KPopped, Apple TV+
ITZY performing in KPopped, premiering Friday on Apple TV+.Juhan Noh/Apple TV+
We know what makes CanCon CanCon (or, rather, the oracles at that CRTC tell us what does), but what makes K-Pop K-Pop? How Korean, if at all, does it have to be? KPop Demon Hunters, the hit Netflix movie of the summer, is an American animated musical (with a Korean Canadian director); is it inside or outside of the K-Pop phenomenon?
To help you ponder these deep questions about culture, commerce and nation, Apple TV+ offers up (as of Aug. 29) KPopped – an enjoyably ersatz music competition shot in Seoul in which Western pop artists collaborate with K-Pop groups on reinterpretations of their songs. In the first episode, executive producer Megan Thee Stallion works with four members of girl group Billlie to turn Savage into a K-Pop hit (and tries the spiciest ramen she can find); it’s not bad.
We need a second season stat where Blackpink works on a Pinkerton cover with Rivers Cuomo, so we can finally find out what happens when K-Pop goes the Weezer.
Vice is Broke, MUBI
Director Eddie Huang examines Vice’s transformation from indie magazine to media behemoth in Vice is Broke.Mubi/Supplied
For those endlessly fascinated by the fall of the Vice magazine turned media empire (that’s me), here’s another deep dive following closely on the heels of the Canadian Screen Award-winning It’s Not Funny Anymore: Vice to Proud Boys – which focused mostly on the Montreal-born brand’s extremist co-founder Gavin McInnes.
Celebrity chef Eddie Huang, who hosted Huang’s World on Viceland (and counted Anthony Bourdain as a mentor), traded the debt Vice owed him after its bankruptcy to get out of his NDA, get the rights to his show’s footage and make this doc. It’s got the requisite encounter with McInnes – in which Huang arm-wrestles him and essentially lets him off the hook for his racist rabble rousing – but mainly focuses on how fellow Canadian co-founder Shane Smith somehow convinced mainstream companies like Disney to buy into a brand built around an edgelord, then whiffed on a billion-dollar opportunity to sell at its peak. It’s a twisty tale told by a sleep-deprived Huang, who had an infant child while making the film and didn’t really need to don a Guy Fieri costume to make interviews interesting.
Hostage, Netflix
Julie Delpy as Vivienne in Hostage.Des Willie/Netflix
This somewhat unhinged five-episode limited series stars Suranne Jones as Abigail Dalton, the British prime minister, and Julie Delpy as Vivienne Toussaint, the president of France. While the suspenseful script penned by British writer Matt Charman (Bridge of Spies) has plot holes as wide and deep as the English Channel, it’s been No. 1 on Netflix this week thanks to its star casting. Jones and Delpy do indeed have fine chemistry as female frenemies when they get to take a break from dealing with hostage takings and civil unrest to riff on the British-French relationship – in a scene, for instance, where they toast with a cocktail and Diet Coke, respectively.
Delpy, best known for Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, is most watchable, cast against type as a kind of French Phaedra – a politician playing footsie with the far-right and engaged in a sexy affair with her activist step-son. Other excellent European actors squandered on this implausible trash thriller include Martin McCann (Blue Lights) and Jehnny Beth (Anatomy of a Fall), who, incidentally, has a new industrial rock album out this week called You Heartbreaker, You with a kind of vintage Nine Inch Nails sound.
The Royal Hotel, CBC Gem
Jessica Henwick, left, and Julia Garner, right, in a scene from The Royal Hotel.Supplied
In this 2023 psychological thriller from Australian director Kitty Green, Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) are backpackers who end up working as bartenders at a pub in a mining town after they run out of money. Inspired by the 2016 documentary Hotel Coolgardie by Pete Gleeson, the plot follows its protagonists as the local masculinity turns increasingly toxic. In his 2023 Critic’s Pick review, Barry Hertz wrote: “The tidy genius of Green’s film is that she manages to keep the tension at a constant state of low-boil simmer. Like Hanna, the audience is primed to keep one eye on the background of the action, anxiously aware that the bar’s male customers might explode into primal rage at any moment.” Added to Gem on Aug. 29.
Owning Mahowny, Crave with Starz
Philip Seymour Hoffman in a scene from Owning Mahowny.Sony Pictures
Based on the true story of a Toronto banker and gambling addict who embezzled millions from the CIBC in the 1980s, this 2003 Canadian film features one of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s more unsung performances. In his three-and-half-star (out of four) review for The Globe and Mail at the time of release, the late John Bentley Mays praised the movie – directed by Richard Kwietniowski and written by Maurice Chauvet – for the many ways in which it and its star dodged every Hollywood cliché about its topic. “Don’t expect babes-and-booze razzle dazzle,” he wrote. “Don’t look for a crazed salesman betting his baby’s last diaper on the ponies, or hussies in scarlet garters luring nice business guys from Mississauga to their doom at a jimmied roulette wheel. This film describes, instead, the pathetic last days of a joyless gambler and bank robber who lives in Toronto, a city, as everyone knows, that was declared rhinestone-free many centuries ago.” On Crave with Starz Aug. 29.
