Martin Cid's Blog: Martin Cid Magazine, page 7

Mags Returns With ‘Herified’: A Focused Pop Statement on Fascination, Visibility, and “Big Love”

Copenhagen pop artist mags (Margrethe Tang) issues Herified, an eight-track album that frames desire, self-recognition, and queer visibility within a lucid electronic pop language. Conceived as a life-affirming project about coming to love oneself and coming forward, the record treats personal narrative as the engine for direct, melodic songwriting.

The concept turns on a single word: “fascination.” Drawing an explicit line to Monet’s serial water-lily canvases, Herified returns to love from multiple vantage points—euphoric, heavy, messy, crystalline—without losing its stylistic through-line. The title literalizes action: taking the noun “her” and adding “-ified” to signal a shift from knowing to doing. In practice, that means translating feeling into movement, and intimacy into songs designed for immediacy.

Across eight songs, mags alternates diaristic verses with clean, hook-built choruses, moving between quirky electronic textures and widescreen balladry. The production favors clarity over clutter, leaving space for unguarded vocals that mirror the album’s perimeter themes: the exhilaration and fear that accompany desire when it is lived openly and named without euphemism.

The project is equally a statement about representation. Having grown up in the Danish countryside with few visible queer, female role models, mags positions Herified as a corrective to the pop canon she inherited. Centering queer, female-led narratives is not framed as provocation or plea but as normalcy: stories of women loving women belong in mainstream love songs, and their absence is a problem of visibility, not universality.

Lead single “blue” distills the record’s thesis into an uncomplicated celebration of falling in love. Where radio staples once defaulted to boy-meets-girl templates, “blue” writes a different default—one that names queer romance plainly and trusts its resonance. The track reads as both personal milestone and artistic manifesto: love is universal precisely because love has no gender, and pop’s task is to say so with precision and flair.

The album’s sequencing underscores that claim. Lithe, bubbling passages sit beside heavier, slower articulations, mapping an affective range that refuses to choose between the rush and the reckoning. What binds the set is intent: visibility as practice, not posture; craft as the means for witness; and fascination as the discipline that keeps a single subject—love—open to endless, concrete variation.

In a Nordic pop landscape known for craftsmanship and clarity, Herified reads as a compact, purposeful statement. It consolidates mags’ voice as one that privileges directness and color while expanding the field of who gets centered in pop’s most durable narrative. The result is an album that is at once personal and expansive, diaristic and public-minded, shaped by the conviction that self-knowledge gains force when set to melody.

Date: September 5, 2025.

Seattle’s Appaloosa Fire Off “Get It Together, Kid,” a Two-Minute Power-Pop Jolt

Seattle quartet Appaloosa compress urgency, melody, and shine into “Get It Together, Kid,” a brisk 2:06 dispatch that threads punk economy through classic power-pop architecture. The single arrives in an FCC-clean version and foregrounds the band’s core strengths: a front-and-center vocal line, guitar parts that bite and shimmer, and a rhythm section that keeps everything taut without sacrificing swing.

Formed when singer-guitarist Erica Rose returned to the Pacific Northwest after six years in New York’s punk and indie circuits, the group—Rose with Leif Anders (lead guitar), Kevin Voss (bass), and Ian Sides (drums)—writes with a reporter’s eye for detail and an arranger’s ear for compression. Earlier recordings circulated widely in underground channels, but the new track refines their aesthetic: concise verses, a pre-chorus that ratchets tension, and a hook that lands hard on first listen.

APPALOOSA. Get It Together, Kid

“Get It Together, Kid” began life as a five-minute ballad before being re-engineered into a sprint, and that origin story lingers in the DNA: beneath the tempo, there’s ballad logic—stanza, refrain, release—condensed for maximum impact. Lyrically, the song interrogates the mood of functional adulthood: the way obligations pile up, ambition speeds ahead, and care becomes both anchor and accelerant. The writing sidesteps slogans in favor of clean images and conversational phrasing, matching the arrangement’s no-waste ethos.

Production choices underline the song’s dual allegiance to sweetness and scuff. Johnny Sangster tracks the band with a live-room immediacy—guitars bright but never brittle, drums close-miked and forward—while Kurt Bloch’s mastering preserves dynamics, giving the chorus lift without over-compression. The result splits the difference between glam sparkle and garage grit: think chiming leads over down-stroke rhythm guitar, a bass line that pushes rather than pads, and drums that phrase like a lead instrument.

On stage, Appaloosa have built a regional reputation on economy and presence, translating studio minimalism into sets that move quickly and leave little air between songs. Roadwork beyond the Northwest—shows in New York City and a festival appearance in Mexico City—has tightened the ensemble and sharpened their material for rooms of different scale. “Get It Together, Kid” reads as both postcard and promise: a snapshot of a band consolidating identity while signaling velocity toward what comes next.

Release date: September 4, 2025.

Octoberman’s ‘Chutes’ Finds Grace in Imperfection and Time

Octoberman returns with Chutes, a spare, warm-toned seventh album on Ishmalia Records that treats breath, hiss, and room tone not as flaws but as essential parts of the music’s architecture. Produced by Jarrett Bartlett with bandleader Marc Morrissette, the sessions prioritized presence over polish: the core takes were recorded live to two-inch tape at Little Bullhorn Studios in Ottawa—no click, no screens—then completed with minimal overdubs at home studios across Ontario. The decision yields performances that breathe at human scale, where micro-rubato, cymbal decay, and the grain of Morrissette’s voice become narrative cues in their own right.

Lyrically, Chutes threads two complementary strands. One revisits third-person vignettes salvaged from older hard-drive demos—short stories set to melody, attentive to gesture and weather. The other is newly confessional, written in the long aftershock of family loss and concerned with how fear, tenderness, and resilience settle into daily life. That dual perspective lets the record scan memory from both sides: as something witnessed from a distance and as something felt in the body. The songs decline melodrama; they move instead with a plain-spoken candor that trusts listeners to connect the dots.

Octoberman’s ‘Chutes’

The ensemble—Morrissette (guitar, vocals, synth), Marshall Bureau (drums, vibraphone), Tavo Diez de Bonilla (bass, vocals), J.J. Ipsen (guitar), and Annelise Noronha (accordion, banjo, guitar, background vocals)—leans into a live-off-the-floor chemistry that favors interplay over ornament. Vibraphone shadings and accordion drones broaden the spectrum without crowding the arrangements; banjo appears as texture rather than twang, a percussive filament threading through the guitars. Bartlett’s engineering keeps the edges intact: transients are allowed to bloom, bass sits wooden and resonant, and the mixes resist the lure of maximal loudness in favor of dynamic headroom.

Octoberman’s long arc has often invited comparisons—Sparklehorse’s lyrical chiaroscuro, Stephen Malkmus’s loose melodicism, the tuneful melancholy of a sunnier Elliott Smith. Chutes honors those affinities while sounding unmistakably like a band deep into its own vocabulary: conversational melodies riding ringing guitars; chord changes that feel inevitable once they land; hooks that announce themselves quietly and then refuse to leave. It is music that trusts repetition and proportion, trading spectacle for durability.

Context matters for a group that has built its reputation by increments rather than pivots. Octoberman’s catalog has placed songs in television and put the band on bills with Julie Doiron, Mount Eerie, and Owen Pallett, but Chutes reads less as a résumé line than as a statement of method. The record’s modesty is intentional: these are songs designed to weather years of listening, to reveal detail at low volume, to meet the moment without straining for it. Even the sequencing underscores the ethos, allowing narrative threads to surface and recede without rigid genre markers or studio gimmicks.

The release arrives with a pair of intimate Ontario shows—small rooms chosen for acoustics and proximity, the better to reproduce the record’s unhurried dynamics and the close-miked intimacy of its voices. Photo credit: Rémi Thériault.

Release and live dates: album out August 27; Toronto’s Cameron House on October 3 and Ottawa’s Red Bird on October 10.

Inspector Zende on Netflix: An Unlikely Duel in 1980s Mumbai

Predicated on the foundational cinematic trope of a relentless manhunt, Inspector Zende situates its central conflict within a meticulously recreated 1970s and 80s Mumbai. The narrative is propelled by the brazen escape of the infamous “Swimsuit Killer” from Tihar Jail, an event that triggers an elaborate, cross-country pursuit forming the film’s structural backbone. Yet, this is no grim procedural. The film deliberately positions itself as a quirky crime-comedy, a generic hybrid that filters a dark, historical episode through a stylized lens of nostalgia and levity. This calculated narrative strategy renders the period’s grit aesthetically consumable, transforming the winding gullies and retro-infused atmosphere of a bygone Mumbai from a site of authentic peril into a vibrant stage for an elaborate cat-and-mouse chase. It is a self-aware salute to an era of old-school policing, a celebration of the resourceful, instinct-driven justice—the art of jugaadu—that thrived long before the advent of modern technological forensics.

The Protagonist and The Antagonist: A Duality of Performance

The film’s narrative engine is the dialectical tension between its two leads, whose performances function as a study in contrasting archetypes. Manoj Bajpayee, an actor whose career is defined by seminal roles in the crime genre (Satya, Gangs of Wasseypur), portrays the titular Inspector Madhukar Zende not as a cinematic supercop but as an unassuming public servant. His Zende is an unlikely hero whose primary weapons are gut instinct and an unyielding determination. Bajpayee imbues the character with a familiar gravitas, grounding him in the blue-collar realities of his profession—a man of quiet cunning, unconcerned with glory, focused solely on the task. The performance resonates with echoes of his celebrated work in The Family Man, blending professional tenacity with a distinct Mumbai flavour and a dry, understated humour. In stark opposition stands Jim Sarbh as Carl Bhojraj, a fictionalized iteration of the serial killer Charles Sobhraj. The character is a study in duality: a charming, sophisticated trickster and a ruthless murderer. Sarbh, who has cultivated a formidable reputation playing complex antagonists (Neerja, Padmaavat), masterfully leverages his hypnotic on-screen charisma. He embodies the historical Sobhraj’s manipulative allure, presenting a villain who is as intellectually seductive as he is menacing. The resulting “electric face-off” transcends a simple hero-villain clash, becoming a confrontation between two distinct performance methodologies and the social worlds they signify. Bajpayee’s grounded, vernacular realism is pitted against Sarbh’s theatrical, cosmopolitan polish, staging a metaphorical duel that elevates the film beyond a conventional crime story into a nuanced commentary on dueling identities in a transforming nation.

Inspector Zende

A Marathi Auteur’s Hindi Debut

The film marks the Hindi directorial debut of Chinmay D. Mandlekar, a graduate of the National School of Drama who also penned the script. Mandlekar is a prolific and respected figure in the Marathi entertainment industry, primarily known for his extensive work as an actor, writer, and stage director within the historical drama genre, with acclaimed films like Farzand and Pawankhind to his credit. His transition to a Hindi-language production for a global streaming platform is emblematic of a significant trend in contemporary Indian cinema, where Over-the-Top (OTT) services act as a conduit between robust regional industries and the national mainstream. This allows a filmmaker with a deep, vernacular understanding of a specific cultural milieu—in this case, Maharashtra—to transpose a “grounded sense of place and perspective” onto a larger canvas. The project is produced by Om Raut and Jay Shewakramani under the Northern Lights Films banner. For Raut, himself a director with roots in Marathi historicals like Lokmanya: Ek Yug Purush, the film fulfills his father’s long-held wish to see the story of the real-life Inspector Zende dramatized. This investment in a local, “Marathi superhero” aligns with Netflix’s strategy of championing “heartland heroes”—culturally specific stories woven into the fabric of Indian history, yet packaged with nationally recognized stars for pan-Indian appeal.

Crafting a Retro Criminal World

The film’s aesthetic coherence is crucial in balancing its tonal complexities, a task largely shouldered by its cinematography and musical score. Cinematographer Vishal Sinha, whose oeuvre spans from the raw realism of Bhoot to the stylized romanticism of Raanjhanaa, creates a visual language that accommodates both the grim underpinnings of the crime story and the quirky levity of its comedic interludes. Sinha’s adeptness with low-light photography, particularly his use of the Sony VENICE camera system, allows him to capture the authentic character of the city at night, using naturalistic sources to evoke the period’s atmosphere without sacrificing visual clarity. This technical precision grounds the film in a tangible reality, lending texture to its nostalgic recreation of Mumbai. The musical score, by composer Sanket Sane, navigates a similar duality. Sane, known primarily for his work in the Marathi music industry with a foundation in folk and devotional melodies, provides a soundscape that must pivot between the tension of the chase and the humorous banter of Zende’s team. The selection of a composer with roots in traditional musical forms appears to be a deliberate choice to enhance the film’s local flavour. Together, the cinematography and score achieve a coherent mise-en-scène, creating a world where the dialectic of grit and quirk feels organic, preventing the film from fracturing under its own generic ambitions.

The Serpent Reimagined

While inspired by true events, Inspector Zende engages in significant historical reframing. The factual basis is the decades-long pursuit of Charles Sobhraj by Mumbai Police officer Madhukar Zende. Sobhraj, known as “The Serpent,” was a French serial killer who preyed on Western tourists along the “hippie trail” in the 1970s. Zende, a highly decorated officer, first arrested Sobhraj in 1971 in connection with a planned heist, though Sobhraj later escaped. The more famous capture, which forms the film’s climax, occurred in 1986 after Sobhraj orchestrated an infamous escape from Tihar Jail by drugging the guards. Astutely deducing his target’s habits, Zende successfully apprehended the fugitive in Goa. The film fictionalizes names—Sobhraj becomes Carl Bhojraj—to allow for narrative license, but its most significant departure is its comedic tone. This choice distinguishes it from more somber portrayals, such as the BBC/Netflix series The Serpent. By centering the narrative on the inspector, the film engages in a form of hero-centric revisionism. The story is effectively reclaimed from the globally infamous criminal and reframed as a triumphant tale of local Indian ingenuity. The quirky comedy serves to domesticate the horror of the real crimes, transforming an international story of terror into a celebratory national narrative about a “heartland hero” whose resourcefulness outmatched a world-renowned master of deception.

The Cat-and-Mouse Game as Social Commentary

Ultimately, Inspector Zende employs the familiar structure of a cat-and-mouse thriller to explore enduring themes of justice and heroism. The genre, with its inherent focus on pursuit, evasion, and psychological games, provides a compelling framework for the contest between Zende’s street-smart instincts and Bhojraj’s manipulative intellect. The film finds its place in the evolution of the Indian crime-comedy, a genre that has moved from the overt social satire of classics like Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro to the darker, edgier sensibilities of contemporary films like Andhadhun. Inspector Zende carves its own niche, using its comedic elements not for biting satire but to underscore the unabashed determination of its characters. The film’s thematic core is the triumph of an ordinary man who delivers an extraordinary form of justice, a narrative that resonates deeply within a cinematic tradition in India that often celebrates heroes who operate with a moral clarity that transcends a flawed system. By focusing on the real-life officer who twice bested one of the world’s most elusive criminals, the film crafts a narrative that is at once a piece of nostalgic entertainment, a compelling character study, and a testament to the timeless appeal of the underdog.

The film premiered on the streaming platform Netflix on September 5, 2025.

New Netflix Docuseries Investigates Romance Fraud Through Victim-Led Justice

A new unscripted docuseries from Netflix, Love Con Revenge, examines the world of romance fraud by following a notable victim of the crime as she seeks to help others achieve justice. The six-part series centers on Cecilie Fjellhøy, who was previously featured in the 2022 documentary The Tinder Swindler. In this new series, Fjellhøy transitions from the subject of a past con to an active participant in confronting digital predators. The narrative follows her partnership with private investigator Brianne Joseph as they work on behalf of individuals who have been financially and emotionally exploited by romance scammers.

The series is built around the collaboration between Fjellhøy and Joseph, a dynamic that combines personal experience with professional expertise. Fjellhøy’s direct involvement provides a foundation of empathy and a unique understanding of the victims’ experiences, while Joseph functions as the operational and intelligence arm of their mission. This structure moves beyond the reflective, testimony-based format of its predecessor. Instead of recounting past events, Love Con Revenge adopts an active, present-tense investigative approach, focusing on a mission to empower victims and secure a form of retribution against perpetrators who often operate with impunity. The series frames its objective as helping victims reclaim their lives, voices, and power.

Love Con Revenge

From Victim to Vigilante: A New Narrative Approach

The docuseries unfolds over six 40-minute episodes in an unscripted format, documenting the duo’s efforts to investigate active cases. The narrative follows Fjellhøy and Joseph as they assist victims who have been unable to find resolution through conventional channels. The storytelling method is a hybrid, blending the meticulousness of a procedural investigation with the high-stakes nature of reality television. Each case involves a period of assiduous online preparation which culminates in high-octane, direct physical confrontations with the alleged scammers. This approach provides a narrative arc that moves from the digital realm of the crime to the real world, aiming to deliver a tangible sense of accountability.

While the investigative process and confrontations provide the series’ dramatic structure, the narrative remains centered on the human cost of romance fraud. The series dedicates significant focus to the stories of the victims, detailing the severe emotional and financial devastation they have endured through powerful personal testimony. The ultimate goal of each investigation is not only to expose the perpetrator but also to facilitate a path toward healing and recovery for the person who was targeted, making the emotional journey a central component of the story.

Behind the Lens: The Creative Team

The series is directed by Max Shapira, a BAFTA and Broadcast Award-winning documentary filmmaker. Shapira is known for making smart, authentic films and has a reputation for eliciting engaging and honest performances from real people while creating impactful visuals and powerful narratives. His previous credits include documentaries for major broadcasters such as Channel 4, the BBC, and Netflix, including The Jury: Murder Trial and SAS: Who Dares Wins.

Production is handled by Twenty Twenty Television, a British company with a long history in unscripted programming. A subsidiary of Warner Bros. Television Productions UK, Twenty Twenty has a diverse portfolio that includes both popular factual entertainment series like First Dates and serious investigative journalism for programs such as Channel 4’s Dispatches. This dual expertise in both emotionally resonant storytelling and rigorous investigation equips the company to manage the unique demands of the series: presenting sensitive victim testimonies with journalistic integrity while also capturing the dramatic, confrontational elements of the investigations. The production team also includes Chris McLaughlin as showrunner and Ruth Kelly as executive producer, with James O’Reilly serving as creative director.

Spotlight on a Global Crime

Love Con Revenge presents romance fraud as an escalating global issue. The series’ creators describe it as a “truly modern crime that is exploding in the United States and around the world,” highlighting the jaw-dropping scale of the fraud and the severe emotional and financial toll it takes on victims. The show aims to illustrate the significant scale of this type of fraud and expose the methods used by what it terms “digital predators.” By doing so, it functions as a platform for victim advocacy. Fjellhøy’s participation is framed as a mission to use the public recognition from her own experience to support a wider community of victims.

The series operates in a space often left vacant by traditional law enforcement, which can be ill-equipped to handle complex, often transnational, digital crimes. The narrative explicitly focuses on cases where victims have been unable to find help through established systems, positioning the actions of Fjellhøy and Joseph as a form of parallel justice. By investigating cases, confronting perpetrators, and holding them accountable on camera, the series provides a resolution for its subjects that may not have been otherwise possible. This approach offers a narrative of justice in a domain where official accountability is frequently elusive, seeking to hold perpetrators to account who have gotten away with their actions for too long. The series is rated TV-MA and is available for streaming on Netflix starting September 5, 2025.

Sickick, Vikkstar and Aloe Blacc convene on “Lonely Together,” an EDM–pop crossover built for festival scale and algorithmic reach

“Lonely Together” fuses three distinct vectors of contemporary music culture: Sickick’s viral EDM craftsmanship, Vikkstar’s creator-economy gravity, and Aloe Blacc’s crossover soul. The single’s chassis is classic dance-pop: a four-on-the-floor pulse in the mid-tempo festival range, verse-to-pre-chorus tension, and an explosive chorus whose topline sits forward in the mix via parallel compression and precise EQ sculpting. Side-chained pads and reverb-washed layers build a sonic landscape that breathes before the downbeat, while transient-tight kicks and a clean sub integrate through bus compression so the drop translates on both big rigs and playlists. The production tucks ear-candy—percussive ad-libs, short-decay claps, and octave-doubled synth leads—around Blacc’s vocal, which is treated with modern de-essing and subtle harmonic saturation to preserve grit without harshness.

Context matters: Blacc’s voice is synonymous with dance-pop’s crossover apex thanks to Avicii’s “Wake Me Up,” now RIAA Diamond—a credential that still confers wide adult-contemporary and pop familiarity when he fronts a club record. That halo effect primes “Lonely Together” for multi-format discovery, from editorial dance-pop lists to AC lean-backs, and strengthens prospects for sync in sports and lifestyle content where anthemic hooks and clean masters excel.

Sickick arrives with proven dance-chart currency. His reboot of Madonna’s “Frozen” surged on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs and picked up international certifications, underscoring fluency with modern release playbooks that move seamlessly from short-form virality to DSP conversion. Those instincts—iterative versions, creator collaborations, and dynamic mastering aimed at both headphones and PA systems—frame the commercial ambitions of “Lonely Together.”

Vikkstar’s inclusion sharpens the creator-to-club funnel. As a co-founder of Sidemen and a YouTube mainstay, he pressure-tested a high-visibility rollout on “Better Off (Alone, Pt. III)” with Alan Walker and Dash Berlin, a franchise-grade Eurodance reboot that situated him credibly within the EDM mainstream. Bringing that audience portability to a Sickick-produced single meaningfully increases first-week conversion on pre-saves, shorts, and fan-to-fan handoffs.

Label infrastructure is aligned. Purple Fly’s expansion into publishing—with a remit covering catalog exploitation, licensing, and synchronization—creates a runway beyond streaming metrics, particularly for a hook-heavy, mid-tempo dance-pop cut. The imprint’s crypto-native marketing DNA and integrated rights posture support both festival rotation and brand-safe placements where up-front clearance accelerates turnaround.

What listeners will hear. Expect syncopation tightening across the pre-chorus, a lift into a saw-forward lead with airy delays, and a breakdown that strips to vocal + piano before re-stacking layers into the final refrain. The instrumentation favors bright, side-chained pads, piano stabs doubling arpeggiated synths, and a low end designed for punch over bloom—choices that maintain clarity under elevated production values without smearing the stereo field. It’s a vocal-centric mix calibrated for DSP thumbnails, vertical-video hooks, and late-set drops alike.

Why it matters now. The single operationalizes a release archetype that increasingly defines dance-pop: legacy-credible vocalist, viral-capable producer, and platform-native co-star. With Blacc’s chart-tested resonance, Sickick’s modern-catalog uplift, Vikkstar’s distribution across social surfaces, and Purple Fly’s publishing lever, “Lonely Together” is architected for discovery loops—radio hooks that reappear on reels, festival moments that rebound into streams, and a chorus designed to index quickly in short-form edits.

Jackie Lam (aka 009) Returns to JPS Gallery Hong Kong with “Encounter,” a Meditation on Quiet Connection

JPS Gallery Hong Kong presents “Encounter,” a solo exhibition by Jackie Lam—widely known as 009—that reorients the white cube around slow looking and narrative suggestion. The show assembles the artist’s signature “cosmic travellers,” anonymous figures that drift through spare, luminous environments and function as stand-ins for viewers navigating their own inner terrain. Rather than prescribing interpretation, the works invite projection and recognition, framing attention itself as a form of care in an over-mediated culture.

The installation is conceived as a calm threshold between the terrestrial and the celestial. Maritime atmospheres—central to the artist’s sensibility—inform a palette and staging that feel reflective rather than escapist: a “luminous harbour” where travellers and onlookers share the same, unhurried horizon line. Within this architecture of quiet, vulnerability is recast as a communicative tool, opening a space in which being seen—by an artwork or by another person—can be restorative.

Lam’s visual language fuses references to Japanese manga and European modernist movements with crisp contours and saturated, even-tempered color. The alias “009” acknowledges Cyborg 009 by Shōtarō Ishinomori, but the citation functions less as homage than as an index of method: a narrative impulse distilled into archetypes, then refined through the discipline of design. The result is a character-driven vocabulary—economical, emotive, and legible at a glance—that sustains depth without resorting to sentimentality.

Born in Hong Kong in 1979, Lam studied at the First Institute of Art and Design before working as a toy designer and theme-park architect—apprenticeships that sharpened his command of scale, silhouette, and viewer choreography. He later established himself as an illustrator and cartoonist and published Drawin9 Life in 2009. Parallel forays into art toys, including the astronaut figure “Unio,” have enjoyed broad popularity across Asia and inform the sculptural presence and narrative clarity of the works on view.

“Encounter” ultimately advances a clear proposition: when pictorial protagonists are deliberately anonymous, audiences supply the specificity. Lam leverages that anonymity to produce scenes that read as universal without becoming generic, placing modest gestures—posture, gaze, proximity—at the center of the encounter. In doing so, the exhibition argues for the civic utility of quiet: a reminder that connection thrives where attention is protected.

Exhibition details: JPS Gallery (Hong Kong), G/F, 88–90 Staunton Street, Central, Hong Kong. Opening reception: Thursday, September 11, 2025, 5–8 pm. Exhibition period: September 12–October 11, 2025 (gallery closed September 17–22).

Jackie Lam a.k.a. 009

Countdown: Canelo vs. Crawford on Netflix: A Definitive Portrait of Modern Boxing Royalty

The premiere of the new docuseries, Countdown: Canelo vs. Crawford, offers a comprehensive and parallel biographical study of two of the most accomplished boxing champions of the modern era. The series moves beyond the simple premise of a fight preview, instead establishing its central theme as an in-depth examination of the divergent philosophies, career trajectories, and technical masteries of Saúl “Canelo” Álvarez and Terence “Bud” Crawford. It presents the two athletes, both widely considered among the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world, as distinct archetypes of boxing excellence, chronicling the contrasting paths they have taken to reach the pinnacle of the sport. The narrative is not merely a recounting of victories but a character study of two masters who have achieved greatness through nearly opposite means, positioning their potential meeting as an inevitable collision of legacies.

The Narrative of Two Ascensions

The documentary meticulously constructs two parallel timelines, each dedicated to the unique journey of one of the fighters. It delves into their origins, their formative professional years, and the defining moments that shaped their respective claims to historical significance. The series portrays two fundamentally different approaches to building a boxing legacy: one of vertical conquest across weight divisions, and another of horizontal domination through systematic, undisputed rule.

The Path from Guadalajara: Canelo Álvarez’s Conquest

The documentary opens its examination of Saúl Álvarez in his hometown of Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, establishing his deep-rooted connection to the sport from an exceptionally young age. After compiling an amateur record of 44 wins against only 2 losses, he turned professional at just 15 years old, portraying him as a prodigy whose career was set on an accelerated course from its inception. The narrative arc follows his relentless climb through the ranks, capturing his first world championship, the WBC light middleweight title, at the age of 20. This achievement is presented as the first major step in a career defined by a constant search for new challenges across the sport’s weight divisions.

The series dedicates significant time to analyzing Álvarez’s campaign to conquer four distinct weight classes, securing world titles at light middleweight, middleweight, super middleweight, and light heavyweight. This vertical ascension is framed as the central tenet of his ambition. Key fights are dissected to illustrate his evolution, with particular focus on his historic 11-month campaign in 2020 and 2021. During this period, he defeated a trio of undefeated champions—Callum Smith, Billy Joe Saunders, and Caleb Plant—to become the first and only boxer in history to achieve the status of undisputed super middleweight champion.

However, the documentary frames his 2013 loss to Floyd Mayweather as the most critical turning point in his career. This defeat is not depicted as a simple failure but as the primary catalyst for his transformation from a gifted, aggressive power-puncher into a complete and methodical ring tactician. The film illustrates a distinct shift in his fighting style in the years following the bout. It highlights the development of what would become his signature attributes: superb defensive awareness, elite head movement, and a patient, intelligent counter-punching style that complements his natural power. The narrative makes a clear connection, showing how the experience of facing a master defensive fighter forced a fundamental deconstruction and rebuilding of his approach, ultimately forging him into a more durable and formidable champion. Beyond his in-ring achievements, the documentary also touches upon his status as a global commercial force, noting his consistent placement on lists of the world’s highest-paid athletes and his various business ventures, which include the Canelo Energy gas station chain, the “Upper” brand of convenience stores, and the VMC canned tequila cocktail line.

The Undefeated Virtuoso from Omaha: Terence Crawford’s Domination

In stark contrast to Álvarez’s narrative of conquest and evolution through adversity, the documentary presents Terence Crawford’s career as a story of technical perfection and systematic domination. His journey begins in Omaha, Nebraska, with the film establishing his deep technical foundation by exploring his decorated amateur career, which concluded with a record of 58 wins and 12 losses. It highlights his 70 official amateur bouts, which included victories over future professional world champions such as Mikey Garcia and Danny Garcia, underscoring the depth of his boxing education long before he turned professional.

The core of Crawford’s narrative is his unblemished professional record of 41 wins and zero losses, a rare accomplishment at the highest echelons of modern boxing. The documentary focuses on his methodical and comprehensive clean-out of multiple weight divisions. It details his path to becoming the undisputed light welterweight champion, unifying all four major world titles in that division before moving up to welterweight. There, he repeated the historic feat by defeating Errol Spence Jr. to become the undisputed welterweight champion.

The film places immense weight on the historical significance of this achievement, clarifying that Crawford is the first and only male boxer in the four-belt era to become an undisputed champion in two different weight classes. This accomplishment is presented as his unique and undeniable claim to all-time greatness. The documentary posits that his perfect record is not merely a product of talent, but the result of a unique fighting philosophy centered on proactive problem-solving. His adaptability is shown to be a strategic weapon that prevents opponents from ever successfully implementing their own game plan. A key example analyzed is his 2014 fight against Ricky Burns for his first world title; after Burns found success with his jab in the early rounds, Crawford switched to a southpaw stance, completely neutralizing Burns’ primary weapon and dominating the remainder of the fight. This sequence is used to illustrate a central argument of the film: Crawford remains undefeated because he is, stylistically, an unsolvable puzzle who identifies and neutralizes threats before they can fully materialize.

Countdown Canelo vs. Crawford

A Study in Contrasting Styles: Deconstructing the Sweet Science

The docuseries transitions from biographical narrative to technical analysis, using archival fight footage, training segments, and expert commentary to deconstruct the fighters’ distinct approaches to the sport. It breaks down their mechanics, strategies, and underlying philosophies, illustrating how their contrasting styles are a direct reflection of their career paths and personalities.

The Art of Calculated Power: Canelo’s Methodical Approach

The film’s breakdown of Canelo Álvarez’s style presents him as a fighter who blends the traditional, forward-pressing aggression of Mexican boxing with an elite and sophisticated defensive system. Under the guidance of his trainer Eddy Reynoso, he has honed what Reynoso calls the classic Mexican style—to hit and not get hit. The narrative focuses on how he leverages patience and ring intelligence to create openings for his well-documented power. His defensive mastery is examined in detail, with slow-motion analysis of his exceptional head movement, including the subtle slips and rolls he uses to evade punches while remaining in range to deliver his own offense. His disciplined high guard, footwork, and use of pivots to create angles are also highlighted as foundational elements of his defense.

Extensive clips from his fights against Gennady Golovkin, Miguel Cotto, and others are used to demonstrate his status as one of the sport’s premier counter-punchers. The documentary shows how he expertly times his opponents’ attacks to land powerful and accurate hooks and uppercuts. A dedicated segment is given to his formidable body punching, which is described as one of his most effective weapons. The analysis focuses on his signature shovel hook to the liver, explaining how this single punch is used to break down the stamina and will of his opponents over the course of a fight. The film emphasizes that Álvarez is a “thinking fighter” who lays traps and uses a variety of feints to bait opponents into making tactical errors, rather than relying on the reckless volume punching sometimes associated with his fighting heritage.

The documentary puts forth the idea that Álvarez weaponizes his defense, treating it not just as a form of protection but as the primary setup for his offense. His head movement and blocks are shown to be intrinsically linked to his power shots. The act of slipping a punch is depicted as the same motion he uses to load up a devastating counter hook. The film analyzes his use of specific techniques, such as the “pull counter,” popularized by Floyd Mayweather, and the “leverage block,” as explicit examples of defensive movements designed to create immediate offensive opportunities. This creates a tactical dilemma for his opponents, which the documentary explores at length: in order to land their own punches, they must expose themselves to his most powerful and accurate counters. The film concludes that this dynamic—turning an opponent’s offense into his own—is the central pillar of his effectiveness.

The Unsolvable Puzzle: Crawford’s Adaptive Genius

The documentary deconstructs Terence Crawford’s style as a unique and multifaceted system built on the pillars of versatility, intelligence, and, most importantly, his ability to switch stances at will. He is presented as arguably the most adaptable and unpredictable fighter of his generation. His mastery of switch-hitting is identified as the cornerstone of his entire approach. The film explains how his capacity to fight with equal effectiveness from both orthodox and southpaw stances serves multiple strategic purposes: it confuses opponents, disrupts their rhythm and timing, and creates unorthodox angles of attack that they are unaccustomed to defending.

His exceptional ring IQ is highlighted through sequences that show him analyzing opponents in real-time and making subtle adjustments to his strategy round by round. The documentary examines his use of feints and baits to draw reactions and his perfect timing in executing counters. Crawford’s style is portrayed as being in constant, fluid motion. He is shown fighting effectively off the back foot, countering opponents while they are in the middle of throwing their own punches, and seamlessly shifting his attacks from the head to the body. His defense is shown to rely less on a static guard and more on superior footwork, pivots, and an unorthodox loose-handed guard that, while seemingly risky, improves his visibility and reaction time. Furthermore, the narrative underscores that he possesses genuine knockout power in both hands and from both stances, making him a constant offensive threat regardless of his positioning.

The documentary’s analysis culminates in the presentation of a compelling theory: that Crawford’s style is designed not just to defeat his opponent, but to deconstruct and exploit the fundamental principles of boxing itself. Traditional boxing training is based on years of repetition and muscle memory, typically against a single, predictable stance. The film shows how Crawford’s constant stance-switching disrupts this foundational training at its core. An opponent’s most practiced and reliable weapon, their jab, often becomes ineffective or even a liability against him. The series analyzes specific techniques, such as his habit of slowing down his first punch to bait a defensive reaction before landing a faster second punch, or his ability to catch a punch and counter with the same hand. These tactics are framed as maneuvers designed to exploit the learned, almost automatic reactions of a well-schooled boxer. The film concludes that Crawford’s genius lies in his ability to turn the very “rules” and ingrained habits of the sweet science against his opponents, forcing them into a state of constant tactical uncertainty where their training and instincts ultimately betray them.

Behind the Production: Crafting the Narrative

Countdown: Canelo vs. Crawford is directed by Asif Kapadia, a filmmaker known for his work on acclaimed biographical documentaries that explore the psychological and personal journeys of public figures. His involvement signals a narrative focus that prioritizes the motivations and pressures that drive the athletes, moving beyond a simple chronicle of their achievements to explore the character of the men themselves. Kapadia is noted for his trilogy of archive-constructed documentaries—Senna, Amy, and Diego Maradona—which avoid traditional talking-head interviews, instead using a collage of public and private archival footage to create a sense of immediacy and intimacy. The production is credited to Noah Media Group, a company with a track record of producing premium, cinematic sports documentaries for major global platforms, including Finding Jack Charlton and 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible. The film’s aesthetic and narrative depth align it with other prestige sports documentary series that use the arena of sport as a lens through which to tell larger stories about legacy, identity, and the human condition. The choice of a director like Kapadia suggests the series is less concerned with the chronological recounting of what happened in the fighters’ careers and more focused on exploring the complex question of why they were driven to achieve such heights.

A Collision of Legacies

Ultimately, Countdown: Canelo vs. Crawford presents a definitive and comprehensive examination of two living legends of the boxing ring. The series meticulously crafts a narrative built on the central theme of a collision course between two different, yet equally valid, paths to greatness. It juxtaposes the calculated power and multi-divisional conquest of Canelo Álvarez with the undefeated, adaptive genius and systematic domination of Terence Crawford. The documentary serves as an essential record of the current landscape of boxing at its highest level, defining the careers of two athletes who have fundamentally shaped their era.

The docuseries premiered today, September 13, 2025, on Netflix.

American Documentary, UFO and Bird Street Bring Second ‘Shorts In-Session’ to CIFF, Spotlighting Works-in-Progress

American Documentary, Untitled Filmmaker Org (UFO), and Bird Street Productions have named the projects selected for the second edition of Shorts In-Session, a recurring work-in-progress program that helps short-form documentary makers refine their films with guidance from peers and industry experts. The new cohort will present at the Camden International Film Festival (CIFF).

Conceived as an open, community-driven forum, Shorts In-Session invites filmmakers with shorts in production or post-production to screen excerpts and discuss editorial choices in front of an expert panel and a festival audience. This year’s working committee includes UFO co-directors Sean Weiner, Arno Mokros and Martha Gregory; representatives from Bird Street Productions; and Opal H. Bennett, senior producer of POV Shorts at American Documentary. Organizers describe the session as a way to break the isolation of the edit room, connect artists with supportive industry leaders, and surface standout projects at a festival known for formally adventurous nonfiction.

The participating filmmakers reflect a range of practices within the short form. Rebecca Blandón, a Nicaraguan-American journalist and filmmaker from the Bronx, makes work about communities “hidden in plain sight”; her shorts have screened at major U.S. festivals and she has contributed reporting to PBS Frontline and The Boston Globe. Bianca Giaever, an independent radio journalist and filmmaker whose pieces have appeared on This American Life, Radiolab, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is the creator and host of the podcast Constellation Prize and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. Ora DeKornfeld is an Emmy-winning director, cinematographer and editor with credits across The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, CNN, Netflix and National Geographic; her projects include USA V SCOTT, the NYT Op-Doc This Is What a Post-Roe Abortion Looks Like, Elizabeth Lo’s Mistress Dispeller, Netflix’s Explained and the feature Mija. Rounding out the group, filmmaker and writer Maia Wikler—also a Ph.D. candidate in Political Ecology at the University of Victoria and a National Geographic Explorer—focuses on memory, corporate accountability and climate justice; her short Walking Two Worlds premiered at Tribeca, and she recently attended the Woodstock Filmmakers Residency to advance her forthcoming Wild, Wild East.

Beyond the showcase value, the initiative addresses a structural need in nonfiction: editing is often solitary, while breakthroughs typically emerge through rigorous conversation. By staging a public work-in-progress forum at CIFF, the partners aim to accelerate craft development, expand professional networks and amplify emerging voices at a time when short documentaries play an outsized role in cultural and civic discourse.

UFO (Untitled Filmmaker Org) focuses on giving time, space and money to under-resourced filmmakers through programs that prioritize in-person, inclusive community-building. Its core initiatives include a Short Film Lab at BAM for underrepresented early-career artists and a Family Filmmaker Residency at the Silver Sun Foundation in the Catskills that provides childcare alongside creative support. Bird Street Productions develops documentary shorts and features with a mandate to amplify diverse perspectives and provoke civic reflection. American Documentary, Inc. (AmDoc)—the nonprofit behind POV and POV Shorts on PBS—presents contemporary, socially relevant nonfiction across broadcast, digital and community platforms, pairing distribution with engagement strategies that translate stories into dialogue, education and participation.

Event date: Friday, September 12, 2025.

Donald Moffett’s “Snowflake” at Alexander Gray Associates Examines the Terms of Political Address in Abstraction

Alexander Gray Associates presents Donald Moffett: Snowflake, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together new extruded-oil and spray paintings, a free-to-take bumper-sticker installation, and the moving-image work Aluminum/White House Unmoored, the presentation considers how contemporary art engages public concerns—environmental stress, civic institutions, and the rhetoric of protest—without reducing itself to slogans.

The “Snowflake” paintings are engineered for optical and material ambiguity. Worked in whites, pewter tones, and pale blues, their drilled and pierced fields appear alternately to recede into or hover before the wall, producing a measured dissonance between surface and support. The series sits within Moffett’s ongoing NATURE CULT project, which addresses environmental acceleration while acknowledging a built-in contradiction: industrial paints, plywood, and specialized application techniques both visualize ecological strain and participate in the material economy that underwrites it. As the artist notes, “The surface holds—lush and fragile… The structure and substructure drift, melt, and erode,” a formulation that captures the works’ calibrated balance of seduction and collapse.

Presented in dialogue with these paintings, Aluminum/White House Unmoored depicts the executive residence in a state of dissolution. The piece treats political architecture not as a fixed icon but as an image vulnerable to erosion, placing institutional symbolism under the same pressure the paintings exert on pictorial structure. Together, the works sustain a rigorous vocabulary of drifting, melting, and unmooring—terms that are formal before they are thematic, yet legible across art and public life.

A takeaway set of bumper stickers extends Moffett’s long-standing interest in direct address. Their concise, declarative language recalls the strategies of activist graphics while their analog circulation—designed for bodies, cars, and streets rather than feeds—underscores the changing conditions of attention and persuasion in a saturated media environment. The stickers function as modest counter-devices: portable, slow, and site-specific.

Moffett’s biography amplifies this tension between immediacy and reflection. As a founding member of Gran Fury, the graphic-activist collective that emerged from ACT UP, he helped develop a language of urgency for street-level communication during the AIDS crisis. In parallel, through Bureau, the design studio he co-founded with Marlene McCarty, he adapted principles of clarity and address for nonprofit and commercial clients. His studio practice, by contrast, embeds political content within abstraction’s procedures—surface engineering, optical interference, and a sustained interest in how materials index time and pressure.

Across media, the exhibition frames dissolution—of surfaces, symbols, and communicative certainty—as both image and method. Rather than proposing resolution, it delineates where aesthetic inquiry can register structural stress while acknowledging its own limits as material culture produced within the conditions it examines. Moffett’s work has been widely exhibited and is represented in major public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Blanton Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Hammer Museum; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; The Menil Collection; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Venue and dates: Alexander Gray Associates, New York — September 12–October 25, 2025. Opening reception: Friday, September 12, 6:00–8:00 p.m. Work date: Aluminum/White House Unmoored (2004). Selected solo exhibitions: Alice Austen House, Staten Island (2025); Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland (2024); McNay Art Museum, San Antonio (2022); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2011), with subsequent venues at The Andy Warhol Museum and the Tang Teaching Museum (2012); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2002). Selected group exhibitions: MASP, São Paulo (2024); National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (2024); Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo (2022); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2019); Whitney Biennial (1993).

Donald MoffettAluminum/White House Unmoored, 2004Video projection, oil, and alkyd on linen40 1/8 x 60 5/8 in (101.9 x 154 cm)Video: 14 minutes and 51 seconds