The Golden Globes attempt to make a comeback, learned how to look at art from a new perspective, and got spooked by a fictional high-tech doll who can kill. Here’s what the NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour crew was paying attention to – and what you should check out this weekend.
Alice in Borderland, Season 2
- It’s a science fiction thriller, it’s on Netflix, and it’s entirely in Japanese – which I actually enjoy because I feel like I don’t get the opportunity to watch a lot of foreign language properties.
- The characters are forced to play these games for their lives in a kind of post-apocalyptic universe.
Aftersun and After Yang
- Two films from 2022 with similar titles, but are unrelated to one another except thematically they kind of are.
- Aftersun is a father-daughter drama about a grown woman looking back on a vacation she took with her dad, played by Paul Mescal, about 20 years prior to the main action of the film.
- After Yang sees Colin Farrell in another one of his great performances, as a father in a family whose android has stopped functioning.
Jeanne Dielman
- 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
- A Belgian woman watches a movie about a widow who supports herself by doing sex work in the afternoons before her son comes home for dinner
- The movie is about domestic labor and what gives meaning and value to different kinds of work
- She was never bored, and never felt hurried to stop watching the movie
Recommendations from the Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter
- The celebrated film director Hirokazu Kore-eda created, and directed some episodes of, the new Netflix series The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House
- Based on a manga series, it’s about two teenagers who go to Kyoto to become maiko or apprentice geisha.
- One of them discovers that her true calling lies in the preparation of food, and if you’ve seen some of his films, you will not be surprised at the exploration of cooking as a calling as well as an act of communion
