Binge-r #204: Teenage Bounty Hunters + Acute Misfortune
Holy Rollers: Maddie Phillips (Sterling) and Anjelica Bette Fellini (Blair) in Teenage Bounty Hunters
TEENAGE BOUNTY HUNTERS S1
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All 10 episodes now streaming
Was I apprehensive about a Netflix series titled Teenage Bounty Hunters? Yes. Am I happily surprised at how amusing, seditious, and engaging the show turned out to be? Absolutely. From the opening sequence, where twins and high school students Sterling (Maddie Phillips) and Blair Wesley (Anjelica Bette Fellini) are in separate cars and taking charge of their respective doofus boyfriends, Kathleen Jordan’s show has a knack for turning potential potholes into enjoyable inducements. Equally applicable to an audience young enough to be in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or old enough to have watched it on release, this blithe comic-drama rolls with the unlikely circumstances so that daffy logic and ratatat sibling exchanges win out.
Having “borrowed” their father’s utility, Sterling (the over-achiever) and Blair (the rebel) discover a new trade when they crash into a bail jumper’s car and end up apprehending him, much to the annoyance of veteran bounty hunter Bowser Simmons (Kadeem Hardison). Needing cash for repairs, they split the bounty with Bowser and hit him up for more work. The writing makes canny use of their position: as the daughters of wealthy white Atlanta suburbanites, the teens can get access to places Bowser can’t (“this is some Django shit,” he notes when they pull up outside a members-only country club), while they’re armed to the teeth thanks to the guns their Republican parents gave them for Christmas. They’re not unaware of their privilege, but the series lets them discover ways to undermine it.
The prestigious Christian academy they attend is a mine of satirical scorn – there’s a hint of Heathers to the pious veneer – even as Sterling worries about being judged for her choices and Blair stans Nine Inch Nails. “Let me have my cool, ominous moment,” the former tells the latter when she has a deductive breakthrough in the first episode, which is directed by Jesse Peretz (Our Idiot Brother, Girls), and Teenage Bounty Hunters is self-aware to the ludicrousness it straddles. The plot opens as individual cases allow the young women to see the institutions they adhere to in a new light while mixing with Atlanta’s Black majority – yet, that’s Wu-Tang Clan’s Method Man as Bowser’s rival bounty hunter. The series is hardly essential, but it’s an enjoyable diversion that keeps ticking welcome boxes including loopy twin psychic communication and a sex-positive outlook.
Brush with Fame: Daniel Henshall (Adam Cullen) in Acute Misfortune
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
ACUTE MISFORTUNE (Stan, 2018, 92 minutes): A savage, staggering assault on the enduring conventions of the biopic and great artist myths, Thomas M. Wright’s remarkable debut feature is the best Australian film since Mad Max: Fury Road. Adapted from journalist Erik Jensen’s scalpel-sharp 2014 biography of the late artist Adam Cullen, Acute Misfortune uses telling tableaus and unadorned encounters to chart the mutual need that tied Jensen (Toby Wallace) and Cullen (Daniel Henshall) together for four years marked by deception, abuse, and despairing desire. The concept that history is written by the victor gets a deeply personal imprimatur, and Wright uses the finely calibrated lead performances to supply a menacing commentary that negates back story or expository dialogue. The mindset of the ambitious writer and the successful artist are both exposed (Wright and Jensen co-wrote the screenplay), and the movie feels shaped to an exacting vision: the screen ratio used is the narrow 1.37:1 standard prevalent from the 1930s through 1950s, but which here suggests both a portrait’s proportions and a cell’s constraint.
New on Netflix: Highlighting the capricious psychology of good taste alongside comic touches worthy of Wes Anderson, the crime documentary Sour Grapes (2016, 85 minutes) charts the many machinations around a newcomer’s fabled wine cellar; Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt headline a predictable spin on the superhero genre in Project Power (2020, 113 minutes), where almighty powers are briefly bestowed by an illegal pill.
New on SBS on Demand: Gripping in the ways it circles isolation, despair and the cruel emotions that fill the void they make, Lee Chang-dong’s masterful Burning (2018, 142 minutes) is a slow-burn psychological thriller about a young man (Yoo Ah-in) whose brief affair with a young woman (Jeon Jong-seo) becomes an uneasy triangle when she returns with an inscrutably wealthy new boyfriend (Steven Yeun).
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