Weekend Watch: June 16, 2023
Exploring techno-paranoia, Black AF horror satire, Queer time loops and measuring a lifetime in one thousand seven hundred forty seconds...
Happy Friday, TueNighters! We’re cruising into the weekend with another awesome list of movie releases, series drops, and tv shows, as seen on this week’s TueDo List — LET’S GO!
Here are this week’s picks:
How Do You Measure a Year? (HBO): From the time she was two years old until she turned 18, filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt filmed his daughter Ella on her birthday in the same spot, asking her the same questions. In just 29 minutes, we watch her grow from a toddler to a young woman with all the beautiful and sometimes awkward stages in between. Each phase is captured fleetingly but makes an indelible mark.
Her responses to her father’s questions are just a backdrop for a deeper story of parental love, acceptance, and ultimately, independence.
Fun fact: The title comes from the lyrics of the track "Seasons of Love" of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Rent… and it’s giving us all the feels.
Black Mirror | Season 6 (Netflix): Featuring stand-alone dramas — sharp, suspenseful, satirical tales that explore techno-paranoia — the series is a contemporary reworking of "The Twilight Zone" with stories that tap into the collective unease about the modern world.
The new season's stellar cast includes Ben Barnes, Zazie Beetz, Michael Cera, Rory Culkin, Rob Delaney, Paapa Essiedu, Josh Hartnett, Kate Mara, Annie Murphy, Aaron Paul, Salma Hayek Pinault, and more.
The Blackening (Theaters): A group of Black friends reunites for a Juneteenth weekend getaway only to find themselves trapped in a remote cabin with a twisted killer. Forced to play by his rules, the friends soon realize this ain’t no motherf****** game.
The Blackening skewers genre tropes and poses the sardonic question: if the entire cast of a horror movie is Black, who dies first?
Fun fact: “The Blackening” is based on a Comedy Central sketch of the same name originally developed by the comedian Dewayne Perkins, who co-stars in the film and wrote the script with Tracy Oliver (a writer of “Girls Trip”).
Jagged Mind (Hulu): When Billie (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) starts dating a mysterious new girlfriend, she suffers blackouts and strange visions that feel like she’s living the same moments in her life over and over. She must break out of a series of loops created by her manipulative ex-girlfriend.
Early reviews: This new queer horror movie offers a new, fresh twist on the time loop trope made famous by Groundhog Day, sans the cute and funny.
The Flash is in theaters and it’s speaking to my Marvel-enthused heart!
Will def check out How to Measure a Year and Jagged Mind. Thanks! I'm waiting for June 28th for the Rock Hudson doc on HBO, All That Heaven Allowed. And this weekend is Formula 1 (I know, don't judge); hoping at some point Hamilton will actually win a race again (I'm still not over his championship being robbed from him in 2021, so I don't know how he could be). Fingers will be crossed on Sunday. If nothing else, I hope the toad DNFs. xo