The Sympathizer (2024)

Park Chan-wook lit-adaptation miniseries, take two. Everything looks extremely slick until CG helicopters start falling from the sky. Hoa Xuande is good as the lead, but each Robert Downey Jr. is worse than the last one. The highlight comes halfway through when our guy is advising on a Vietnam War movie with John Cho and David Duchovny, attempting to inject hidden messages by coaching the extras’ dialogue. After he gets blown up on-set, timelines start bleeding.

Co-created by Don McKellar, who brings along Last Night star Sandra Oh. Park directs for a while then the City of God guy takes over, then the guy who made the Steve Buscemi episode of Electric Dreams.


Random Acts of Flyness season 2 (2022)

Not a sketch show anymore, a psychic spiritual sci-fi therapy gaming narrative.
Extremely ambitious blend of history, myth, realism, and virtual worlds.
Intriguing yes, but does it work… is it fully successful? Also yes.
Najja is now Alicia Pilgrim of last year’s A Thousand and One.
Most of the directors are from the music video world, and Nuotama Bodomo made Afronauts.


Painting With John season 3 (2023)

Potatoes!
Flea goes to jail.
Kenny Wollesen and the rest of the band hit the studio.
Sometimes there’s still some painting.
Great show (and soundtrack).


Smiling Friends season 1 (2022)

101. I think I missed the pilot where it’s explained that the main characters are cheery helpers for hire… anyway, here they succeed in rehabilitating the career/reputation of an evil racist frog.
102. A gaming-addicted shrimp misses his ex.
103. Pim gets lost in the spooky woods and chased by a forest demon while gathering firewood on Halloween.
104. They solve the case of a fast food manager murdered by one of his mascots.
105. They’re sent to cheer up the Princess of the Enchanted Forest, led by a stalker hobbit.
106. Frowning Friends move in across the street and turn the whole block pessimistic.
107. Charlie goes to hell at Christmas, feat. cameo by Gilbert Gottfried as God.


Smiling Friends season 2 (2024)

201. They help a 16-bit 3D video game character find a new job.
202. Managing a presidential election vs. Mr. Frog.
203. Red office guy Allan on a quest for paperclips.
207. Journey to colorful capital-punishment town, the boss’s son becomes a malevolent butterfly.
208. Garbage snowman fears death.

I know I’m missing some but these are very short episodes and if I ever need to know which one had the boss marrying an evil demon I can just google it. Creators/voices Pim and Charlie come from, respectively, a Rick & Morty parody called Bushworld and hit youtube series Hellbenders.

Found these on Criterion, whoopee!


No Ward (2009)

Short doc focused on hurricane refugees in Texas, dreaming of life in nearby suburban Carrollton. Cocorosie and Four Tet provide glitchy drone music that wouldn’t be out of place in Tenet.


Their Fall Our All (2014)

A long way from the doc, with beautiful photography and sci-fi editing, transporting a few women and girls between realms. Mirrors reflect different people, identities get mixed up, and there’s a subplot involving a senator being blackmailed. Really good.


You and I and You (2015)

An apparently single-take video to two songs by The Dig (not the “why don’t you believe, believe in your own god” Dig), a couple and their kid walking along a road, accosted by different mystical groups until they’ve been separated and transformed.


Jimi Could Have Fallen from the Sky (2017)

“Nance humor is so chaotic,” writes a letterboxd reviewer. An imagined origin story of Jimi Hendrix in seven minutes, with a bunch of actors (incl. Nance, a purple-haired kid, a skydiver) playing Jimi, with dance scenes and audio trickery. Probably the only great biopic.

It becomes less random as the series goes on and sketches start calling back to each other or continuing from previous episodes. It is pretty random tho, also one of the most imaginative series I’ve ever seen. Seems like a high-budget Adult Swim thing, with sketches and animation and music and interviews – can’t believe it’s on HBO, or that creator Terence Nance (An Oversimplification of Her Beauty) landed a big-budget live-action cartoon on the heels of this.

Very many participants, including actress Dominique Fishback, the Ghanaian director of Afronauts, and Solange Knowles.

A first-person semi-documentary by Nance about his uneven love life, which also contains a second-person semi-documentary by Nance (How Would You Feel?) about his uneven love life, plus fragments of a first-person documentary by Nance’s ex Namik, plus drawn animation and stop-motion and other things. The presentation is great fun, and though all the navel-gazing relationship talk gets to be a bit much, it’s not an overlong movie and all the shape-shifting kept me happy.

Not the first documentary I’ve seen to contain its own test screening. I thought Nance had a new movie in Sundance last month, but I guess it was a live performance of his project where he googles phrases about black kids and follows the results down a wormhole, then posts the results on his vimeo page. I watched for a few minutes, but the online version seems to be missing essential narration.

Flying Lotus did the music for this and LoveTrue which I saw a few weeks later. And I tried to look up articles or interviews about the film but instead got caught up in a highly entertaining essay Nance wrote about Exodus: Gods and Kings in which he convincingly labels Ridley Scott a white supremacist. Ah no wait, here’s a Filmmaker interview in which Nance claims he was playing “the type of guy she wouldn’t like” on camera so the story would make sense, which complicates things even more.