The Stargazer

Hulu is promoting Asian Pacific American Heritage Month this May with a site featuring all of the Asian titles that are available for streaming on their platform. One such title is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, a Japanese film widely renowned for its delicate, gripping narrative that exposes the human definition of the word “family.” The drama follows a seemingly conventional family made up of a grandmother, two parents, an aunt, and a son. The tension slowly rises when the father figure, Osamu (Lily Franky) encounters a little girl who was left outside her house in the winter. He takes the girl home with him and trouble ensues when she is reported missing. The family decides not to return her since they found scars on the child’s arms and other signs of abuse. In the second half of the drama, many secrets concerning the real origin of each family member are revealed and their lives are drastically changed. If that premise is not a sufficient hook, here are four reasons to go watch (or re-watch) Shoplifters.

French filmmaker Céline Sciamma’s new film, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), was the recipient of the award for Best Screenplay and the Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. At the time this was written, the film boasted a 98% Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes with an Audience Score of 92%. Portrait was released in the U.S. in 2020 and is available for streaming on Hulu. Since its release, it has produced a lot of commentary, both about its breathtaking cinematography and its scandalous love scenes.

Shakespeare’s plays have endured centuries in the public mind. Theatre and film adaptations alike have retold Shakespearean tales to the point where they are sometimes unrecognizable to the untrained eye. Some people still gasp when they are told that The Lion King was based on Hamlet, that 10 Things I Hate About You was based on The Taming of the Shrew, that She’s the Man was a retelling of Twelfth Night, so on and so forth. Contrastingly, there are critics who recognize the Bard’s influence and hold movie adaptations up to the standard of West Side Story, or even higher. Finally, there’s me, a hopeless romantic in quarantine who just wants an enjoyable retelling of Romeo and Juliet. The following three movies are adaptations that either flew under the radar, are laughable until you give them a chance, or hid their similarities to the original so well that the reveal might surprise a viewer.

As college students across the country find themselves back in their poster-ridden childhood bedrooms, that familiar feeling of teenage angst seems to be crawling back into everyone’s minds. A lot of us moved away from our hometowns to discover the freedoms that college had to offer just to be back under mom’s roof, and subsequently, mom’s rules. It’s perfectly normal to fall back into your teenage tendencies when it just feels like no one understands you and everything is the end of the world... especially during a global pandemic.

I was drawn into playing Smash Ultimate for the first time in 2019. I had no experience with a Game Cube controller and no idea what I was doing in general, so I flailed and screeched a lot – much to the amusement of my boyfriend. Since then, we have played many more hours and I have learned at least enough to write this rookie review.