Category: 2020s

Leslie Odom Jr. is married and very much in love with his wife Cynthia Ervio, who was previously married to Orlando Bloom. Bloom illegally travels through time and fixes his former marriage to create a present where he is still married to Ervio and Odom is now married to someone else. I confess to enjoying questionable-on-the-science time travel films, despite their incredible flaws. This one creates a world where pasts, presents, and futures are all subjected to the whims of those willing to make the jumps. Even those not directly affected by the jump feel the pulse from the changes made. Luckily it has an incredible cast who portray the various relationships in believable and endearing ways.    

I’d think that a biopic about Aretha Franklin starring Jennifer Hudson would have been a slam dunk. Unfortunately I was wrong. While Hudson truly gives her all in portraying the Queen of Soul, the film fails her in almost every way. Glossing over so many details of the diva’s life, both the harrowing and the joyful, it’s impossible to even get a sense of what made the singer a queen. The film makes no attempt to even portray Franklin’s entire life, ending at the filming of her Amazing Grace album. There is some great more recent footage of Aretha performing as the credits roll, but I would recommend just watching the Amazing Grace documentary that was finally released a couple of years ago if you want to see some of the best of what she had to offer. 

Forest Whitaker is an inventor and toymaker who loses his creative spark when his apprentice steals his newest design. Years later, his granddaughter whom he’s never met comes to visit and helps him find his way. Last year when I first watched this, I found it a bit strange and lacking. The whole production is a weird and somewhat jarring mix of steampunk, Victorian, but modern sensibilities. The songs and Christmas touches are mostly a miss and the ending is a bit silly, but I do really enjoy the energy given in the dancing sequences and the dazzling details and colors in the costumes and sets. The cast as a whole, including Keegan-Michael Key, Anika Noni Rose, Ricky Martin, and young Madalen Mills, really shines.   

I had a chance to see this at the drive-in during the earlier days of COVID. I’m glad I didn’t, because after Free Guy and Space Jam, I need a little bit of reassurance about modern filmmaking. In this indie, Sunita Mani and John Reynolds are a Brooklyn couple who take a break from technology and head to upstate New York. Unfortunately while they are gone, Earth comes under attack and they are the last to know. They also quickly realize how ill-suited they are to protect themselves when they don’t have a way to search the internet. They have great chemistry as a couple and are familiar in their moments of support and exasperation with each other. It’s really funny and the alien critters are terribly cute.  

I have never really followed professional basketball, but I can say that in terms of acting ability LeBron James is no Michael Jordan. LeBron and his son are sucked into the internet by an AI played by Don Cheadle. No one even seems to remember what made the original film fun, except the toons. For some reason, the Looney Toons remember this all happened before but no one else does. The writing is so lazy that I’m fairly certain Warner Brothers movies are indeed created using an algorithm. The film is so jammed with WB IP, you can hear the creators of Free Guy saying ‘Why didn’t we do that?’ The grand match-up in the end has so many extras dressed as characters from every WB film imaginable that I’m pretty sure they gave every cosplayer in the universe $5 to show up in whatever they could find lying around the house.

I had gone into this fairly blind and was left more underwhelmed than expected. I fear there isn’t anyone out there currently to bring fully realized musicals to the big screen. Reading the wikipedia entry for the stage version, it seems like the story was sanded down so utterly that there is little conflict left in the film aside from ‘should I stay or should I go’. The answer that question is unearned in the end. I can understand wanting Lin-Manuel Miranda to be part of the movie, but his character could easily have been sacrificed in order to develop some of the main ones fuller. The songs make Hamilton seem less impressive as they all seem to have been reworked into that musical. The lip synching, especially for the younger women, is poor and disengaging. Instead of singing about their actions, the actors often seem to be doing things because the song tells them to. Maybe it feels more real for people from the area, but here, aside from an overabundance of fanny packs, Washington Heights appears to be little different from any other neighborhood in any other city. All that being said, there was a real joy expressed in the film and real emotion portrayed, particularly from Anthony Ramos and Olga Merediz, that it is hard not to feel immersed in the production.