Archive
THE WILD ROBOT – Kris Bowers
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Wild Robot is a new animated science fiction adventure film, based on the 2016 children’s novel of the same name by Peter Brown, and directed by Chris Sanders, one of the co-directors of How to Train Your Dragon. The story follows the life of Roz, a highly sophisticated service robot who is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and who must quickly adapt to her surroundings. Over time she builds relationships with the local wildlife, including befriending a fox named Fink, and becoming the adoptive mother of an orphaned goose named Brightbill; however, she soon finds that her new idyllic life as a ‘wild robot’ is under threat from the company that built her. The film has an enormously impressive voice cast led by Lupita Nyong’o as Roz, Pedro Pascal as Fink, and Kit Connor as Brightbill, plus Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Catherine O’Hara, Matt Berry, and Ving Rhames. The film is a beautifully drawn, artistically rendered, funny, moving exploration of numerous concepts related to environmentalism and nature, consumerism, motherhood, adaptability and building relationships, and it has been an enormous box office success, grossing more than $270 million, and sequels based on Brown’s other Roz novels are already in the works. Read more…
HAUNTED MANSION – Kris Bowers
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The latest Disney theme park property to hit big screens, hot on the heels of five Pirates of the Caribbean films, Tomorrowland, and Jungle Cruise, is Haunted Mansion. It’s the second film to be based on the wonderfully ghoulish ride after the 2003 Eddie Murphy movie which was scored by Mark Mancina, but where the first film deviated considerably from the canonical Haunted Mansion story, this one seems to be much more rooted in Disney lore. The film stars Rosario Dawson as Gabbie, a single mother who moves into a long-abandoned mansion with her teenage son, with dreams of turning it into a bed-and-breakfast – only to discover that the mansion is overrun with ghosts! At her wit’s end, the skeptical Gabbie turns to a group of psychics (Lakeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito) to help exorcise their mansion and destroy the ghosts around them. The film was directed by Justin Simien from a screenplay by Katie Dippold, and had a lot of good pre-release buzz, but unfortunately the film has been something of a commercial flop, likely due to the peculiar decision Disney took to release it in July rather than the more logical late-October. Read more…
CHEVALIER – Kris Bowers and Michael Abels
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Think of a classical composer. Any classical composer. What sort of face springs to mind? White. Male. Middle Aged. Some sort of imposing hairdo, probably a beard. Formal clothes. A facial expression that combines seriousness with intelligence. It’s the sort of face we’ve all seen for hundreds of years, from Mozart to Beethoven to Brahms, to Tchaikovsky and beyond. It’s what we’re all accustomed to seeing and thinking of when western classical music is mentioned. However, the truth is that there is, and has always been, more diversity than that, both in terms of gender and race, but most of the music of non-white non-male composers was overlooked and, at times, intentionally suppressed in the past, to the point that today very few of us know, and can name, any composers outside those gender-based and race-based confines. This new movie, Chevalier, attempts to redress some of that a little. Read more…
SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY – Kris Bowers
Original Review by Christopher Garner
Twenty-five years ago Michael Jordan shared the big screen with the Looney Tunes for a film that was lackluster (at best), yet is fondly remembered by a lot of people of a certain age. Now we get the sequel, in which a fictional Lebron James (played by the actual Lebron James) and his fictional son Dom (played by Cedric Joe) are sucked into a virtual multiverse of Warner Brothers properties by an evil artificial intelligence named Al-G Rhythm (played by Don Cheadle). James runs into the Looney Tunes and enlists them to play in a basketball game that will somehow determine the outcome of the film. Director Malcolm D. Lee is usually associated with comedies steeped in African American culture like Girl’s Trip, Undercover Brother, and The Best Man, rather than live action/animation hybrid films for children. This film has not fared well critically. It made $160 million worldwide, but with a budget of $150 million, it can’t exactly be termed a financial success either. Read more…
THE UNITED STATES VS. BILLIE HOLIDAY – Kris Bowers
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
There have been several films and plays made about the life and work of the great jazz singer Billie Holiday, who died in 1959 aged just 44. Lady Sings the Blues from 1972 earned Diana Ross an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, while Audra McDonald received unanimous critical praise for her performance as her in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill a few years ago. The latest actress to play her on screen is Andra Day in the Lee Daniels-directed The United States vs. Billie Holiday. The film follows Holiday at the height of her fame and explores two story strands that speak to the African American experience in the 1940s; the first concerns her role at the center of the ‘War on Drugs’ wherein Holiday – a long-time heroin addict – becomes a target for the federal government and is seduced by and has a long-term relationship with narcotics agent Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes), who was taking part in an undercover sting operation against her. The second concerns the effort of similar authorities to stop her performing the controversial song “Strange Fruit,” an anti-racism song written in response to the lynchings of young black men in the 1930s. Read more…
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