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The new Netflix film, Orion and the Dark, is an animated adaptation of the 2014 children’s book of the same name, by writer and illustrator Emma Yarlett. In the book, Orion is a young boy who is defined by his many fears: dogs, wasps, the ocean, girls, space, grandma, etc. But, what he’s more frightened of than anything else is the dark. We meet him on the night when that finally changes for him.  In the book, on the night in question, Orion is in bed, too scared to sleep. He ultimately grows so frustrated with his own fears that he yells out to the darkness, telling it to just go away. And, to Orion’s surprise, the darkness hears him. Orion watches as the night and shadows take shape in his room to talk to him about his request.  If you’ve ever read any children’s book, you can probably work out how the rest of the story unfolds. This personification of darkness convinces Orion to accompany it for an evening to explore the dark places in his family’s home, along with those outside his window, to see how these places don’t need to feel as scary as they seem. This exposure therapy works, and by the next morning, Orion is so attached to Dark that he’s now sorry to see it go. And to this Dark tells Orion not to worry because, wherever he might go, it will never be far away from him. Very touching.  The book is a perfect little gem of a story. It’s not trying to do too much. It’s 25 pages of pictures that can be knocked out in 5 minutes at bedtime while delivering an easily digested message for kids about facing your fears. What it isn’t, though, is an obvious candidate for a feature-length film adaptation, particularly not one penned by Oscar-winning screenwriter and experimental filmmaker, Charlie Kaufman.  Charlie Kaufman is no stranger to adaptation, of course. Of his nine screenplays that have been turned into films, Orion and the Dark  is the fourth to be adapted from someone else’s book. What all of these adaptations share with Kaufman’s original stories is a generally bleak view of the human condition, typically conveyed through the perspective of some lonely creative who shares many of the same fears and flaws that Kaufman sees in himself. Even when adapting someone else’s work, Kaufman always finds an approach that allows him to fit that story into his own strange voice.  Orion and the Dark  is so tonally out of step with the rest of Kaufman’s work, though, that it feels like a wild departure. But, in terms of actual content, this children’s film overlaps with the rest of his projects more than you might think. Orion shares many of the hallmarks of a typical Kaufman protagonist; he’s smart and terrified of the world, painfully aware of how close at hand the life he wishes he was living would be were he not so incapacitated by his own fears. The key difference in this story, though, is that Orion is still young enough for his life to turn out differently.  Kaufman makes two big changes to the book to expand the story into something that could be stretched to feature length. The first big difference is that he radically expands the world that Dark shows to Orion. They still spend the night together, but Kaufman’s cast of nighttime entities expands to include other personifications like Insomnia, Unexplained Noises, Sleep, Quiet, and Sweet Dreams. All of these are friends with Dark, and become friends with Orion, too. Kaufman also creates a character that works as a foil to the darkness, Light. Light isn’t exactly an adversary for Dark, but rather just that better-liked part of the natural order that works in opposition to darkness. A dynamic Dark is aware of and self-conscious about. In Charlie Kaufman’s imagination, even the constituent elements of the universe have their own neurosis to work through.  The other big change Kaufman makes is the structure of how the story is being told. While he largely follows the children’s book in how he initially sets up the plot, he makes a big departure right when Orion first agrees to accompany Dark for the night. Just as they are about to head out on their predictable nighttime adventure, the story breaks for a moment, and we learn that everything we’re experiencing is actually a story that an adult Orion is telling to his daughter, Hypatia, as she navigates her own fear of the dark. This little reveal was the moment when I fully got on board with what Kaufman was doing with this story. Similar to how this same conceit functions in The Princess Bride , this move creates a meta-commentary on storytelling within the story being told. In The Princess Bride , what’s being drawn out has more to do with that interactive element of telling and being told a story. We watch the grandfather tweak and massage the story based on the reactions of his audience of one: A little less kissing, a little more sword fighting, and maybe we’ll skip that bit about the shrieking eels this time. We’re seeing that, rather than a story being something fixed and rigid, it’s ideally a live experience shared between the teller and the audience.  Kaufman is doing this, too, but he’s also using this conceit to say something about how we use stories to pass important knowledge between generations over time. Fear of the dark and the unknown are primal fears that have been with people for as long as there have been people. (In the unexpected words of Werner Herzog, for almost as long as there have been light-sensitive proteins.) Orion begins to tell his daughter this fanciful tale about how he overcame his fear of the dark, and then one day she’ll tell her version of that story to her child, with each new generation adding what they’ve learned from their own unique experience along the way.  Without going into details, the ending of Orion and the Dark is hopeful, happy, tidy, and family-friendly. Not at all Charlie Kaufman’s usual, but appropriate here because of the kind of story being told. Kaufman is approaching the same issues he normally does - human fears in a foreboding natural world - but from the opposite direction, from the standpoint of the child who still has their life ahead of them. This makes Orion and the Dark  less of a departure for Kaufman, than an entry point for his ideas tailored for younger viewers. Exactly the kind of film I wish I had when I was a kid.  Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and two children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

While watching Adam Sandler’s new Netflix movie, Spaceman , I was repeatedly struck by something oddly familiar about the story. The film is based on Jaroslav Kalfař’s 2017 book, Spaceman of Bohemia. Sandler plays Jakub Prochazka, a Czech astronaut on a solo mission to investigate an astronomical anomaly that unexpectedly appeared in our solar system four years ago. When Jakub’s mission begins, all we know about the anomaly - now called Chopra - is that it is a cloud made of some kind of space dust created by a passing comet past the orbit of Jupiter.  When we meet Jakub, he’s six months into his mission and just days away from reaching the anomaly. His only substantive tether to Earth is his principal handler within the Space Agency, Peter (Kunal Nayyar). Jakub does have a direct line of communication set up at home with his pregnant wife, Lenka (Carey Mulligan), but he hasn’t been able to reach her for some time. Unbeknownst to Jakub, this is because the Space Agency has intercepted a message from Lenka telling Jakub that she’s leaving him.  The film is explicitly about loneliness, which is not unusual for a story about a singular figure traveling alone in space; but it’s a particular kind of loneliness at play here. Jakub’s feelings of estrangement are of his own making. Even if he isn’t aware that his wife has already left him, he is beginning to realize what prioritizing his ambitions over his wife’s needs (and their nascent family) has cost him. He is in the midst of all he ever thought he wanted - he’s a cosmonaut in space, on the verge of a groundbreaking contribution to our understanding of the universe - but he feels further away than ever from what might actually make him happy.  The film is an odd mix -  the tone, themes, and performances are all serious and grounded, but many of the story’s elements are heightened or fantastical. The core of the story is this relationship drama between two people who aren’t talking to one another, but the film’s setting is this odd alternate universe where the Czech Republic has its own space program, and its nearest rival in this historic mission is the equally unlikely South Korean space program. There are numerous elements like these throughout the film that signal to the audience that, while the story is meant to be emotionally grounded, some of the story’s details are going to get a little far out there. So, it isn’t as much of a surprise as you might expect it to be when a giant telepathic spider (voiced by Paul Dano) appears on Jakub’s ship just as its making its final approach to Chopra.  Here, despite the film’s hard sci-fi aesthetics, we realize we’re dealing with a much more abstract story. We learn that this spider-like creature was drawn to Jakub and his vessel, having been vaguely aware of humans as a thing, but curious to see one up close. The spider, which Jakub will come to name Hanuš, takes a specific interest in Jakub and his loneliness. And, through some combination of its telepathic abilities along with the amplification of that ability by its proximity to the Chopra cloud, Hanuš can show Jakub memories of his time with Lenka in order to try and see where their relationship went wrong. It’s when Hanuš starts to explain to Jakub what the Chopra cloud is that I began to feel like I had seen a version of this story before. Hanuš describes Chopra as a ribbon of particles left over from the beginning of the universe, a temporal anomaly traveling through space, where past, present, and future intermingle. This would also be a fair description of the Nexus from 1994’s Star Trek: Generations.  Now, that by itself would just be an interesting coincidence, but as Jakub’s story unfolds I realize that Star Trek: Generations is also principally about two people, specifically two men, grappling with late-in-life realizations that their career-minded drive to explore the universe cost them the chance of having a stable family life back on Earth.  Star Trek: Generations  was the first Star Trek film to feature the characters from the ‘90s series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. There was some concern at the time that there wouldn’t be an audience for such a film, so it was structured as a crossover event with the cast from the original Star Trek, who had already made six films of their own at this point. The combined cast would be too large to give everyone their own storyline, so the decision was made to focus on just the two captains, Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart).  In their respective time periods, both Kirk and Picard find themselves on missions that bring them in contact with The Nexus. In the case of Captain Kirk, he’s merely a visiting dignitary from Starfleet Command present for the launch of a new starship, the U.S.S. Enterprise-B, when it gets unexpectedly summoned to rescue a pair of ships that had become trapped by the energy ribbon.  When we meet Kirk, he has come back out of retirement because he couldn’t handle civilian life on Earth. We’ll also learn that his return to Starfleet was the breaking point in a relationship with  Antonia, a woman he was seeing on Earth. To hammer the theme home, while Kirk is first touring the Enterprise-B, he’ll meet Demora Sulu, the daughter of one of the original series characters. Kirk will even say out loud, “When did Sulu find time to have a family?” To which he is pointedly reminded of having said himself, when something is important to you, you make the time. It won’t be too long after this exchange that, during the rescue mission, an explosion will pull Kirk out of the ship and, we will later learn, into the Nexus.  We meet Picard, some 80 years later, having just learned that his only remaining living relatives - his brother Robert, and his young nephew René - both died in a fire back on Earth. He’ll eventually confide to a crewmate that part of his solace in never having had a family was knowing that at least the family would live on through his nephew. With that loss, he finds himself mourning, not only his brother and his nephew but also the family he never made for himself.  How Picard winds up in the Nexus is kind of needlessly complicated to get into, since it’s really just a mechanism to get him and Kirk into the same story, but one of the people who was rescued by the Enterprise-B all those years ago, an El-Aurian named Soran (Malcolm McDowell), was actually pulled out of the Nexus, and has been working to get back there ever since, no matter the cost. Soran’s evil plan works, an entire solar system is destroyed, but Picard is also pulled into the Nexus.  Now, we’re pretty far afield from Spaceman at this point, but I assure you this is building to a point about how these two films end, and what I believe they’re trying to say about narratives around men and families. What we’re meant to take the Nexus to be is some kind of space-time anomaly that can create for anyone held within it the exact reality they always wanted. That is the endless experience of all of your dreams coming true, which is apparently so seductive that we accept that Soran would be willing to destroy millions of lives in order to get back to it.  Not so for our two captains, though. Picard and Kirk each find themselves in their idea of Heaven - Picard in a Victorian house about to have Christmas dinner with his wife and children, and Kirk at his ranch making breakfast in bed for Antonia. Just as in life, neither of them has trouble walking away from this dream, though. Using the temporal powers of the Nexus, Picard finds Kirk, and they both return to the moment when they can stop Soran. They’re both making the right call, but it’s again rejecting all of the experiences of family life for another space adventure as if part of the moral of the story is that this is what heroic men are expected to do.  It’s with this idea in mind that we come back to Jakub and Hanuš. Hanuš shows Jakub where he went wrong in his relationship with Lenka. It wasn’t just that he left his pregnant wife back on Earth while he went off to space for a year. Hanuš shows Jakub all the ways he hadn’t been present for  Lenka during his career, including, when she miscarried a previous pregnancy. Jakub has this breakthrough. He manages to get Peter to bring a phone to Lenka so she can at least hear him say that he’s realized just how he’s let her down. Jakub seems like he’s recommitted to putting Lenka first from now on if she’ll have him. And yet, we find he’s almost immediately willing to throw it away for one more space adventure.  Having shown Jakub all these things, we learn that Hanuš is dying. Part of why he stumbled across Jakub in the first place was he was on his way to Chopra to die. Hanuš leaves the ship so he can spend his last moment among the particles from the origin of the universe. And Jakub puts on his spacesuit and follows him into the cloud. Having just committed himself to his family, he willingly consigns himself to what should be certain doom by leaving his spaceship to follow the giant telepathic space spider he’s just met into an as-yet unstudied energy cloud. And to do what, exactly? To give Hanuš some un-asked-for company for a few more minutes before they both die? Jakub and Hanuš share their moment, but Jakub lives just the same. He’s rescued by that South Korean spaceship that was right behind him. He’s even able to call Lenka from their ship where they have a final bittersweet exchange that leaves the story open-ended regarding whether they’ll get back together when he returns to Earth. For our purposes, this mirrors the endings of Kirk and Picard. Kirk dies stopping Soran, never to return to Earth to try and make things right with Antonia. And although Picard successfully saves millions of families, all he is left with of his family in the end is a half-burnt photo album.  It’s hard not to come away feeling that the ending of each of these stories echoes the mindsets that led each character to their unhappy circumstances. Each narrative begins with a man unsatisfied with his life, having foregone the experience of having a family in favor of space adventures, and each narrative ends with a man foregoing the experience of having a family for another space adventure. It’s almost like the idea is that having a family is incompatible with adventure, and it’s probably an idea like that which led each of these characters to their unhappy circumstances in the first place. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and three children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

Mike Burdge and Reeya Banerjee team up once again to chat all things Bond, catching up on the latest rumors of casting the next bow-tied devil, discussing what makes a good Bond actually work in these movies, all while chatting about the lone Lazenby entry from 1969: On Her Majesty's Secret Service . They also cover From Russia with Love, A View to a Kill, Tomorrow Never Dies and Skyfall . They behave themselves. Listen on....

I’ve only recently discovered how common this experience was, but I grew up reading Stephen King books starting at a fairly young age. I had been pretty exclusively a TV kid until I was 10 or so. I could finish an age-appropriate book at that age, but it wasn’t something that would ever occur to me to do voluntarily, or for fun. Starting in fifth grade, though, we started having "D.E.A.R." time as part of the school day, where we had the option to either "Drop Everything And Read," or do schoolwork. Now, schoolwork was generally to be avoided at all costs, so I was strongly motivated to find something, anything, to at least pretend to read during D.E.A.R time. When I got home after that first day, I went straight to my parent's bookshelves and grabbed the biggest book I could find, which happened to be a 1,100+ page copy of Stephen King’s It . I brought that book to school with me and, rather than just sit and stare, I began to read. Unexpectedly, I deeply bonded with that book, and I’ve had close to thirty years to try and puzzle out why. To this day, I’m not otherwise a horror person. I avoid anything genuinely scary, but I plowed through It over a period of months, despite how heart-poundingly frightened it made me feel at times. What I think I’ve finally landed on is that there was something about how King writes his characters, specifically how he writes kids and teenagers, that strongly resonated with me at that time. He didn’t write generic scared little kids. He could viscerally capture what being scared, embarrassed, overwhelmed, or intimidated feels like to a kid. Early in King’s career, kid characters featured prominently in his work, with his pulling inspiration from his own childhood memories, his experiences as a father, and notably his experiences as a teacher. Horror lends itself to the school-age experience because it’s a way to engage with some of the stereotypical realities of those times - being bullied, not fitting in, being scared all the time, feeling like you’re being ignored or mistreated by adults - while allowing the tropes of the horror genre to convey how heightened and intense the lived experience of those feelings are when you’re a boiling-over hormonal adolescent or teenager with underdeveloped impulse control, feeling like you’re white-knuckling your way through life. The titular character in Carrie is Carrietta White, a sheltered and socially outcast high school senior girl, who lives alone with her unstable, ultra-religious mother. We’re led to believe that Carrie’s experiences at school are sad but unremarkable to this point. She’s already an outcast when we meet her in the first scene but in a garden-variety sense. Like the characters in King’s novella, The Body , which became the film Stand By Me , or like the kids from It , these kinds of kid characters have been King’s bread and butter, and Carrie was the first one. King often writes kids as strange in some way, or as outcasts, but ones who are enduring the way most kids manage to do with the circumstances they find themselves in. In the case of the kids from The Body or It, they largely survive the ordeals they’re confronted with because at least they have some kind of friend group to support them. What makes Carrie importantly different is that King doesn’t really give her anyone. In the first scene, we have with Carrie, we see her being mocked at the end of gym class for causing her team to lose at volleyball. We feel sorry for her, but this just feels like a kind of low-level daily trial of her life. From gym class, though, we move into the girl’s shower where the rest of the story is put into motion. In the film, it’s fascinating how Brian De Palma chooses to film this scene, and probably impossible at almost any other time. Ostensibly, we’re looking at naked, frolicking high school girls. They’re filmed in slow-motion, with soft focus, with a delicate score playing along with them. It’s artfully done, but the only thing keeping it from being skeevy is what De Palma is setting up. The camera moves through the other girls and finds Carrie in the shower. It lingers on her body in the same way as she washes. At this moment she’s the same as the other girls, right up until the moment when Carrie feels herself start to bleed. The delicate score cuts out altogether, and all we hear is running water as Carrie tries to make sense of her bloody hand. With the next cut, it’s like a spell has been broken and Carrie looks almost like someone entirely different. The way De Palma frames her makes Carrie suddenly seem small, vulnerable, and years younger. Cutting back to the other girls, they’re all dressed and feel older than Carrie and a little far away. The rest of the scene plays out like a nightmare. Carrie stumbles into the girls begging for anyone to help her. She doesn’t know what’s happening and thinks she’s hurt. The other girls think Carrie is being ridiculous, maybe even childish, and tease her with tampons, backing her into the shower, pelting her with them, and taunting her to “plug it up.” How Carrie is treated at this moment is important for how the rest of the story plays out, but it’s not everything. It’s easy to imagine that if she had any sort of friend group or any support at home, maybe things would unfold differently. Maybe the gym teacher, Miss Collins, doesn’t feel the same motivation to punish the other girls the way she does, which pushes Chris to enlist Billy and others to help her get revenge. Maybe Sue Snell doesn’t feel motivated to try and make it up to Carrie by telling her boyfriend to ask Carrie to prom. But Carrie doesn’t have anyone. When she gets home, not only does her mother not sympathize with her, but instead locks Carrie in a closet to pray because of a belief that anything as bodily or carnal as menstruation is sinful. Carrie is completely isolated, not just in her shame over this embarrassing incident and her own ignorance about the natural changes her body is undergoing, but also the supernatural changes her body is experiencing as well. The book plays this element up a bit more, that along with her first period, and all that means for the development of her body, she also feels this great and potentially destructive telekinetic power growing within her. The book takes more time than the film to show Carrie’s experiences as she is beginning to feel out and cultivate her abilities. As her power seems pretty clearly meant to be a metaphor for her growing sexuality, it seems much more empowering in the book that Carrie is consciously feeling her way through her power, rather than almost exclusively being overwhelmed by it in the film. It’s not like her control isn’t present at all in the film. We do see that she’s able to use her powers to reassemble the mirror that she breaks, but that’s not quite the same as Carrie intentionally trying to flex her power in the book by seeing what things she can lift or move, or how long she can keep an object in the air. Because of how the film ends and is viewed from our contemporary vantage point, it feels impossible to me to engage with Carrie without seeing it through a particularly dark framing: that of a school shooting. Carrie is an isolated and bullied kid with no support system; she is struggling through one of the most developmentally challenging periods in life. Unlike the typical school shooter, she makes no plan to get a weapon and hurt people - she just happens to be a weapon in the moment of her greatest humiliation. This framing seems all the more obvious to me knowing that prior to Carrie , while Stephen King was a senior in high school, he wrote a novel about a school shooting where a high school boy takes his classmates hostage, outsmarting all of the other kids and adults along the way, before finally being shot himself. That book, Rage , would be published in 1977 as the first novel published under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman. After King was outed as the real author behind the Richard Bachman pseudonym, it was collected in a large volume with four of the other Bachman Books, and published under his own name. King would go on to let the book go out of print during the late 90s though because it kept popping up in connection to perpetrators of actual school shootings. The problem King found in writing Rage, is that he had inadvertently created a dangerous fantasy that troubled, young men identified with and wanted to emulate. Contrarily, in the case of Carrie, King created a character that people could sympathize and identify with, but with a story so deeply rooted in humiliation and loss of control, that nobody winds up wanting to be Carrie. The opening shower scene is a bit of a bait and switch: De Palma initially depicts the young naked girls in one way, until everything changes, revealing that there was something else going on all along. The whole story of Carrie is a bit of a bait and switch as well because we are made to feel such great heartache for this young girl throughout the story, and are right there with her when she is again standing bloody in front of a room of people, but this time, instead of watching her beg for help, we watch her lock every exit to the gym and burn it down with everyone inside. It may be possible, with effort, to have compassion for a school shooter, but never sympathy. Yet, Carrie is sympathetic. Part of that may be gendered. Historically, perpetrators of mass shootings or violence are almost exclusively male, so it may not actually be intuitive to see Carrie through that framing. Part of it may be that we see her have some kind of mental break at prom that indicates that she’s not truly in control of her actions. Part of it may be that we see that she may be afraid of or intimidated by, her classmates, but we never see her exhibiting any kind of malice towards them, which makes us less inclined to hold her responsible for what happens. It’s challenging to frame how to feel about Carrie at the end of the story. The damage caused by Carrie is horrific, but her vacant eyes while it’s happening make it harder to lay specific blame for what happened at her feet. What Chris and Billy do to her is terribly cruel, but that can never actually excuse Carrie indiscriminately killing everyone in that building. On one hand, we know that in this gymnasium there are many of the kids that bullied Carrie, specifically the girls that were taunting her in the shower at the beginning of the story, but we see Carrie being treated well early in the prom and everyone there is sincerely cheering and clapping when her and Tommy are voted King and Queen. Also, with very few exceptions, specifically Chris and Billy’s co-conspirators, no one is actually laughing at what happens to Carrie. She will see it differently, but DePalma takes the time to make clear that the people in the gymnasium are on the same page as the audience of the film in being appalled by what has happened to her. From the moment Carrie is doused in pig’s blood, the tragic ending feels inevitable. De Palma makes sure that we understand there is no victory for Carrie at this moment. When she comes to her senses, she will make her way home and try to wash herself clean; she will go to her mother looking for comfort, and our hearts will break for Carrie as her mother stabs her in the back. Carrie kills her mother, giving her the martyrdom she seems to have wanted all along, but she then pulls her mother’s body close to her as she pulls the house down on top of them both because, even now, she still doesn’t have anyone else. Carrie , both as a book and a film, is a story well told, but it’s hard to watch because of how terribly cruel it is. Not just in the things that happen to Carrie, but in the way the story itself treats the audience. We know it’s not going to work out, but all we want for Carrie is to be able to live in that moment forever, crowned prom queen, standing next to the boy she likes, while all of her classmates clap and cheer for her. Being a kid is hard, especially for her, and we want her to have finally found her people, but that’s not the story we’re being told. Carrie White is a good-hearted kid who deserves better right up until the moment she isn’t. It’s brutal to see what is so cruelly taken from her, and worse still to see what she then takes from everyone else. Damian Masterson Staff Writer Damian is an endothermic vertebrate with a large four-chambered heart residing in Kerhonkson, NY with his wife and three children. His dream Jeopardy categories would be: They Might Be Giants, Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon, 18th and 19th-Century Ethical Theory, Moral Psychology, Caffeine, Gummy Candies, and Episode-by-Episode podcasts about TV shows that have been off the air for at least 10 years.

A review of Late Night with the Devil Live television broadcasting can be a stressful, competitive, soul-crushing, and exhausting endeavor. One would even describe it as the devil’s business. This has never been more prevalent and literal than in the Cairnes Brothers found footage horror comedy Late Night with the Devil , debuting in theaters in March 2024 before streaming at home on Shudder in April. The film is a stand-out in Shudder’s catalog as a clever and playfully gruesome chiller that aesthetically emulates a certain era of 1970s late-night television and what would happen when a particularly offbeat broadcast invites dark forces into the studio, unleashing chaos and pandemonium unto its crew and audience. It is ostensibly Dick Cavett meets Pazuzu, and it is certainly refreshing to see a wild genre picture with a tiny budget receive as wide of a release as it has. Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) is the host of the 1970s late-night live television show Night Owls , where on a typical night, he invites strange carnival sideshow characters to interview and exploit in front of a studio audience. However, his ratings are severely lagging behind Johnny Carson, and he is grieving over his recently deceased celebrity wife. Desperate for a ratings boost to save his show, he invites a cavalcade of oddballs onto his show for his 1977 Halloween special, including a parapsychologist and her case study, a 13-year-old cult survivor, seemingly possessed (or as the doctor describes, psychically infested) by a demon she refers to as “Mr. Wriggles” as a way to capitalize on the growing “Satanic panic” sensation occurring throughout the 70s. The film exists in a tiny subgenre of horror I like to dub “mockumentaries depicting live entertainment disrupted by a supernatural force”. It occupies a similar aesthetic space to the 1992 BBC TV movie special Ghostwatch  as well as the 2013 WNUF Halloween Special . Ghostwatch  incorporates real BBC broadcast talents such as Michael Parkinson and Craig Charles (shout-out to Robot Wars ) to give its supernatural investigation an air of authenticity. WNUF Halloween Special utilizes a scrappy 1980s public access presentation complete with amusing fake commercials. Late Night approaches its subject as though a master tape of the fateful evening has been unearthed and shown to the public for the first time, Blair Witch  style, complete with VHS artifacting and glitches, sudden cuts to commercial breaks, and mono audio mixing. While the film mostly sticks to this gimmick, it occasionally cuts to a fly-on-the-wall black and white documentary style, similar to a Maysles Brothers film, in between the interstitial commercial breaks. While these scenes do a solid job of adding narrative tension, as the cast and crew grow weary of the potential danger in the studio, it also breaks some immersion in the setting. I wish we could have seen a way for the whole episode to play out as is uninterrupted. It is a real pleasure seeing David Dastmalchian in a leading role. He's been a memorable supporting player in productions by the likes of Denis Villeneuve, Christopher Nolan, and James Gunn ( Prisoners  is a particular favorite of mine). Now he gets to shine as Jack Delroy, playing a charming and funny late-night host with great chemistry with his co-hosts and guests. He has just the right amount of nervous and chaotic energy where you can believe he's been hosting the show for 6 years, yet still lagging behind the likes of Johnny Carson. He's the heart of the film and I hope this leads to him being the heart of more films to come! There's an unfortunate elephant in the room which I need to address. During the interstitial cuts to commercial breaks, splash images are displayed on the screen. These images are confirmed to be AI-generated. AI art is also on display in the production design, on the backdrop. I personally do not condone the use of generative AI in commercial art. AI can be useful in the early development process to create reference points, but AI-generated art has no place in a finished piece of art, in my opinion. It’s a shame, too, since there’s so much attention to detail and love put into the presentation, the AI generation sours some of the authenticity on display. They did not need to cut corners when they put in so much effort elsewhere. If AI generation doesn’t bother you, it won’t make an impact on your viewing experience. If it does, I don’t necessarily blame you for not wanting to support this film, but there is a lot to love here in other departments. Film is a collaborative medium, I only wish real graphic designers and artists got to contribute to this collaboration in that way. For seasoned genre heads of either found footage mockumentaries or possession/exorcism films, Late Night With the Devil doesn’t exactly offer anything profound or groundbreaking. I do wish it could have gone further with its concept and committed to its bit to a stronger degree. As it is, though, it is still a thoroughly entertaining and creative horror film with a playful and sinister tone full of practical gore. It will assuredly be a staple of many Halloween marathons for years to come. Jeremy Kolodziejski Jeremy is a long-time supporter of and contributor to the Story Screen Fam, as well as the entire Hudson Valley Film community, as a writer, filmmaker, film worker, and general film fan. You can find him sifting through the most obscure corners of horror, martial arts, comedy, noir, and crime drama cinema, always on the hunt to discover something new, strange, and exciting.

Mike Burdge and Bernadette Gorman-White strap into the stretch limousine that is The Pattinson Stuff , this time taking a look at the films the actor made on the side during his Twilight years, including his ultimate attempt to immediately distance himself from that sort of type-casting: Cosmopolis . Other films discussed include Remember Me, Love & Distrust, Water for Elephants, Bel Ami and Dior: 1000 Lives . Listen on....

It's our 25th episode of Story Screen Presents ! We celebrated by attending our latest movie screening in Beacon, NY at Harry's Hot Sandwiches, where Mike, Jack and Robby all watched the noir classic, Memento , with a crowd of people and then talked about it! Wanna know what they talked about? Mainly Christopher Nolan movies. #Newsletter #Podcasts #Memento #Overdrinkers #MikeBurdge #JackKolodziejski #RobertAnderson #HarrysHotSandwiches #25thAnniversary

Mike Burdge, Bernadette Gorman-White and Diana DiMuro go over all the categories for the 96th Academy Awards, discussing their predictions and hopes, as well as chatting about some truly great flicks that entered the Oscar race this year. Big movies discussed include Oppenheimer, Barbie, The Zone of Interest, Napoleon, The Eternal Memory , all the Oscar Nominated Shorts and so so so much more. Listen on....

The films we didn’t take seriously, until we did. The Oscars are coming, the Oscars are coming!  Of the ten films nominated for Best Picture this year, two of them are foreign films ( Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest) , one is about cultural misappropriation ( American Fiction) , one is about America’s long history of oppressing and harming the native inhabitants of our land ( Killers of the Flower Moon) , and one is about the complicated nature of being an immigrant, simultaneously within and outside of two cultures ( Past Lives) . I think it’s pretty cool to see this kind of diversity in the Best Picture category (even though let’s be real, we all know Oppenheimer  is going to win, and I am totally fine with that).  Last year, RRR  became the first Indian film production to win an Oscar, for Best Original Song, and that was a seismic moment - not just for me personally, but for Indian cinema, and honestly, for cinema as a whole. RRR ’s win has been in the back of my mind every time I think about my history as a film lover, and when I wrote my Story Screen piece last fall about the fifth anniversary of the film Bohemian Rhapsody  (about the British-Indian frontman of the band Queen) all sorts of big thoughts and emotions about Indians in cinema AND Indian cinema, in general, have been rattling around my head. So come with me on a little journey about the politics of identity and representation as seen in film… When I was in high school and college, I was full-blown obsessed with Bollywood films and also full-blown obsessed with getting my non-Indian friends obsessed with them. This was in part a reaction to having gone to predominantly white schools my whole life and feeling an aggressive need to honor my non-whiteness in communities of well-intentioned liberals who always claimed to me that they "couldn't see color.” (This is what passed for anti-racist discourse in the late 90s/early aughts.) In high school, I formed the Bollywood Club with my best friend Munaf, which was basically a shameless excuse to screen my favorite Bollywood movies after school once a month for anyone interested. (As a result, there is a demographic of white kids from San Francisco who became fans of my favorite Bollywood actor, Shah Rukh Khan.) In college, I majored in film theory and criticism and decided early on that when the time came, I was going to write my senior thesis on some aspect of the Indian film industry. The stereotypical notion of an Indian film, pretty much since people outside of India (and film scholars) were aware of them, was that they were silly, over-the-top melodramatic musicals featuring overwrought acting and goofy song-and-dance sequences where the hero would chase the heroine across lush fields and around trees, and a well-timed rainfall would drench her red chiffon sari, allowing it to cling to her body suggestively, and the music was old-fashioned, lushly orchestrated, featuring singers trained in the Indian classical vocal tradition.  In that late 90s/early Aughts period, there was a sea change happening in the Indian film industry, but the world of film scholarship hadn't quite caught up to it. Dil Chahta Hai  came out in 2000 and broke ground on two levels, the first being that it portrayed Indian youth culture in Bombay in a realistic, non-movie musical heightened way, the second being that the soundtrack, written by songwriting trio Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, featured music that felt less like old-time movie musical songs and more like contemporary pop songs that could get Top 40 radio play. Lagaan  came out around the same time, tackling a story about Indian villagers in the Victorian era fighting back against their British colonial oppressors, and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film (it unfortunately lost). Kal Ho Naa Ho  was released in 2003, the first big-budget Indian film shot entirely in New York City, depicting the lives of Indian immigrants in America and again featuring music by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy.  But the old stereotype remained, and along with it that very outdated scholarship about the Indian film industry. The seminal text that most film scholars referred to when writing about Indian cinema was a book called Indian Popular Cinema: A Narrative of Cultural Change  by K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake, published in 1998. If one wanted to study Indian cinema in an academic setting, there was no way to avoid that book. I cited it in my senior film thesis. That said, Gokulsing and Dissanayake’s overarching position on the purpose of Indian cinema is, in retrospect, reductive, imperialist in nature, and insulting. They claim that Indian cinema is purely about escapism - which, fine, I would argue that in many ways that is the purpose of all cinema, a chance to take a few hours and immerse yourself in another world and stop thinking about your own life. But their point wasn’t just that Indian cinema was escapism in a universal humanistic sense - it was escapism specifically for the rural poor population in India (which is admittedly quite large), and as such the plots of these films were designed to be purposely simplistic: good triumphs over evil, the good guy always wins the heart of the good girl, the bad guys always get their comeuppance, the bad girls are shamed for their shamelessness. Gokulsing and Dissanayake were basically saying that Indian cinema is inherently uncomplicated and easy-breezy fun because it is fundamentally at odds with the reality of the lives of most of India’s hard-living low-income population. These two scholars aren’t the only people who have this grand-sweeping generalized view of the target audience of a typical Indian film; this film-going population is a demographic that acclaimed writer and noted imperialist snob (I’ve met him; he would agree with me) Salman Rushdie referred to as the “teeming masses” in his award-winning novel Midnight’s Children . Former Under-Secretary of the United Nations, international civil servant, renowned writer, notorious large-vocabulary-word wielder-when-speaking-in-public and professional intellectual (also my uncle’s former student; he attended my parents’ wedding reception) Shashi Tharoor referred to this same population as “rural moralists” in his book India: From Midnight to the Millennium  - positing that the simple fact of their poverty and lack of cosmopolitanism meant that they were inherently conservative-and-simple minded.  I’m not name-dropping the personal connection I have to these two learned men just as a #humblebrag.  I bring that up to emphasize that this take on Indian cinema was the prevailing one for many years both on a broad scale, culturally, and on a very intimate scale in my own life. In college, I ran with a crowd of rabble-rousing POCs who were very politically minded, and social justice-oriented, and studied serious topics in their areas of discipline - Economics, Poli Sci, History, and Literature. They all made fun of me for wanting to write a film thesis about Bollywood, because they were operating under that old assumption that these movies are facile and not worthy of critical thought beyond the old Gokulsing/Dissanayake framework. They quasi-accused me of not being political enough, of being entrenched in an identity crisis (I was an ABCD - an “American Born Confused Desi”), and trying to work that out in school. They accused me of being simple-minded and uninterested in high art. “High Art.” There’s an interesting term, and one I absolutely hate. High Art, is implicitly in opposition to Low Art. High Art means highbrow, substantial, and important. Low Art means lowest-common-denominator, facile, and unimportant. Parallel Cinema - which is the term Indian film scholars use to describe non-commercial films (roughly equivalent to art-house cinema in the West) - as created by filmmakers like Satyajit Ray, was High Art. Social criticism and complex themes about injustice and the human condition are embedded in the stories. Often deeply depressing films. Commercial mainstream cinema in India - mostly fluffy, fun, rom-com romps, was Low Art. I think the entire notion of High Art versus Low Art is bullshit. Art is art. If art is done well, it moves people. It makes them feel something. That’s the point of art. You can like some art and dislike some art, but don’t ever fool yourself into believing that the art you like is somehow morally or intellectually superior to art you don’t care for.  And this is the trouble with making generalizations about Bollywood films. Gokulsing and Dissanayake, in their ground-breaking text, made the same mistake that many people still make when they talk about Bollywood: they use the term “Bollywood” as a genre, instead of what it actually is, which is an industry. Bollywood is an industry. Just like Hollywood is an industry. That’s where the term Bollywood comes from – some jackass British journalist in the eighties coined the term as a portmanteau of Hollywood (the so-called filmmaking capital of the world) with Bombay (the so-called filmmaking capital of India - now known as Mumbai). What followed, of course, was more portmanteaus for other popular regional cinemas - Tollywood (for Telugu films), Kollywood (for Tamil films, mostly shot in studios in the Kodambakkam neighborhood of Chennai). But the simple fact remains: these are the names of film industries - industries that collectively produce nearly 800 films per year: action films, rom-coms, dramas, thrillers, horror films, political films, slapstick comedies, you name it. So, to write a whole damn book about what constitutes a Bollywood movie - and by extension, all Bollywood movies - is pretty presumptuous and frankly, condescending. There are plenty of bubble-gum pop-fluff Bollywood films out there – I wrote about a few of them in my thesis – but there are also a lot of arty Bollywood films out there as well. These are films that follow the basic musical film format but are telling stories that are more complex and nuanced than the stereotypical fare. I wrote about some of those movies in my thesis as well. The reason why they get lumped into the mainstream umbrella is because they are in Hindi and have songs. But I would be hard-pressed to compare a weightier film like Parineeta  to a pretty conventional rom-com (right down to the When Harry Met Sally  allusions) like Hum Tum . You just can’t. Both films were created by the same industry, but you cannot claim that they are similar in any way other than the fact that they are about complicated male-female friendships and they both star Saif Ali Khan. The music is different. The sets are different. One is a period piece. The acting style is different. Parineeta  is a very rich, nuanced cultural criticism about class and privilege. Hum Tum  is When Harry Met Sally . But they are both Bollywood films. And so that is why it is flawed to think of the stereotype of the rom-com song-and-dance chasing-the-girl-around-trees wet-red-chiffon-sari model as the benchmark for “mainstream” Indian movies. You cannot use one such film as a representative, a universal stand-in, for some concept of “mainstream.” For one thing, it’s sloppy scholarship – while you can use models and generalizations when talking about, say, statistical data, you just can’t when you’re talking about art. You cannot use a thing to stand in for a concept. That would be as absurd as suggesting that I am a universal representative of transnationalism. For another thing, it’s just sort of gross and imperialistic. It’s anthropology in its worst, most fetishizing definition. It’s looking at a giant industry, a giant body of work, and saying “Yeah, but it’s so meaningless and silly that it can all be summed up in this one film.” It’s just fundamentally untrue. At any rate, in the midst of all of this derogatory noise from the preeminent intellectuals who study Indian popular culture, my peers, and my family, I wrote my college film thesis about the intersection of the use of foreign shooting locations in Bollywood films, feminist film theory, and how foreign location allows Indian filmmakers to broach topics that are still considered taboo to talk about openly in Indian society - like homosexuality, marital infidelity, toxic masculinity, divorce. I analyzed, in detail, three extremely commercial, mainstream, big-budget, non-arthouse romantic comedies starring the biggest celebrity actors in the industry at the time - Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol, Rani Mukherji, Amitabh Bachchan, Saif Ali Khan, Preity Zinta, Abhishek Bachchan, Hrithik Roshan, Kareena Kapoor - and in the process I was able to demonstrate that yes, even in so-called mainstream “low art” there is an opportunity to present thorny stories about complicated topics in society that, just by virtue of their being peddled to Rushdie’s “teeming masses” could raise awareness and empathy. Yes, even to Tharoor’s “rural moralists.” The films I wrote about were not all simplistic stories about good vanquishing evil, black vs white the way Gokulsing and Dissanayake codified into conventional scholarship about this type of cinema; one of the films I wrote about was literally about two people who have an extra-marital affair, destroy two families in the process, but find a measure of peace with each other that was lacking in their respective toxic marriages. How’s that for the gray area? I was the first person in the history of my college’s film department to write a senior thesis about non-Western cinema. I got an A.  And then I stopped following the industry; I think the deep dive it took for me to finish that thesis effectively burned me out. I spent the last 72 hours before my thesis was due frantically transcribing pages upon pages of long-hand writing in four notebooks (yes, I am that old) revising, pulling still images and video clips as supplementary material, revising some more, compiling footnotes, and not sleeping. I subsisted on coffee, Mountain Dew Code Red, cigarettes, dubiously-procured Ritalin from a friendly drug-dealing neighbor (not proud of that but hey, I was 22), and listened to an endless loop of Sanskrit yoga chanting set to music blaring loudly from my computer speakers. I’m pretty sure my housemates thought I had found God. In the 17 years or so since then, academic scholarship has blown wide open on Indian cinema - so much that I have not been able to keep up with it. I'm not saying this explosion of critical thought is because of me - no one in academia knows who the fuck I am, and I’m totally fine with that. I never had any intention of becoming a professional academic. But something has changed, and scholars are now willing to give these films a level of consideration and celebration that I was once mocked for wanting to do myself. People are paying attention, and people are rejecting that old Gokulsing and Dissanayake model of assessing the value not just of Bollywood films, but of contemporary Indian popular cinema in general. They are looking at them not as High Art or Low Art, but just Art. Art that is worthy of consideration on a global scale. Which brings me to the Tollywood film RRR  winning Best Original Song for “Naatu Naatu” at the Oscars last year. My Story Screen colleague Damian did a great writeup of the film on his best of 2022 list so I'll point you in that direction to learn more about the film itself, because I want to focus on what happened at that telecast. Deepika Padukone, one of the biggest Bollywood actors working today, came on stage to introduce the song, which had become a viral sensation globally since the film's release. The cast of the film came out and recreated a version of the dance sequence for the audience. The crowd went wild.  I was in tears. Not long after, Kate Hudson and Janelle Monae presented the Oscar for best Original Song to M.M. Keeravani and Chandrabose, the songwriters of “Naatu Naatu.” Keeravani began his speech by saying that he grew up listening to the Carpenters, and now here he was at the Oscars. He then sang the rest of his acceptance speech to the tune of a Carpenters song.   At this point, I was ugly crying. It wasn't just pride - cultural pride, national pride, whatever you want to call it. (National pride isn't accurate anyway - I was born in the US, I'm American; India is where my parents are from.) It was the first song from an Indian production to be nominated at the Oscars, and it won. It was a validation, for me, for everything I had believed back in my young adulthood - for my dogged determination to prove that Indian cinema was worthy of being considered good filmmaking using the standard of what is art meant to do rather than what the Western canon deems worthy of taking seriously. It was retribution to all of those assholes in college who made fun of me for my Bollywood obsession, to my family who sneered at my love of Bollywood films and complained to my dad about why I wouldn't focus my studies on the art-house Parallel Cinema oeuvre of my Bengali compatriot Satyajit Ray, to the whole goddamn world who looked at my interest in Indian cinema and wrote it off as the manifestation of an identity crisis or an extended excuse to moon over Shah Rukh Khan under the guise of academic thought. Should India care that the American Motion Picture Academy finally sat up and paid attention? I mean, that's debatable too. While Hollywood films dominate the globe, so do Indian films due to the diaspora. We Indians are everywhere. Shah Rukh Khan is the most recognized man in the world (the conventional wisdom is that if Tom Cruise and Shah Rukh Khan were walking through Heathrow Airport at the same time, Khan would be getting mobbed for autographs far more than Cruise). India has been doing its own thang cinematically for decades, and it shouldn't take recognition from America to legitimize it. It was already legit. It was legit from the get-go. But here’s how this all feels for me. For me, an elder Millennial who grew up in a time where for decades the only Indian person on TV was Apu on The Simpsons.  For me, someone who nearly gave up on my dream of being an artist because I simply didn't think it was possible for someone who looked like me and had a name like mine to achieve any measure of success, recognition, or attention. For me, someone who loved Indian cinema because it allowed me to see - before the rise of brown-skinned actors like Hasan Minaj, Mindy Kaling, Aziz Ansari, Kumail Nanjiani, Priyanka Chopra (our crossover Bollywood star!), Dev Patel, Padma Lakshmi, Hari Konabolu becoming famous - people who looked like me on screen. For me, a child of Indian immigrants, who had to wait till I was in my thirties before Hollywood made a whole goddamn movie about Queen and reminded the world that their frontman Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara) was also the child of Indian immigrants. For me, an American-born woman of Indian origin who went to college specifically to study film, and more specifically to study Indian film - yes, it was a big deal to see an Indian production be celebrated and honored by the American film industry. Last October I went back to my high school for my 20th high school reunion, where I saw for the first time in two decades many of those white kids who I dragged into the Music Room one Friday a month with Munaf to watch my favorite Bollywood movies. They may not remember how important that was to me, but I do. I returned to the place where I tried, in a small way, to get American people to take Indian filmmaking seriously, to give it consideration and appreciation, to look at a long-maligned form of Low Art and interpret it as capital-A Art. And I returned in a year when the whole world had finally taken notice of what the Indian film industry could achieve. I don't presume to think that my tenure as president of the Urban School of San Francisco Bollywood Club and my achievement as the first film student in the history of the Vassar College Film Department to write a senior thesis about non-Western cinema had anything to do with the Tollywood film RRR  winning at the Oscars. But I made a good faith effort for many years to move the needle on this issue, and even if at the end of the day it has nothing to do with me, I am proud not just of  RRR , but to be a person who saw the potential for this to happen, and who understood the importance - the NEED - for this to happen. Watch RRR . Watch everything. Watch Sholay , and Amar Akbar Anthony , and Main Khiladi Tu Anari , and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge , and Dil Se , and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai , and Kabhi Khushi Kahbhi Gham , and Dil Chahta Hai , and Lagaan , and Kal Ho Naa Ho , and Parineeta , and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna , and The Dirty Picture , and Don  (the remake is better than the original don't @ me), and Om Shanti Om , and Dil Dhadkne Do , and Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani . Death in the Ganj. Sir. Monsoon Wedding. Mr and Mrs Iyer. 36 Chowringhee Lane. Sairat. Watch all of the other movies that are out there, that keep getting made, too many for me to count or keep up with. Action films, historical epics, period pieces, biopics, romantic comedies, domestic dramas, political satire, slapstick goofball comedies, thrillers, children’s films - in any genre you can think of, you will find several great Indian-language films. Watch. Them. All.  Do it, because these are good films. Not good Indian films. Good films, period. Do it because they are worthy of your consideration. Do it so that the next time an Indian film is recognized at the Oscars, I won't sit there and ugly cry, because it will no longer be unprecedented. It will be normal. Reeya Banerjee Staff Writer Reeya is a musician and writer based in Chattanooga, TN, by way of NY's Hudson Valley. Her debut album, “The Way Up,” was released on January 27, 2022 and her follow-up album, "This Place," will be released in spring 2024. In her other life, she works as a staff accountant for a management company that oversees veterinary practices nationwide, enjoys watching Better Call Saul reruns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use.

Diablo Cody, writer of Juno  and Jennifer’s Body,  teams up with Zelda Williams (daughter of the legendary Robin Williams) for her feature-length film directorial debut: Lisa Frankenstein . Starring Kathryn Newton ( Freaky, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania ) and Cole Sprouse ( Riverdale ), the film centers around Lisa, a girl mourning her recently murdered mom who has trouble connecting to the land of the living, namely, her new stepmother Janet (the wickedly amazing Carla Gugino) and her stepsister, Taffy (Liza Soberano in a standout performance). Lisa and her dad ( Stranger Things’ Joe Chrest) have moved in with Janet and Taffy during Lisa’s final year of high school, forcing her to adjust to a new town and new school after already suffering the devastating loss of her mom. Taffy is a popular girl with a clique of devotees who feels genuine in her compassion and concern for Lisa, attempting to help her out of her shell in making new friends and meeting boys — as long as they’re the right  ones. Kudos to Zelda Williams for creating a film that looks and feels like an actual 80s film. While Williams and Cody have said they drew inspiration from such films as Weird Science  and Beetlejuice, the movie gave me major Edward Scissorhands  and Heathers  vibes in the best way possible. Taffy, as head of her clique, feels like a nicer version of the combined Heathers, while Lisa is most definitely cast in the role of Winona Ryder’s Veronica. Lisa is a delight but she is also a flawed character. She gets hurt and angry and doesn’t always make the best decisions. In the film, Lisa frequently pines after the head of her new school’s literary magazine. Alternatively, she also spends a lot of time hanging out in the abandoned graveyard known as “Bachelor’s Grove,” doing wax rubbings of old tombstones and talking to the handsome statue above the grave of Cole Sprouse’s character. One night after attending a party with Taffy, a huge storm breaks out and a massive bolt of lightning hits said bachelor’s grave. A muddy moaning corpse (Sprouse in some amazing physical comedy) finds his way to Lisa’s house and finally makes actual contact with our Goth heroine. Hilarity (and later, murder,) ensues. I won’t go into further details to avoid spoilers. Newton and Sprouse have great chemistry. Sprouse, who normally utters sarcastic jabs on Riverdale,  gives a performance that evokes the great physical work of Bill Irwin or Doug Jones. He is able to convey tenderness and so much more with just a look. The film has a  killer  soundtrack, excellent set design, and vibrant 80s costumes. Flannel nightgowns have never given me such deja vu before. This is a film that was truly a pleasant surprise for me and one I think I will enjoy even more upon rewatch.  Check out Lisa Frankenstein  now, before it leaves theaters. It’s original, funny, and darkly romantic.  Diana DiMuro Besides watching TV and movies, Diana likes plants, the great outdoors, drawing and reading comics, and just generally rocking out. She has a BA in English Literature and is an art school dropout. You can follow her on Instagram @dldimuro and Twitter @DianaDiMuro

On this episode, Bernadette Gorman-White and Reeya Banerjee wrap up their discussion on the Netflix series, The Crown . Along the way, they applaud the show for wrapping up the Diana and Dodi storyline in a respectful and, perhaps, insightful manner, while also maligning the show for spending too much time on Will and Kate, and ultimately compare the final season's strengths and weaknesses to prior seasons. Listen on....

I was originally going to focus this piece on Netflix’s insanely popular hit British miniseries Fool Me Once , based on Harlan Coben’s novel of the same name. Netflix has produced adaptations of nine of Coben’s works, which typically explore unresolved or misinterpreted events about past murder investigations, with twisty-turny plotlines that are perfect for creating extremely bingeable series. Fool Me Once  premiered on Netflix on January 1 of this year and quickly became the number one show streamed that week - watched by over 37.1 million Netflix accounts with a total of 238,200,000 hours watched, making it one of Netflix’s largest debuts.  With Netflix eagerly giving me this statistic - the #1 television show streamed that week - I figured I’d go ahead and see what the fuss was all about. Look, I’m going to give you a plot summary, and then I’m not going to mince words. Maya Stern (Michelle Keegan), a disgraced former army captain, is grieving the murder of her husband Joe Burkett (Richard Armitage), a member of a prominent English family who runs one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. One of her friends gives her a nanny cam to keep tabs on her daughter while she’s not home, and one evening as she reviews the camera footage, she sees Joe - who is supposed to be dead - visiting their daughter. This sends her down a rabbit hole of trying to understand how the heck this could be possible which eventually uncovers a mass conspiracy by the Burkett family to cover up various crimes committed both by their company (they have been pushing faulty drugs out into the prescription pipeline, many of which have devastating and irreversible side effects for those who take them; shades of Dopesick here) and by Joe himself (who, it turns out, is a big old murder-y murderer). Alongside Maya’s quest to discover the truth, her niece and nephew seek to find out the truth about their mother Claire (Natalie Anderson) - Maya’s sister, who worked for the pharma company run by Joe’s family - and her also fairly recent murder which has relegated their father Eddie (Marcus Garvey) to complete basket-case status. (I’ll give you three guesses if you can figure out right now who was responsible for Claire’s death.) Simultaneously, we see Deputy Sergeant Sami Kierce (Adeel Akhtar), the detective assigned to solving Joe’s murder, starting to piece together the connections between the two murders while also suffering unknowingly from side effects from one of the medications he takes regularly that is manufactured by Burkett Global Enterprises. There’s also a hacker whistleblower character named Corey the Whistle (Laurie Kynaston) who is instrumental in solving this whole mess and operates his shady hacking dealings out of a cavelike office under a video game arcade because of course, there is and of course, he does. I said I’m not going to mince words, so I won’t: Fool Me Once  is absolute trash. Glorious, shameless, guilty-pleasure, binge-watch-in-one-night trash. Despite decent performances by most of the main cast (with special shout-outs to Akhtar, Garvey, and the legendary Joanna Lumley as Joe’s mother and matriarch of the Burkett family), there is no way to mask the epic soap-opera nonsense logic trashiness of this show. It’s awful. It’s so bad. The plot twists are absurd and stupid, the dialogue is cringeworthy, and the shock ending, which I suspect they intended to be poignant, is actually so corny and saccharine that it made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. And yet, I did binge all eight episodes in one night. Why, I ask you? Why? I think I kept watching because I felt that Joanna Lumley’s participation in this mess gave it an air of respectability and was hoping that the show would rise to her level, but sadly, no.   There’s not much else I can say about Fool Me Once . I don’t even want to encourage (OR discourage) you from watching it. It’s entertaining as all get out. It’s also objectively terrible television. If you need a break from the horrors of the world right now and just want to watch good-looking people behave in incomprehensibly dumb and implausible ways while investigating two literal cold-blooded murders, then hey, I won’t judge. I did it too.   But what happened to me - and my Netflix queue - AFTER Fool Me Once  is where things got interesting. Netflix’s algorithm seemed to figure out that I am the kind of person who: 1) likes miniseries; 2) especially, if they are crime  miniseries; and 3) is undisciplined enough to binge eight hours of television in one night. Netflix also (I assume based on my repeated viewings of Delhi Crime  - a crime anthology series - natch - which I wrote about for Story Screen last year  and also binged each of its two seasons in one night) thought I might be interested in another miniseries set in India. So it directed me to Kohrra , a Punjabi-language crime thriller police procedural released last summer.   Kohrra  is similar to Fool Me Once  in that it’s about a murder investigation with many twists and turns. That is basically all they have in common, though, because Kohrra  is far from trashy.  Dark, haunting, and moody, Kohrra  follows the story of the murder of Tejinder “Paul” Dhillon (Vishal Handa), a young Indian man raised in London who returns to Punjab for an arranged marriage, the disappearance of his best friend Liam Murphy (Ivantiy Novak), who accompanied him on the trip as his best man, and the two detectives who are assigned to the case, Sub-Inspector Balbir Singh (Suvinder Vicky) and Assistant Sub-Inspector Amarpal Garundi (Barun Sobti) - a classic television police partnership dynamic of an older, world-weary, hardened, careful cop and his younger, hot-headed, and not-yet-worn-down-by-cynicism partner who looks to him as a mentor. The relationship between Singh and Garundi is really sweet to watch, as these two men, aside from their shared profession, could not be more different but share a genuine affection for each other and a fierce level of protectiveness towards one another. Set in a depressed village in Punjab where there is a serious heroin addiction epidemic amongst the poor youth and a glaring divide between that population and the middle and upper classes who would just as much pretend not to notice this problem - as exemplified by the wealthy Dhillon family who owns homes both in the UK and in India, the patriarch of whom is in a long-standing property dispute with his just as wealthy but not as worldly younger brother who never left India - Khorra (which  literally  translates to “fog” in Punjabi) is about how these social and class conflicts create an inherent murkiness in the community, making it difficult for Singh and Garundi to figure out exactly how a young, wealthy man could be murdered and left in a barren field near a slum two days before his wedding. Vicky as Balbir Singh in particular is the MVP of this series, portraying a sad, stoic man who has fallen victim to corruption in his profession and regrets becoming part of the problem in this village. Rachel Shelley also gives a lovely, nuanced performance as Clara Murphy, Liam’s mother, who has come to India for the wedding only to have her son go missing and be entangled in a murder investigation. (For you Bollywood enthusiasts out there, Shelley played Elizabeth Russell in the Victorian-era historical epic Lagaan  in 2001, and this series marks her first return to an Indian production in over twenty years.) I’m not going to tell you how Kohrra  ends because y’all should watch this series. I am going to tell you that it’s maddening to me that Netflix wasn’t marketing the hell out of this series last summer when it was released the way they were marketing Fool Me Once . Delhi Crime  won Netflix an International Emmy Award and you’d think they would want to capitalize on that a bit more by promoting their other Indian programs. At any rate. Watch Kohrra . Yes, there are subtitles. Get over it. It’s a damn good show. After I binged Kohrra  in one night (I told you I have no discipline), Netflix figured out that not only do I love me some crime thriller police-procedural miniseries, but it also figured out that I don’t have a problem watching non-English language shows. It also, I assume, based on my repeated viewings of Call My Agent  (actually called Dix Pour Cent  in France - a dramedy about talent agents in Paris), figured that I might dig another French-language show. So it served me up The Forest  (La For ê t), a 2017 joint Belgian-French crime thriller police procedural about a teenager named Jennifer Lenoir (Isis Guillaume) who disappears into a forest near the small village of Montfaucon in the Ardennes, and the police investigation into her disappearance led by new-in-town chief detective Gaspard Decker (Samuel Labarthe) and Virginie Musso (Suzanne Clement), a law-enforcement officer who grew up in Monfaucon. They are assisted by local school teacher Eve Mendel (Alexia Barlier), who is a mentor to many of the girls in the school and also has a mysterious, traumatic past involving the same forest where Jennifer has disappeared. The Forest  and Kohrra are similar in that they are about criminal investigations in small villages that suffer from issues of class disparity, poverty, and addiction. The Forest also reminded me a lot of HBO’s 2021 crime thriller police procedural miniseries Mare of Easttown , starring Kate Winslet as the titular Mare Sheehan, a detective in a small town outside of Philadelphia beset with issues of class disparity, poverty, and addiction. In particular, the parallels between Mare and Virginie Musso - both detectives who are raised locally and so deeply embedded in their communities that they know most of the townspeople who may or may not be suspects, leading them to have blindspots when their superiors want to turn the investigation a certain way - were glaringly evident, to the point where I wonder if the showrunners of Mare of Easttown  had ever looked to  The Forest  as reference material. As The Forest progresses through the obligatory twists and turns that are necessary to this genre of Netflix programming, we learn that Musso’s daughter Maya may be connected to Jennifer’s disappearance, and then Maya goes missing herself, leading one to wonder why Musso is still being allowed to be a primary investigator in the case when there is such a clear conflict of interest.  In all fairness to Captain Decker, he does voice this concern several times, and at one point, when she oversteps tremendously, threatens to pull her off the case - another parallel to Mare of Easttown , where Mare is temporarily suspended from the force for tampering with evidence due to her personal connections to a case. The Forest  had me riveted the way Kohrra  did. Again, I binged all six episodes in one night.  (I’m really not getting adequate sleep these days, clearly.) The performances by Labarth, Clement, and Barlier are top-notch, and Patrick Ridremont also does a beautiful job with his portrayal of alcoholic ex-convict and small-time criminal Theirry Rouget (whose daughter Oceane might also be a person of interest in Jennifer’s disappearance) - a role that could very easily have fallen into a “deadbeat dad” stereotype but instead he layers with a nuanced portrayal of hurt, guilt, and trauma. Again, I’m not going to tell you how The Forest  ends, because y’all should watch this series too. Yes, subtitles. Get over it. You can read. If you couldn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this. What Fool Me Once , Kohrra , and The Forest  share in common, besides them all being crime thrillers about police investigations with many plot twists that keep you from turning the TV off when Netflix goes to autoplay the next episode immediately after the current episode concludes is that they all have fairly surprising endings. That said, I did allude to the fact that Fool Me Once’s  ending was shocking and then subsequently corny AF, and I stand by that. It’s bad.  Kohrra’s  ending, however, is shocking and then deeply, hauntingly sad, and The Forest’s  ending is shocking and strangely cathartic.   I’m not going to sit here and say that Netflix’s original programming from India and France is better than anything that they produce in the UK or the States. Y’all know I stan  The Crown  hard around these parts, and even though it kind of went off the rails as it went on, Orange is the New Black  was a truly groundbreaking television show when it first made itself known ten years ago. I am going to say that it is deeply disappointing to me that a show like Fool Me Once  could make such a huge splash the way it did the first week of this year on Netflix while Kohrra  and The Forest  went largely unnoticed when they were released. All three shows feature largely unknown casts (except Joanna Lumley) to American audiences, so this isn’t a question of who has more potent star power. Harlan Coben’s work is a known quantity for Netflix, so it does make sense that they would lean on the Coben brand when pushing a new show like Fool Me Once .  But it’s a shame that I only learned about the existence of Kohrra  and The Forest after having suffered through the melodramatic hot mess that was Fool Me Once due to a Netflix algorithm that pegged me as a crime-show junkie who also likes Indian and French stuff. (I coincidentally do have family in both India and France, so Netflix has sussed me out pretty well, creepy as that might be #bigbrotheriswatching.) Kohrra was released only a year ago, but The Forest is nearly seven years old and has been languishing in some Netflix black hole all this time, only emerging when someone with my particular viewing profile emerges. I wish it didn’t have to be that way because Fool Me Once  is absolute garbage, and Kohrra  and The Forest  are legitimately brilliant television on par with prestige crime television shows like Mare of Easttown , True Detective  (Season 1!!!), and Fargo . Netflix would benefit strongly from spending more of their marketing dollars getting people to take notice of shows like Kohrra  and The Forest as aggressively as they did with Fool Me Once  instead of letting me find them by algorithmic chance - especially since The Crown , arguably Netflix’s most prestigious, classy show, just aired its series finale late last year. If Netflix wants to retain any semblance of respectability, they should maybe move away from the pulpy Coben adaptations - or at least not shove them down our throats so aggressively - and give these incredible foreign productions a bit more love so larger audiences can find them easily as opposed to by accident. Now that I’ve finished The Forest,  Netflix is suggesting that I watch Secret City  - an Australian political crime thriller show starring Anna Torv (known to US audiences primarily via The Last of Us, Fringe,  and Mindhunter ). Netflix probably put together the fact that I like the intersection of crime and politics from my binging of Delhi Crime , plus the fact that I binged the first four seasons of The West Wing  repeatedly in a nostalgic frenzy several times before Netflix lost the rights to it to Max. There are two seasons of Secret City,  making it more of an anthology series than Khorra  and The Forest . I have a feeling I’m going to like it because so far, the algorithm does seem to have me pegged. Check on me later, though, and make sure I didn’t stay up all night watching both seasons back to back to back to back. I gotta work in the morning. Reeya Banerjee Staff Writer Reeya is a musician and writer based in New York's Capital District. Her debut album, “The Way Up,” was released on January 27, 2022. She can frequently be seen in her car on the NYS Thruway cursing traffic on her way to the Hudson Valley for band rehearsals or to Brooklyn for recording sessions. In her other life, she works as a staff accountant for a management company that oversees veterinary practices nationwide, enjoys watching Law & Order SVU returns while eating gummy bears, and has a film degree from Vassar College that she does not use.