Binge-r #186: Black AF + Tales From the Loop

Party Down: Kenya Barris (Kenya) and Rashida Jones (Joya) in Black AF

BLACK AF S1

Streaming Service: Netflix

Availability: All eight episodes now streaming

When Hollywood writer Kenya Barris got a show on an American television network it was titled Black-ish, a reflection of the strictures his comedy about a black family operated under. Now that he’s on Netflix, with far fewer restrictions, his new series is the unfiltered Black AF. The result is a boisterous, occasionally derailed, update of the half hour comedy. It’s a meta-sitcom, a meditation on being black in America, a takedown and tone up of family comedies, and a rumination on commerce’s grip by an artist living the privileged pinnacle of Los Angeles life. It is, in short, a lot, but it’s boldly conceived and often funny, both in terms of sardonic ripostes and knowing outcomes.

Barris plays an exaggerated version of himself: the creator of Black-ish with a just signed big money Netflix deal, six children and a wife, Joya (Rashida Jones), who he has a fractious and complex accommodation with. His fictional privilege is a celebration and a burden. Black AF is shot as a documentary being made by the couple’s level-headed 17-year-old daughter, Drea (Iman Benson): it’s her university audition piece, but Kenya paid for a professional camera crew to carry out the teenager’s wishes. The familiar model of the family reality show is sent up, as explanatory interviews give way to social set-pieces, but in the first episode alone there’s a discursive debate on Kenya’s obsession with the “white gaze”. The freedom Netflix has given Barris mostly pays off, and when it doesn’t the results are still mostly intriguing.

As an actor Barris is low-key – his exasperation simmers. But Jones, best known as the good natured if baffled foil on Parks and Recreation, inhabits every corner of Joya’s mercurial personality. The former lawyer turned mother of six snipes mercilessly and also succumbs to parody, with the second episode turning on the couple taking ecstasy at a music festival only for Kenya to discover that their oldest daughter, Chloe (Genneya Walton), is also present. Kenya pushing his cultural outlook on his children, who’ve grown up under vastly different circumstances than him, is a recurring feature, while later episodes include some telling exchanges in character with the likes of Tyler Perry. This humour comes from self-examination, making it smartly sharp. Black AF gets a solid B.

Black Hole Sun: Abby Ryder Fortson (Loretta) in Tales From the Loop

TALES FROM THE LOOP S1 (Amazon, eight episodes): Bittersweet meditations on want and the inexplicable, this Amazon series about the interlocked residents of a 1970s American town that has a vast experimental physics laboratory beneath it is a kind of melancholy Black Mirror, leaning less to dystopian malevolence than faded futurism. Adapted from Swedish artist Simon Stalenhag’s book, the episodes are keyed to a landscape dotted with mournful robots and outcroppings of unknown technology that alter both the horizon and reality. Beginning with a young girl (Abby Ryder Fortson) whose quest for answers reaches a researcher at the Loop (Rebecca Hall) with a connection to her, creator Nathaniel Halpern (Legion) and eight individual directors (starting with Mark Romanek and ending with Jodie Foster) weigh up how we react when circumstances suddenly change. The middle episodes sag, but it you like contemplative what-if scenarios the full season is worth it.

>> Further Reading: If you have Foxtel and are down for cerebral, inside-out contemporary science-fiction – like me – then filmmaker Alex Garland’s limited series Devs is for you. I wrote about its beguiling tech conspiracy landscape for The Age [full story here].

NEWLY ADDED MOVIES

New on Netflix: Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004, 99 minutes) is a deftly funny and very British zombie apocalypse comedy, with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost trying to find safety at the pub; suffused with grim dystopian wonder and a muddled storyline, Blade Runner 2049 (2017, 163 minutes) is a fitting but not altogether satisfying sequel to a classic with Harrison Ford joined by Ryan Gosling and director Denis Villeneuve.

New on SBS on Demand: Led by a simmering Bob Hoskins as a London gangster, with Helen Mirren as his posh girlfriend, moving his money into London’s revitalisation, The Long Good Friday (1980, 109 minutes) is an essential gangster film that memorably gets at the violence residing in ambition, power, and language.

New on Stan: John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard (2011, 97 minutes) is a blackly comic update of the mismatched cops genre, with Brendan Gleeson as the rogue Irish copper joined by Don Cheadle’s FBI agent; Barbarella (1968, 99 minutes) is an iconic Jane Fonda performance, but the counterculture science-fiction romp is a less than stellar film.

>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here for a rundown on Netflix’s new comic voice via The Iliza Shlesinger Sketch Show and Stan snagging Parasite, the winner of multiple Academy Awards in February.

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>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 228 series reviewed here, 140 movies reviewed here, and 33 lists compiled here.