How you can finally watch Pearl, the film NZ funded but couldn't see
Why'd it take nearly a year for the slasher to make it here? Plus, The Idol might not be as bad as everyone said it was, and all the new shows landing in time for the weekend.
Hello! We are living in a time when we have unprecedented access to content – there’s so much coming at us that it’s impossible to keep up. With around 20 streaming services competing for our attention, it feels like we have every film and TV show at our fingertips at all times. But that’s not always the case. Today we’re going to talk about one that slipped through the cracks. It’s not a movie that’s for everyone, but the story behind how Pearl got made, and why we haven’t been able to see it until now, seems emblematic of a very strange time in the content world.
-Chris Schulz, senior writer, The Spinoff
Yes, Mia Goth should have won all the awards
A few weeks ago, my friend sent me a breathless late night message. Standing outside Auckland’s Capitol Theatre, where custom cocktails were being mixed and the lobby was dressed up especially for the night, he wrote: “Mia Goth is freaking amazing. No spoilers, but she does things in the last 10 minutes of this film that are just extraordinary.” To cap it off, he finished with: “She shoulda won all the awards.”
He’d just seen Pearl, the taxpayer-subsidised, Whanganui-shot feature film from Ti West, the follow-up and prequel to last year’s “Texas porno slasher” X. The story behind these two films is pretty crazy, and basically involves an entire American film crew getting stranded mid-pandemic near my home town, and deciding to shoot both movies back-to-back on shoestring budgets. (Producer Jacob Jaffke spoke to Alex Casey about how the whole saga unfolded here.)
I trust my friend’s opinion. When I receive a message like that, usually I drop everything I’m doing and head straight to the nearest cinema. But I couldn’t do that with Pearl – my friend had just seen the one and only screening. Despite almost universal praise for the film, as well as constant plaudits for the lead performance from Mia Goth, that single night at the Capitol is the only time anyone in Aotearoa has been able to take it in.
My colleague Stewart Sowman-Lund has reported about this anomaly religiously. In January, he discovered 215 New Zealand crew members had worked on Pearl, while nine of the main cast and 124 extras were also local. (Tandi Wright is in it, and she’s fantastic.) It also received $1.6 million in taxpayer money under the New Zealand Screen Production Grant. By paying your taxes, you helped Pearl get made.
Which makes it kind of bonkers that Pearl didn’t get any kind of cinematic release here. While X did receive that honour – I went and saw it with the friend who texted me about Pearl – last year’s prequel never did. When it was released in cinemas overseas in September, critics went nuts for it. “A beautiful, sometimes moving, and delightfully unhinged journey,” raved a critic for We Got This Covered. Martin Scorsese loved it. “I was enthralled, then disturbed, then so unsettled that I had trouble getting to sleep. But I couldn’t stop watching,” Variety reported the veteran filmmaker as saying. He campaigned for it to receive an Academy Award.
This week, Pearl’s NZ immigration status changed. From Wednesday, it’s been available to rent through Neon for $7.99. So that’s exactly what I did. It turns out the critics were right. Pearl is even better than X. It’s a savage character portrait of a woman being pushed around, fraying at the edges, coming apart at the seams. Yes, there are bloody thrills and spills – if you’re a fan of what West did with X, you’ll know what you’re in for, and dig this even more. I’ll certainly never look at a pitchfork the same way again.
But it’s Goth’s performance that elevates Pearl into rare cinematic territory. It ends not in a bloodbath, like X, but with an absolutely riveting 10-minute monologue. Mascara streams down her cheeks. Snot drips onto her chin. The camera doesn’t move. Goth’s Pearl is sad then angry, focused then manic, upset then unhinged. She admits to the bad things she’s done, then reveals why she’s done them, careering through so many emotions in one take my head was spinning by the end of it. It’s a mesmerising scene showcasing an actor at the peak of her powers.
In Pearl, Goth reeks of freaky, old school, off-kilter Hollywood charm. Scorsese was right: it’s a performance that’s pure cinema, one for the ages. Everything critics have said about it is true. “The visual flair soars on the big screen,” declared NME. Pearl should have been available in more theatres than just that one night at the Capitol. Watching it at home is not the same. But it’s better late than never, I guess. (For the record, Mia Goth did win a couple of awards for Pearl, but she did not receive any Academy Award nominations. Like my friend said, she totally shoulda.)
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The Idol is sick, dumb and twisted - and totally entertaining
In last week’s newsletter, I warned everyone to stay away from The Idol. HBO refused to send advance copies out to critics, which is always a sure sign something’s rotten. The reviews coming out of America sounded awful. “An irredeemably bad show,” said a Jezebel review, pretty much summing up most of those that I read. On Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, the show’s got a 27% approval rating. That’s incredibly bad.
On Tuesday, stuck at home with a head cold, I decided there was no better time to give The Idol a go. I expected it to be awful. It is. The show follows a pop star’s comeback being derailed by a leaked pornographic image and a relationship with a twisted cultish figure played by charisma-free pop star The Weeknd. There’s no sense of irony, or parody. No one seems in on the joke. There’s a weirdly lecherous vibe. There hasn’t been this much unnecessary nudity since Game of Thrones.
But was I entertained? Absolutely! There is a much better show waiting to be made about a Hollywood pop star going through multiple crises, but this isn’t it. If you instead choose to watch The Idol as a complete and utter mess, Hollywood folding in on itself, or, as The Watch podcast put it, “Veep but with celebrities,” it makes it far more enjoyable. I’d rather Sam Levinson had gotten to work on season three of Euphoria, but I’m not mad The Idol was made. It is a Hollywood shocker, in every sense of that word.
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Here’s all the new stuff you can watch right now
Tom Holland is a bonafide movie star, a box office crowdpleaser who’s played Spider-Man in seven films now. He doesn’t have much time for television, but The Crowded Room (Apple TV+) is an exception. Set in 1979, it’s a cat-and-mouse murder-mystery thriller in which Holland’s Danny is arrested and interviewed for a grisly murder. “Twisty but tedious,” said The Hollywood Reporter. Apple TV+ also has the third season of The Snoopy Show landing today, and TVNZ+ has 10 new Bluey episodes from Sunday, for any kids in your home.
Elsewhere, Neon has all four episodes of Framed, a documentary following a brazen Australian art heist in which a Picasso was taken off the wall in 1986. This one’s been on my radar for a while, and the reviews are great. “Too wild to be believed,” said The Guardian. Also on Neon is the third season of Awkwafina is Nora From Queens, the acclaimed comedy with Awkwafina playing a fictionalised version of herself.
The fourth season of Mindy Kaling’s Netflix comedy Never Have I Ever kicks off on Netflix, while Arnold Schwarzenegger’s takeover of the streaming service continues with a docuseries called Arnold, in which the bodybuilding action star apologises for groping women, among other things. Prime Video has season two of The Lake, Acorn has The Light in the Hall (“A thriller without too much in the way of thrills,” said The Guardian) and TVNZ+ has the true-crime comedy Based on a True Story.
Blockbusters Fast X and Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3 continue to dominate the local box office, but don’t forget about Bank of Dave, the feelgood Netflix hit that’s landed in theatres here right now. Wētā Workshop creature feature The Tank comes with an R13 rating and is also in theatres now. And don’t forget about Pearl, the acclaimed Ti West slasher finally available for rent on Neon. That will cost you $7.99 but it’s totally worth it.
For more new releases, check out our weekly new to streaming guide.
On The Spinoff now: The stench of the Love Island villa, revealed
This week on The Real Pod we discuss everything from Tracked to Tina from Turners. Plus, Alex talks to the narrator of Love Island ahead of the debut of the new season.
Everything you need to know…
A reminder: Spark Sport is closing at the end of the month and most of its content is heading to TVNZ+. Duncan Greive explains more here. It’s free to sign up and watch most of the service’s content, including the Champions League final between Manchester City and Inter Milan on Sunday at 7am.
New York’s air quality is so that it’s affecting everything from this weekend’s Governors Ball festival to Broadway plays. Vulture reports Killing Eve star Jodie Comer stopped a recent performance of Prima Facie because she couldn’t breathe.
Apple has finally unveiled its new headset, a face computer called the Vision Pro. Out next year, with a staggering price tag, it’s definitely not for everyone.
The Office Australia is looking more like The Office New Zealand by the day.
When did The Kardashians get so bleak? We tried to find out.
From his spare room in Scotland, one snarky Scot changed reality TV forever. Alex Casey meets Love Island UK host Iain Stirling.
Why did Police Ten 7 get cancelled? These graphs may show why.
They sure are getting fast at making podcasts these days. Wondery has just unveiled Spellcaster about the very recent fall from grace of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
Finally, they did it, they made an Expendables 4. Here’s the first trailer with Jason Statham, Sylvester Stallone, Megan Fox and, yep, 50 Cent.
That’s it for Rec Room for this week. If you liked what you read, why not share Rec Room with your friends and whānau.
