Elvis’ granddaughter is a slippery stripper in A24’s tweet-based saga

The greatest limited series of all time - and yes, this is a big call - will change you.

Riley Keough and Taylour Page in Zola. Photo: A24

Copenhagen Cowboy
Netflix

Danish enfant terrible Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive, Only God Forgives) returns with his first project in his native tongue since 2005. Copenhagen Cowboy, the six-part Netflix series (though really, it’s more of a film), is NWF playing all the hits: it’s a vibey, hyper-violent whip around the criminal underground, glacially-paced, filled with never-ending silences, drenched in neon and soundtracked by a banging Cliff Martinez score. Miu (Angela Bundalovic) is the stone-faced supernatural hero of this story, an illegal immigrant whose parents sold her off when she was seven. She’s introduced as a good-luck charm, purchased by an elder Serbian woman who wants to get pregnant. Said woman runs a brothel, and has deep links to Copenhagen’s criminal netherworld — leading Miu down an increasingly dark and desolate path. If you’re into NWF’s oeuvre, you’ll find yourself glued to the screen. If not, you might find it all a bit tedious.

Zola
Binge

“Y’all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out? It’s kind of long but full of suspense,” wrote exotic dancer A’Ziah “Zola” King, in the first instalment of the buck wild, “mostly true” 148-tweet story that trended worldwide back in 2015. Hashtagged #The story, the tale found obsessive fans in the likes of Missy Elliott, Solange Knowles, and Selma director Ava DuVernay. It also spawned the first film ever to be adapted from a Twitter thread. Janicza Bravo’s Zola stars Taylour Paige in the titular role as a Detroit waitress who is seduced into a weekend of stripping in Florida by a fascinating but slippery customer (played by Riley Keough, Lisa Marie Presley’s daughter). What follows is a sleepless 48-hour joy ride through stripper hell. Though there’s danger at every turn — drugs, reckless Backpage sex work, trafficking, and an absurd suicide attempt — it never stops being fun. Kudos to Mica Levi, one of the greatest working film composers, whose impeccable score captures just how frenzied it feels to be online.

Another Round
SBS on Demand

Look, if there was anything to learn from the ill-fated Fantastic Beasts franchise, it’s that Mads Mikkelsen’s handsomeness is enough to sustain us through the most egregious entertainment. As a reward for our perseverance, we have Another Round, the Oscar-winning Danish drama from Thomas Vinterberg. Mikkelsen is in a rut — once a sparkling ballet dancer, he’s found himself at midlife, in a loveless marriage, working a thankless job as a high school history teacher. As a means to bring zest to his humdrum existence, he and three other friends — each in a slump of their own — attempt an experiment: they decide to test the theory that maintaining a blood-alcohol level of 0.05 makes people looser and more creative. At first, the experiment is carefully controlled (no drinking after 8pm, and none on the weekends), and things chug along without a hitch. “I haven’t felt this good in ages,” Mikkelsen says. But, as his incipient addiction asks for more drinking, life starts to unravel. Vinterberg’s film is warm and humane without falling into the sap trap. It also ends with one of the best dance sequences since Beau Travail.

Angels in America
Binge

I’m going out on a limb here in saying that this is the greatest limited series of all time. Originally conceived as two three-hour, made-for-TV movies, Angels in America, HBO’s majestic adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer and Tony-winning play about the AIDS crisis, will change you. In 2003, when this was conceived, top actors feared to tread the small screen, but no major studio wanted to tackle Kushner’s beast. With the late, great director Mike Nichols behind the camera, and a cast of Emma Thompson, Meryl Streep, Jeffrey Wright and Al Pacino, to name a few, it made a convincing case for television as a medium for sophisticated art. And the rest is history. It’s the first program in Emmys history to win every major eligible category, and won all four acting awards. But enough with the boring industry accolades, and on to Thompson, as an Angel of the Lord, delivering the immortal line “the stiffening of your penis is of no consequence!”

Norwegian Wood

Watch on SBS on Demand

Pity the director faced with bringing Haruki Marukami’s internal prose to screen. Tran Anh Hung’s adaptation of the Japanese author’s bestseller Norwegian Wood isn’t perfect, but it is lovely. Set in the late 1960s Tokyo, it follows Toru Watanabe, a student torn between his love for two women. There’s Naoko, who is recovering from a nervous breakdown in a rural sanitarium after her boyfriend — Toru’s childhood best friend — died by suicide years before. And there’s Midori, a freewheeling college girl with a penchant for locker room talk, and the promise of a peaceful future. It’s lyrical and languid, and, thanks to cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bin (In The Mood For Love), looks sublime.

Looking for more? Here is what I recommended in last week’s column.