Justin Chang
speaker
1,638 appearances
51 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 2d ago
Justin Chang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 28 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 6.
Appearances
In the days that follow, as the wedding countdown accelerates, Charlie finds himself wondering how well he truly knows the woman he's marrying.
The problem with the drama is that it doesn't quite seem to know what to make of Emma either, even as it tries to account for how she could have come so close to doing what she didn't ultimately do.
We see flashbacks featuring another actor, Jordan Curit, as a 15-year-old Emma, who experiences her share of depression and loneliness.
But these scenes, which could be a mix of Emma's unreliable memories and Charlie's even less reliable hallucinations, feel like paint-by-numbers psychoanalysis.
And although Zendaya's performance is skillful and empathetic, it's hard to connect her Emma to the younger version of the character.
The movie's premise seldom feels like more than just a premise.
I didn't believe that Emma could be capable, or even almost capable, of the horrific act in question.
Borgli previously made the 2023 film Dream Scenario, which starred Nicolas Cage as a nebbishy university professor who inexplicably began haunting the dreams of those around him.
Like the drama, it was a darkly amusing yet conceptually half-baked comedy about the power of suggestion and the ease of villainizing someone for something they didn't actually do.
You could say both of these movies are loosely about cancel culture, something of which Borgli may have some first-hand knowledge.
In 2012, he wrote an essay for a Norwegian magazine about his relationship with a teenage girl who was ten years his junior, in which he sought to grapple with a long-standing taboo and defend his actions.
That essay recently resurfaced online before the rollout of the drama, unsurprisingly stirring fresh waves of outrage.
Is humanity capable of authentic change or redemption?
In a way, Borgli sidesteps that question.
His great skill is for wringing tension, dread, and squirm-inducing comedy from ugly situations.
And the drama is most successful not as a character study or a moral inquiry, but as a wedding stress movie.
It's about the horrors of having to worry about DJs, photographers, and florists when you're not even sure you're going to have a marriage at the end of the day.
In a way, Borgli is trying to skewer the empty flash and pump of certain social rituals, which serve only to keep us from really talking about the things that actually matter.
He ends the movie on a faintly hopeful note that Charlie and Emma will ultimately move past this crisis.
though he doesn't rule out the possibility that they might look back at their marriage and see it as the actual worst thing they've ever done.
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