Tag: cinema

Netflix review: Bernard Rose’s “Candyman” (1992)

As the Black Lives Matter movement marches across the globe to protest the murder of Black Americans at the hands of the police, activists are taking systemic racism to task.

One of the targets of their revolution includes Hollywood, which, historically speaking, is infamous for its whitewashing. The horror genre in particular negatively represents Black characters (if they’re even represented at all).

With its “racism as horror” allegory, is Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992) ahead of its time, or is it of its time?

If you don’t know what to watch next, Candyman is available to stream on Netflix. The supernatural slasher stars Virginia Madsen as well as Tony Todd.

It appears on Bravo’s “100 Scariest Movie Moments,” Bloody Disgusting and UGO’s top slasher lists, Filmsite’s “Greatest Scariest Moments and Scenes” and “Greatest Film Plot Twists, Film Spoilers, and Surprise Endings,” and Retrocrush’s “100 Greatest Horror Movie Performances.”

Set in Chicago, Helen Lyle (Madsen) is a semiotics graduate student researching urban myths who hears a local story from the Cabrini-Green housing project about Daniel Robitaille, “the Candyman” (Todd).

According to legend, the Candyman can be summoned by saying his name in a mirror five times, before killing you with his hook hand. After putting the vengeful spirit’s existence to the test, Helen finds herself fighting for her life.

Candyman predates Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) by about twenty-five years, and Get Out is one of the greatest releases of its decade. Its racial commentary is as stirring as its scares are hair-raising.

Perhaps what’s so horrifying about it is the ways in which it relates to the contemporary American experience, and its realism to all who survive the horrors of racism.

And this is all due to the filmmaker’s script. In addition to intersecting Helen between misogynistic gaslighting and violence, Rose mythologizes his narrative with a story within the story about the Candyman’s origin.

White-on-black brutality has never truly stayed dead, and it is only a word away.

But, in many ways, you can still tell this was written by a white man. Candyman puts forward a number of toxic stereotypes about Black people, such as a superstitious lean and a hive-mind mentality which paints them as a sub-intelligent, quasi-barbaric horde.

Whether or not this was the director’s intention is irrelevant – what is relevant, is the outcome.

At least the reboot (produced by none other than Peele himself, and directed by Nia DaCosta) is sure to correct some of the picture’s more damning faults. Regardless, Candyman is still a classic for any fan of the genre (when viewed critically).

Indeed, where a lesser horror film would have patted itself on the back simply for making its monster Black (without lending a second thought to the larger implications), Candyman goes so far as to textualize those racial ramifications through a mainstream generic lens.

“The Los Angeles Times” ranks Ennio Morricone’s ten greatest film scores

Randall Roberts of The Los Angeles Times writes, “Serving as sort of whimsical, opinionated Greek chorus — one that could turn dark and sinister in a flash — his work played a co-starring role.” (Image Courtesy: The Los Angeles Times).

Ennio Morricone died yesterday in Rome at ninety-one years old, according to The Los Angeles Times. Staff writer Randall Roberts describes him as not only “the most important film composer of the twentieth century,” but “also the busiest.” Roberts lists his top ten scores as: Sergio Leone’s Trilogia del dollaro; Gillo Pontecorvo’s La battaglia di Algeri (1966); Sergio Sollima’s La resa dei conti (1968); Dario Argento’s Il gatto a nove code (1971); Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento (1976); Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978); John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982); Roland Joffé’s The Mission (1986); Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987); and Quentin Tarantino’s The H8teful Eight (2015).

Amazon Prime review: David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012)

Where were you the first time you saw David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook (2012)?

It takes a special film for this critic to remember the answer to that question.

Indeed, how could one forget staring into Bradley Cooper’s star fire-blue eyes and falling in love with the character who marked his metamorphosis into the “serious” dramatist who would go on to give us his A Star Is Born (2018)?

As for Jennifer Lawrence, the audience surrogate reacting to this beauty and charisma she covets for herself even though the gulf between she and Cooper is as tantalizingly close but frustratingly wide as that between the viewer and the silver screen, her dramatic catharsis is communal.

If you don’t know what to watch next, Silver Linings Playbook is available on Amazon Prime. The romantic comedy-drama was adapted by the filmmaker himself from the 2008 novel of the same name by Matthew Quick.

It was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay, with Lawrence winning Best Actress.

Set in Philadelphia, Patrizio “Pat” Solitano, Junior (Best Supporting Actor nominee Cooper), is released into the care of his parents, Patrizio Solitano, Senior (Best Supporting Actor nominee Robert De Niro), and Dolores Solitano (Best Supporting Actress nominee Jacki Weaver).

After spending eight months at a mental health facility for bipolar disorder, Pat attends a dinner party with his friend, Ronnie (John Ortiz), and Ronnie’s wife, Veronica (Julia Stiles), where Pat meets Veronica’s sister, Tiffany Maxwell (Lawrence), a mentally ill young widow.

Tiffany falls for Pat, but Pat is still in love with his ex-wife, Nikki Solitano (Brea Bee), who has taken out a restraining order against him after he beat her extramarital lover, and, so, Tiffany offers to give Nikki a letter from Pat if he agrees to enter a dance competition as her partner.

As one can plainly see from all the acting nods, Russell is an actor’s director. That Silver Linings Playbook is one of only a handful of films in Oscars history to be up for all four acting categories testifies to that.

But Silver Linings Playbook succeeds where, say, American Hustle (2013) fails because it is as narratively tight as it is dramatically fiery, while the overlong American Hustle is bloated with its cast’s improvisational excesses.

And Lawrence is every bit as bright as you would expect her to be. Between this, American Hustle, and Joy (2015), her creative partnership with Russell sings the song of a muse and her artist. Her alchemic transformation into Tiffany is a firework show.

Unfortunately, though, she continues the trend of women with mental illnesses being sensationalized on film. Another Lawrence collaborator, Darren Aronofsky, similarly exploited Natalie Portman in his Black Swan (2010), for which Portman also took home the trophy.

A person’s psycho-emotional suffering shouldn’t be a means to an end for actors looking to make spectacles of themselves.

However, Silver Linings Playbook humanizes Tiffany as a romantic lead, rather than villainizing her a la Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1986). She is no less magnetic than Cooper himself.

The film is miraculous in the romance it electrifies between two people for whom love is more painful than not, a spell only movie magic can cast.

Tens of thousands sign petition to block film starring Michael Jackson’s daughter as Jesus

The late pop superstar Michael Jackson’s daughter, model and actress Paris Jackson, was cast back in April alongside Bella Thorne and musician Gavin Rossdale in a film called Habit, according to The Guardian. Jackson is to play a lesbian Jesus, complete with “a nose ring, tousled waves and a traditional robe,” while Thorne will portray “a street smart girl with a Jesus fetish [who] gets mixed up in a violent drug deal and finds a possible way out by masquerading as a nun.” One Million Moms is circulating a petition against the production, which has attracted sixty-nine thousand signatures.

The cast of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” reunites

In the season finale of the YouTube series Reunited Apart with Josh Gad, the core cast of John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) joined together for the first time in thirty-four years, according to NBC Chicago. Matthew Broderick, Jennifer Grey, Alan Ruck, Mia Sara, Cindy Pickett, Lyman Ward, as well as Ben Stein all hopped onto a Zoom call with Gad. Broderick, who hadn’t seen Ruck in at least fifteen years, told Gad about how he hurt his knee before shooting the parade scene, before the cast went on to act out iconic scenes from the cult classic.

Hulu review: Isao Takahata’s “Grave of the Fireflies” (1988)

Studio Ghibli is not all soot sprites and fire demons dubbed by Billy Crystal – indeed, Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988) is one of the most devastating films you will ever see, anime or otherwise.

If you don’t know what to watch next, Grave of the Fireflies is available to stream on Hulu. The animated war film is based on the semiautobiographical short story of the same name by Akiyuki Nosaka. It stars Tsutomu Tatsumi, Ayano Shiraishi, Yoshiko Shinohara, and Akemi Yamaguchi.

Set in Kobe, Japan, around World War II, the movie opens September 21, 1945, with a teenage boy named Seita (dubbed by J. Robert Spencer) starving to death and his spirit joining that of his younger sister, Setsuko (dubbed by Corinne Orr).

Several months earlier, the two children are orphaned after a firebombing destroys most of Kobe and kills their mother (dubbed by Veronica Taylor).

Upon moving in with their aunt (dubbed by Amy Jones), Seita and Setsuko face the brutal reality of growing up as refugees in wartime Japan.

Studio Ghibli is known for its antiwar themes. For example, Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) is heavily influenced by the filmmaker’s childhood in postwar Japan.

Grave of the Fireflies is the dream factory’s most powerful tragedy, though, its young characters developed in such a way that only Ghibli would know how.

To be sure, it is because of the studio’s family-friendliness that Grave of the Fireflies is so mature and heartbreaking. Seita and Setsuko are childlike in a way that transcends across cultural as well as artistic boundaries.

That they are cartoon characters does not detract from their characterizations.

But the nationalistic, toxic masculine intent behind the picture sullies it somewhat. After all, Japanese audiences interpret Seita’s decision not to return to his aunt’s as a wise one, even though the consequences are deadly.

While there are cultural differences at play, Seita’s pride in himself as an imperial Japanese male should not be more important than life itself.

But intentionalism is a critical fallacy – there have been many filmmakers throughout history who did not mean to shoot unethical works but did so anyway – so the director’s interpretation is no less subjective than that of the viewer.

Eddie Redmayne and Daniel Radcliffe respond to JK Rowling’s transphobic tweets

Fantastic Beasts star Eddie Redmayne has joined “Harry Potter” himself, Daniel Radcliffe, in condemning JK Rowling’s recent transphobic social media posts, according to The Guardian. Redmayne – who played Lili Elbe in Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl (2015), the first known person to undergo sex reassignment surgery – says, “Respect for transgender people remains a cultural imperative, and over the years I have been trying to constantly educate myself.” Similarly, Radcliffe says, “Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations, who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I.”

Black Criterion Collection pictures to stream without a subscription

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Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), Maya Angelou’s Down in the Delta (1998), Shirley Clarkson’s Portrait of Jason (1967), Agnes Varda’s Black Panthers (1968), and Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground (1982) are among the movies that will stream for free on the Criterion Channel. (Image Courtesy: IndieWire).

On Thursday, the Criterion Channel has joined the likes of A24 and Bad Robot in coming out to help support the fight against systemic racism, as well as advocate police reform and support for protestors throughout the United States, according to IndieWire. In an email from Criterion president Peter Becker and CEO Jonathan Turell, the company announced a $25,000 initial contribution, in addition to an ongoing $5,000 monthly donation, to organizations that back Black Lives Matter. Criterion will also lift the paywall on titles from Black filmmakers and white documentarians who have captured the Black experience, available on their homepage.

A list of films celebrating Pride Month

Between violent confrontations with police in protests over George Floyd’s death, the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as record unemployment rates, there is little to celebrate about this year’s Pride Month, according to The New York Times. This isn’t to say all Pride events are canceled or postponed, because many can still be enjoyed online, such as virtual drag shows, benefit concerts, and, of course, “entertaining and evocative” films about the queer community and its history. Seven of these movies are: Arthur J. Bressan Junior’s Gay USA (1977); Greta Schiller and Robert Rosenberg’s Before Stonewall (1984); Christopher Ashley’s Jeffrey (1995); Gus Van Sant’s Milk (2008); Matthew Warchus’s Pride (2014); Robin Campillo’s BPM (Beats Per Minute) (2017); and David France’s The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson (2017).

This Black academic encourages people to learn about systemic racism from TV and film

As protests continue to rage over the death of George Floyd, Black social justice leaders as well as scholars urge people wanting to make a change to educate themselves on systemic racism through books, conversations, movies, and documentaries, according to ABC. Doctor Creshema Murray, founding fellow at The Center for Critical Race Studies at the University of Houston-Downtown, published her first book in 2018, Leadership Through The Lens: Interrogating Production, Presentation, and Power. “Television and film is a way for us to disconnect from what’s happening in the real world, but it’s also a tool for us to understand,” says Doctor Murray.