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Mothers, J. Lo, spiders, Aquamen – Lightbox has ’em all in April.
Mothers, J. Lo, spiders, Aquamen – Lightbox has ’em all in April.

Pop CultureApril 1, 2019

New to Lightbox in April: True crime, many spidermen and Jenny from The Block

Mothers, J. Lo, spiders, Aquamen – Lightbox has ’em all in April.
Mothers, J. Lo, spiders, Aquamen – Lightbox has ’em all in April.

All the superheroes are coming to Lightbox this month – Spider-Man, Aquaman, Jennifer Lopez, Spongebob Squarepants – but there’s a few villains in the bunch too. It’s your round-up of what is coming to Lightbox in April.

The Act (Four episodes dropping April 4, then weekly)

From Jean Sergent’s review of The Act, coming later this week: “As a connoisseur of true crime, there is no telly event I’ve been more excited for this year quite like The Act. Chronicling the horrific crimes of Dee Dee Blanchard and her daughter Gypsy Rose, this is a powerhouse drama that takes us through a story of lies, fraud, illness, and murder. I’m gleeful about it! There are so many moments in The Act that are designed to give viewers chills and elicit gasps. The story of Dee Dee Blanchard’s mistreatment of her daughter Gypsy Rose isn’t the banality of evil – it’s the garishness of greed.” / Jean Sergent

9-1-1 (Binge S1 from April 2)

It’s a show starring Connie Britton and Angela Bassett as a 911 operator and a police sergeant? Why are you still reading this? Go and watch it right now! Nothing I have to say is worth more than watching two women at the peak of their actressing power!

But, in all seriousness, 9-1-1 marks television auteur Ryan Murphy’s sashay into the police procedural, and it’s the best of both worlds: The reliable thrill of a show that delivers a contained, resolved myster in the space of forty-five minutes but also the firework nutbaggery that is a Ryan Murphy show. You have no idea what will happen or why, but you know that it will, and it will be wild. / Sam Brooks

Second Act (Film from April 3)

Don’t be fooled by the platinum-selling albums, the billion-viewed YouTube video or the rocks that she got, she’s still Jennifer Lopez, ridiculously charismatic and appealing actress.

Now, I am as much in the can for Jennifer Lopez as a human being can be. I think her performance in Out of Sight is one of the great unheralded performances of our time; she manages to be effortlessly natural onscreen and impossible to look away from. If she didn’t pivot to music and focussed on acting full-time, there’s no question in my mind that she would be considered one of our most significant movie stars, as opposed to quadruple pop cultural threat she is now.

Which brings me to Second Act, a beautiful froth of a workplace comedy that is quietly groundbreaking in so many ways. One, it’s a mainstream comedy led by a woman in her late forties (J Lo is 49 you guys), who’s also a woman of colour, and one where her love interest is noticeably younger than her but it never comes up. It’s the movie equivalent of frosé – refreshing, and gets you reliably buzzed.  / SB

Good Girls Revolt (Binge from April 4)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAB_BuPH4EQ

You’ve heard about mad men, but have you heard about mad… women? Set in the swinging 60s, where the bouffants were as bafflingly large as the gender pay gap, a small group of women working at News of the Week magazine are realising just how badly treated they are. Forced to fetch coffees, publish under male bylines and put up with sexist comments all day, the women band together to due their employer for gender discrimination and general bad-times. If that’s not enough to get you into it, the character Nora is based on Nora Ephron. What an origin story! / Alex Casey

Spongebob Squarepants (Binge S10 from April 10)

He lives in a pineapple under the sea!

Last year when I found out Stepen Hillenburg, creator of Spongebob Squarepants, had died, I feel like a part of me died too. I fondly remember racing home after school to hit record on the VCR at 4.30pm every afternoon, diligently pausing the tape when the ads were on so that I could relive the pure undersea nonsense interruption-free.

Call me a stoned Jack Black on the couch in the smash hit Colin Hanks vehicle Orange County, but I truly think Spongebob Squarepants is still just a damn funny show. Think about all the memes. Think about the Krusty Krab Pizza song. When I tell you to get into the sea for this one, I bloody well mean it. / AC

Woodshock (Film from April 10)

Who would have ever foreseen Torrance Shipman becoming a true and pure indie film darling? She’s sexy, she’s cute, she’s taken too many psychedelic drugs and has wandered into the forest to process her grief. Classic. Yarn. In Woodshock, Kirsten Dunst plays a woman who loses herself in the woods (metaphorically and literally) after the death of her mother.

The directorial debut of sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy, it looks to be a haunting as hell examination of loss and isolation, with the added Tom Ford aesthetic of both directors being fashion designers. The New Yorker likened it to “Alice in Wonderland in reverse,” but my instinct is to double feature it with Melancholia and really have a good, trippy wallow. / AC

Aquaman (Film from April 17)

When I saw Aquaman, I left the cinema asking many questions. If Nicole Kidman wanted to hide from the people underneath the ocean, why did she live in a lighthouse right next to where she washed up? What accent is Temuera Morrison doing? How much of the filming did Amber Heard spend lightly damp? What is the actual economy of the crab civilization under the ocean? How does Jason Momoa’s spiky armour have spiky abs? When can I see it again, can I see it in Gold Class?

But, also? I had a whole lot of fun watching Aquaman. It’s fun in a way that none of the previous DC Universe films have been, so rather than it being like watching an embittered grown man bang action figures together, it’s like watching a twelve year old kid do the same, with that fantastical joy and imagination in his mind. It’s silly, it’s dumb, it’s fun, and it’s a really good time.

Plus, Dame Julie Andrews plays a massive snake monster, in what I’m sure is the role she’s been preparing for her whole life. / SB

Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse (Film from April 17)

No qualification here: Into the Spider-Verse is not only the best Marvel movie to come out, it’s not only the best Spider-Man movie that exists, but it’s the most inventive and joyous comic book movie I’ve ever seen.

If I was a parent, or an eight year old child with unprecedented access to a cinema, this is the film I would use to introduce them to comic book movies. It is effortlessly diverse, beautifully funny, visually inventive and so full of creative verve and vim – basically it’s the purest and most honest adaptation of what comic books are, and can be. Other films try to turn comic books into film and get stuck in origin stories and endless fanservice, but Into the Spider-Verse captures the propulsive momentum of someone flipping through colourful pages frantically, wanting to get to the end of the story.

Absolutely necessary watching, no matter your demographic. / SB

The Americans (S6 from April 27)

It already looked like all the best hair on television was coming to Lightbox this April thanks to Connie Britton, but who has to come along and clinch the deal but Felicity herself Keri Russell? That’s right, it’s the sixth and final season of The Americans.

What I’ve already said about the show remains true: “The Americans has been hailed as one of the best, smartest and most taut shows on television. If you haven’t heard of it, I don’t know what Cold War rock you’ve been living under, but you need to get on the boat. While the premise might be simple (two Russian spies are in deep cover in America in the 80s), the emotions are anything but. Within all the spy drama, and wigs, there’s a beautiful and compelling story of a relationship constantly in flux as each party decides what they want, and what they actually need. Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys give performances worthy of the show – sometimes even exceeding it – while guest stars Margo Martindale, Alison Wright and Frank Langella do layered, sparky work from the sidelines.” / SB

This content was created in paid partnership with Lightbox. Learn more about our partnerships here.

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Three Girls is a drama focusing on the lived realities of the women involved in the Rochdale rape ring (image: supplied)
Three Girls is a drama focusing on the lived realities of the women involved in the Rochdale rape ring (image: supplied)

Pop CultureApril 1, 2019

Television doesn’t need to make someone else’s agony our entertainment

Three Girls is a drama focusing on the lived realities of the women involved in the Rochdale rape ring (image: supplied)
Three Girls is a drama focusing on the lived realities of the women involved in the Rochdale rape ring (image: supplied)

The three-part mini-series Three Girls tells the story of the horrendous Rochdale child rape ring in the UK. It’s a harrowing watch, says Emily Writes, but it’s important we don’t look away – on screen and in real life.

I’m not a fan of true crime; it too often feels like ingesting someone’s agony as popcorn. I’m not being high and mighty – I’m a big fan of nature survival documentaries and movies and just last night enjoyed a film simply because a man was eaten by a bear. I felt he deserved it. There’s just something that makes me feel sick about shows where the body count increases episode to episode, where rape is simply a way to move the plot forward, where someone’s precious life is turned into an hour and forty minutes that can be turned off as simply as it was snuffed out.

So I wasn’t the ideal candidate to review Three Girls. I’d avoided details of the case which seemed to have focused on the ethnicity of the attackers because it’s not news that girls and young women are raped and abused and taken advantage of by old men.

In 2011, when the Rochdale rape ring hit the news in a big way, that side of the story was barely covered. The white victims were suddenly viewed as precious by the white men around them, if only because brown bodies had attacked them. It was a first generation British-Pakistani Nazir Afzal who brought the case to public attention, overturning the original decision to drop the case because those involved didn’t think it would hold up in court.

Three Girls feels like the first time the story of the girls is being told. The details are more horrific than you can imagine – girls as young as 13 raped by packs of men daily, given away as “birthday presents” to disgusting old men, as one girl describes “passed around like bowls”.

It’s harrowing stuff but Three Girls handles the brutality carefully. In a world where we have rape entertainment like Game of Thrones and 13 Reasons Why, I was incredibly worried about watching Three Girls. As a survivor myself I knew I didn’t want or need to see it to know how bad it is.

Three Girls does what others can’t – it recognises that so many women know what rape is like, and they don’t need to see graphic, extended versions of it to understand the horror. It also seems to recognise that men who do want to see this, who insist that they must see it “because it’s real”, should not be given the privilege. It’s just one of the most powerful statements in the series.

Watching the girls dropped at locations and then picked up afterwards conveys every bit of horror needed. It doesn’t turn these experiences into snuff porn. It sets an example to others to consider their audiences – there are plenty of things that are “real” that we don’t show on TV, like someone peeing or taking a dump. People have said that’s because “nobody wants to see that”. Well, that’s something directors should ask themselves. Who wants to see rape?

It’s clear that Three Girls is written and directed by women. Writer Nicole Taylor pulled directly from the testimony of three of the girls involved in the case, three of 47 girls who were raped by more than 19 men.

You can hear their voices, it all sounds so true and authentic – and that’s what just compounds the tragedy that they were ignored, diminished and betrayed by the many adults around them who should have been there to protect them. Three Girls is more than a story of horrific men and brave girls. Over three episodes it tracks the appalling failures of authorities to do anything to help these girls because of how they perceived them.

The story is told from the viewpoint of three of the victims: 14-year-old Holly Winshaw, played by Molly Windsor, 16-year-old Amber Bowen (Ria Zmitrowicz) and her younger sister Ruby, 13, (Philippa Lowthorpe). It shows their grooming and how their lives were eventually stolen by these men. It is completely believable. Even in an age where men will do backflips not to believe women when they talk about their rapes. In a time where women are asked: Why didn’t you report? This series should tell all why.

But it is a story of hope somehow too – in the face of so many adults who gave them cause not to trust, they did trust. The hero of this story is Sara Rowbotham, the sexual health worker who first recognised patterns of child abuse in the community and fought to bring these crimes to police attention. She is the shining example to us all of how just one adult giving a shit about children can save lives.

We know that in New Zealand we have had pack rape groups – from gangs to the Roastbusters (who got off scot-free) and even our own police. There may be a desire to consider the events of Rochdale as being unique in someway – unique to the UK, unique to the ethnicity or religion of the rapists.

Women know better but my hope is that after Three Girls many will know better. Many will see how the grooming process works, how we minimise and treat young girls and women, how we view teenage girls, power imbalances and the way the court system is weighted in favour of rapists – if you even get there.

Three Girls is important. It’s vital television viewing – as vital as it is gut-wrenching. It’s exactly what a “true crime” dramatisation should be. It should serve a purpose. It shouldn’t be entertainment but rather a call to look at ourselves. If we’re asking – what would we have done? Maybe the better question should be – what can we do now?

The most powerful scene in the miniseries isn’t an act of violence. It’s nurse Sara Rowbotham seeing Holly Winshaw, just 14, crumbling before her eyes and knowing she must do something. She didn’t turn away. Can we do the same?

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