In a show that boasts appearances by the likes of Emma Stone, Bowen Yang, Amy Sedaris and Aidy Bryant, Julio Torres’ “Fantasmas” may well make a TV star out of someone who aptly goes by a single name: Martine.
“This is the biggest role I’ve ever had,” Martine, a trans visual and performance artist, says via Zoom. “I’m officially the star of a television show. And it might also be my favorite TV show.”
For anyone who’s watched “Fantasmas,” that endorsement should double as insight into Martine’s own aesthetic and artistic sensibility. Because “Fantasmas” isn’t like any other television show out there.
The six-part urban fairy tale, which premiered June 7 on HBO and drops episodes weekly on Fridays through July 12, imagines a New York City where ExxonMobil builds developments and rideshare apps called Chester — with a driver named Chester — exist alongside mermaid sales reps and rodent nightclubs-turned-CVS pharmacies.
Within that fantastical vision of New York, Torres’ Julio (who was hit by lightning as a child and is allergic to the color yellow) is constantly trying to eke out a living with the help of his robot assistant, Bibo (voiced by Joe Rumrill), and his agent, Vanesja (the “j” is silent), played by Martine.
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“The show itself is kind of postgenre,” Martine suggests. “It’s very much a genre-building show. It’s hard to explain what you should expect to see.”
Every set piece in “Fantasmas” — whether it’s a sitcom called “MELF ” that riffs on “ALF ” and features Paul Dano, or a vignette focused on a zealous customer service rep played by “Euphoria’s” Alexa Demie — lays bare its crafted theatricality. It’s always clear that audiences are watching something shot on a set, with painted backdrops and makeshift props. This is a fanciful world that never pretends to be anything more than an absurd and absurdist take on everyday life.
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1.Paul Dano, right, is featured in a skit about an “ALF”-like puppet named MELF.(Atsushi Nishijima/HBO)2.Alexa Demie plays an overzealous customer service rep.(Monica Lek/HBO)
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“It felt like theater,” Martine says of working on the show. “It felt like being onstage with an audience. Everything was built inside this one giant soundstage and it was all repurposed: The school becomes the nightclub, the nightclub becomes a rooftop. And the audience was everyone on set.”
Within this funhouse mirror of a show, which blends sketch comedy with a farcical plot that finds Julio wanting to avoid getting an ID that would serve as his “proof of existence,” Martine was similarly encouraged to play with her own identity — as a performer, artist and actor.
“I don’t recognize myself in the show,” she says. “Because it’s Vanesja. And I think Vanesja happened because I was so nervous about my performance. The only way for me to move ahead was to say, ‘You don’t have to be yourself. You can put forward some kind of armor, some kind of stronger, idealized person you want to move through the world as.’”
For Martine, the very idea of being “yourself” is elusive. Questioning the rigidity of our sense of self has long been at the heart of her art, which has been featured in galleries and art museums all over the country — not to mention at the Venice Biennale — and in magazines like Interview and Artforum.
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“Who am I?” she wonders aloud. “I think I’m constantly trying to shed that definition. I think I’m constantly throwing it away, discarding the old skin, shedding it, as it were, to move into some wider, broader, stronger, faster model. Or predator or something.”
Such facetious language, which moves from the probing to the preposterous with ease and humor, is arguably why she gets along with Torres. Martine first met the Salvadoran comedian close to a decade ago at an archery championship. “It’s truly an unbelievable story,” she recalls. “Julio was there at the buffet. He’s vegan, and I was kind of pretending to be vegan at the same time.”
They both reached for the last tater tot, and at the moment when their fingers touched and their eyes met, Martine knew she’d found a new friend. Maybe even more. “This is your sister wife,” she remembers thinking. “This is your kindred spirit, and you’re both starving … to be seen.”
What Torres most remembers about his first encounter with Martine was something equally ineffable. “Her ability to subvert her own physicality, to find humor in beauty,” he recalls via email.
Their friendship blossomed in between archery practices and congenial DMs as their careers bloomed in separate if complementary directions. While Torres joined the “Saturday Night Live” writing staff and later premiered his own comedy special (“My Favorite Shapes”), Martine was busy creating art installations that satirized advertising campaigns (Martine Jeans), a publication that similarly critiques glossy high-fashion magazines (Indigenous Woman) and sci-fi-set live performances (“Circle”) that toyed with ideas around gender, femininity and self-expression in equally cheeky and wryly self-serious ways.
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Their earlier collaborations — Martine previously played an unimpressed gallerist in Torres’ feature film debut, “Problemista,” and an impaled beauty queen in his Peabody award-winning show “Los Espookys” — feel like playful preambles to their work together on “Fantasmas.” Vanesja is, after all, a performance artist who’s been playing Julio’s talent agent for so long, she’s lost track of whether it’s still a performance.
“Without Martine, there is no Vanesja,” Torres says. “That’s how I work sometimes, in collaboration with a performer to create something tailor-made for them. She first planted the seeds of Vanesja when leaving me cryptic voicemails. Something about closing a big deal and not being able to discuss it. We welcomed each other into our worlds.”
In the surreal world that is “Fantasmas,” Vanesja is a reminder of how we ourselves can often be indistinguishable from the makeshift roles we play.
“I think a lot of the show’s motifs exist in my work too,” Martine says. “I love mannequins. I love asking a lot of questions broadly about identity and using costumes and using personas to try and get to some deeper truth. And it was so refreshing to lean into that with comedy because the art world is so unbearably serious.”
“I love mannequins. I love asking a lot of questions broadly about identity and using costumes and using personas to try and get to some deeper truth,” Martine says.
(Monica Lek / HBO)
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With Vanesja, you see Martine reveling in that comedy. With her droll sense of humor intact and Vanesja’s aesthetic aching to be described as “business executive realness,” she’s constructed a dry-witted performance of an artist-cum-agent whose indifference to the world around her is bewitching. There’s her voice, for starters, which is sultry and breathy, marked by a glacial pace that makes Julio and audiences alike become engrossed by her every word. She almost feels plucked from the late 1990s, when the blazers and pencil skirts Vanesja wears were synonymous with a feminine, if not outright feminist, brand of seriousness.
“Vanesja is classically binary,” Martine says. “She has both the charm of a woman and all the strength of a man.”
In working within such a gendered binary, I bluntly ask how she was able to create this entrancing character who seems aloof yet interested, cold yet warmhearted. How did she do it?
“How does she Vanesja?” she asks herself, in between laughter, wanting to clarify my question — knowing, perhaps, that she’s arrived at a key philosophical way of understanding her process and her character alike. “I Vanesja every day. I try to Vanesja at least once a day, just for flexibility and my health, my mental health.”
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For Martine, getting a chance to create Vanesja alongside Torres was a joy because it allowed her to unearth parts of herself and her work that exist at the surface yet get at deep-seated ideas about who we are and how we present ourselves. At a purely visual level, though, she had a very simple reference in mind.
“I’m obsessed with Ursula from ‘The Little Mermaid’ when she becomes a cis woman,” she says. “Her name is Vanessa, and I do feel like there is a resemblance between that Vanessa and myself, just like out of drag. This was me trying to implement a villainous persona that I personally feel lives inside me.”
That hint of Disney wasn’t the only personal touch Martine brought to “Fantasmas.” She is to thank for what has already become one of the most talked-about images teased from the show, and seen in Friday’s episode: her scene partner, “Teen Wolf” star Dylan O’Brien, wearing red lacy undergarments, with garters and stockings to match.
Dylan O’Brien and Martine in “Fantasmas.”
(Monica Lek / HBO)
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“That was probably my one contribution, narratively, to the show,” she admits. “It’s a personal taste thing. I think it’s really sexy to see a man in women’s lingerie. Dylan had no problems with it. He was so down. And he looked great.”
Such an incongruous image (in a scene that’s quite melancholy, not really all that steamy, in fact) doesn’t feel out of place in “Fantasmas.” The show, like Vanesja, embraces binaries only to bridge them. Or break them. Or perhaps just toy with them. But it can do so only because the series is fascinated by the personal dramas we all carry within. There’s a push toward empathy for the other that runs through the show, even in its most outlandish moments.
“‘Fantasmas’ is the people who populate it,” as Torres puts it. It’s a show “about characters who, with little screen time, aim to capture the curiosity of the viewers.”
Further echoing those words and in trying to sum up this off-kilter show’s ambitions, Martine is reminded of Jon Brion’s song “Little Person,” which he co-wrote with Charlie Kaufman for the filmmaker’s meta-theatrical opus “Synecdoche, New York.”
That 2008 film is centered on a theater director eager to celebrate the mundanity of real experiences. The only way he knows how is to put on a stage show of his own life and that of everyone he comes into contact with. “I’m just a little person,” Martine sings. “One person in a sea of many little people, who are not aware of me.”
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“I feel like that’s everyone in New York,” she says. “And also everyone in ‘Fantasmas.’ You get this everything, everywhere all at once TikTok universe where every story is simultaneous. Where everyone is the lead in their own narrative. Which is kind of the closest thing to reality that you can get.”
In cinema logic, sharks, especially great whites, make excellent characters in animation. From Bruce in Finding Nemo to Mr Shark, the master of disguise in The Bad Guys, these apex predators turn their great gummy mouths with many pointy teeth into jolly good fellows.
In Hoppers, the 30th animation film from Pixar, there is a great white called Diane (Vanessa Bayer), who, despite being a scary assassin, has such sweet, shining eyes and a warm smile that one cannot help but grinning back.
Hoppers (English)
Director: Daniel Chong
Voice cast: Piper Curda, Bobby Moynihan, Jon Hamm, Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco
Storyline: A fierce animal lover uses a new technology to converse with animals and save their habitat from greedy, self-serving humans
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Runtime: 104 minutes
We first meet Mabel (Piper Curda) as a little girl trying to set all the animals in school free and being sent home for her pains (and also because she bites one of the teachers trying to stop her). Her busy mother drops Mabel with her grandmother (Karen Huie) who shows her the peace and quiet that can be hers if she only stops to listen.
The glade where grandmother Tanaka teaches her this valuable life lesson becomes a special place for Mabel. Years later, after her grandmother has passed, 19-year-old Mabel is a college student and still fighting for animal rights.
Matters come to a head when the mayor of Beaverton, Jerry Generazzo (Jon Hamm) plans to blow up the glade to build a freeway. Mabel tries to get signatures from the citizenry to stop the freeway plans, but that comes to naught as people quickly turn away from the zealous Mabel.
Frustrated, with no recourse in sight, Mabel chances upon a beaver making its way to her university’s biology lab. First worried that her biology professor Sam (Kathy Najimy) is doing some unspeakable animal experiments, Mabel is nonplussed to find that Sam, with her colleague Nisha (Aparna Nancherla) and graduate student Conner (Sam Richardson), have developed a revolutionary technology to transfer human consciousness to robot animal.
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Mabel uploads her consciousness into a robot beaver and sets off to thwart the mayor. Seeing the world from the animals’ perspective gives Mabel a unique point of view. Hoppers has jokes, chases, largeness of heart and solid science — not consciousness-switching with robot animals or flying shark assassins but the fact that beavers are the environmental engineers of the natural world.
The voice cast is wonderful, from Bobby Moynihan as the beaver king, George to Dave Franco as Titus, the prickly butterfly who becomes the insect king after Mabel accidentally kills his mum — the Insect Queen, played with terrifying grandeur by Meryl Streep.
The animals are delightfully delineated, from the spaced-out beaver, Loaf (Eduardo Franco) to Ellen (Melissa Villaseñor) the grumpy bear. The animation is lovely, with each of the animal and human characteristics clearly outlined. From the mayor’s grasping to Sam’s brilliance, Mabel’s fervour to Loaf’s stillness, and the different animal monarchs’ regality, it is all given marvellous life.
ALSO READ: ‘The Bride!’ movie review: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s glam-goth Frankenstein can’t hold its stitches
The “pond rules” ensure that the animals are not completely anthropomorphised — a sticky point in animation films where carnivores and herbivores hang together without even a sneaky licking of lips!
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Smart, funny, exciting, honest, and touching, Hoppers is the kind of film you can watch with the bachcha party and elders alike, with a happy grin. And then there is Diane of the red, red lips and sparkly white rotating teeth — yes, Hoppers boasts that level of detailing.
A moment of silence for all the comedians, late-night-show writers, political satirists, memers, animators and random influencers who just lost a wealth of inspiration.
Kristi Noem, Homeland Security secretary, was fired Thursday by President Trump, ending the 13-month tenure of a political figure whose bravado, cruelty, incompetence and commando cosplay inspired more wickedly funny material than Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin and Sean Spicer combined.
Social media’s so-called ICE Barbie, the first Cabinet secretary to leave the Trump administration during the president’s second term, was a font of material for “South Park,” “SNL,” late night and thousands more sketch artists, impersonators, musicians and everyday trash posters. She never disappointed, unless you were looking to her for feasible, humane immigration policy enforcement.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
(Julia Demaree Nikhinson / Associated Press)
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Drama and spectacle marked her brief career, from posing in front of a packed holding cell at El Salvador’s maximum security prison CECOT, where the DHS had shipped and detained deportees, to casting herself as an agent of action in multiple ICE raid videos. Donning a big gun and long, flowing locks of hair, she insinuated herself into operations, vamping for the camera in a bulletproof vest while masked agents rounded up fellow humans like cattle.
Grim, to be sure, but at least she contributed a shred of comic relief (unintended, of course) to our new, sad reality of federal agents invading American cities and abducting people off the streets, out of their cars and from their homes.
“South Park” skewered Noem in unprintable ways. “SNL” brought back Tina Fey to play Noem. Dressed in a lavender pantsuit, too much makeup and brandishing a massive firearm, she introduced herself as “the rarest type of person in Washington, D.C.: a brunette that Donald Trump listens to.”
The endless stream of memes across social media date back to 2024, when in her memoir Noem recalled shooting and killing her 14‑month‑old dog, a wirehaired pointer named Cricket, after deciding the dog was “untrainable.” Gov. Gavin Newsom later trolled the DHS and Noem with a meme captioned “Kristi Noem’s Dog Obedience School: She’ll Treat Them As Good As She Treats Brown People.” The mock ad featured a smiling woman holding a gun and kneeling beside a dog.
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If it seems cruel, consider that the DHS posted holiday-themed deportation memes around Christmas, proclaiming that federal agents were stepping up removals “for the holidays,” with a “holiday deal” offering a free flight and $1,000 to those who self-deport. One X post featured an AI-generated image of federal agents in Santa hats with the caption, “YOU’RE GOING HO HO HOME.”
Noem’s dismissal comes on the heels of two congressional hearings this week where she was questioned about her response to the ICE killings of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis (she incorrectly called Good a domestic terrorist and claimed Pretti was involved in an act of domestic terrorism). She was grilled about the department spending $172 million for the purchase of two jets, the nature of her relationship with top DHS adviser Corey Lewandowski, and her $220-million DHS ad campaign starring none other than Kristi Noem. She testified in the hearings that Trump approved the ads. He said he knew nothing about them.
Her firing triggered an immediate rush of snarky content across social media, and a sharp a comment or two from prominent politicians. “Shouldn’t let the door hit her on the way out,” said Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker.
But all is not lost for those needing a laugh at Noem’s expense, or at the expense of the DHS, for that matter. The president said Thursday that Noem would take on a new, freshly invented role: Envoy for The Shield of the Americas. He described the position as one that will lead “our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere.” The job title and description already sound like the basis for a villainous political satire, without even trying.
And for the new guy taking the post? He’s Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), a former MMA fighter. Let the memes begin …
The satirical romp Josie and the Pussycats (2001) is a fun movie. But is it a great rock ‘n’ roll movie? Eh, not so fast on that second one. Welcome back to Glide’s quest for what makes a good rock ‘n’ roll movie. Last month, we looked at Almost Famous, a great launching pad because it gets so much right. And every first Friday, we’ll take another look at a rock ‘n’ movie and ask what it means in the larger pantheon. This month, the Glide’s screening room brings you Josie and the Pussycahttps://glidemagazine.com/322100/almost-perfect-why-almost-famous-sets-the-gold-standard-for-rock-movies/ts. The film is a live-action take on the classic comic-and-cartoon property of a sugary, all-girl rock trio that exists in the world of Riverdale, a.k.a. fictional home of the iconic Archie Andrews.
But this Josie has next to nothing to do with Riverdale and is instead a satire of consumerism and ’00s boy bands. A worthy target, and a topic that has stayed worthy in the quarter-century since Josie dropped. The film was not a hit, but it has become something of a cult classic (like many movies featured in this series).
The plot is fairly simple. Wyatt Frame, an evil corporate type, is making piles of money off boy band Du Jour. They start to wise up to his evil scheme and have to be… taken care of. Frame needs a new group to front his plot, which revolves around mind control to push consumer culture. Enter Josie and the Pussycats, who are about to have a whirlwind ride to the top. And along the way, foil a plot with tentacles so far-reaching they have ensnared… Carson Daly?
Josie is a fun, clever movie, but it doesn’t have a whole lot to say about real rock ‘n’ roll, unless you want to simply accept a perspective that it’s just another cynical consumer-driven product. Even that is an argument that can be made, as long as you’re willing to ignore underground and indie scenes and passionate artists making amazing music.
And it is true that this is a theme of Josie. The band triumphs at the end via their authentic music. But it somehow doesn’t feel authentic, which makes it something of a hollow victory. Let’s consider the criteria already established for a good rock ‘n’ roll movie, and how Josie delivers on that front. The first is in the characters department. The film dodges the previously established Buckethead Paradox, which states that “The real-life rock stars are so much larger than life that you can’t make up credible fictional versions. There is no way someone like Buckethead would come out of a writer’s room and make it to a screen.”
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For better or worse, Josie dodges the Paradox by essentially embracing it. The characters themselves are cartoons, and there’s no effort at realism. Given that intent is a huge part of art, it seems unfair to call these characters “cartoons” as a criticism, and it should probably be a compliment. At the same time, they aren’t particularly memorable, which is not a great quality.
And—as a bonus—Tara Reid is perfectly cast as drummer Melody Valentine. Josie was a few years after her turn in Around the Fire (1998), an unintentionally hilarious classic that plays like a jam band afterschool special from the producers of Reefer Madness (look for this amazing film in an upcoming piece). The acting in general is good, with Rachel Leigh Cook as Josie McCoy and Rosario Dawson as bassist Valerie Brown rounding out the band. And Alan Cumming almost steals the show as sleazy corporate weasel Wyatt Frame.
The character of Wyatt is the film’s funniest riff on a rock ‘n’ roll archetype: the sleazy, corporate manager accompanied by assorted crooked accountants. From Colonel Tom Parker to Albert Grossman to The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle. It’s all about the benjamins. Which is where the music comes in. If the music is good, that’s what makes it worth it. And Josie’s music has aged particularly well. It’s well-recorded, produced and executed. The songs are particularly catchy. The vocals are by Kay Hanley of Letters to Cleo. Much of the soundtrack sounds like a lost album from The Muffs, and one wonders why Kim Shattuck wasn’t involved.
There’s an argument that power pop was never supposed to be dangerous, and that the Muffs aren’t dangerous either. Fair on the surface, but they played real punk clubs and came from a real scene. There’s not even a hint of that in Josie. So an argument that they play pop punk (which they kinda do) is really lacking the punk part. And it was produced by Babyface, of all people. While that doesn’t seem like it should lead to great rock ‘n’ roll, sometimes preconceptions are wrong.
That said, this is a very commercial product and sound—as catchy as it is—so maybe it’s not a misconception. Maybe the right question to ask is whether it’s all too perfect? And that’s what gives this ostensibly rock ‘n’ film a smoothed-down edge? After all, the basic ingredients are there. But part of what makes good rock good is that it feels actually dangerous. Maybe there are some actual subversive messages, or a genuine counterculture scene. And Josie simply isn’t that film. The soundtrack is fondly remembered enough that Hanley appeared live and performed the songs at a screening in 2017. That appearance also included the film’s stars Cook, Dawson and Reid.
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It’s worth noting that while Cook and company obviously lip sync to the songs in the film, their performances are credible. They went through instrument boot camp, so they pull off the parts.
In the end, the film is primarily a satire of consumer culture. And even more strangely, is loaded with actual product placement. Clearly, the joke was intended to “hit harder” with real products, but having Target in the film constantly makes it feel like more of what it is parodying than a parody. Where’s the joke if the viewer actually pushes to shop at Target while watching the film? And if the filmmakers actually took money (which they almost certainly did)?
And perhaps that is the lesson for this month: a great rock ‘n’ roll movie needs to have something to say about the larger meaning or culture of the music. And while Josie may have a lot to say about culture in general, and it may say it in a fun and likeable way, it’s just not very rock ‘n’ roll. There’s no grit. Now, does it have some things to say about being in a band? Yes, though they are arguably true of most collaborations.
If someone in a hundred years wanted to understand early 21st century rock, Josie and the Pussycats is a bad choice. It doesn’t show the sweat of a performance or the smell of beer. But it’s a great choice for anyone looking for a light-hearted, fun watch with a great soundtrack. We could all use some sugar in our lives these days. Join us again next month, when we’ll look at one of the inspirations for Josie, A Hard Day’s Night, the legendary first film from The Beatles
