Breaking the Cycle review – meet the charismatic Thai politician striving to change his country’s history

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Gripping documentary examines the Future Forward Party’s unprecedented 2019 election result, and its leader’s aim to break Thailand’s repeated military coups With his disarming good looks, pro-democracy activist and businessman Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit resembles an actor rather than a typical Thai politician. Heir to the country’s largest car manufacturer, he is blessed not only with personable charisma but also inexhaustible funds. His stunning rise into public consciousness is the beating heart of Aekaphong Saransate and Thanakrit Duangmaneeporn’s debut film, a thrilling documentary about an extraordinary political campaign that shook a nation. As founder of the progressive Future Forward Party (FFP), Juangroongruangkit’s central message cut through the noise of electoral politics: secure a brighter future by correcting the wrongs of the past. Since the end of absolute monarchy in 1932, Thailand has undergone a never-ending cycle of military takeovers, including 12 coups. Dur...
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Zoey 102 review – Jamie Lynn Spears returns for unwanted nostalgia reboot

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The long-gestating movie follow-up to the mid-aughts Nickelodeon show gets mired in a familiar ongoing adolescence

If I were a television executive, particularly one at a large streaming platform that contains a teen network, I would certainly consider a reboot of Zoey 101. The tween series, which ran from 2005 to 2008 and starred Jamie Lynn Spears as a boarding school student in Malibu, is remembered fondly by a certain slice of Nickelodeon-raised late millennials. Its ending felt premature and tinged with sadness, as the series finale aired a few months after Spears, the younger sister of Britney, revealed that she was pregnant at 16. Though the show had already wrapped production before Jamie Lynn became a too-young tabloid fixture, the popular impression was that her off-screen shock pregnancy torpedoed the cutesy, very PG series. (As a 14-year-old at the time, this was a brain-searing event.)

In other words, there’s an on-paper case for Zoey 102, the new Paramount+ movie reboot of the series, in the sense that there was a lingering feeling of unfinished business to the show and that streaming service logic demands anything once popular be tried again. But it’s a fool’s errand. The revisionist happy ending for Zoey 101 feels at best strange and too overdue to work. (The logline bills the reboot as Zoey finding herself in her 20s, though the cast “graduated” high school 15 years ago and are almost entirely in their mid-30s; Spears herself is 32.) At worst, as often is the case with the finished product, it’s so focused on recapturing long past, hazily remembered magic as to be cringe-inducing.

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