Paper Girls, on Prime

Remember how great the future looked in 1988? The music and movies were consistently fun and George H.W. Bush was poised to be elected president in a veritable landslide. So, how did the 2010s and 2020s turn out so badly? Maybe four newspaper deliverers will find out. They are about to be swept into a time-war in Stephany Folsom’s 8-episode Paper Girls, based on Brian K. Vaughan’s comics, which premieres today on Prime Video.

It is the morning after Halloween (but not for long), when many of the drunken teenaged troublemakers are still roaming the streets. Erin Tieng picked a heck of a first day to start her paper route. Tiffany Quilkin, a savvier paper girl helps show her the ropes. Soon, they meet up with tough-talking Mac Coyle and preppy-ish KJ Brandman, forming a temporary alliance to finish their deliveries together. However, the drunken bullies are not the only ones prowling around their suburban Cleveland neighborhood.

Fatefully, the four girls are caught up in a skirmish between future time-traveling revolutionaries, the STF (Standard Time Fighters), who want to prevent all the bad things from happening, and the “Old Watch,” the reactionaries fighting to protect their privileged positions (and maybe the integrity of the whole space-time continuum dealio). Disoriented after traveling through a worm-hole, the girls decide to hide out at Tieng’s home. They find she is still living there, but she did not turn out how the twelve-year-old would have hoped. As they navigate the future, other girls learn revelations about themselves from family members and in some cases, their future selves.

Folsom’s adaptation of Vaughan’s comics features some pretty intriguing time-travel twists. It is somewhat unusual to hear the old arguments against altering history so casually dismissed, but let’s be honest. The truth is the real, old-school Doctor Who would probably agree with the Old Watch. Nevertheless, the 1980s nostalgia always works and despite some themes of sexuality (brought on by observations of the girls future’s selves), Paper Girls is not annoyingly woke. In fact, the way Ronald Reagan acts as a sort of spirit guide for Tieng is kind of clever.

The battery of four directors (all veterans of episodic drama) keep action rolling along at a brisk pace. The generally shorter episode length (mostly around forty minutes) makes Paper Girls highly bingeable. However, it might be a mistake to end the first season without a greater sense of resolution. After all, it could suffer the same fate as Prime’s cancelled Night Sky (which is also a pretty good show, but we’ll never know its ultimate secrets).

Sundance ’15: Seoul Searching

Suppose they threw a cultural camp and a 1980s teen comedy broke out instead. Evidently, it happened quite regularly. Not so surprisingly, the sponsoring Korean government was not too amused—hence the program for children of the Korean diaspora was eventually discontinued. However, the camp will have one big horny, heartfelt last hurrah in Benson Lee’s Seoul Searching (trailer here), which screens during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

Prepare to get your eighties on. They are the children of Korean immigrants in America, Germany, England, and Mexico, who have assimilated more completely than their parents. In many cases, they do not even speak Korean. They have been packed off to reconnect with their Korean heritage, but they are really just there to party. Grace Park, the New Jersey pastor’s daughter, has modeled her style on Madonna. Sid Park has adopted Sid Vicious as his idol. These two might be perfect for each other, but it will take them a while to overcome a really rough start.

S. Park will bunk with Sergio, the aspiring Latin lover, and the ever so German Klaus Lee. The latter is decidedly reserved, but he will come out of his shell a little when he helps American adoptee Kris Schultz track down her biological mother. Meanwhile, military academy cadet Mike Lee wages an open war with three kids who want to be the next Run DMC. Yet, the stern Mr. Kim only seems to want to bust Sid Park’s chops.

Searching is based on writer-director Lee’s fondly remembered 1980s summer at Korea’s cultural summer camp—and you can really feel the nostalgia. Honestly, if all the Clash, Go-Gos, Erasure, and Violent Femmes tunes do not bring the decade flooding back for you, you just weren’t around back then. In terms of tone, it is four parts John Hughes and one part American Pie, but the underlying themes of generational culture clashes and the need for roots gives it greater bittersweet substance.

The entire cast is ridiculously charismatic, even when selling the grossest make-out session ever and plenty of manipulative melodrama involving Schultz and her birth-mother. Frankly, it seems like Justin Chon and Jessika Van are way due to breakout as major stars (he was terrific in the short film Jin, but might be better known for the Twilight franchise, while she made a strong impression in indie fare like Bang, Bang). They really have great chemistry in their punked out, material girl Moonlighting-esque sequences. However, Korean actress Byul Kang sort of steals the third act out from under everyone as the taekwondo tomboy Sue-jin.

Even if you weren’t at the Korean government sponsored summer camps, Lee and his cast will make you fondly remember something from your teen years. He juggles at least a dozen well defined characters and two or three times as many mood shifts. Yet, he holds the overstuffed film together and makes it work quite well. Slightly naughty but wholly endearing, Seoul Searching is recommended rather highly for all kids of the 1980s when it screens again next Saturday (1/31) in Park City and Sunday (2/1) in Salt Lake, as part of this year’s Sundance.