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Onefour: Against All Odds ★★★½
Netflix
Uncompromising in its depiction of both conflict and self-expression but subtle in the connections it makes, this is a valuable Australian documentary about the hip-hop group Onefour and their rise despite adversity. Writer and director Gabriel Gasparinatos doesn’t shy away from the controversy that has defined the renegade outfit and subsequently been used against them. As reportage this is vivid and sustained – the narrative is punctuated with footage of street fights and armed police raids, celebratory appearances and jailhouse communiques.
“Footy, the factory, or a life of crime” are the main prospects for the Pacific Islander community in western Sydney, says Onefour member Spenny.Credit: Netflix
Onefour’s five members are from Mount Druitt in Sydney’s outer western suburbs, part of a Pacific Islander community that offers three choices to its young men: “footy, the factory, or a life of crime,” says Spenny (Spencer Magalogo). As sit-down interview subjects they’re unsurprisingly wary, but the documentary has an exceptional roster of associates and experts who shed light on the group’s beginning, motivation and transformation.
Early supporters, such as youth worker Ian Escandor, whose music program at Mount Druitt’s Street University introduced Onefour to the recording studio, acknowledge a duality that some still struggle to reconcile. Onefour were involved with a street gang whose violent clashes with rival gangs were numerous, and that’s what they rapped about. Drill, their hip-hop genre, is abrasive and explicit. Onefour made autobiography into art, creating an underground sensation.
The documentary’s ultimate focus is the targeting of Onefour by Strike Force Raptor, the NSW Police unit that tackles organised crime. As explained by the senior officers interviewed, Onefour’s rise was seen as a risk to public safety, even after three members were jailed in 2019 for their part in a 2018 pub assault. The “suppression tactics” Raptor deployed included exerting pressure to shut down Onefour gigs not only in NSW, but nationally. It’s unprecedented in this country, and seemingly short-sighted. Depriving Onefour of their career can only encourage them to reoffend.
Against All Odds doesn’t devote enough time to Onefour’s evolving artistry, but the main issue is its time frame. It essentially ends in May 2022, with a triumphant Onefour appearance at the Sydney stadium gig of collaborator turned superstar The Kid Laroi. Eighteen months is an eternity in popular culture, and while Onefour have recently been able to play some gigs, Lekks (Salec Sua), was deported to New Zealand in January after serving his 2019 jail sentence. The documentary raises more questions than it answers, such as whether its subjects are now boxed in by the authenticity of their breakthrough singles, but nonetheless it offers – just like Onefour’s music – a telling perspective on Australia’s contradictions.
The Buccaneers ★★
Apple TV+, Wednesday
Kristine Froseth in The Buccaneers.Credit: Angus Pigott
Edith Wharton’s revered Gilded Age novels have previously been adapted into several uncompromising feature films, including Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth. The Buccaneers, Wharton’s final, unfinished text, has a deliberately modern bent in this lush adaptation: what if Taylor Swift fans populated a period romance? Pinballing between post-gig exuberance and high drama, this eight-part series is a mass of jarring contradictions mostly shorn of illuminating friction.
Giddy comrades high on champagne and entitlement, the young American heiresses in this 1870s melodrama – led by Nan St. George (Kristine Froseth) and the already engaged Conchita Closson (Alisha Boe) – arrive in tradition-bound London, where their dowries attract titled suitors and disapproving looks. From the start, Katherine Jakeways’ adaptation is perilously choppy, with mood and motivations altering from scene to scene and little sense of place aside from the obligatory grand vistas and country houses.
A revisionist take on the past is a valuable use of the costume drama, but The Buccaneers is essentially ahistorical. As modern ciphers, these young women casually break boundaries that the story then inflates to heart-wrenching importance. They are having it both ways, as is the show, which can’t resist a hackneyed grand gesture – a suitor emerges from the sea in the very first episode – even as it brushes off the milieu that made them matter.
Bosch: Legacy (season 2)
Amazon Prime
Season 2 of Bosch Legacy sees Harry Bosch (Titus Welliver) moving from LAPD detective to private investigator.Credit: Tyler Golden
Moving Harry Bosch (Titus Welliver) from LAPD detective to private investigator at the end of the first season of this spin-off was a misjudgment. The Bosch franchise works as a season-long procedural, unfurling a case and capturing the murky mores of Los Angeles, and it doesn’t take too long to get back to that. Turning up the emotional stakes on Bosch is intriguing if desperate – this is a character who carries a lifetime of defiance and despair and is committed to trying to make a foot soldier’s difference every day.
American Auto
Stan
Fans of Colin from Accounts (Binge) hanging out for the forthcoming second season can get a new Harriet Dyer performance in the two seasons of this American workplace comedy, where she plays part of the corporate team under a new CEO – Ana Gasteyer’s Katherine Hastings – at an American auto manufacturer trying to get to grips with the demands of the 21st century. American network NBC cancelled the sitcom in June after two seasons, but I think it’s one of the better traditional half-hour comedies to emerge from American network television in recent years.
Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper
Disney+
Christian Cooper in New York’s Central Park.Credit: Brittainy Newman/The New York Times
A writer and editor of science texts and graphic novels, Christian Cooper was flung into the headlines in 2020, when the passionate birdwatcher asked a white woman in Central Park, per park signage, to collar her dog, and she called police to tell them a Black man was threatening her. Phone footage exonerated Cooper, and his passion for birding now gets to flourish in this six-part documentary. The amateur ornithologist is an enthusiastic, knowledgeable host, which combined with impressive production values and visual detail makes for an enjoyable entry piece.
Difficult People (seasons 1-3)
Binge
Julie Klausner and Billy Eichner in the comedy Difficult People.
This blistering comedy ran for three seasons between 2015 and 2017, but it has barely aged a day because its subject – the hilarious self-entitlement, abrasive manners, and prickly comic dynamic of New Yorkers – is an eternal subject. Julie Kessler (Julie Klausner, the show’s creator) and Billy Epstein (Billy Eichner) are a pair of struggling New York comics hitting mid-30s reality who negotiate the rest of the world with disdain but are deeply loyal best friends to each other. They are horrible, but in ways both honest and hilarious.
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