When I walked out of my screening for Lee Daniels’ The Butler, I was sure that I had seen a good movie. It’s probably why I wrote such a rave review over at Awards Circuit. However, the film has grown in estimation over the past few days to be one of the more impressive films in recent memory that dealt with issues in the African-American community. Black issues in films are very difficult to tackle on-screen, partially due to the fact that everyone is so used to the white heteronormative narrative. But I thought it would be nice to give kudos to Lee Daniels’ The Butler and analyze why it worked so well.
And you thought the only thing I talked about here was Teen Wolf! It’s been a while since I’ve addressed anything to do with sports on the blog, but I have so much time on my hands these days I figured it’d be fun to go back to that well. Since I’ve moved to LA I have been able to catch up on baseball, thanks to Time Warner’s great selection of channels (one of these days I’ll tell yall about the bullshit they pull in Texas). Of course this coincided with Alex Rodriguez’ return to the Yankees and no matter which of the 5 million ESPNs there are or Fox, you can’t escape the conversation. I mean ESPN broke from it’s Wednesday Night Baseball feed just to show us ARod’s at bats, as if we’d see him juicing on TV. This crazy coverage and the fallout from the biogenesis clinic have me pondering some things reagrding MLB.
Fanboys seem to be having an interesting week. Pacific Rim has arrived to wildly divisive response, Comic-Con fever is about to hit and we’re in the thick of the summer movie season. But the biggest news of the week was derived from an interview with current Spider-Man star Andrew Garfield in which he tells Entertainment Weekly that he talked with his director about the possibility of MJ being played by Fruitvale Station actor Michael B. Jordan. Not only would Spidey then get a male love interest but have an interracial relationship, which is rare on screen in any movie, let alone a superhero one.
I thought about doing this piece as a standard review but I’m tired and I don’t particularly feel the film demands much attention for its strengths. Sure Now You See Me is a fairly entertaining film that keeps you enthralled till the end through it’s fun performances and high octane action. I gave it two and a half stars and I’ve no doubt many people will come away from the movie with higher grades than that. However, what interested me the most about the film were it’s short comings, specifically how the magic was portrayed, so I’ve decided to focus on that.
To start off, I love me some Angelina Jolie. She’s perhaps the only actress I will line up opening day to see, she’s incredibly sexy, a great celebrity whose life is endlessly fascinating, and she’s extremely philanthropic. In short she’s this generation’s Elizabeth Taylor and we all stand in awe of her. Yesterday, she released an op-ed in the NY Times speaking about how she arrived at the decision to have preventative double mastectomy surgery after taking a test that revealed she had the gene for breast and ovarian cancer. She speaks at length in the article about her mother who died from the disease, her children asking her if she would have the same fate and her partner Brad Pitt sticking by her side. Angie ends the piece by talking about how women should be proactive in their health as well as subtly critiquing the health care system for the cost of this test.
Oh Smash, you make it so hard to continually tune in every week. I have resolved to go. This season has traded in the batshit crazy bravado of the first season for more streamlined stories that lack ambition. They’ve sort of buried the craziness in a shallow grave, but it could only remain there so long. On last night’s SMASH titled “Phenomenon” the show took a dip back into that pot of foolishness and created a storyline that while somewhat dramatically compelling, just stank of tired clichés, bad writing, and the ultimate demise of the show.