If you thought K-pop was the pinnacle of manufactured strangeness, prepare for virtual idols - humans performing as anime-style digital characters via motion capture - to blow your mind. Michelle Kim's favorite is a girl group called Isegye Idol, created by Korean VTuber Woowakgood. The six anonymous members deploy a rare breed of honesty and humor while playing games like League of Legends, Go, and Minecraft, chitchatting, and performing kitschy music that's somewhere between anime soundtrack and video-game score. It's very DIY, very intimate, and its wild popularity speaks to the mood of famously lonely and culturally adrift Gen Z South Koreans - struggling to find work, giving up on dating, and trying to find friendships online. It shows what a magical online universe people can build when reality stops working for them.
Pavel Talankin didn't have the easiest life as a schoolteacher in the copper-smelting town of Karabash, Russia - a place UNESCO once called the most toxic on Earth. But video he shot, partially in secret, makes it clear he loved it: the smokestacks, the cold, the ice mustache he'd get walking around outside, and, most of all, his bright-eyed students. That makes it all the more painful to watch a distant, grinding war and state propaganda change the town. An antiwar progressive with a democracy flag in his classroom, Talankin had to deal with a new patriotic curriculum, mandatory parades, visits from mercenaries, and the loss of the creative space he'd built. His footage tells his story in the Oscar-winning documentary from director David Borenstein, highlighting the strange, profound ways adults shape kids without even recognizing it.
Kim is the kind of person who will pay $150 to watch a comedian in a smelly San Francisco theater that charges $20 for a can of water - because she's crazy enough to hope standup will not die. In February, she saw British comedian James Acaster perform live... and it was a mediocre show. But Repertoire, his 2018 miniseries on Netflix, is gold. Shot shortly after Acaster went through a breakup, the four-part show features him portraying, among other characters, a cop who goes undercover as a standup comedian, forgets who he is, and gets divorced. And then things get weird. 'What if every relationship you've ever been in,' Acaster asks, 'is somebody slowly figuring out they didn't like you as much as they hoped they would?' If the best comedy comes from paying attention to the hellhole you're in, we wish Acaster many more pitfalls.