Friday, 1 September 2017

Behind The "Bold Type" Episode That Addresses Immigration And Trump

9/01/2017 02:18:00 pm Entertainment

Kat (Aisha Dee) standing with Adena (Nikohl Boosheri) at the airport before she boards a flight back to Iran.

Freeform

In the latest episode of Freeform’s The Bold Type on Tuesday, Kat (Aisha Dee) and Adena (Nikohl Boosheri) decide they are going to give their relationship a real shot. The two met in the very first episode of the series, and viewers have been on a will-they-or-won't-they emotional roller coaster ever since. After Kat came around to the idea of being in her first same-sex relationship and Adena broke up with her girlfriend, Coco, back where she temporarily lived in France, it looked like these two were finally on the "they will" track.

But Adena doesn’t have a steady job in the US, and she hails originally from Iran, so her passport is flagged when she’s about to come back into New York. And because her US work visa expired, she isn’t allowed back into the States at all. This prompts Kat to impulsively purchase an $11,000 airline ticket (using her parents’ miles, of course) just so she can spend 14 hours with her almost-girlfriend in the airport terminal before she has to be flown back to Iran. They spend the whole day and night together there, having sex for the first time in a private first-class lounge.

Kat and Adena sleeping in the airport after having sex for the first time.

Freeform

The Bold Type cowriter Lynn Sternberger said this highly anticipated and intimate scene in the episode, “Before Tequila Sunrise,” almost didn’t happen, mostly because she and the other writers couldn’t decide whether or not Kadena (the couple name fans are using to describe Kat and Adena) would have sex at an airport. Ultimately, however, the writers wanted the couple to have the opportunity to consummate their feelings for each other.

“You fall in love with the love that they’re growing between each other,” Sternberger said of the show’s vulnerable yet fierce couple. “And I feel like it’s rare that a ship like Kadena gets treated with exactly the same amount of thoughtfulness as any other heterosexual ship on television.”

Kat and Adena aren’t just a queer couple, but they’re also women of color, a very rare show of representation on TV overall. Sternberger sees the show as a unique opportunity to present such a couple, and as an important way to make more room for queer women of color all over media. “It’s just not being done enough, period,” she said. “There’s a lot of diversity in cable, but there should be no reason why there aren’t those characters everywhere. They are everywhere in real life. There should be very complicated characters who make mistakes the same way other characters make mistakes, make different life choices, excel at their jobs, and screw up at their jobs.”

While The Bold Type is making strides toward bringing representation to television and tackling more serious issues, Sternberger thinks this season — and this show — are at the onset of a new era in television in which representation and progress are at the forefront.

Kat and Adena spending the night together at the airport.

Freeform

“There’s a generation of writers coming up with a world that was different to them,” Sternberger said. “I never had to be closeted, for example, and I think that will start to be reflected on television — I hope it will — as we rise through the ranks and start being show creators.”

Kat and Adena’s fictional relationship onscreen is just one example of this. In Episode 9, they both reveal the deep feelings they share for each other, but Adena still has to get on a plane back to Iran, and Kat, who initially teases the idea of going to Iran with her love interest, makes the last-minute choice to stay in New York City. They’re unable to stay in the same city because Adena can’t obtain a visa without providing official documentation that proves she has a job in the US, plus Kat is hesitant to fly across oceans and live in a country where she doesn’t speak the language, doesn’t have a job, and doesn’t know anyone besides Adena. Their struggle doesn’t have a simple solution.

Sternberger said they wanted to tell a more universal story about immigration issues instead of specifically tackling Trump’s immigration ban from earlier this year. “It’s not just current events that have created restrictions for people as far as immigration goes,” Sternberger explained. “They fought so hard, and we wanted to play into the reality of the fact that you can’t control everything. Sometimes rules and regulations and entire governments will get in your way.”

Still, the political resonance of President Trump’s immigration legislation is impossible to ignore in this specific storyline. When production for The Bold Type started in January 2017, days in the writers room would kick off with catching up on daily news. It’s no coincidence that these kinds of conversations led to The Bold Type addressing topics like immigration, women’s sexuality, and even Trump himself in the show.

“We had to just unburden ourselves from what was happening in the world around us and to our loved ones. I’m sure that some of that seeped into the storytelling,” Sternberger told BuzzFeed News. “We thought we were going to have a [writers] room under the first female president, and that’s not what happened.”

Kat and Adena saying goodbye.

Freeform

Immigration issues getting in the way of the relationship is also not foreign to Sternberger on a personal level. After Episode 9 aired on Tuesday night, Sternberger tweeted that she was happy to contribute to Kat and Adena’s storyline because of her own experience: Her wife is a French citizen, and while their struggles didn’t necessarily inspire what happened in “Before Tequila Sunrise,” Sternberger was able to relate.

“I felt like I was able to bring some authenticity to the feelings in those scenes, because I’ve been through so many of those goodbyes. There are so many hoops to jump through, and it is such a long process. And I think that there’s a lack of awareness about that. Some people are just born across a border,” Sternberger said. “I think that people are getting more informed about this stuff, but there’s still space to listen to people who aren’t born in this country and who have had struggles with retaining citizenship or staying here.”

The fate of Kadena is still to be seen. With the season finale airing on Sept. 5 and the two currently living continents apart, it’s unclear whether or not Kat and Adena will end up together. But Sternberger indicated that it’s a hopeful situation, despite their past hardships and complications — like Adena’s ex-girlfriend Coco, Kat getting cold feet, and all of the miles between them. “It’s really about not giving up on one another. Both of them are persistent women, so hopefully it encourages people to be like, ‘I will fight for something that I feel strongly about,’” Sternberger said. “That’s the entire show in a nutshell.”

via BuzzFeed/Travel

6 Under-The-Radar Movies You Won't Want To Miss This Month

9/01/2017 01:13:00 pm Entertainment

1. Gook

Justin Chon and Simone Baker.

Samuel Goldwyn Films

Taking place on the first day of the 1992 LA riots, Justin Chon's black-and-white indie with the incendiary title serves as a pained rumination on the place of Asian-Americans in our troubled racial tapestry. Its main characters, brothers Eli (Chon) and Daniel (David So), work in Paramount, just east of Compton, running the struggling shoe store left to them by their late father, a first-generation Korean immigrant. They exist within the primarily black and Latino community without belonging to it — outsiders looked at as either predatory trespassers or soft targets by most of the people they encounter. And not without reason — they're queasily aware that they're seen in the same light as the suspicious liquor store owner down the block, Mr. Kim (Sang Chon), a Korean man from their father's generation who's content to take money from the neighborhood but sits glowering behind his bulletproof glass, clutching a gun. In a scene meant to evoke the killing of Latasha Harlins, he threateningly accuses 11-year-old Kamilla (Simone Baker) of stealing.

Kamilla happens to be the brothers' only local friend, a surrogate sibling of sorts who's found a sanctuary for herself in their store, though it's one her own brother, Keith (Curtiss Cook Jr.), disapproves of due to the tragic history between their families. In its depiction of a city poised to explode with tension and fragmented along racial lines, Chon self-consciously evokes Do the Right Thing, a huge work that casts a long shadow from which Gook doesn't escape. His film is a nuanced, minor version of Spike Lee's as told from the perspective Sonny, the Korean grocer who pleads in broken English to those who would burn his store at the end "I no white! I black! You, me, same!" But Gook, with its Asian-American characters witnessing and lingering at the fringes of black oppression and unrest, aware of it without sharing in it, would never make so simple a claim.

How to see it: Gook is now in theaters in limited release.

2. Kill Me Please

Dora Freind, Mariana Oliveira, Valentina Herszage, and Júlia Roliz.

Cinema Slate

Sex, death, and adolescent angst intertwine in Brazilian filmmaker Anita Rocha da Silveira's mesmerizing debut, a movie that lingers in the general vicinity of horror without ever giving away where it's heading. Kill Me Please is half a dreamy exploration of the lives of a set of well-off high schoolers in Rio's Barra da Tijuca neighborhood, and half a study on how a mysterious string of nearby murders starts to affect their state of mind. The killer has a taste for pretty adolescents — adolescents like the main character, 15-year-old Bia (Valentina Herszage), a schoolgirl who is titillated rather than frightened by the things she has in common with the victims. Her friends, with whom she spends long, idle hours — no parents are ever seen onscreen — gather around news of a new body being found like it's the hottest gossip. Hotter, even, because when you're their age, death feels more like an intriguing abstraction than a real fear, even when it's lurking in the empty lots around your rapidly developing corner of the city.

Then Bia has an intimate encounter with mortality that seems to set her world permanently askew, leading her to systematically alienate everyone in her life, from her devout boyfriend to her besties, in pursuit of something she can't begin to articulate. Mood rather than story-driven, Kill Me Please has a deep, Lynchian weirdness to it, from the heightened showiness of the church services the characters sometimes attend, to the voracious quality of the making out they habitually engage in, like they're trying to swallow their partner whole. But the death-obsession doesn't seem exaggerated at all — just a standard kind of teenage curiosity allowed to blossom into something darker and grander, into a last scene that makes Rocha da Silveira feel like a gothier, sexier successor to Sofia Coppola. And how awesome is that?

How to see it: Kill Me Please is now playing in Brooklyn, and heads to LA on Oct. 13.

3. Lemon

Brett Gelman, Nia Long, Keith L. Williams, and Conrad Roberts.

Magnolia Pictures

Lemon is an absurdist movie about a fortyish failed actor named Isaac (Brett Gelman) who gets dumped by his estranged, blind girlfriend Ramona (Judy Greer) and stumbles his awkward way around Los Angeles coming to terms with his underwhelming life to date. If this description sounds tremendously quirky-indie, well, for the most part, that's how the film plays. It premiered at Sundance and, in addition to Gelman and Greer, features appearances from fellow scene stalwarts like Michael Cera, Gillian Jacobs, Jon Daly, and Martin Starr. But Lemon is also the directorial debut of a black woman, playwright, and filmmaker Janicza Bravo, who has a keen interest in interrogating the insular world of alt-comedy in addition to playing around in it.

And so the movie also features Nia Long as a casting director Isaac attempts to woo by asking her out for an uncomfortable date of stilted conversation. While it doesn't exactly go well, he then convinces her to take him along for an even more uncomfortable outing to her Afro-Caribbean family's barbecue, where the attendees are bemused by Isaac's wincing attempts to talk to them about race. Isaac isn't presented as another blundering white guy comedy protagonist for whom everything works out okay in the end — he's a man whose presumptions of success get observed from the outside, where they don't look all that merited. If there are any hints of autobiography in the characters' uncertain fledgling romance (Bravo and Gelman, who are married, wrote the script together) they're best guessed at — the film feels boldly indifferent to any more personal readings. It is, in the end, more compelling in the interviews Bravo has given than as an intentionally divisive viewing experience, but its discordance is distinctive and hard to forget. More than anything, it leaves you anxious to see what she does next.

How to see it: Lemon is now in theaters in limited release — here's a list of locations.

4. The Trip to Spain

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.

IFC Films

Fair warning: The Trip to Spain utterly flubs its ending with a miscalculated joke that's meant to be at the expense of Steve Coogan (playing a fictionalized version of himself), but feels more like a burst of xenophobia. Everything before those final 30 seconds is wonderful — a wealth of bitterly funny meditations on status, food, travel, mortality, and relationships from the team of Coogan, fellow actor-comedian Rob Brydon (also playing himself, sort of), and director Michael Winterbottom. The Trip to Spain is the third movie in a series from the trio, each of them cut down from a longer episodic TV version, but you don't need to know that or to be familiar with predecessors The Trip and The Trip to Italy to appreciate this new one.

All that's required is an enjoyment of the improvisation-heavy dynamic between Coogan and Brydon, who drive around Spain on a travel writing assignment eating gourmet meals and trading banter and celebrity impressions (David Bowie and Mick Jagger are among those added to the roster). The relationship between their characters is the sort you don't often see onscreen, one based less on mutual affection than on mutual understanding. The two snipe at each other as often as they commiserate over careers and aging. They're united in their showbiz insecurities and egos, and while that isn't the most heartwarming basis for a friendship, three films in, it's still a very entertaining one.

How to see it: The Trip to Spain is now in theaters in limited release.

5. The Villainess

Kim Ok-bin

Well Go USA Entertainment

There aren't a lot of movies out there that alternate between bone-crunching violence and K-drama-worthy emotional twists. But The Villainess makes you think that there really should be. The film comes from Jung Byung-gil, who, like Atomic Blonde's David Leitch, got his start as a stunt performer before becoming a director. And it shows in every astonishing action sequence the movie packs in, including an opening one that plays like an homage to the hallway fight in Oldboy. Only this is shot entirely from the main character's point of view as she punches and slices her way through dozens of gang members in an act of vengeance we only later discover the motivation for. The camerawork is just as dazzlingly, impossibly fluid in the fight scene carried out on motorcycles, and the jaw-dropping sequence in which the hatchet-wielding main character smashes her way onto a moving bus.

But when she's engaged in technically awe-inspiring acts of slaughter, antihero Sook-hee (Kim Ok-bin) is being put through the ringer dramatically in a plot that pulls freely from La Femme Nikita, Shiri, and Kill Bill and plenty of others. Sook-hee trains to be a gang assassin and then, after her husband gets killed, gets recruited by a black ops government organization to train in even more ridiculous ways to serve as an assassin for them. Also, she's given plastic surgery, has a kid, and marries a new guy who's secretly been deployed by the agency they both work for to keep tabs on her but who's maybe also falling in love with her for real. And she goes undercover as a lead actress, which is a delightfully counterintuitive approach to blending in as a sleeper operative. It's all extremely hard to follow and silly, but Kim plays her character's suffering as real and wrenching, making The Villainess a rare thing indeed — a brutal action movie in which the damage you worry most about is that done to its protagonist's heart.

How to see it: The Villainess is now in theaters in limited release — here's a list of locations.

6. Whose Streets?

Magnolia Pictures

[Note: BuzzFeed News signed on as a presenter of Whose Streets? in August — the author of this piece saw the film in January.]

It's been three years since Ferguson, but sometimes it can feel like it's been three decades, given how much has happened since the unarmed, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9, 2014. The rousing, vital documentary Whose Streets? works both as a way to revisit one of the moments that brought Black Lives Matter to national prominence, and to reckon with how much went unseen in news coverage from on high. Directed by activist-turned-filmmaker Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, Whose Streets? offers a ground-level point of view of events that might start off with the painfully familiar to anyone who followed the media coverage, but quickly becomes less so, the film lingering in Ferguson after the news crews leave to capture the burgeoning of a movement.

Whose Streets? is raw and vivid in its mission to depict what those crews didn't, mixing news footage with cell phone footage with professionally shot footage. It gradually coheres around figures like Copwatch's David Whitt, and partners Brittany Ferrell and Alexis Templeton, people who work to channel the momentum of the unrest into ongoing activism. The film only grows more powerful as it goes along — maybe never more so than in the scene in which it holds on the face of the sole black woman in a line of police. As the activists the cops are confronting engage with her and then tell her they have love for her, she tears up — and watching, it's hard not to do the same.

How to see it: Whose Streets? is now in theaters in limited release — here's a list of locations.

via BuzzFeed/Travel