My Favorite Performances of the Year (So Far)

The more content we have, the more our “to watch” lists rack up shows that we may never get to touch. That’s not a bad thing. It’s better to have more than we can find time to watch than too little, but it’s important to share those series and performances that move us. Sometimes we find these where we don’t expect.

I’m not a big TV comedy watcher, in part because I prefer shows that are willing to tread into the absurd. That hasn’t been the style the last decade. When we’ve standardized even the mockumentary format, we need to find new approaches before it’s tired out. Yet this year has shown a tendency to do just that, not just navigating into far more absurd and satirical waters, but also changing formats and genres on the fly without worrying about whether each half hour forms a complete thematic arc.

There are so many other performances this year that don’t make a list like this. When you highlight the individual, you can overlook the ensemble, and “Abbott Elementary” boasts one of the best ensembles of the year, led by Quinta Brunson and Tyler James Williams. (I know I just complained about standardized mockumentaries, but this one shines through the format.)

Similarly, “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” has no weak spot in the cast. Anson Mount may be trying to make himself my new favorite captain in the franchise, but as “Star Trek” often is, the show is a resounding group effort.

I didn’t really dive deep into voice acting, but I do have to highlight Rie Murakawa’s work as the gender-expansive Osana Najimi on “Komi Can’t Communicate”. Few convey the balance of care for others with the pure, willful chaos that she does.

There are also those performances that might not ask their actors to stretch too far because that’s not what the show needs from them in that moment. They’re examples of perfect casting nonetheless. I think of Hazal Kaya’s charismatic light mystery turn as Esra in the Turkish “Midnight at the Pera Palace”, Cassandra Freeman’s Vivian and Jordan L. Jones’s Jazz on “Bel-Air”, and Alan Ritchson’s Jack Reacher on “Reacher”.

There are several performances I want to highlight even more than these:

Emmy Rossum, “Angelyne“

You could dismiss Emmy Rossum’s performance in “Angelyne” as that of playing a ditz, but this would overlook an incredibly complex role. The story of an 80s celebrity famous for being famous is described through various conflicting recollections. These different perceptions, including Angelyne’s own, each change who she is and her path to celebrity.

There’s a scene where Angelyne sits down with Playboy owner Hugh Hefner. He’s surrounded by an entourage of women, and Angelyne counters with her own entourage of men – both retinues are only there for show. He wants her to pose nude, but it quickly becomes clear he’s outclassed. He’s part of an old-fashioned misogyny that trades fame for ownership and exploitation. She’s pioneered the trade of exploiting celebrity itself, without the need to answer to someone like him. It’s here that her ability for negotiation, cutthroat attitude, and business acumen all bite, where her airhead presentation gives way to a keen understanding of Hollywood and how to beat men at their own game.

Don’t get me wrong – Angelyne comes off in many other situations as a narcissist and manipulator, but not because she’s a sociopath. She ditches who she once was and embraces a celebrity persona as an escape from abuse, itself a re-enactment of generational trauma. Her performance serves as both a critique of New Age commercialism and the influencer culture that evolved from it, and an understanding of the desperation that drives people to chase it as a survival mechanism. That Rossum’s performance utilizes camp as well as drama lends a stunning flexibility to the series. Rather than portraying someone who’s conflicted, she portrays someone who conflicts us: she’s deserving of our horror and judgment as well as our empathy and admiration.

Jabari Banks, “Bel-Air”

The dramatic remake of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” is good, and it does the difficult, thought-out work of adaptation well. Do we need a second take on “Fresh Prince”? How could it not ruin what came before? Won’t it complicate my nostalgic understanding of the character to have a completely different actor play him? I lament this difficult question so much I can barely pay attention to movies containing anywhere between three and seven Spider-folk.

“Bel-Air” updates many things that wouldn’t be said on TV in the early 90s, advancing conversations about racism into today’s media and political climate. At the show’s heart is Jabari Banks’s performance of a young man who’s torn between versions of who he wants to be, who both admires and resents the wealth that suddenly surrounds him and is wary of the self-hate that social acceptance in white circles demands of him.

Banks captures so many of the tics and nuances in the actor Will Smith’s original performance, while still giving his interpretation of the character Will Smith. You can emulate someone else’s performance with nods to their movement, but Banks encodes it into his performance in a way that feels much more natural and internal than an acting nod. The characters don’t just act similarly, they think similarly. “Bel-Air” leans on a strong cast with a number of good performances, but Banks’s is a captivating interpretation that drives the show.

Barbara Liberek, “Cracow Monsters“

“Cracow Monsters” is a Polish horror series that’s more fantastique than fantasy. Based on Polish folklore, the series hearkens back to the moodiest and most atmospheric habits of 90s horror with quick and harrowing bursts of action. Barbara Liberek plays Alex, a medical student who fears the onset of schizophrenia and self-medicates with drugs and alcohol. She’s revealed to have a power that can help hunt otherworldly creatures, and grudgingly works with a group of similar students.

Alex’s curiosity, earnestness, and frustration are balanced against a tendency for self-destruction and isolation. She wants to survive, but is so afraid that she’s on the cusp of repeating her mother’s mental illness and suicide that she also wants to destroy herself in what time is left to still control her own fate.

Liberek realizes a character who’s dreaming yet terrified her dream is doomed, rushing against the clock to become a doctor before the onset of schizophrenia. She takes care of others, yet aggressively rejects anyone attempting to aid her, lest they get invested. She couldn’t care less about helping anyone hunt demons until her curiosity drives her enough to tolerate having to work with other people. Alex is the kind of standoffish, matter-of-fact, justifiably resentful noir character that women rarely get to play, but Liberek realizes her in both humanizing and iconic ways.

Claudia O’Doherty, “Killing It”

Claudia O’Doherty possesses that rare Madeline Kahn ability to exist in the show’s story so completely that she’s naive to it, while at the same time sitting outside of it and pointedly commenting on it. It’s one of the toughest demands in comedy because it asks the actor to simultaneously portray two extremes that each comment on the middle ground where all the other characters live.

O’Doherty achieves both the character and the meta extremes, whether it’s fulfilling a dead man’s last wish by eating his identifying information, or dragging a bag full of dead snakes through a convention hall where the wealthy con their worshippers. She delivers an outsized portion of the absurdism in “Killing It”, while existing inside of it as someone who’s completely normalized to it.

One of the midseason episodes, “The Task Rabbit” involves O’Doherty’s Jillian housesitting in a mansion, and coached by Zoom call to pretend she’s rich and cutthroat for a wealthy date. It’s an acidic take on “Cyrano de Bergerac” that becomes a half-hour of modern science-fiction as pointed as anything I’ve seen this year. It entirely relies on O’Doherty’s ability to comment on the story even as she suffers it.

You may also recognize O’Doherty as Stede Bonnett’s wife Mary in “Our Flag Means Death”.

Kheng Hua Tan, “Kung Fu”

“Kung Fu” is an important show, but not necessarily a great one. It’s the kind of CW fare where you can drop in on an episode and know everything that’s going on in the first three minutes, chiefly because all the characters repeat it over and over again. Nonetheless, I love it, in large part because its cast is so incredibly charming.

As their kids run around having adventures, it’s the parents played by veteran actors Kheng Hua Tan and Tzi Ma who anchor often-poignant B-plots. The main plot about artifact trails, all-too-convenient clues, and insta-hacking can get very silly, but they often serve as an opportunity to open up points about Chinese history in the U.S., racism, and fighting gentrification.

Preserving one’s culture in a society determined to assimilate and re-purpose it hides traumas both historical and personal. Where Tzi Ma’s emotionally open Jin abides and understands, Kheng Hua Tan’s Mei-Li is more intense and guarded. Those scenes when she opens up enough to speak about her own history provide some of the clearest and most resonant moments happening on TV.

Taika Waititi, “Our Flag Means Death“

“Our Flag Means Death” lets director and Oscar-winning writer Taika Waititi stretch his legs as an actor. His improv and comic timing are impeccable. On the surface, his character of Blackbeard is a man for whom nothing is a challenge anymore. He’s grown numb to life, and wants to retire and enjoy his wealth. Yet this numbness hides something else – a growing attraction to the incompetent gentleman-pirate Stede Bonnett.

Paired with Rhys Darby’s Bonnet, Waititi’s Blackbeard offers a lens on two ways that men are taught to deny their homosexuality. In Stede’s case, it’s trying to fit into a suffocating heterosexual lifestyle – acting the part in regards to wife, children, place in society.

In Blackbeard’s case, the metaphor is that of suppressing who he is through a psychological self-mutilation, an inwardly turned hate and cruelty that bubbles to the surface and has to find other targets beyond himself – thus reinforcing the expectations of who he should be and how he should act.

Stede is an escape from that, but both struggle to escape the cages of expectation they’ve lived in most of their lives. They’re each expected to act a certain way, and do massive harm to themselves and those around them just to keep up the facade. To find each other and accept who they are is a kindness for both of them and their communities. That this is presented so well in the storytelling of a satirical sitcom is remarkable. Waititi is surrounded by an excellent cast, but it’s his performance that gives the series its pace and rhythm.

Minha Kim & Youn Yuh-jung, “Pachinko“

Minha Kim and Youn Yuh-jung play young and elderly versions of Sunja, in a story that follows her family across half a century. “Pachinko” uses this family as an opportunity to look at the Korean diaspora, some of which fled Korea during a brutal occupation only to suffer more hate and racism in Japan and the U.S.

Kim and Youn (along with child actor Yuna) realize the same woman across half a century, keeping and evolving mannerisms, showing how physicality changes without losing what makes that physicality unique. The way each glances, considers a silence or speaks before thinking, the way each enters a space, looks out for someone else or forgets to…it’s all the same person. It’s all the same character in a way that goes beyond two actors finding something shared. There’s an essence on-screen, something that we talk about when we think of movie magic, that these two actresses evoke.

There’s no suspension of disbelief needed. They’re the same person. In the emotional, gut reaction we have as viewers, there’s an instinct in me that would sooner believe they’re the same person across decades than that this could possibly be a character played by different actresses. I don’t think I can say I’ve ever felt that before.

Alan Tudyk, “Resident Alien“

“Resident Alien” might be the best thing SyFy’s managed in years and years. The comedy about an alien who’s crash-landed and has to live among the humans he was sent to destroy had a strong first season last year. This year’s been a little more up and down, but Tudyk’s performance continues to be a comedic goldmine.

The evolved-octopus-out-of-water story asks Tudyk to be doing outlandish physical comedy constantly, and the man hasn’t hit a wrong note. The series is edited for a sense of irony, and this only helps. It’s the kind of show where it would be very easy to chase a joke that doesn’t work. Very occasionally, it will do that for some of the other characters. The series centers on Tudyk’s Harry first and foremost, though, and a live-action series anchoring itself to this much physical comedy is nearly unheard of today. That’s because it needs someone with Tudyk’s skill to pull it off.

Bridget Everett & Jeff Hiller, “Somebody Somewhere“

The way these two characters appreciate and speak to each others’ unique way of looking at the world – and their anxiety at not finding a place in it – helps them find a joy that’s otherwise blocked.

Stuck in small town Kansas, and struggling with a rural environment that often feels claustrophobic, Jeff Hiller’s Joel is the only person around who treats Bridget Everett’s Sam as if she’s somebody admirable and worthy of notice. It’s not a romance. Joel is gay and he has a boyfriend, though the rest of the town is so willfully blind to this fact that they all just assume it’s a “corrective” romance for both.

Their friendship opens up a level of acceptance and self-acceptance that both have trouble finding elsewhere. It enables them both to not just help each other up, but to foster the beginnings of community within a community where they’ve rarely fit.

Andrew Garfield, “Under the Banner of Heaven“

I opened my “Under the Banner of Heaven” review by calling Andrew Garfield a beautiful performer. The crime scene that opens the show is horrific – you just don’t ever see much of it. We see its corners and edges, but we never leave Garfield’s Detective Pyre. It’s his reaction, the plaintive eyes that he can’t disguise, the bodily shudder, the beginning of erosion in someone’s beliefs played out in his carriage…it tells me so much more about the effect of that crime scene than the goriest image ever could.

It shook me from the beginning. Pyre’s caring but insistent manner is ideal in a detective, and arises from his faith even as it readies to be ripped to shreds by the realizations he’ll make about the brutal, misogynist Mormon fundamentalism he investigates. Pyre’s a walking emotional and spiritual sacrifice, and there are points where even he knows this. Yet he’s played with a care and gentleness that’s more admirable and capable than the blunt, desensitized cops that are worshiped on so many other shows. (The only flaw I find in his performance is how much he looks like Jimmy Carr in this hairstyle.)

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A Timely Hideousness — “Under the Banner of Heaven”

Andrew Garfield is a beautiful performer. “Under the Banner of Heaven” has one of the most impactful depictions of a crime scene I’ve seen in recent memory, without even showing much of it. Instead, the camera stays on Garfield’s Detective Pyre. We see just the edges of the rooms he walks through, but every twitch and tic in his face and eyes. It’s a captivating sequence that describes the scene’s horror far better than if we’d been shown the murder victims in graphic detail.

There’s a restraint and empathy when it comes to the individuals in “Under the Banner of Heaven” that’s balanced out in the other hand by an exacting and coldly logic fury at the organized abuse within the Mormon Church. It takes a poetic sense of capturing both history and myth in one net, to see which boils into justifications for abuse when placed against fact.

Pyre investigates the murder of a woman and child in 1984, arresting the blood-covered husband but quickly opening up deeper questions about a politically influential fundamentalist family. It quickly becomes clear that the situation has arms that reach into every facet of the Mormon Church.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or LDS Church, has been at the heart of investigations into systematically covering over child abuse, domestic violence, even statutory rape. Dozens of women detailed how the church threatened them with the loss of eternal salvation if they left violent partners. It even used a victims’ hotline as a resource to hide sexual abuse claims.

This is the question at the heart of “Under the Banner of Heaven”, in which fanatics insist their war against “socialism”, “haughty women”, taxes, and outsiders is justification enough to take out their anger on the women who do the silent work of “building their kingdom”. With no credit but all the blame, the minute a man fucks up it’s the woman’s fault, and should a woman have aspirations or thoughts of her own, well we see the result of men’s childish anger and vengeance painted in Pyre’s eyes in that opening scene.

At times, “Under the Banner of Heaven” is edited like a storm of impressions that combine interrogation, flashback, and Mormon myth, all containing questionable motives and tableau that repeat in Pyre’s own life. These are visual expressions of Pyre’s identification with victims and suspects alike, and that identity carries with it doubt. It creates a screen reality that isn’t sustainable, in which Pyre himself can’t spiritually or emotionally survive.

What “Under the Banner of Heaven” is at its heart is a deconstruction of the LDS Church’s history of abuse of women, down to its most buried bones. It argues that its systemic abuses against women are infused into its DNA and trace back to its creation; that its creation wouldn’t have been possible without both the work of women and the abuse of the women who did that work.

In its way, “Under the Banner of Heaven” gnashes teeth. This isn’t just a series that presents a mystery without judgment of larger systems. It stares wide-eyed and carves the LDS Church apart in action and in history. It wrangles the type of system of horror against women we treat as too big to comprehend, let alone fail, and renders each element with clarity. Much like Pyre separates his suspects and jumps between interrogations to ferret out information, the series isolates elements of LDS misogyny and abuse so that they can’t inter-rely to cloud the issue. It builds a case as Pyre does, of an organized religious system built top-to-bottom to suppress women, victimize them, and – if needed – spit them out with varying degrees of damage if they can’t be taught a learned helplessness.

It’s a timely hideousness that “Under the Banner of Heaven” comes out just as the Supreme Court’s draft opinion on Roe v. Wade was leaked. The LDS Church, after all, effectively provides two U.S. senators at all times to oppose women’s rights, including the right to an abortion.

“Under the Banner of Heaven” isn’t just a self-contained mystery, it’s a direct prosecution of the LDS Church’s treatment of women, and a larger condemnation of many religious organizations that act similarly.

If there’s one criticism I have of the series, it’s that in the episodes we’ve seen so far, it’s told mostly through male eyes. Pyre engages in complex discussions with suspects about the nature of the LDS Church, allowing the series to jump across time as arguments throughout the church’s history are evoked. These conversations allow him to corner his suspects, but sometimes trap him when his own doubt overwhelms. He lives with a wife, daughters, and his elderly mother, so the repercussions of what his first suspect suggest about the church echo louder and louder in his own mind.

The only lens into a woman’s direct experience that we’ve gotten is through the story of Daisy Edgar-Jones’s Brenda, the murdered wife. This is housed as flashback by her surviving husband as he’s interrogated, but it doesn’t obey the rules of flashback – it tells pieces of the story that he wouldn’t have directly witnessed. It works, in large part because we need to see her story through her perspective, and not just through the limitations of her husband’s recollections. His interrogation serves more as a bridge into an omniscient narrative, rather than as second-hand recitation.

“Under the Banner of Heaven” isn’t an easy watch, as beautifully painted and detailed as it is. It’s intended to be a difficult one. I appreciate that it creates its tension as a mystery through dialogue and a changing landscape of information. It has a brief chase and scenes with guns, but these are treated with realism and honestly aren’t as tense as those interrogation dialogues that sweep between the details of a crime and the abusive history of the LDS Church.

That the series comes within a week of the leaked Supreme Court decision draft on Roe v. Wade makes it even harder to watch – perhaps more important to watch as well, but certainly more difficult. What I appreciate about it is that its fury is cold, clear-eyed, sourced. The arguments that would resist its own aren’t avoided, but rather engaged, deconstructed, dissected.

It’s all based on a real case, specifically as examined in Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction book “Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith”. Showrun by Dustin Lance Black, writer of “Milk” and “Big Love”, the ways in which larger, more philosophical conversations around the LDS Church’s abuse of women are turned into dialogue and morphed into tableau and crescendoing montage are…they’re exquisite from a storytelling standpoint. That’s what makes them so hideous from any human one.

You can watch “Under the Banner of Heaven” on FX or Hulu. The first two episodes are available now, with a new one arriving every Thursday.

If you find articles like this useful, subscribe to Gabriel Valdez’s Patreon. It helps with the time and resources to write more like it.

New Shows + Movies by Women — March 11, 2022

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”.

You can watch “Turning Red” on Disney+.

Mainstream (Showtime)
directed by Gia Coppola

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.

You can watch “Autumn Girl” on Netflix.

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.

Take a look at new shows + movies by women from past weeks.

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 Top 5 Music Videos of 2014 (So Far)

by S.L. Fevre, Cleopatra Parnell, Vanessa Tottle, & Gabe Valdez

Vanessa here. I asked to do the intro today, because of what music videos mean to me. Music videos are the most watched form of short film. They come in all different flavors – performance videos of your favorite band, dance videos, comedies, dramas, experimental, arthouse. People say the musical’s dead, but it’s very much alive – billions of people across the world watch music videos every day. It’s our modern version of opera, touching narratives and social messages condensed into musical storytelling. And if you worry that speaks ill of our society, you’re watching the wrong music videos.

Our top 5 videos run the gamut – an animation with an ecological message, a socially conscious rap video, an angry social comment starring everybody’s favorite web-slinger, a tearjerking drama, and perhaps the most singular dance performance in recent music video history. But first, allow me to feature a personal favorite of mine.

Roar – Addy
The Make-A-Wish Foundation

This is what music videos mean to me. Here’s a little girl named Addy. She got stage IV cancer when she was just four years old. She went through chemo and radiation. What she says got her through it all is watching her favorite musicians on YouTube. The Make-A-Wish Foundation, a non-profit organization that grants dying children their one wish, was able to make a music video of Addy, thankfully after her recovery, performing Katy Perry’s “Roar.”

What do music videos mean to me? They mean a way to reach out into the world, across cultures, to perceive someone else’s story, their pain, their suffering, their success, five minutes at a time. Five minutes can change someone’s life, give them hope, and communicate the most urgent messages we have the capability to speak.

Music videos were Addy’s lifeblood, and she’s just one little girl. How many little girls, little boys, teenagers, men, women, those suffering pain, heartache or loss, find those five minutes that keep them going another day?

Why this music video? Because not everyone gets to make it out of being a kid, that’s why. Why the next one? Because I don’t own my body in the United States. Why the next one? Because thousands of underprivileged black families’ water is being turned off in Detroit. Why the next one? Because the LGBTQ community still isn’t accepted, and outed people still get beaten in certain places. There are countless next ones.

One of my co-writers, Cleopatra Parnell, wrote about Lykke Li’s “No Rest for the Wicked” (#20 in our countdown) that every country that wages war on a race, gender, religion, or lifestyle has a chance to show “whether we learned…or history repeats itself. The role of musicians and artists today is to be the conscience that refuses repetition.”

Music videos create a major part of our social consciousness now. They are our most readily accessible way to translate stories at no charge across cultures. That can save a lot of Addy’s. That can be a strong conscience that crosses borders. That can change lives. Enough changed lives can change entire cultures. And even if nothing else, at least they saved the lives of girls named Addy and Vanessa when they were unsure if they could make it another day.

Enjoy our top 5, and please keep watching and making every piece of art you can.

-Vanessa Tottle

P.S. Due to music copyright law, you may have to click through to YouTube to watch certain videos.

5. Re – Nils Frahm
directed by Balazs Simon

This is quiet, lyrically animated. It’s a story repeated day after day in a world we care about in voice, but often refuse to take action to save. What’s it like to be the last, lone beast in the scraps of a ruined wilderness? You can run, you can leap, you can be gallant and noble and beautiful, but if something’s meant to die and no one’s there to witness you, what does your beauty and talent mean? One of the best animated music videos I’ve ever had the pleasure of seeing.   -Gabe Valdez

4. 25 Bucks – Danny Brown feat. Purity Ring
directed by NORTON

There’s a violence in day-to-day struggle more and more families are feeling. It’s not the obvious violence I see in movies about black gangsters and brown drug-dealers and white heroes. The violence is internal and families feel it against themselves. It’s the violence of disappointment and discouragement. When you realize you’re up against something bigger than yourself, the system’s stacked against you, and you can’t win, where else is violence supposed to turn but on yourself and your loved ones?   -S.L. Fevre

3. We Exist – Arcade Fire
directed by David Wilson

It shouldn’t matter anymore whether someone is gay. It shouldn’t get anyone beaten or killed. You would think those two statements are so obvious it would be stupid to write them. Yet we live in a world that’s wasting its time and resources on holding the LGBTQ community down when it wouldn’t make a damn difference to the world what that community does. So it’s still a big deal when Andrew Garfield stars as a transvestite in a major music video released two weeks after his role as Spider-Man in The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

But it’s not the old moment when we used to celebrate the specialness of someone’s difference. That moment now is angry – we look at the normalcy of someone’s difference, and instead feel despair and frustration at the violent holdouts who hold back a world that needs to get on with doing something more important than clinging to hate.   -Vanessa Tottle & Gabe Valdez

2. “What is This Heart?” trilogy
Part 1: Repeat Pleasure – How to Dress Well
Part 2: Face Again – How to Dress Well
Part 3: Childhood Faith in Love – How to Dress Well
directed by Johannes Greve Muskat

A young man sacrifices having any life of his own to take care of his grandfather. His grandfather’s nurse falls in love with him. Together, they steal the grandfather away to visit his childhood home. Things go wrong. And the rest of it is about coping, how to learn to rely on someone else, how to learn to give into moments you can’t control. It’s a trilogy of videos still reeling around in my head, being turned over this way and that to get ahold of the story from every angle. Each time I watch the trilogy, I find something new in it. The performances are dramatically sterling. By the third video, the mythical power of the trilogy is astounding. Watch it through. You won’t regret it.   -Gabe Valdez

1. Chandelier – Sia
directed by Sia & Daniel Askill

This was a unanimous choice for #1. If you knew how much this group bickers about every little detail, that would blow your mind. None of us pretended anything else can be here, though, not even for a second. You don’t even need to understand why. You just need to watch “Chandelier.” The level of performance is what you get when you watch Jackie Chan or Mikhail Baryshnikov – less refined but at such a singular level nonetheless that it’s impossible to replicate or find a similar moment anywhere else you look. Maddie Ziegler shares dance solo at its finest, choreographed and performed by an 11-year-old. It’s the most unexpected music video.   -Vanessa Tottle

In any form of art there’s genius. You can’t point to what makes it up, but you know it when you see it. Maddie Ziegler’s choreography and dance here is feral, animal, chaotic, and yet so brilliantly nuanced – every move means something. She’s 11 and yet there’s a maturity that speaks to emotional moments and struggle and pushing forward despite being held back…there are times you think there’s a 30-year-old, weathered dance veteran on-screen. At the same time, there’s an immaturity, a free attitude and irreverence in the moves she’s chosen that reminds me of the experience of being a kid, of overcoming that sense of being overwhelmed in order to learn you can push your own boundaries. How she captures that, how an 11-year-old’s artistic discretion pulls from both ends of the spectrum to create and then perform a dance that speaks to you and sends chills up your spine…it’s an impossible performance, and yet there it is.   -Gabe Valdez

Enjoy the rest of our rankings:
Music videos #15-6.
Music videos #25-16.
Music videos #35-26.

Earning its Name — “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”

There’s an early scene in “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” in which Electro, still discovering his electrical superpowers, accidentally causes a disaster in Times Square. Web slinging superhero Spider-Man tries to defuse the situation by talking to Electro, who explains that he doesn’t understand what’s happening to himself, that he needs help. Both of these dynamic super-powers are on the same side.

The nervous Electro suddenly twitches at a surge of energy, and a police sniper takes the shot. It’s a cavalcade of misunderstandings that – at a moment’s notice – turn a good person into a villain. Electro reacts to protect himself, and Spider-Man has to save bystanders who are in the way. Suddenly those Times Square billboards that were zooming in on Electro’s face are zooming in on Spider-Man’s. Electro sees them. Where there wasn’t a fight before, where Spider-Man and Electro were on the same page in a tense situation, suddenly they’re presented in the media capital of the world as opponents. A serious event where lives are at stake has suddenly become a carnival, a conflict imagined from thin air. It’s no mistake that the African-American actor who plays Electro, Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx, is dressed in a hoodie for this scene.

Spider-Man still tries to talk with Electro, to calm the situation down before more people get hurt, but when you tell two people they’re in a fight for their lives, the one with less power is likely to believe you. Very few movies can so elegantly teach how national news media gets us to tune in, click links, and get angry about imagined conflicts – between race, religion, and even entire countries. Enough public pressure, and sometimes those imagined conflicts even become real.

It’s a powerful statement in a surprisingly sophisticated superhero movie, and it works because the film is always finding new ways to capture your attention. Spidey’s crime-fighting antics and soaring journeys through the New York City skyline are realized as beautifully as they’ve ever been. The fights are pumped up to cartoonish levels of color and acrobatics, yet they’re always anchored by a sense of what’s at stake.

While “Amazing Spider-Man” can deliver stupendous action and smart social metaphors, it doesn’t seem interested in a complex overall story – evil characters become evil because you know they’re going to, not because they’ve taken every step on the path to get there. While the movie’s capable of delivering captivating and emotional individual scenes, you could take those scenes and rearrange them and it wouldn’t make much difference to the plot. This would be far more glaring a flaw if it weren’t for the movie’s beating heart – the complicated relationship between Spider-Man and Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone.)

That relationship works because actor Andrew Garfield’s superhero is so different from Tobey Maguire’s reserved, socially awkward Spider-Man of a decade ago. Garfield’s Spidey is a class clown. He’s more emotionally raw, and his quick wit is only abrasive until you realize what a defense mechanism it is. Gwen is much more central to the plot than most superhero girlfriends get to be. In a twist on conventional superhero roles, it’s Spider-Man who’s faced with uprooting his life and following Gwen as she pursues her career. It’s nice to see a superhero plot that acknowledges this modern reality.

In the end, this entry is a structural mess, disjointed and uneven. It’s also a stylistic success, brimming with color and ideas and barreling ahead with tremendous energy. There’s one more lesson here, most consistently voiced by Spider-Man’s Aunt May, who raised him. She’s played by Sally Field, who can make any character feel so real you think you’ll see them leaving the theater afterward. The message is that, in difficult times, it’s not enough to just keep up hope. We need to exemplify that hope through action, by helping the smallest and weakest among us, by giving them hope. Spider-Man, Electro, and Green Goblin are all disowned, bullied, and betrayed both by loved ones and the world around them. The difference is that one of them has an Aunt May. She’s the real hero of the piece, although “The Amazing Aunt May” probably wouldn’t draw so many crowds. We all get a chance to play that role for someone, though, to help create a hero for tomorrow instead of a villain, so we can have a world that talks before shots are fired, and that doesn’t make a carnival out of conflict.

“The Amazing Spider-Man 2” is rated PG-13 for sci-fi action.