PACHINKO | EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE | ATLANTA Season 3 | YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER
Pop Culture Weekly Round-Up 25/03/2022
Happy Friday, everyone! I’m back to give you guys some Pop Culture recommendations for your weekend. In this week’s newsletter, I share my thoughts on the epic Apple TV+ series PACHINKO. I also rave about the latest A24 film, EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, which I had a blast watching. I also talk about the return of one of my favorite shows ever, ATLANTA, and how excited I am to have this show back in my life. To finish things up a talked about an interesting film that I watched at TIFF last year called YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER. And as always there is a playlist of five songs I listened to last week.
QUICK THOUGHTS
EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE follows a middle-aged Chinese woman who gets sucked into a bizarre journey in which she is the only one who can save the world by traveling to alternate worlds and interacting with her other-selfs. However, she got swept away into an even greater quest when she becomes lost in the multiverse's limitless realms. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert have directed an exciting and fun vortex of cinematic mayhem. The premise of the film is full of twists and turns. It's also absolutely packed with terrific action set-pieces and a lot of heart. EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE is a very interesting movie with plenty of laughs. But it's also a really powerful display in terms of its capacity to go from laughter to tears in the blink of an eye. I was blown away by how complex the plot was and how well it came together in the end. I highly recommend checking this film out.
ATLANTA is back, baby! This has been a long time coming. I’ve waited 4 years for this third season. I love this show so much and I think it really is among one of the best ever made. The first two episodes dropped last night and they did not disappoint me. So yeah, episode one was weird. I mean, Atlanta was always a show that was ready to take risks. And it’s not afraid of crafting episodes in which some of the major characters are placed in an odd situation. But still, it takes a lot of guts to return four years later with an episode that has nothing to do with the primary characters or narrative. Fortunately, it was a good episode. It was weird, however, not even close to the “Teddy Perkins” episode in levels of weirdness. But I think that nothing will ever be. In the second episode though, Earn and his friends are reintroduced. And it's refreshing to see that they haven't changed at all. The episode follows them during their European tour with Paper Boi. The situations they got into are cringe but also hilarious. Earn is sick and totally lost and has to deal with more problems than he can manage, as usual. Honestly, I liked the episode in which Earn and the rest of the team are altogether more than the first one. But I think it is only because I really missed those characters. Anyway, I’m looking forward to the rest of this season and to enjoying this masterpiece while it’s still here because, after season 4, this legendary show will be no more. But in my opinion, Atlanta will go down as one of the best shows of our generation.
YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER is Writer/director Kate Dolan's feature directorial debut. I had a chance to watch it last year at TIFF and I enjoyed it. The film mixes Irish folklore with supernatural elements while also dealing with mental illness and abuse. The film kicks off with Angela, Char's ailing mother, inexplicably vanishing. Her abandoned vehicle is found sitting in the midst of a field. But when Angela returns home without explanations the next night, Char and her grandma, Rita, realize that something is wrong. At first, Char enjoys the vigor of the new personality her Mom has acquired. But as Angela evolves bit by bit things get weird. I really liked how the director/writer exploits the use of some disturbing traumas. And I appreciated how well she kept the suspense going even when it fell into certain conventional jump scare cliches. Overall, YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER is a cleverly haunting film that tackles a lot of thought-provoking subjects without losing that dread feeling.
PACHINKO
PACHINKO is a Korean, Japanese, and English-language television series. Writer Soo Hugh, and filmmakers Kogonada and Justin Chon created a brilliant adaptation of Min Jin Lee's bestselling book which was already a profoundly emotional crowd-pleaser. The series is a multi-generational epic, an immigration tale, a history lesson, a portrayal of ethnic intolerance, and a testament to women's ability to endure even the harshest conditions.
In this new epic Apple TV+ series, I caught myself following a Korean family's difficult ascent over 70 years. The show spans through numerous historical periods, beginning with Japan's conquest of Korea in the early twentieth century. Sunja (Minha Kim) was living a tranquil life in a tiny fishing community in Busan, going to the market every day and helping her widowed mother (Inji Jeong) manage the local boarding house. Then the district's stylish and mysterious fish trader, Koh Hansu (Lee Min-ho) falls for Sunja, and their secret affair forces her to flee her hometown and nation. Fifty years later, Solomon (Jin Ha), an ambitious New York-based banker, travels to Japan to assist his bank in closing a huge real-estate deal in Tokyo. Solomon's father, Mozasu (Soji Arai), who owns a pachinko arcade in Osaka, is overjoyed by the visit, but his grandmother, Sunja (now played by Yuh-Jung Youn), is concerned that Solomon would not return to New York. She worries because she knows things still aren’t good for Koreans in Japan.
This series really opened my eyes to the whole Koreans versus Japanese situation which honestly I had no idea about it. Soo Hugh gives us a massive amount of storyline to digest throughout the series. But despite that, she and filmmakers Kogonada and Justin Chon never hurry the protagonists or their happy and sad moments. History is something that the characters of PACHINKO really respect. It is both unthinkable and inadequacy to try to escape it.
PACHINKO makes clear right away that what makes the series unique is that it's more like a communal remembrance than a history lecture. The way it recounts the fortunes of this Korean family through various nations and decades is stunning. A century-spanning story that uses the difficult structure of looking at the past through flashbacks to create a unique experience. PACHINKO is a superb examination of Korean and Japanese societies and the history that each family has. Unpacking generations is a challenging task, but this series succeeds in doing it in a dramatic and aesthetically coherent manner. With a powerful sharpness and a smooth flow, it succeeds where other shows have. failed.
PACHINKO debuts on Apple TV Plus with the first three episodes of the series today, Friday, March 25, 2022. The remaining five-episode season will air weekly with the series finale airing on, April 29, 2022.
Top 5 Songs
These were the 5 songs on heavy rotation in my house last week. You can listen to them on Spotify and YouTube.