tv & film
tv & film
Hanuman, Hijras, and Heart: What Monkey Man Decolonizes
Monkey Man comes at a time when political struggles in India are reaching new heights for the 2024 elections– and is a pretty clear critique of the BJP Party led by Prime Minister Narendra Modhi
Spectacle over Storytelling– The Live Action Avatar: The Last Airbender and What it gets Wrong
But ultimately, what’s so special about Avatar: The Last Airbender is the story underlying all of the fantastical elements– the magic comes in the humanity of the characters, bender and non-bender alike.
Saturday Morning Storytelling: Catching up with Cartoons (as Kids Shows)
Content for children – cartoons and otherwise – has always been a hot commodity, in every sense of the term. Is the resurgence in revisiting cartoons and kid shows with a new inclusion of adult audiences simply a product of nostalgia, or do the stories from our childhood signify something else?
Summer Nostalgia and Soccer: A Reflection and Review on Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham
Bend it Like Beckham feels like summer, soccer (football, sorry!), and queer awakening (all deeply nostalgic to me). But more importantly, it feels like coming of age– and coming into myself, and all the ways I can bend but not break.
Sort Of Proud: Nonbinary BIPOC Representation and Demanding to be (Authentically) Seen
Queerness and transness take center stage, but not artificially– and they don’t define the characters completely. That’s what good meaningful representation is.
Minari: A Meditation on Migration, Family, and the American Dream
Lee Issac Chung’s 2020 American drama powerfully evokes Asian American diaspora and what it means to construct a family, a life, and a dream thousands of miles away from “home”.