REVIEW: Dumbo [1941]

I think you’re ears are beautiful. It’s always weird watching a movie I haven’t seen since I was a little kid only to discover how different it is from my memory. I used to watch Dumbo a lot back in the day and yet I could have sworn the entirety of the film was about the titular elephant’s struggle to find the courage to fly without his magic feather. Suffice it to say: realizing that what I thought was the whole plot only takes up the last three minutes of…

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REVIEW: How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World [2019]

There’s no better gift than love. It’s not often a studio as big as Dreamworks goes on record to say the third installment of a critically acclaimed series and box office success will be its last. Why paint yourself into a corner like that when the possibility for more is right at your fingertips? Dare I say the answer is integrity? I know. That’s not a word you hear much in Hollywood, but I have to believe it’s the reasoning behind Dean DeBlois‘ adaptation of Cressida Cowell‘s How to Train…

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REVIEW: The Kid Who Would Be King [2019]

Quick. Lift up the flaps. Another King Arthur retread? This was my first thought watching the trailer for Joe Cornish‘s The Kid Who Would Be King and probably a main contributor to why its box office was so poor (alongside an American aversion to thick British accents—albeit not nearly as thick as the writer/director’s brilliant debut Attack the Block). We’re barely two years removed from Guy Ritchie‘s acquired taste of a revision and not much further from the gritty magic-less one starring Clive Owen, so mustering enthusiasm isn’t guaranteed. What…

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REVIEW: Mary Poppins Returns [2018]

It’s today or never. Not all live-action/animated hybrids from Disney of yesteryear live up to the nostalgic memories of youth (I’m looking at you Pete’s Dragon), but Mary Poppins is an exception. Maybe it was revisiting it after seeing the underrated Saving Mr. Banks for added context concerning craft and motivation or maybe it’s simply that its message, adventure, and fun combine to form a film that literally stands up to the test of time. Let’s face it: you don’t retain the same reverence through multiple generations over five decades…

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REVIEW: Mary Poppins [1964]

A wooden leg named Smith. I never had a great affinity for Mary Poppins as a child. It could have been that I didn’t connect to the subject matter or more likely it was because my sister did. I gravitated towards Bedknobs and Broomsticks instead as a point of conflict—a film (unbeknownst to me at the time) with the same director (Robert Stevenson) and screenwriting duo (Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi). I had therefore let everything slip away from memory as far as plotting and characterizations go due to my…

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REVIEW: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse [2018]

It’s just puberty. You have to hand it to Sony for thinking outside the box. Not long ago they had the number one cinematic superhero property with Tobey Maguire donning the Spidey-suit to take on the Osborns. They tried to strike gold twice with a new “Amazing” iteration starring Andrew Garfield, but the results simply couldn’t compete with the creative and financial gains Marvel proper had with their Disney-backed universe. So they buckled. They made the compromise they said they never would and allowed the Spider-Man character to become an…

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REVIEW: 未来のミライ [Mirai no Mirai] [Mirai] [2018]

I don’t like everyone! Young Kun (Moka Kamishiraishi) is excited to welcome his mother (Kumiko Asô) home after giving birth to his baby sister. I single out “mother” because she’s whom he misses. Dad (Gen Hoshino) has never really been around due to constantly working so Kun doesn’t necessarily have any affinity for the man. As for the new child: if she can’t pull her weight playing bullet trains with him, what’s the point of her even being there? Kun is barely removed from the toddler age scale himself, though,…

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REVIEW: Ralph Breaks the Internet [2018]

You said I was trenching! I knew things weren’t going to go as hoped when the lack of a short film before Ralph Breaks the Internet brought a filmed introduction by three of its middle-aged, male creators instead. They pretend as though they’re personally beaming themselves into our theater to share their gratitude with fake buffering circles freezing frames every now and then as one tells us the hardest part of making this sequel was fitting everything they love about the internet in. It’s spoken with a transparent insecurity boomers…

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REVIEW: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald [2018]

We mustn’t be what they say we are. Who is Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne)? This is an important question we have to ask while watching Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, one we didn’t during the entirety of Harry Potter’s adventures at Hogwarts and beyond. Back then we knew who our hero was because of the mark on his head. Potter was the child of prophecy, the fated vanquisher of the wizarding world’s greatest foe Voldemort. So we invested in him and his friends from the beginning. We willingly grew…

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REVIEW: Tito e os Pássaros [Tito and the Birds] [2018]

You catch fear from ideas. The “outbreak” started years ago when the twenty-four hour news cycle broke onto the scene by stoking fear for ratings out of a necessity for content. We used to only get an hour of local news every night—itself needing to be bolstered by a public interest story or two—with a few national programs enlightening us on world events. Information dispersal became editorializing. Editorializing became for-profit politicization wherein truth was filtered through a partisan prism pre-packaged for Election Day rather than relevancy. News became entertainment, snuff…

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REVIEW: Smallfoot [2018]

True your aim. Would it be hyperbolic to call Smallfoot the most dangerous film of the year? Definitely … and yet it wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. Yes there’s a wholesome message at the back of what Karey Kirkpatrick (who co-directed with Jason Reisig and co-wrote with Clare Sera from a previous script that itself was based on Sergio Pablos‘ book Yeti Tracks) has put onscreen, but it’s not difficult to misconstrue its meaning if you’re motivated to do so. Ask him and he’ll say it’s a story about not lying…

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