Quickfire round: Yes, God, Yes

I really didn’t get this film. A sexually curious girl attending a strict catholic school navigates a challenging few days at its Kirkos retreat, and discovers that basically everyone is a hypocrite.

A common reaction to the contents of an internet chat room

That’s it. Like, that’s the movie. It’s basically any other coming-of-age film except slower and daintier. The acting was fine, but I just don’t see how it garnered the critical praise it did. Maybe I’m not American (or Christian) enough to understand what makes this such a great watch.

So, a bit more plot. Our main character is Alice, and she’s kinda lonely. She has a best friend, but relationships with others at her school are tense because she’s been accused of sneaking off with someone else’s boyfriend to toss the salad. She doesn’t know what that means, and neither did I before I googled it (suggestion: do not google it).

It’s the summer of 2000, which means beige CRT monitors, AOL, and public chatrooms. Alice asks the chatroom for their wisdom and in return they bombard her with ‘A/S/L?’ and various other sexual advances. Confused and alone, she decides to sign up to the school’s Kirkos retreat, a 3-day residential ran by Father Murphy. Honestly, the retreat is total bullshit. Alice is asked to fill in a questionnaire about her ‘feelings’, which get scrutinised towards the end of the retreat if they are a little too sexually freeing.

Alice soon discovers this for herself as she sees the camp mentors engaging in sexual activity (outside of marriage: oh the horror!) and even Father Murphy himself viewing an adult video on the office computer.

This is all fair enough, but it’s also very pedestrian. I don’t even think the turning point in the film, where Alice runs away from the retreat and tries to get served at a roadside bar, was any good at all. All of a sudden, with the words of a complete stranger, she learns to have a different outlook on life? Okay.

But, like I said, I probably just didn’t get it. Perhaps there are metaphors in here that make more sense if you’re a Catholic Christian who went through the same sort of things. As it stands, I am none of those things and so this mostly felt like a waste of time.

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Quickfire round: Spree

A decent B-movie, this black comedy horror film manages to communicate some kind of actual message hidden amongst the surreal violence taking place on screen.

A totally normal thing to do as a rideshare driver is to make a peace sign as your customer dies behind you

Social media stars are all the rage these days. But how far would you go for a little attention and following online? For Kurt Kunkle (Instagram: KurtsWorld96), there’s practically no limit. Fed up of posting videos for years without much success in the online fame department, Kurt suddenly comes up with a plan to produce some of the hottest content on the internet.

If you had ‘rideshare killing spree’ on your list of ideas to try to become famous on social media, you’ll have to take it off that list as Kurt Kunkle is the all time champion. Kurt is a self-employed driver for Spree, (essentially Uber). He’s rigged his car with about 8 different cameras to showcase every single angle as he streams. Such is the indifference of his customers, half of them don’t notice the cameras and the other half are perfectly fine with them after Kurt offers a brief little explanation.

At this point, Kurt’s stream only has one viewer. A kid he used to babysit, Bobby, who has a much larger following online than Kurt (and who produces the sort of crass prank content you’d find in the real world from Joey Salads and Jake Paul.) “Help yourself to a water” offers Kurt. The passenger duly obliges. Moments later, they start to feel sick and eventually, we assume, they die completely. Poisoned by the contents of the water bottle that Kurt painstakingly covered to make it look brand new (be sure to check out the how-to guide on his YouTube channel). This is Kurt’s primary murder weapon for his spree, but as things start to escalate later on in the movie we see the body count rack up in different ways, too.

Overall, I can’t say much more than that it’s a decent B-movie. Don’t expect anything amazing, but do expect to see some decent creepy-guy acting from Stranger Things’ Joe Keery, and perhaps give a thought to the hundreds of thousands of small-time content creators like Kurt (but hopefully much less homicidal) who are just trying to make it out there.

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What I thought about: Big Mouth (Season 4)

The latest season of this adult cartoon continues to explore important themes of life with its usual grotesque flair – but the storytelling is less tight this time around.

Andrew (middle) has a unique fashion sense, and he won’t heed to any criticism of it

What’s it about?
Big Mouth is an adult cartoon set around a group of high school freshmen. They’re beginning their puberty journey, and learning to cope with everything that comes with it. The characters are hugely exaggerated and yet somewhat relatable.

Each of the kids have a hormone monster, an invisible creature only they can see. Sort of like fairy godmother, they talk to them and guide them through this stage of their life. I think they are supposed to be a manifestation of their hormones rather than an actual, individualised character – but either way they add so much colour to the show.

What do I like about it?
The personification of thoughts and emotions is perfect. We have the hormone monsters, of course, whom you might say are the stars of the show. But there’s also The Shame Wizard, a scraggy looking British wizard who pops up whenever you do something shameful – which for Andrew is basically all the time.

New to Season 4 is the Anxiety Mosquito and I have to commend the writers for the choice of animal because a mosquito is a perfect representation of anxiety. There can be more than one. They don’t go away when you flail and try to swat them. They question what you’re doing and shout at you when something goes wrong. As someone who went through this year’s summer with a lot of anxiety, I thought the portrayal was brilliant.

The voice acting is also on point, and somehow being able to tell which voice actor is voicing multiple characters just makes it funnier.

What do I not like about it?
Usually I love the show and it’s a consistent ten out of ten. This time around though, I didn’t think it was quite as good as before. I think it’s down to the way the stories were told. Characters had much more individualised storylines that didn’t often intersect. It was a departure from the ‘we’re all in this together’ class-sized story of previous seasons. While I do understand why this was the case (as you go through puberty and discover more about yourself, you naturally diverge from where you and your peers all began) it did just make this season a little less enjoyable.

Worth a watch?
Yes, but definitely start from the beginning and try to not take the toilet humour too seriously.

By the way…

• One of my favourite characters, Missy, changes voice near the end as she has bene recast to be voiced by a black woman, which should have happened in the first place
• Netflix has renewed the show all the way up to Season 6, which I was really happy about

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What I thought about: You Me Her (Seasons 1-3.5)

Any interest I had in this show unfortunately fizzled out at the beginning of Season 4. Characters became annoying, the plot wore thin, and the initial intrigue I had in the show’s premise simply faded away. I’ll try and unpick my thoughts here.

I had a hard time thinking Jack’s smile was ever sincere.

What’s it about?
Married couple Jack and Emma have pretty successful careers and live in the rich and fancy suburbs of Portland, Oregon. The one thing they don’t have is a sex life. After a series of increasingly tense couples therapy sessions, Jack’s brother offers some advice: go and see an escort, and you’ll have such a good time it’ll reignite something in your own sex life.

Enter Izzie, a grad student who escorts in her spare time. Jack backs out of the session before anything serious happens, but his guilt gets the better of him and he immediately confesses to Emma. Understandably pissed, Emma arranges to met Izzie as a customer, planning on exposing her and telling her to keep the hell away from Jack. Instead, uh, they end up making out. Long story short, the couple are both infatuated with Izzie and form a polyamorous relationship.

What do I like about it?
You can’t help but be intrigued by the plot here, right? Their unusual relationship situation (not to mention the fact that Izzie is quite a bit younger than them) is a poor fit for their socially conservative professional lives, and the first couple of seasons sees Jack and Emma flip-flopping over whether to commit fully to the relationship, which at times is an emotional watch.

I also really liked the side characters. Emma’s best friend Carmen and her husband Dave are particular stand-outs, as is Izzie’s room mate and fellow escort Nina. The supporting cast really helps tie the show together and I think are a big part of what kept me invested in the show for so long.

What do I not like about it?
Unfortunately, the supporting cast’s magic eventually runs out and you start to realise how boring the main characters became, or perhaps how boring they always were. Despite claiming to be fully committed to the three-way relationship, the show is fully of petty and often bizarre fall-outs between them. Characters change their minds on a whim. Emma, who essentially comes out as bisexual in the first season, ditches the throuple for a full-blown lesbian relationship at the end of Season 2. By Season 4, she’s basically the most annoying character in the show.

Put simply, it lost its polish.

Worth a watch?
No. Not because the idea is bad – but because, if you’re a completionist like I usually am, you’ll find the latter seasons a real grind.

By the way…

• It says a lot that, when writing this review, I had to Google Jack and Emma’s names, but not Carmen or Dave’s.
• I like how, on Wikipedia, episode synopses for the show stop at the beginning of Season 3. Seems like I’m not the only one who gave up on this show.

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Quickfire round: Love and Anarchy

This quirky Swedish show – ostensibly a workplace comedy romance – was an intriguing watch and ended up having a much deeper emotional side to it than the trailer would suggest. It won’t be for everyone, though.

The lipstick is a token for their dares.

Married mother-of-two Sofie is called in to a small publishing house in Stockholm to help them restructure as they struggle in a tough marketplace. Sofie is good at her job, but must be having trouble with her husband because, in the first few minutes of Episode 1, she’s masturbating in the family bathroom before work. After a long day at the office, she does the same thing, this time at her desk. Enter Max – no, literally, he enters the building to carry on with his IT construction work, having been sent home by Sofie earlier in the day for making too much noise. Max quickly gets his revenge by snapping a photo of Sofie doing her thing, and the next day turns up to work with a renewed sense of power.

“How much do you want?” Sofie asks, keen to have the video deleted. “I just want you to take me out for lunch”, says Max (character building earlier in the episode shows us that Max, many years younger than Sofie, has a thing for older women). And so out they go. Max hands over his phone for Sofie to delete the photo, but she then refuses to hand it back. “You made me do something, now you need to do something to earn this back”, she says, “do something outrageous at the office”.

And so begins a pretty hilarious game of workplace dares between Sofie and Max.

What I loved about this show was the setting. Everyone else at the publishing house are just trying their best to keep going, but still manage to be funny in their own right. Friedrich is an old stalwart of the publishing world whose older, male, clientele occasionally clash with Denise’s younger and more liberal authors. At one point Friedrich, following a series of failures (one of which is at the hands Sofie’s dare to Max), goes to an Ayahuasca retreat to treat and find his true self. You can imagine how that went.

Towards the end, the show reveals a sort of underlying purpose. We learned earlier that Sofie’s father, a staunch communist, is sometimes mentally unstable. Although her willingness to participate in Max’s escalating dares is perhaps an indication that Sofie might be suffering a similar ailment, it’s not until she literally hisses at her husband, animal-like, that we can be sure of it. You could also say that Max, feeling the pressure from his spiteful mother and stepfather, also loses it when he poses completely nude for a family photo. (This is also a good time to mention that there is full frontal nudity in this show.)

A short, charming, crazy show that’s absolutely best watched in its original language with subtitles, I really quite liked it.

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