Hip hop nostalgia and a young Mr Obama
Barry Available from Friday THERE has already been some Oscar buzz around this hotly anticipated biopic of Barack Obama. The film is set in the early 1980s, when Obama first arrived in New York City.
In a crime-ridden and racially charged environment, ‘Barry’ (played by Devon Terrell, who looks like he was carved from marble) finds himself pulled between various social spheres and struggles to maintain a series of increasingly strained relationships with his Kansas-born mother, his estranged Kenyan father, and his classmates. He is portrayed as too white for black people and too black for white people. For instance, there is a noted scene when a well-dressed Barry is in a public restroom and he’s mistaken for a toilet attendant at a party with a predominantly white crowd.
On the other side of that coin, is when Barry is spending time in Harlem with his white girlfriend, Charlotte (played by Anya Taylor-Joy) and is the victim of the side-eye treatment from local pedestrians and residents scrutinising the couple walking down the street armin-arm. The pacing might be a little slow for some, and there isn’t much levity here (which, given Obama’s personality and sometimes mischievous sense of humour, seems a little strange), but the performances are top notch and the soundtrack alone makes it very watchable. And let’s face it; we already miss Obama.
Nobel, Season 1 Available from Tuesday
CONTINUING Netflix’s strong recent form of uncovering televisual gems from non-English speaking countries, the streaming service brings us this Norwegian drama, which proves that Scandinavia is not just good at police procedurals. Nobel focuses on Erling Riiser (Aksel Hennie), a Norwegian soldier in the Special Forces (FSK). He and his platoon are in action in Afghanistan and orders given by NATO and the Norwegian Foreign Office. Then Erling and his soldier-friends are suddenly involved in a tricky political conspiracy. This has a profound impact on his life, his family and also in the end, Norway as a nation. It was shot in Oslo, Prague and Morocco and is one of the more gripping pieces on the tragic impact of war that you’ll see. Van Helsing Available from Wednesday NOT to be confused with the (fairly awful) movie of a few years back, this series, which started life on the American SyFy channel is also a far cry from the teenage vampire stories which were all the rage a few years ago. Gone is the coquettishness we’ve come to associate with the highly attractive creatures of the night, and in its place a gritty, grimy, visceral appearance that gives this more the feel of a dystopian horror than a teenage romance.
The heroine of the piece is a young woman (played by Kelly Overton from True Blood) who wakes from a coma having missed the volcanic eruption that led to the vampire pandemic and the post-apocalyptic survival tale that she’s now immersed in. Comparisons to The Walking Dead are probably somewhat inevitable but this series may stake out its own fanbase.
Hip Hop Evolution, Season 1 Available now
FOLLOWING hot on the heels of the well received The Get Down, this series travels back to 1970s Bronx and Harlem, showing how hip-hop evolved from its beginnings as a New York house-party experiment, to the global phenomenon it is today, and more importantly, how it created a voice for the disenfranchised.
It’s a power-house of a documentary, hosted by MC Shad Kabango and features interviews with the pioneers who started it all: hip-hop’s “Holy Trinity” of Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, as well musical legends like LL Cool J (who has hardly aged a day). The soundtrack is a time warp back to our youths of mix tapes and Smash Hits posters. Some might wish it focussed less on the excesses of the rappers and the beefs that killed some of them and more on the forces that caused hip hop to fizzle as a vehicle for social change but these seem like quibbles when measured against the overall power of the series.