repeating the internal experience of violence. To not speak may avoid that direct pressure point, but asks the quieted to live inside and legitimize their marginalization. Men need to understand that for women. White people need to understand that for people of color. Enabled people need to understand that for disabled people. Cis het people need to understand that for LGBTQ+ people.
The purpose of this feature is to highlight work by women and to help make the women doing that work better known. I don’t always know how to call something out when the history of that person’s work itself platforms racism, misogyny, ableism, or other forms of bigotry. I’ve cut things before because they’re blatantly, explicitly hateful. I won’t platform bigotry, but there’s a lot that rides the line, or that comes from someone who featured bigotry in one project…but perhaps not this one.
I’m sure there are some things I don’t see – especially with not being able to watch everything that’s featured here. I specifically want to make this article series as informational as possible because that helps me mitigate potential forms of implicit bias I may not recognize I hold. When a creator has made racist work before, I hope readers realize bringing it up is about the racism, and that does have a place being discussed when that work is featured for another reason. I hope to see the creator I’m about to highlight surpass that racism, to isolate it to a prior point in her career, but without seeing some kind of reckoning with that prior work, the only other option is to talk about the nature of it and the impact it has.
NEW SERIES
Minx (HBO Max) showrunner Ellen Rapoport
“Minx” follows Joyce as she creates the first erotic magazine for women in the U.S. “Minx” takes its inspiration from a number of similar magazines that started publishing in the 70s. Ophelia Lovibond and Jake Johnson star.
Ellen Rapoport previously wrote and produced on “Three Moons Over Milford”. She got her start as a writer on “The Jamie Kennedy Experiment”.
I’m trying to figure out the right way to say this because the moment I looked at Rapoport’s project history my heart sank. She wrote a film called “Desperados” which was incredibly racist toward Mexicans in an era when that racism is even more dangerous than usual. When a creator has done that before, I can’t feature something from them without noting it.
Like I said, I strive to keep this feature informational, but that is information to me because that kind of racism is dangerous in general and it’s specifically dangerous to me and my family. What makes us safer is other people realizing that is information as well, and not some kneejerk or emotional interpretation. When someone is racist, the fact that they are racist and have done something racist is information we need other people to understand instead of dismiss. The kind of things Rapoport wrote in “Desperados” are the kind of things that make people feel legitimized in dehumanizing or threatening Latine people. I wrestled with whether I should even feature this project or not, but there’s nothing that immediately points to “Minx” sharing that racism. That doesn’t make me feel immediately safer because “Desperados” didn’t look racist from its press releases and trailer either.
This isn’t a case of me harping on something minor; “Desperados” was repetitively racist and dehumanizing. To share another project from the same creator without talking about that would be to participate in my own dehumanization and marginalization. I’m hoping it was isolated to that one project because I’m genuinely interested in “Minx”, but I know from experience that hope is not often sustained.
You can watch “Minx” on HBO Max. Two new episodes arrive every Thursday, for a total of 10.
Standing Up (Netflix) showrunner Fanny Herrero
In this French comedy, four young Parisians juggle stressful lives and jobs while trying to make it as stand up comedians.
Showrunner Fanny Herrero also created French comedy “Call My Agent!”.
Anna Torv plays a news anchor who takes a reporter under her wing and trains him. They develop a bond as they cover the whirlwind of news the mid-80s brought. The series is set behind-the-scenes at an Australian broadcast news program.
Emma Freeman has directed on “Stateless” and “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries”, among other Australian series.
You can watch “The Newsreader” on Roku. All six episodes are available immediately.
Cracow Monsters (Netflix) showrunner Kasia Adamik
In this Polish fantasy series, a medical student is pulled into a circle of investigators who hunt monsters and gods from Slavic mythology.
Kasia Adamik’s shows regularly contend at the Polish Film Awards, with “Wataha” winning two of its three best series nominations, and “1983” being nominated. For “Pokot”, she was also nominated for Best Film and Best Director alongside her mother and co-director, the great Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland.
You can watch “Cracow Monsters” on Netflix. All eight episodes are available immediately.
The Paradise (Acorn TV) directed by Marja Pyykko
In this Finnish-Spanish mystery series, a Finnish family is found murdered in Spain’s Costa del Sol. They send an investigator to bridge the Finnish community and Spanish investigators there. The series is told in Finnish, Spanish, and English.
Director Marja Pyykko is a fairly prolific director of Finnish TV.
You can watch “The Paradise” on Acorn TV. All eight episodes are available immediately.
Welcome to Flatch (Fox) showrunner Jenny Bicks
A U.S. remake of BBC mockumentary series “This Country”, “Welcome to Flatch” sees a documentary crew film the young adults of a small town.
Showrunner Jenny Bicks was a producer on “Sex and the City”, and wrote and produced on “The Big C” and “Men in Trees”.
You can watch “Welcome to Flatch” on Fox. New episodes arrive every Friday.
Lust (HBO Max) directed by Emma Lemhagen
No English trailer available, but in this Swedish series, Anette takes part in a government study about the sex lives of women in their 40s. This evokes her and her friends to reflect on how the study’s questions play into their lives.
Emma Lemhagen directs. She’s helmed films in Sweden since the 90s.
You can watch “Lust” on HBO Max. All episodes are available now.
NEW MOVIES
Love After Love (MUBI) directed by Ann Hui
In the 1940s, a girl is sent from Shanghai to Hong Kong so she can continue her education. Instead, she starts working for her aunt to seduce the rich and powerful.
Ann Hui is a legendary Hong Kong director who’s won Best Director at the Golden Horse Awards three times and at the Hong Kong Film Awards six times.
This is the third time Hui has directed an adaptation of Eileen Chang’s writing. Chang was a feminist writer of the 1940s who fled the Communist regime. Another adaptation of her work that might be familiar to Western audiences is Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution”.
Violet suffers anxiety. Knowing she makes her decisions out of fear, she puts herself in fearful situations in order to break the cycle. Olivia Munn stars.
Justine Bateman is best known as an actress going as far back as “Family Ties”. This is her first feature as writer or director.
A state trooper partners with a rescued shelter dog in an attempt to get into the K-9 Search and Rescue unit.
Director Katt Shea started out as an actress in the 80s, but was soon directing films for legendary B-movie maker Roger Corman. Her big break came in 1992 with the infamous “Poison Ivy”. After 18 years away (since 2001), she returned with “Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase” and seems to be focusing on the family genre. (In a weird twist, this also stars Scott Wolf, an actor on Melinda Hsu Taylor’s very different “Nancy Drew” series, which I highly recommend. I look forward to winning a pub quiz with this trivia several years from now.)
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The Streamer Awards offered a glimpse into a possible future of awards shows, and I have to say it was a lot more fun and meaningful than the stodgy yesteryear glamour of the Oscars. Not to be confused with the broader scope of the Streamy Awards, The Streamer Awards honed in specifically on live streaming and – well – takes itself a lot less seriously.
Don’t get me wrong, their production values are night and day. Created and hosted by Twitch streamer QTCinderella, The Streamer Awards were hosted at a small venue, the Fonda Theater in Los Angeles. They were weighted toward online voting, which accounted for 70% of the voting for winners. While the ads on Twitch are thankfully fewer than on live TV, the hosts hawked the show’s sponsors so often it turned into a running joke. You could see some of the technical seams showing, but this is part of what streaming is all about.
Streaming is off the cuff, a strange performance art that’s a marriage of scripted and unscripted, stagecraft and improv. It’s often funniest when chat and the audience are in on the joke and can see how it’s done. Every scuff becomes a feature that highlights how streaming is a participatory conversation between streamer and viewer. When it comes to streaming, seeing how the magic trick is done makes you part of it. Laughing at how it’s screwed up means both performer and viewer are laughing alongside each other at the same thing.
That’s how streaming takes advantage of the internet to convey its performance art in a way other mediums can’t. Does that mean it’s all great? Of course not – just like every other storytelling and performance medium. What’s important is what makes it unique, what it can do that other mediums can’t.
Of the hosts, presenters, and winners, many of them were visibly nervous and unused to a theatrical production. A streamer talking to a few thousand people in chat still has the benefit of distance, guard, and the buffer of the technology they’re using. They have the freedom to pull the plug at a moment’s notice if they want. Speaking live in front of a few hundred people can be a lot more tenuous, and was clearly something not all of them had training to do.
The more transparently scuffed nature of the very first Streamer Awards doesn’t mean that they’re niche. The show’s peak viewership was 380,000, and in fewer than two days, 4 million have watched the VOD on Twitch and 275,000 on YouTube. Each medium measures its views a little differently, but compare it to the 11th Streamy Awards, which has seen 9.6 million views since it aired four months ago. Now compare these to the 2021 Golden Globes telecast, watched by 6.9 million, or even last year’s Oscars telecast, which dropped to a record-low 10.4 million viewers.
Every success made The Streamer Awards as a whole a success. And yet every failure, every joke that bombed or moment of cringe, also made it a success because that’s what streaming is. Watching a community and its chat appreciate the work, and empathize with the intent regardless of whether it’s pulled off, is such a different experience from watching the Oscars and knowing that every dress, punchline, and even people’s attentiveness throughout a three-hour-plus show will be rated.
Here, QTCinderella scolded the audience when they talked too loudly through her co-host Maya, and Maya called out the jokes she didn’t think would work but QT insisted remain. The cameras cut to two streamers making out late in the show. No one gave a shit. It wasn’t a moment that sparked gossip or angry letters. It didn’t stain some nonsense perception of elegance, etiquette, or proper carriage.
The other part of this is the path streamers take to popularity. The typical view of streaming is that it centers on gamers who never leave their room. There are certainly places where that’s true, and The Streamer Awards were quick to use this joke every time a streamer who wasn’t present won an award. Yet this overlooks some powerful performance art created this year, as well as a number of IRL streams.
Take co-host Maya, or Maya Higa, who started streaming in 2019. From the beginning, her streaming content has centered on conservation. She started by getting permission from the zoo she worked at to feature her work in raptor rehab and falconry. Her Twitch following caught fire in a clip where she featured an injured hawk she was rehabilitating. She’s since expanded into conservation podcasts, and founded a non-profit animal sanctuary and education center.
Like Maya, most streamers who make it big expand into some level of variety streaming. They need a diverse range of content to be able to fill hours, which means working with other streamers, cooking, chatting, making music, the list goes on. The point is that there’s no one way into streaming. Many play games, many like Maya barely play any. Both are valuable.
In fact, the Twitch streamer with the most subscriptions today is Ironmouse, a Puerto Rican streamer with CVID, an immunodeficiency disorder that keeps her on oxygen. She’s a VTuber, meaning she uses an animated avatar (in this case, an anime-styled devil) controlled by motion capture software. A talent for voice over and training in singing serves the VTuber approach well, and she balances gaming and chatting streams with her talk show “Speak of the Devil”, where she interviews other VTubers in character.
Like many, my initial reaction to VTubers a few years back was that it was off-putting. It hadn’t occurred to me then just how useful a tool it can be for performers who are disabled, cope with anxiety, or want to control their own image for a variety of reasons, including safety concerns. Ironmouse has spoken in interviews about how streaming through an avatar allows her to do things she otherwise couldn’t when bedbound for long periods of time.
The scope of what can be accomplished in motion capture also hadn’t occurred to me. The Streamer Awards had a category for VTubers, though Ironmouse was beaten by CodeMiko, Youna Kang’s cutting edge blend of motion-captured character, CGI environments, Cronenbergian interpretations of memes, and live content (when Kang doesn’t feel like putting on her motion capture suit and plays the character’s technician instead).
I think what appeals to me most about The Streamer Awards is that it didn’t merely recognize the boundary-breaking elements of its medium, it highlighted them. The category League of Their Own featured four geniuses in performance art:
Kitboga streams his interactions with those aggravating scam callers who’ve made us all refuse to pick up the phone the last several years. After finding out his grandmother had fallen prey to a scam in 2017, he built a career around scamming scammers. He utilizes a voice changer to play characters. When scammers want access to his PC, he runs a virtual machine off his computer that’s spoofed to look like a unique PC. He even created a fake banking website that’s extraordinarily difficult for scammers to navigate and that gives him control of the financial transactions.
Ibai is a Spanish streamer who invented a whole new international sport: the Balloon World Cup. Based on the game where you have to keep a balloon off the ground, each player gets one touch to keep it afloat. If the other player can’t touch it to keep it afloat, you score a point. It sounds silly, but put it on an obstacle course and the final product becomes intense, athletic, and a lot more exciting than most professional sports.
The Sushi Dragon livestreams…well, the making of his livestream. The hell’s that mean? He uses a device on his wrist to edit the stream as it happens. He turns his live recording of daily life into an immersive experimental film.
The winner was Jerma985, who rented out a warehouse, built a complete sitcom-styled set, and employed a film crew to offer viewers the chance to control his stream as if he were a character on The Sims. They could decide how he looked, what he did, what he bought, what events happened to him, and influence his emotional state, complete with stagehands who upgraded his house during intermissions, and used props to represent housefires.
Awards shows that take themselves more seriously don’t do this. There’s no Oscar award for who fucked up film the best this year, for those who changed our understanding of what it can even be in the first place. In fact, I’d argue the people who did exactly that, such as Julia Ducournau (“Titane”), Prano Bailey-Bond (“Censor”), and Michael Sarnoski (“Pig”) saw a grand total of zero nominations for their films in any category.
In another vein, we saw an award for Best Philanthropic Streamer. This was won by Irish streamer Jacksepticeye, who raised $7.6 million to combat homelessness in 2021. When was the last time we saw an award for Best Philanthropic Actor, or Film that Caused the Most Change?
The Streamer Awards also featured an inclusive range of presenters, nominees, and winners – something the Oscars and other awards shows still can’t manage reliably.
But look – this article? It’s only kind of about the Oscars. It’s really about streaming as a medium. The Oscars are the jumping off point. As it shears away some of its most interesting awards in the pursuit of making the telecast shorter, it misses the point that it should be diving deeper to catch up with how people view film and become interested in the medium’s storytelling. I mean, hell, the quickest fix is to look at what the Independent Spirit Awards did with Aubrey Plaza hosting, but the longer fix is to figure out what forms communities around film, and how to feature and appreciate this.
The Streamer Awards already has that down when it comes to live streaming. It felt like a community that appreciated each other, that acted like a community even as the awards show was happening. It didn’t matter if there were technical issues or a third of the jokes clunked. It mattered that as the show went on, it became a downright sweet appreciation for the performers others marveled at, a celebration of just how far communities enable performers to take their art.
There was no regality. The awards both mattered to the point where streamers were moved to receive them, and didn’t matter to the point where they accidentally broke or forgot them. That both these aspects are true defines the weird landscape of streaming, where the audience is in on the joke but participates in the performance by taking it seriously.
If that seems like a dangerous form of art, that’s because it is. We live in a dangerous reality, where enough of the population believes bullshit that they’ll refuse to get life-saving vaccines, refuse to wear a mask, that they’ll frenzy to take school lunches from children, celebrate politicians who take money from enemies, the list goes disappointingly on.
If we understand that play is a type of processing and practice for real life that everyone needs – including adults – when we look at the gaslit world we’re in…we need a medium where we can see the joke from inside and out, understand how that participation works and how to recognize it, where we can practice at turning it into empathy, into wanting to see someone else succeed, into celebrating what gives others access, or a voice, or challenges the status quo.
Awards shows are ads, and The Streamer Awards certainly had those. They have a choice what to be beyond that, whether they’re rubber stamp approvals of the way things are, or they genuinely seek to push the boundary of what can be and platform those pushing hardest. Any piece of art has to have a reason for being, and awards shows don’t even think of themselves as a piece of art. That excuses them from having a purpose. Give an awards show a purpose, create it with that expectation, and it can become a piece of art. At that point, what it says starts mattering a lot more than whether it pulls it off or not. People want to see art, even if it has ads stuffed into it. They don’t want to see ads with more ads stuffed in.
The Streamer Awards were scuffed because they were willing to be, and they were willing to be transparent about what they aspired to. Audiences are smart enough to fill in the blanks when they’re entrusted to do so, and that enabled this awards show to have a point, a purpose, to argue for streaming as the largest medium we’ve ever had for performance art, and to point us in the direction of a diverse range of performers who challenge our ideas of what art is, who can make it, and what our participation in it looks and feels like.
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There’s a lot to get into, so let’s dive right in this week. New series come from France, Japan, Romania, the U.K., and the U.S., while new movies come from the Czech Republic, Poland, and the U.S.
NEW SERIES
Shining Vale (Starz) co-showrunner Sharon Horgan
Courteney Cox and Greg Kinnear star in a fantasy comedy about a family that moves into an old home known for its horrible past. Things get stranger and stranger, but the only one who seems to notice is Cox’s Pat, who suspects she might be possessed.
Sharon Horgan created and showruns “Shining Vale” with Jeff Astrof. An Irish actress and writer who became involved in BBC productions, she produced, wrote, and starred in “Catastrophe” and “Pulling”.
You can watch “Shining Vale” on Starz. The first two episodes are out now, with new ones dropping every Sunday.
The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey (Apple TV) half-directed by women
Samuel L. Jackson plays an elderly man with dementia. He has one last chance to remember his past and investigate the death of his nephew. The series is based on the novel by Walter Mosley.
Hanelle M. Culpepper (“Star Trek: Picard”, “Gotham”) directs 2 episodes, and Debbie Allen (“Everybody Hates Chris”, “Scandal”) directs one.
You can watch “The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey” on Apple TV. The first episode is available now, and new episodes arrive on Fridays.
The Thing About Pam (NBC) showrunner Jenny Klein
Renee Zellweger stars as Pam Hupp in a comedy adaptation of a recent murder. Hupp was initially successful in framing someone else for the crime. Judy Greer and Josh Duhamel co-star.
Showrunner Jenny Klein has written on “Supernatural” and produced on “The Witcher” and “Cloak & Dagger”.
You can watch “The Thing About Pam” on NBC or Hulu. The premiere is available now, with new episodes on Tuesdays.
Ruxx (HBO Max) showrunner Vera Ion mostly directed by Iulia Rugina
Can’t find a translated trailer for this Romanian romantic dramedy. It follows Ruxx, who’s navigating political work, family, and romantic life, as well as the toxicity and misogyny that enters into each.
Showrunner and writer Vera Ion is a Romanian playwright. Iulia Rugina directs six of the eight episodes, and she’s already seen two feature films and two short films nominated in the Gopos Awards, Romania’s equivalent to our Oscars.
You can watch “Ruxx” on HBO Max. Three episodes are available now, with a new one dropping every Tuesday.
The Chelsea Detective (Acorn TV) half-directed by Darcia Martin
Two detectives investigate the elite of London’s Chelsea neighborhood in a new four-episode series. As is the case with many British mysteries, each episode lasts around an hour-and-a-half.
Darcia Martin directs two episodes. She’s directed on “Shakespeare & Hathaway” and “Father Brown”.
You can watch “The Chelsea Detective” on Acorn TV. The first mystery is available, with a new one debuting every Monday.
Weekend Family (Disney+) half-directed by Sophie Reine
Emmanuelle is an academic who falls for a man with three children. Each has a different mother who’s very involved in their lives, and the entire family gets together every weekend. Emmanuelle learns how to navigate the situation over the course of eight episodes. This is Disney+’s first original series in French.
Sophie Reine shares directing duties with Pierre-Francois Martin-Laval, at four episodes apiece. Reine is a prolific editor of French film. She edited “The Connection” and won a Cesar award (France’s Oscar equivalent) for her editing on “The First Day of the Rest of Your Life”. She was also nominated for Best First Film for her “Cigarettes et chocolat chaud”.
Disclosure: I know Emmanuelle’s voice-over artist on the English dub, Jessie Hendricks.
You can watch “Weekend Family” on Disney+. All 10 episodes are available immediately.
Kotaro Lives Alone (Netflix) directed by Makino Tomoe
In this anime, a manga artist who’s become unpopular finds himself caring for a 5 year-old child who lives alone.
Makino Tomoe directed her first series last year with “Woodpecker Detective’s Office”. She’s worked her way through key animation, storyboard, and episode direction jobs on various anime.
You can watch “Kotaro Lives Alone” on Netflix. All 10 episodes are available now.
NEW MOVIES
Turning Red (Disney+) directed by Domee Shi
In Pixar’s latest film, Mei Lee is a 13 year-old girl who’s struggling through adolescence. Making things more complicated is the fact that whenever she gets excited, she turns into a giant red panda. Aside from Rosalie Chiang as Mei Lee, the voice cast also includes Sandra Oh, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Orion Lee, and James Hong.
Director and co-writer Domee Shi won an Oscar for Best Animated Short with “Bao”. She’s also been a storyboard artist on “Inside Out”, “Incredibles 2”, and “Toy Story 4”.
Andrew Garfield stars as a major social media influencer who builds his brand off impostor syndrome. Those around him participate in an organized, insincere chaos, less and less sure if they’re the parts they play or the people lost in them.
Director and co-writer Gia Coppola is the niece of Sofia Coppola and granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola. This is her second feature after 2013’s “Palo Alto”. She’s also directed music videos for Carly Rae Jepsen and Blood Orange.
You can watch “Mainstream” on Showtime, or see where to rent it.
India Sweets and Spices (Hulu) directed by Geeta Malik
Alia returns from college during the summer, only to find her parents’ past secrets are disrupting the family she thought she knew.
This is the second feature from writer-director Geeta Malik after the well-regarded “Troublemaker”. She started out in the industry as a grip and assistant camera, in between making short films.
You can watch “India Sweets and Spices” on Hulu, or see where to rent it.
Even Mice Belong in Heaven (Tubi) co-directed by Denisa Grimmova
In this Czech stop-motion animated film, a mouse and fox meet in animal heaven. They become friends, only to be reborn into opposite roles.
Denisa Grimmova directs with Jan Bubenicek. This is her first feature film.
You can watch “Even Mice Belong in Heaven” on Tubi, or see where to rent it.
Autumn Girl (Netflix) showrunner Katarzyna Klimkiewicz
This Polish drama follows Kalina Jedrusik. The singer and actress came to symbolize women’s sexual freedom and independence in the 1960s.
Katarzyna Klimkiewicz directs and co-writes the series. She won a European Film Award for her short “Hanoi-Warszawa” in 2009.
Mark, Mary & Some Other People (Hulu) directed by Hannah Marks
Newlyweds give non-monogamy a try in order to stabilize their relationship.
Writer-director Hannah Marks is better known as an actress in “Necessary Roughness” and “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency”. However, she’s also written “Banana Split”, and wrote and directed “After Everything”.
This was previously featured, but you can now watch “Mark, Mary & Some Other People” on Hulu, or see where to rent it.
If you enjoy what you read on this site, subscribe to Gabriel Valdez’s Patreon. It helps with the time and resources to continue writing articles like this one.
Last night, I watched the world’s first firefight at a nuclear power plant. The Ukrainian plant’s cameras were streaming online as Russia attacked and shelled the facilities of Zaporizhzhia. It’s the largest nuclear plant in Europe. These cameras were confirmed as real footage by multiple journalists. Tracers sometimes shot through the night. Bright flashes erupted regularly – I couldn’t tell if they were from vehicles firing or being hit. At one point, a building on fire was hit, and then it wasn’t really there anymore. It was replaced with a fire that was several stories tall.
I’ve seen these sorts of scenes played out in movies and video games countless times. They’re often fetishized for their godly feel of destruction from on high. Planes, missiles, artillery can all hit targets without even seeing them. They’re presented with cool detachment – at best a disconnect from the result and a justification for the action driven by that detachment. At worst, they’re a Michael Bay-styled fetishization of destructive power.
All I knew as I watched is there were lives there. Then there weren’t. They were ended by people who couldn’t see those lives. As I watched, I didn’t feel the power of destruction. I didn’t feel detached. It didn’t feel fetishized. I felt hollow. I’ve seen historical war footage. That’s disturbing enough, but it all happened. It already is. People already did it. This, I watched live.
I don’t know that this is the right place to put this. I have no conclusion. While men may have a higher tolerance or interest in the fetishization of mass violence, it’s not unique to us. I’ve seen women and men directors create shining, gleaming military sequences where lives are ended with the cool admiration of technology, as those giving orders watch a world away, somehow managing not to feel hollow. I don’t know that this is the right place to put this. It’s the article I’m writing the intro to the next day and right now this is the only thing I can write.
Just please, if you’ve ever believed you had the power to change the world, the ability, the drive, whether you think you can succeed or you think it’s tilting at windmills, you’re needed. We need to change it. Whatever combination of hope and hopelessness, calm and anger, fulfillment and desperation, whatever it is that drove us so well as a community for four years to oppose Trump, that kept us loud and involved and active, we need to still be using that. We need to pick that up again. Please.
NEW SERIES
Pieces of Her (Netflix) showrunner Charlotte Stoudt directed by Minkie Spiro
Toni Collette plays Laura, who one day displays an unexpected aptitude for violence. The series follows Bella Heathcote’s Andy as she tries to piece together who her mother really is. “Pieces of Her” is based on the thriller novel by Karin Slaughter.
Charlotte Stoudt showruns. She’s previously produced on “Fosse/Verdon”, “Homeland”, and the U.S. “House of Cards”. She started out as a researcher on various TV series.
Minkie Spiro has directed on “Better Caul Saul”, “Dead to Me”, “Call the Midwife”, and “Jessica Jones”. She started out as a photographer.
You can watch “Pieces of Her” on Netflix. All eight episodes are available today.
The Dropout (Hulu) showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether half-directed by women
Amanda Seyfried stars as Elizabeth Holmes in a series based on real-life events. Holmes dropped out of college before founding Theranos, an overnight success in healthcare technology. An instant billionaire, Theranos fell apart over the next several years as Holmes and her inner circle were exposed for massive fraud of its patients and investors.
Showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether has written and produced on “New Girl” and “Bless This Mess”. Francesca Gregorini and Erica Watson each direct two of the series’ eight episodes.
You can watch “The Dropout” on Hulu. The first three episodes are available now, with a new episode dropping each Thursday.
NEW MOVIES
Fresh (Hulu) directed by Mimi Cave
Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan star as a new couple who are both exhausted by the modern dating scene. It seems like they’re saved from it by each other. A little bit of cannibalism can’t be the worst red flag she’s ever encountered.
Director Mimi Cave is best known for directing a number of tUnE-yArDs music videos. She’s also directed for Sleigh Bells, Sylvan Esso, and Vance Joy. This is her feature-length debut.
American Girl (Netflix) directed by Feng-I Fiona Roan
A 13 year-old girl is forced to leave Los Angeles after her mother develops cancer. She returns to Taiwan in the midst of the 2003 SARS outbreak.
The Taiwanese film is the first feature from director and co-writer Feng-I Fiona Roan. She won Best New Director at the Golden Horse Film Festival, Taiwan’s equivalent of the Oscars. (The film also won Best Cinematography and Best New Performer there.)
In this Dutch comedy, a Moroccan-Dutch woman sees her family try to set her up. They look down on her for being cheated on by her former partner and now single. They desperately want to ‘solve’ the situation. The film is told in Dutch and Arabic.
Director and co-writer Daria Bukvic is a Bosnian-Dutch director. She entered the Netherlands as a Bosnian refugee at the age of three, alongside her mother. She’s become one of the Netherlands’ most exciting theatrical directors. This is her first film.
The Weekend Away (Netflix) directed by Kim Farrant
Based on the novel by Sarah Alderson, two women vacation in Croatia. One of them is accused of murdering the other, and she attempts to clear her name.
Director Kim Farrant has previously directed on “Strangerland” and “Angel of Mine”.
The Scary of Sixty-First (Shudder) directed by Dasha Nekrasova
Two roommates living in Manhattan discover their apartment hides a secret – it was once used by Jeffrey Epstein for sex trafficking. In what’s advertised as a horror comedy, it’s difficult to know exactly how this subject matter will be engaged.
Director and co-writer Dasha Nekrasova is an actress you may have seen on “Succession”. This is her first feature.
You can watch “The Scary of Sixty-First” on Shudder.
If you enjoy what you read on this site, subscribe to Gabriel Valdez’s Patreon. It helps with the time and resources to continue writing articles like this one.
Gabriel Diego Valdez 