Entertainment
After Blackpink, a new crop of Korean artists take on Coachella
This time last year, the five members of the K-pop group Le Sserafim were glued to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival livestream on YouTube, watching Blackpink make history as the first Korean headliner. On Saturday afternoon, they were getting glammed up in an artist trailer all their own, hours out from making their own Coachella debut.
“Coachella was something I could hardly dream of coming to, even as a spectator,” said Huh Yunjin, of the groundbreaking HYBE girl group. “We’ve watched performances like Blackpink and Billie Eilish online and were like, ‘It’d be so amazing to stand on a stage like this one day.’ ”
“It’s a very famous festival in Korea as well,” added Kim Chaewon, through a translator. “For a lot of artists there, it’s a dream opportunity.”
This year, that opportunity arrived for a whole new generation of Korean acts. After Blackpink’s fast ascent from newcomer to top-billed act, Coachella is already cultivating its next generation of K-pop and South Korean music more broadly. Genres always wax and wane at the fest, with classic rock and EDM giving way to rap and pop. But it looks like South Korean music is a new core element for the fest.
On Friday night the K-pop group Ateez — already an arena act in the U.S. — put on an explosive set to an audience where many were likely seeing them live for the first time. The eight-piece group’s core fandom could barely believe their luck to be able to see them so close.
“When I was training, I really looked forward to this kind of big festival,” said Ateez’s captain Kim Hongjoong, in full goth-glam regalia backstage just a couple hours before his band’s Sahara Tent set. “Coachella has a lot of iconic stages, and Korean fans really love to see Beyoncé, the Weeknd, and Blackpink perform here. I think our performance style really fits at this huge festival. I’ve waited a long time for this.”
The group left it all on the stage on Friday — singing, rapping and dancing with a ferocity and skill that showed the work they put in to get here. Who knows if they’ll get to headline one day, but now there’s proof it’s possible, and Ateez is leading a new class of Korean acts working toward it.
“We really love to perform for our fans, of course, but we’re also curious about how other audiences hear our music,” Hongjoong said. “Today’s a new experience that’s so important to us.”
For Kim Woosung, the singer of the Korean rock band the Rose, Coachella is close enough to a hometown show — he spent much of his childhood in the Valley here.
“I personally always loved Coachella,” Woosung said. “Performing here was always a goal for us, after our first international festival run we left so inspired by the vibe. It’s a dream to be here on stage just one year later.”
The Rose’s sound leans more toward the richly detailed, expansive rock of groups like U2 and the 1975 — singles like “Back to Me” and “You’re Beautiful” howl and soar on their own terms, and brought the group to the Forum in Inglewood last year. Woosung recently teamed up with BTS’ Suga and the late Ryuichi Sakamoto on the song “Snooze.” A magic-hour Sunday set on the Outdoor stage will be a showpiece for non-K-pop Korean music to resonate with new rocker crowds from Woosung’s old hometown.
“We are proud to represent Korea in listeners’ personal journeys in music,” said the band’s bassist Lee Jaehyeong. “We have so many artists from different lands and styles that we want to watch this year as fans again.”
The range of Korean music at Coachella spans even wider — the longtime Goldenvoice affiliates in 88 Rising have a Mojave Tent set, “Futures,” devoted to emerging pan-Asian talent that has often included Korean acts. South Korean DJ and producer Peggy Gou found her own success in underground club music, fully outside any Korean pop apparatus (she’s more of a late-night Berlin type). Her own set Friday in the Sahara was packed out after her single “(It Goes Like) Nanana” became a smash on TikTok. Gou’s become an in-demand fashion model, and with her debut LP, “I Hear You,” is en route to becoming one of house music’s big crossover success stories.
On Saturday night, Le Sserafim made a strong claim to its own long future at Coachella. Dressed in custom Nicolas Ghesquière leather, the group played heated Afro-Latin tracks like “Antifragile” and brought out Chic legend Nile Rodgers for their collaboration “Unforgiven” — a strong endorsement from a guy that previous Sahara Tent legends Daft Punk and Avicii have looked up to.
“We only met him in person for the first time yesterday,” Yunjin said (she grew up partly in New York and long admired his productions). “It was absolutely crazy to work with him. He taught us that when you collaborate, you never want to take away from that person. You always want to add. There are so many acts that came before us that we have so much gratitude for.”
The group’s music is unusually candid and bristling about the pressures for perfection young women face in K-pop — a sentiment many young fans relate to. The group formed in 2022, but to judge by the slammed Sahara Tent for the set, SoCal will be seeing much more of Le Sserafim soon.
“After this, we really want to go the beach in Santa Monica,” Yunjin said. “And we hear L.A. has a pretty great K-town.”
Movie Reviews
Miyamoto says he was surprised Mario Galaxy Movie reviews were even harsher than the first | VGC
Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto says he’s surprised at the negative critical reception to the Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
As reported by Famitsu, Miyamoto conducted a group interview with Japanese media to mark the local release of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
During the interview, Miyamoto was asked for his views on the critical reception to the film in the West, where critics’ reviews have been mostly negative.
Miyamoto replied that while he understood some of the negative points aimed at The Super Mario Bros Movie, he thought the reception would be better for the sequel.
“It’s true: the situation is indeed very similar,” he said. “Actually, regarding the previous film, I felt that the critics’ opinions did hold some validity. “However, I thought things would be different this time around—only to find that the criticism is even harsher than it was before.
“It really is quite baffling: here we are—having crossed over from a different field—working hard with the specific aim of helping to revitalize the film industry, yet the very people who ought to be championing that cause seem to be the ones taking a passive stance.”
As was the case with the first film, opinion is divided between critics and the public on The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. On review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, the film currently has a critics’ score of 43% , while its audience score is 89%.
While this is down from the first film’s scores (which were 59% critics and 95% public) it does still appear to imply that the film’s target audience is generally enjoying it despite critical negativity.
The negative reception is unlikely to bother Universal and Illumination too much, considering the film currently has a global box office of $752 million before even releasing in Japan, meaning a $1 billion global gross is becoming increasingly likely.
Elsewhere in the interview, Miyamoto said he hoped the film would perform well in Japan, especially because it has a unique script rather than a simple localization as in other regions.
“The Japanese version is a bit unique,” he said. “Normally, we create an English version and then localize it for each country, but for the first film, we developed the English and Japanese scripts simultaneously. For this film, we didn’t simply localize the completed English version – instead, we rewrote it entirely in Japanese to create a special Japanese version.
“So, if this doesn’t become a hit in Japan, I feel a sense of pressure – as the person in charge of the Japanese version – to not let [Illumination CEO and film co-producer] Chris [Meledandri] down.
“However, judging by the reactions of the audience members who’ve seen it, I feel that Mario fans are really embracing it. I also believe we’ve created a film that people can enjoy even if they haven’t seen the previous one, so I’m hopeful about that as well.”
Book Review
Dear Monica Lewinsky
By Julia Langbein
Doubleday: 320 pages, $30
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First loves can be beautiful or traumatic, sometimes both. They are almost always intense, with emotions on speed dial and hormones running amok. Nothing like the durable consolations of late-life romance, but headier, more exciting and, in the worst cases, far more damaging.
Even decades later, Jean Dornan, the protagonist of Julia Langbein’s smart, poignant and involving novel “Dear Monica Lewinsky,” can’t recollect her own first love in tranquility. Its after-effects have derailed her life, and an unexpected email invitation to attend a retirement party in France honoring her former lover sends her into a tailspin.
An agitated Jean finds herself praying to none other than Monica Lewinsky, the patron saint of bad romantic choices, or as Langbein puts it, “of those who suffer venal public shaming and patriarchal cruelty.” In Langbein’s comic, but also deadly serious, imagination, this is no mere metaphor. The martyred Monica has literally been transfigured into a saint. And why not? Surely, she has suffered enough to qualify.
Jean and Monica have in common a disastrous liaison with an attractive, powerful, married older man. Monica was humiliated, reviled, then merely defined by her missteps. Meanwhile, her arguably more culpable sexual partner survived impeachment, retained both his political popularity and his marriage and enjoyed a lucrative post-presidency.
Jean’s brief fling during the summer of 1998 coincided with the public airing of Monica’s doomed romance. Jean’s passion took a more private toll, but she still lives with what Monica calls “this deepening suspicion that your existence is a remnant of an event long since concluded.”
Though framed by a fantastical conceit, “Dear Monica Lewinsky” is at its core a realist novel, influenced by the feminism of #MeToo and precise in its delineation of character and place. Langbein’s Monica — having finally transcended her past and ascended to spiritual omniscience — becomes Jean’s interlocutor. Together, they relive the fateful weeks that Jean spent studying the Romanesque churches of medieval France and charming David Harwell, the Rutgers University medieval art professor co-leading the summer program.
Every now and again, Monica, as much savvy therapist as all-knowing seer, interrupts Jean’s first-person account to offer guidance. Threaded through the narrative, as contrast and commentary, is a martyrology of female saints. These colloquially rendered portraits, reflecting a punitive, patriarchal morality, describe girls and women who would rather endure torture or even death than sully their sexual purity — stories so extreme that they seem satirical.
The portraits play off the novel’s milieu: a series of churches, as well as the medieval French castle that is home to an eccentric and mostly absent prince. The utility of religious doctrine and practice is another of the book’s themes. One graduate student, Patrick, is a devoted Roman Catholic, unquestioning in his faith. Others are merely devout enthusiasts of medieval architecture. Judith, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, has an addiction of her own: an eating disorder that threatens to disable her.
A rising junior at Rutgers, Jean is one of just two undergraduates in the program. Her initial dull, daunting task involves measuring and otherwise assessing the churches’ “apertures” — windows and doors. Later, she is assigned to collaborate on a guidebook and write a term paper.
A language major unversed in art, architecture or medieval history, Jean feels overwhelmed at times. But she does have useful talents: fluent French and the ability to conjure delicious Sunday dinners for her bedazzled colleagues. (The author of the 2023 novel “American Mermaid,” Langbein has both a doctorate in art history and a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for food writing, and her expertise in both fields is evident.)
As the summer wanes, Jean’s fixation on David grows. Langbein excels at depicting the obsessive nature of illicit, unfulfilled desire — how it swamps judgment and just about everything else. A quarter-century Jean’s senior, David is trying to finish a stalled book project, laboring in the shadow of his more prolific and successful wife, Ann. An expert on the erotically charged religious life of nuns and the art it produced, she shows up briefly in the story and then conveniently disappears.
David is smooth, seductive and, to 19-year-old Jean, far more appealing than the fumbling schoolboys she has known. But he turns out to be no more grown-up or emotionally mature. After the flirtation and its consummation, David beats a hasty (and unsurprising) retreat. Then he does something worse: He allows his guilt to shred his integrity.
In the aftermath of that summer, a wounded Jean stumbles through her last two years of college, “berserk, unfocused, humiliating.” She abandons her academic and career ambitions, takes a job as a court interpreter, and marries Michael, an affable nurse who has little idea of her emotional burdens.
Then that invitation, inspiring “a racy heat,” arrives, and Jean must decide whether to confront her past or keep running from it. Is there really much of a choice? Fortunately, she has the saintly Monica as her guide. More clear-eyed now, Jean must reject her martyrdom and reclaim her own truth and agency. If she does, David, at least in the realm of the imagination, may finally get his comeuppance.
Klein, a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.
The sixth outing in the director’s chair for filmmaker Kirk Jones, I Swear dramatizes the real-life story of touretter John Davidson (played by Robert Aramayo). Tourette’s Syndrome, for those unfamiliar with the condition, is a nervous system disorder that causes various tics, the most prolific being erratic and explicit language. However, as I Swear expertly showcases, the syndrome is far more than ill-timed outbursts of curse words. Davidson’s story is one of societal frustration, finding your people (both with and without the condition), and using your voice to help others rise. The subject and subject matter are handled with absolute care and understanding under Kirk’s measured vision and Robert Aramayo’s BAFTA-winning performance.
The film kicks off with the greatest exclamation to democracy ever uttered (*%#! the Queen!), as a nervous John Davidson prepares himself before entering an awards ceremony hosted by Britain’s royal family. Right away, the film tells us what it is: a triumph over adversity that blends humor and human drama with education. It’s an important setup, as the film flashes back to Davidson’s 1980s youth, where we see his time as a star soccer recruit flatline as his condition takes hold. Davidson’s life spirals from there. Some aspects, like school bullying and accidental run-ins with authority figures, are expected but important to empathizing with young Davidson’s (young version, played with heart by Scott Ellis Watson) new everyday life. The more tragic, a complete meltdown of his family system, is unsettling if quick. His father (Steven Cree) is never given enough screen time to explore his alcohol coping tendencies. However, his mother Heather’s descent into easy fixes and blaming is crushing and convincing. Harry Potter series actress Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle) gives a layered performance as Heather. Someone who loves her son, but also feels cursed by him as the entire family exits the picture. It’s bitter, she’s tired, and fills each conversation with ‘only medication and your mother can save you’ energy.
From there, the viewer and Davidson find refuge in a host of characters. Maxine Peake plays Dottie, the mother of a childhood friend and a retired mental health nurse. Screen vet Peter Mullan plays maintenance man Tommy Trotter. Together, they help Davidson build a life and an understanding of himself that carries the film forward into its second half. After that, the film is primarily a 3-actor show as director Kirk fills the screen with these tour-de-force performances. Peake and Mullan are great vessels to get the film’s main message across: patience, love, and a shared responsibility between the diagnosed and those who understand their struggle can help change the path for people quickly left behind by a normative world. Together, they are the soul of the movie, with the filmmakers clearly hoping the audience will follow their lead after they exit the theater (in my case, the beautiful Oriental Theater for the Milwaukee Film Festival). Both performances are perfectly warm and reflective and shouldn’t be left out in discussions of I Swear.
I say this because the movie is anchored by The Rings of Power actor Robert Aramayo, who leaves Elrond’s elf ears behind to bring an acute naturalism to his performance of main character John Davidson. Aramayo’s physicality and timing of the fitful Tourettes Syndrome never feel out of place or overplayed. In fact, the movie as a whole does an amazing job of never veering into sentimentality. While many moviegoers left with tissues dabbing their eyes, the filmmaking never felt like it was forcing that reaction out of audiences. It straddles the line between feel-good and reality with every story beat and lands squarely on the side of letting the real inform our feelings. Anyone with an ounce of empathy will grasp the film’s message and hopefully take it with them into life.
I Swear continues at the Milwaukee Film Festival on Tuesday, April 21st, and releases nationwide April 24th, 2026, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
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