Tag: Disney

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Film/TV TV Features

Ahsoka

Rosario Dawson plays Star Wars fan favorite Ahsoka Tano.

Ahsoka Tano was the best new Star Wars character introduced during the prequel era of 1999-2013. She was introduced in The Clone Wars animated series as Anakin Skywalker’s padawan apprentice. Ashley Eckstein voiced the head-tailed Togruta hero as she grew up on-screen during the show’s seven seasons. As the war, the contradictory demands of the Jedi Council, his secret romance with Padmé, and the malign influence of Senator Palpatine slowly changed Anakin from gung ho Jedi to genocidal Sith Lord Darth Vader, it was his relationship with Ahsoka that kept him balanced. But Ahsoka could see what Anakin could not, and she became disillusioned with both the war and Jedi idealism. When she was falsely framed for war crimes in season 5, she became one of the few Jedi to ever resign from the order — as it turned out, just in time to avoid Order 66.

When The Clone Wars returned after cancellation in 2017, showrunner David Filoni spent most of his time wrapping up Ahsoka’s story. But then she returned, 20 years older and much wiser, as Fulcrum, the nascent Rebellion’s most valuable intelligence asset, in Rebels. The character makes her live action debut in the limited series Ahsoka, now portrayed by Rosario Dawson. Filoni, who has been integral to The Mandalorian and other Disney+ live action Star Wars series, returns to oversee the fate of his most beloved creation.

Ahsoka is set in the same era as The Mandalorian. The Empire has been defeated, and the New Republic is struggling to rebuild as much of the galaxy slips into warlordism. Ahsoka and her comrades Sabine Wren (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and Hera (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) survived the war. But nascent Jedi Ezra Bridger (Eman Esfandi) is missing, having apparently sacrificed himself in the final operation which sent Imperial Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen) into exile in a galaxy far, far away. Sabine, who had previously been training with Ahsoka, feels heartbroken and betrayed in the aftermath of the war, while Hera, an ace pilot who fought with the Rebellion, is now a New Republic general. Ahsoka travels with Huyang (voiced by David Tennant), a thousand-year-old droid rescued from the ruins of the Jedi Temple, but her own attitude towards the Jedi remains ambivalent. But she does suspect that a group of defeated Imperials is trying to rescue Thrawn from exile, which is confirmed when Jedi-turned-mercenary Baylan Skoll (Ray Stevenson) rescues Nightsister Morgan Elsbeth (Diana Lee Inosanto) from New Republic captivity. Meanwhile, Sabine is convinced that tracking the Force witch’s movements are the best way to get Ezra back, if he is still alive. Hera is unable to convince the war-weary New Republic to commit assets to the search, so she, Ahsoka, and Sabine set out alone to track down a star map to the distant space whale graveyard where they suspect Thrawn and Ezra have gone.

If all that sounds confusing (Space whales? Yes, they’re a thing.), then you’ve identified the first problem with Ahsoka. After 40 years of movies, comics, novels, and TV series, Star Wars is currently suffering from a bad case of Marvel-itis, where the needs of maintaining the increasingly convoluted continuity take up all available narrative time between the wham-bam space battles and lightsaber duels. Much of the charm of The Mandalorian was that it positioned itself as a monster-of-the-week series apart from the main story. In later seasons, when Luke Skywalker showed up, things went downhill fast.

Ahsoka and Thrawn are both genuinely great characters, but the series gets bogged down in Easter eggs and barely comprehensible lore. Dawson, a legend in her own right, gives an uncharacteristically reserved performance as Ahsoka. (In flashbacks, Ariana Greenblatt portrays young Ahsoka and nails the mischievous spirit Eckstein brought to the role.) Winstead is, as usual, the best thing on-screen, while Stevenson (in his last role before dying in May) understands the level of camp required of a serial villain.

But the biggest problem with Ahsoka is the direction. ILM’s special effects and production design are, as usual, absolutely top-notch, and with the level of acting firepower at his fingertips, Filoni should be able to craft some quality space opera. Yet the bread resolutely fails to rise. The patient, indie-film-inspired editing that works in the political thriller Andor sucks the life out of Ahsoka. The dialogue has been bad even by Star Wars standards. Things liven up when Thrawn arrives in episode 6, but with only two episodes left, it might be too little, too late. Maybe Ahsoka is right, and the Jedi are the problem.

Ahsoka is streaming on Disney+.

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Theater Theater Feature

Mary Poppins at Theatre Memphis

Mary Poppins is just as magical on the stage as on the screen. (Photo: Carla McDonald)

For around a month when I was 8 years old, I had a routine. Every day when I got home from school, I would turn on the VHS player and watch the same tape: Mary Poppins. I’ve seen it more times than I can count and would hazard a guess that I am more familiar with it than any other movie. Funnily enough, until recently I had never seen Mary Poppins performed on stage. To be honest, I wasn’t even aware that it had been developed into a musical, first on West End and then, two years later, on Broadway. Now that I think about it, I’m surprised it wasn’t turned into a stage play sooner than 2004. Mary Poppins is everything you’d expect from musical theater — it’s a show all ages can enjoy.

Theatre Memphis’ production of Mary Poppins has had “phenomenal sales,” according to director of marketing and communications Randall Hartzog. Audience members are encouraged to recycle their programs as almost every performance is already sold out.

Sitting in the Lohrey Theatre before a Sunday matinee, I notice there are numerous families with small children in attendance. Directly in front of me, a family of three asks if I will take their picture — it’s their little boy’s first time seeing a live show. Behind me are two more children, although one of them moves next to me during the first few minutes, his mother’s lap being a more preferable seat. Listening to his guileless commentary was an unexpected, yet welcomed, added bonus to my theater experience.

To my surprise, and in spite of my childhood obsession with the story, there were many new things to be discovered about Mary Poppins, including scenes that are altogether absent from the 1964 Disney film. I was also glad to take note of themes relevant to our cultural experience in 2023 that went over my head as a child. The mighty character of George Banks, for example, can be seen on the surface as a basic absentee-father-stock-character mired in patriarchal gender roles. However, in taking a closer look, it’s obvious that George Banks is more dynamic than static, and modern audiences might interpret his character as a manifestation of breaking generational trauma.

The musical number “Playing the Game” is another part of the onstage production that departs from the Disney film, during which the toys in Jane and Michael’s nursery come to life in response to being mistreated. It brought to mind that scene in Toy Story when Sid’s toys come out from under his bed, and I would be remiss not to include the reaction I overheard from the boy sitting beside me. As multiple toys crawled out of the wings and even out of the set itself (it was the fireplace that really got me), I heard from my right, “What the …” A few moments later, the same voice whispered, “Mom, I’m scared.” Me too, kid.

On the whole, though, the musical was uplifting, and any time the ensemble came together in choreography, it was a treat to behold. The complicated, fast-paced synchronicity in numbers such as “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and “Jolly Holiday” was performed without a hitch. The elaborate and frequent costume changes added to the overall visual spectacle achieved by these full-scale musical numbers.

Russell Lehman’s performance as Bert stood out in particular. Bert acts as a sort of narrative guide throughout the show, orchestrating scene changes and introducing scenes as a central cog in the machinery of the production. Lehman’s energy and enthusiasm shone on stage and seemed to buoy the other cast members.

It’s always encouraging to me, as a person who fell in love with the stage at the tender age of 10, to see enthusiastic theater audiences filled with multiple generations. Fortunately, Memphis is a city with many opportunities to introduce kids and first-time theatergoers to the magic of live performance. Theatre Memphis’ Mary Poppins is a perfect example of one such opportunity, and I am grateful to have been a part of it.

Mary Poppins runs through July 2nd at Theatre Memphis.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Little Mermaid

Disney makes poor unfortunate souls out of its audience with this latest live-action remake.

Ever since roughly 2016, when Disney company man Jon Favreau helmed the live-action remake of The Jungle Book, the question on my mind has been, “Why?” What, exactly, is the point of trying to redo masterpieces from the golden age of Disney animation with modern CGI tech? A live-action Cinderella that uses the 2,000-year-old fairy tale as a jumping off point, sure. Go for it. But no audience ever said, “The problem with Dumbo is that the elephants weren’t realistic enough.”

The real answer is that executives who are terminally infested with late-stage capitalist brain worms want to reuse these free intellectual properties Walt Disney appropriated from the public domain because they have a whole lot of capital invested in theme park attractions based on these stories. They want the goose to lay some more golden eggs without properly feeding the goose with new stories.

But just because you’re bringing new film technology to bear on an old story doesn’t mean that the results are going to look better. Look no further than Flounder, the best friend of Ariel in The Little Mermaid. In the 1989 Disney animated film, Flounder is a pretty simple yellow and blue fish with a friendly, humanlike face that fits his bubbly middle-schooler personality. In the 2023 version of The Little Mermaid, Flounder is an actual fish. His colors are now silver on black. His face is as impassive and free of human emotion as, well, a flounder. When he is scooped from the ocean by a passing fishing boat along with Ariel (Halle Bailey), he flops around on deck like an actual fish out of water. There’s nothing young kids like more than watching the character they’re supposed to identify with suffocate slowly!

Did the suits at Disney who have been shepherding this $250-million behemoth since 2017 think the “kids these days” don’t like hand-drawn animation? Anime is all the kids want to talk about! Disney would have been better off poaching some Japanese animators from one of Tokyo’s notoriously thrifty anime houses and turning them loose on the story of the mermaid princess who lives “Under the Sea” and wants to be “Part of Your World.” Instead, we got something that cost as much as Avatar: The Way of Water but looks like crap.

It’s a shame because Halle Bailey, half of a pop duo with her sister Chloe, gives 100 percent to the role of Ariel. She’s got vocal chops, passion, and a love for the material that shines through the crowded frames she shares with swarming sea life. But when she climbs up on a rock to recreate the poster image of “Part of Your World,” the epic wave that’s supposed to add an exclamation point to the climax evaporates like sea spray. It’s a metaphor for the entire production.

The film’s other bright spot is Melissa McCarthy as Ursula the Sea Witch. Like Bailey, she clearly understands the assignment better than her director. Her rendition of “Poor Unfortunate Souls” is the kind of camp romp you want from an over-the-top Disney villain.

Too bad director Rob Marshall treats The Little Mermaid’s music like he’s embarrassed of it. Did you think “Under the Sea,” the showstopper that earned Samuel E. Wright an Academy Award, was a little too edgy? You’re in luck, because Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs sucks all the life out of it. The new songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda, particularly the hip-hop flavored “The Scuttlebutt,” flop like a fish out of water.

The 1989 original is 83 minutes long; this one is 135 minutes long, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what they did with the extra time. Marshall and screenwriter David Magee could have explored the tragic implications of Hans Christian Andersen’s original story of lovers trapped between worlds, which ends with Ariel sacrificing herself because she refuses the Sea Witch’s order to kill her Above World paramour Eric. Nope. Disney’s regressive ending, which celebrates Ariel’s decision to change everything that’s unique about herself to please a man, remains more or less intact.

Like The Jungle Book and The Lion King before it, this flabby, dull remake of The Little Mermaid will be forgotten by this time next year — just in time for the live action remake of Moana.

The Little Mermaid
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Film Features Film/TV

Turning Red

Pixar’s newest feature explores more than the hormonal changes a preteen endures in a typical coming-of-age film.

Before he expertly defined pandemic-era ennui with Inside, Bo Burnham made his directorial debut with the 2018 comedy Eighth Grade. Elsie Fisher stars as Kayla, a 13-year-old girl who is desperate to be liked and repeatedly crushed when no one notices her. The beauty and charm of Eighth Grade is in Kayla’s relentless optimism. She spends her time producing a YouTube advice show, even though she has no idea what she’s doing in her own life. In the end, she still doesn’t feel like she fits in, but she just doesn’t care so much about fitting in anymore. She closes the film with a message to her future self to keep going no matter how hard things get.

Kayla, the middle schooler with her anxieties fully on display, who is both fascinated and scarred by social media, is one of the most completely drawn characters in recent film history. There’s more than a little bit of her DNA in Mei Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang), the eighth-grader heroine of Turning Red. She has Kayla’s false facade of self-assuredness covering a core of anxiety. But instead of being a Midwesterner with a struggling single dad, Mei is a second-generation Asian from Toronto with a domineering mother named Ming (Sandra Oh) and an easygoing dad named Jin (Orion Lee). Mei funnels all of her anxious energy into being the perfect daughter for a mother whose aspirations for her include secretary-general of the United Nations. So, no pressure. 

Unlike the unpopular Kayla, Mei has friends. Miriam (Ava Morse), Abby (Hyein Park), and Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) think Mei is brainwashed by her mother. Together, the girl gang are obsessive fans of the boy band 4*Town. (“Why are they called 4*Town if there are five of them?” asks Mei’s mom, to no good answer.) Closer to home, they’re currently crushing on a hunky 17-year-old behind the counter at the local convenience store. Mei thinks the boy obsessions are silly, until she finds herself absently drawing pictures of the bodega clerk as a sexy merman. To her horror, Mei’s mother outs her innocent crush to the pimpled teenage boy, who is understandably disdainful of her nascent merman fetish. When Mei erupts in rage for what may be the first time in her fiercely controlled life, she finds herself transformed. Not in the spiritual or mental sense, but physically transformed into a huge, fluffy red panda. 

Mirror, mirror — who’s the panda-est of them all?

Her attempts to keep her panda-osity a secret quickly fail, and her mother informs her that it’s something of a family curse. Their ancestor Sun Yee was granted the ability to transform into a cuddly but very large red panda to defend her home from invaders, and all of the women since then have had the same ability. But since Bruce Banner can tell you it’s inconvenient to turn into a giant monster every time you get upset, the family has developed a magic ritual to imprison the panda spirit in a talisman. “There’s a darkness to the panda,” Ming says, and it’s better to bottle it up than allow it to roam free. 

But is that really the right thing to do, wonders Mei? Her doubts only grow when her grandmother Wu (Wai Ching Ho) arrives to supervise the ritual with her girl gang of Asian aunties in tow. Should she embrace the panda within or submit to soul-crushing but safe normality?

Director Domee Shi is the first woman to helm a Pixar feature. Like her short film “Bao,” which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 2018, Turning Red is a family story told from the perspective of a child in an Asian immigrant family. Although she’s only 34, Shi has storyboarded eight Pixar features, including the seminal Inside Out. As you would expect from a product of the Pixar machine, Turning Red is fleetly paced and visually inventive. Mei’s turbulent tween emotions bend reality around her before subsiding just as quickly as they came, and there’s a great reference to the mirror scene in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, only with cute animals instead of demons. The lycanthrope as stand-in for puberty trope works just as well here as it did when it happened to Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf. It sets up some truly bizarre moments, such as when inter-generational panda trauma manifests itself as a furry-pocalyptic kaiju attack on the SkyDome.  

As a Pixar fanatic, Turning Red is a welcome return to form after the unfocused Onward, but only time and rewatches will tell if it belongs in the storied animation studio’s upper echelon.

Turning Red is streaming on Disney+.

Categories
Art Art Feature

“Inside the Walt Disney Archives” Opens at Graceland

“Inside the Walt Disney Archives” at Graceland (Credit: Abigail Morici)

Today, Graceland celebrates the opening of “Inside the Walt Disney Archives.” The opening marks the second appearance of the traveling exhibit in the United States, after prior appearances in Santa Ana, California, and Japan. The 450 objects on display span the history of the archives, beginning with the man Walt Disney himself, all the way through more recent films, like Frozen and the live-action Beauty and the Beast.

“When you think of American pop culture and its pillars, there are very few names that rise to the top. Elvis and Disney are among the biggest names,” says Angie Marchese, Elvis Presley Enterprises vice president of archives and exhibits. “When we first built this exhibition center, our goal was to bring world-class exhibitions that represent the best of American pop culture. [This exhibit is] the merging of two icons.”

“Inside the Walt Disney Archives” at Graceland (Credit: Abigail Morici)

The exhibit contains original artwork, costumes, props, old ride animatronics, and even some of Walt Disney’s personal belongings. “We wanted to give people the opportunity to see what we do in the Walt Disney archives,” says Becky Cline, director of the Walt Disney Archives. “We’ve shared a way to actually look at the archives. We are open to studio tours in California, where you can come in and see the reading room and Walt’s office, but no one gets to go back into the warehouse where all the treasures are.”

This exhibit is a re-creation of that experience. Visitors begin their tour in the Reading Room, which is a re-creation of the actual room where the Disney team does their research, and then they make their way to the back where they can have a peek into some of the never-before-seen treasures that the warehouse typically holds. 

“We wanted to explain what the archives actually does, explain that it’s not just beautiful props and costumes because the eye-candy, I tell ya, is really great,” Cline says. As such, labels throughout the rooms include stories from the staff members talking about what they do for their jobs — the research, proofreading, fact-checking that goes behind the scenes for every item on display. “We have wonderful treasures,” Cline continues, “and we want to share them with the people who love them the most, which are the fans.”

But as Marchese says, “It’s not all Mickey and Minnie.” After all, the exhibit is at Graceland. “Elvis is actually a part of the Disney archives,” she continues, “A few years ago, Disney acquired the 20th Century Fox archives. Elvis’ first movie, Love Me Tender, was filmed at 20th Century Fox; he actually had several movies filmed at 20th Century Fox.” 

“Inside the Walt Disney Archives” at Graceland (Credit: Abigail Morici)

So the exhibit also contains a few Elvis Easter eggs, including movie posters and original artwork of Stitch, of Lilo & Stitch fame, dressed up as Elvis, Lilo’s favorite singer. “I like to say that Stitch wanted to come back to Graceland to say hi to Elvis,” Marchese says. “In 2002, Lilo and Stitch introduced Elvis’ music to a whole new generation of Elvis fans.”

The archives also include the Swan computer from Lost, Julia Roberts’ red dress from Pretty Woman, Wilson the Volleyball from Cast Away, and so much more. “There’s something in here for the whole family,” Marchese says.

The exhibit will remain open until January 2, 2022, and for the next six months, Graceland will host a wide array of Disney-themed events, including Tour & Tea parties, trivia nights, a Princess and Pirate Day, and movie screenings of Disney classics at the Soundstage, the first of which will be Alice in Wonderland on Sunday, July 25th at 2 p.m. Marchese says, “It’s gonna be so much fun for everybody.”

To keep up with upcoming events or to purchase tickets, visit graceland.com/exhibition-center. Tickets for self-guided tours are $15 (adults), $8 (children 5-10), and under 4 free. VIP tickets are $50 and include a professionally guided tour, special access to a VIP lounge, a commemorative lanyard and pin, and a $15 food voucher. The exhibit is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

“Inside the Walt Disney Archives” at Graceland (Credit: Abigail Morici)
Categories
Film/TV TV Features

The MCU Assumes its Final Form with WandaVision

Correct me if I’m wrong — and I’m sure someone will — but I think WandaVision holds the Marvel record for most elapsed screen time until someone gets punched. In the course of 23 films and eight TV series, the problems of superheroes and their discontents are always ultimately solved by scrapping. (I haven’t seen everything, but I’m guessing there’s a lot of punching in Iron Fist.) That’s to be expected from stories about characters who, as Vision (Paul Bettany) points out, dress like Mexican wrestlers. But for years, the “blam!” and “pow!” that are allegedly the genre’s biggest selling point have been the least interesting part of Marvel movies. How many action sequences do you remember from The Avengers? But you remember when the triumphant heroes went for shawarma.

WandaVision, the Disney+ miniseries that reaches its climax on Friday, March 5th, is the most creative thing to happen to superheroes since Into the Spider-Verse. Its real genius is leaving out the punchy parts that I’ve been tuning out since Vision was born in 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Elizabeth Olsen (left) and Paul Bettany use TV Land tropes to unpack trauma in WandaVision

The love story of magically powered former Hydra operative Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision, the $3 billion vibranium synthoid of Tony Stark’s AI butler J.A.R.V.I.S. and rogue superbot Ultron, was mostly there to provide some pathos when Vision sacrificed himself to save half the universe. But despite the fact that Vision died (twice, thanks to the magic of time travel), when WandaVision kicks off, he and Wanda are living in a quaint house in a quiet New Jersey suburb. Their living room looks just like The Dick Van Dyke Show, right down to the black and white. The superpower couple tries to keep up appearances as normal, 1950s-style humans, even as their words are interrupted by a laugh track of mysterious origin.

The “real people trapped in a TV show” setup is nothing new — remember Raul Julia’s breakthrough performance in 1984’s Overdrawn at the Memory Bank? (No? Just me?) WandaVision‘s first three episodes see our heroic domestics trying to figure out what, exactly, is going on as they cycle through a survey of sitcom history, from I Love Lucy to The Honeymooners to the thematically appropriate I Dream of Jeannie. Then, as the world fills with color and the clothes become a lot less buttoned down, Wanda is pregnant with twins and their house looks like The Brady Bunch. As the twins grow up supernaturally quickly, we transition to the 1980s. In the show’s most delicious meta moment, episode 5 takes on Full House, the show that made Elizabeth Olsen’s sisters, Mary Kate and Ashley, into child stars.

Meanwhile, there’s a parallel story developing in a more recognizable version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) is one of billions of people who return from Thanos-induced oblivion to find a world transformed. She reports for duty at secret super-agency S.W.O.R.D. and is immediately thrust into the twin mysteries of the violent disappearances of Wanda and what was left of Vision, and a small town in New Jersey that has been cut off from the outside world by a dome of energy. By the time the narrative threads meet and the first punch is thrown in episode 6 “All-New Halloween Spooktacular!” the real world and the meta world have become hopelessly intertwined — and we haven’t even gotten to the musical number yet.

Olsen and Bettany, an “unusual couple”

WandaVision is at its best when it plays like the legendary Adult Swim short “Too Many Cooks” with an unlimited budget. Showrunner Jac Schaeffer delights in subverting basic tropes of both classic TV and Marvel superhero movies. The most important scene in the entire show, when Vision confronts Wanda with the knowledge that she created the sitcom world with her magic, plays out with credits rolling over it.

But none of the narrative fireworks would matter without emotional grounding from the leads. Olsen and Bettany have perfect chemistry. You have no trouble believing a witch could love a robot so much that she would bend the fabric of reality itself to bring him back from death (or at least deactivation). There are plenty of good performances among the sprawling supporting cast, especially Kathryn Hahn as Agnes, the nosy neighbor with a secret.

After 2020, the year without superheroes, WandaVision‘s popularity points to the staying power of the MCU, and Disney’s continued market domination, as the film world tries to get back on its feet. In some ways, the show is Marvel in its final form. The MCU has looked more like serial TV than discrete films for a long time, and the show’s cheeky writing makes a running joke out of Marvel’s tendency to hijack unrelated genres and slap a superhero in them. Marvel the infinitely pliable is the perfect vessel for Disney the insatiable devourer.

WandaVision streams on Disney+.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Fight Like a Girl: Can Mulan Save Disney From the Pandemic?

On February 25th, Bob Iger unexpectedly resigned as CEO of Disney. During his 15-year tenure, he oversaw the rise of the House of Mouse into the most powerful entertainment company in the world. In retrospect, his 2009 decision to acquire Marvel Entertainment, and the 2012 acquisition of Lucasfilm Ltd., led to Disney dominating the box office to an extent never seen before in the history of the film business.

So why, on an unassuming Tuesday in February, did he quit “effective immediately”? I think it’s because he saw COVID coming. Disney, like all the Hollywood studios, have long focused on breaking into the Chinese market. In February, the reports out of Wuhan were dire, and it was clear that the disease was poised to spread unchecked across the world. Two weeks later, the rest of America figured it out, too.

The coronavirus pandemic has done huge damage to the film industry. Theaters, a high-risk environment, were shut down immediately. They have only recently reopened overseas and are still closed in many parts of America. Film production at the scale of Mulan is a logistical challenge rivaled only by military mobilization. Now that projects are returning to shooting, pandemic precautions are adding upwards of 25 percent to budgets. Even worse for Disney, the pandemic shut down their theme parks, a major cash cow — initial estimates put the loss for the year at $280 million. Iger did the math and decided to go out on top and leave it to others to save the day.

Anything you can do, Mulan can do better — Yifei Liu (above and below) jumps at the chance to swing a sword for her country in Mulan, now streaming on the Disney+ platform.

Mulan was the biggest Disney release consigned to pandemic limbo. It is the epitome of the international strategy pursued by the studio. When you drop $200 million on a movie, it has to have very, very wide appeal. And since there are a billion people in China, many of whom have newly minted middle-class incomes, setting your movie there just makes good sense.

“The Ballad of Mulan” was first written down in about 550 CE, but it is believed to be much older. Hua Mulan, the female warrior who disguised her gender to fight for her emperor, is as deeply ingrained in Chinese culture as Robin Hood in English folklore. In other words, she’s the perfect protagonist to build a Disney movie around. And indeed, she already got the animated musical treatment in 1998, complete with a dragon sidekick.

Directed by Niki Caro, and budgeted at a breathtaking $200 million, Mulan is the first of Disney’s live-action remakes not to feel like an egregious waste of time and resources. The musical elements have been removed and the dragon sidekick has been replaced with a phoenix that the heroine occasionally hallucinates. Instead, the story gets a straight wuxia treatment — the Chinese story genre whose name translates to “marshall heroes” in which kung fu fighters are blessed with superhuman powers through their mastery of the life force, “qi.” Hugely popular in China, wuxia is familiar to Western audiences through the high-flying wire work of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Mulan is played by Yifei Liu, a Chinese-American actor and model who is well-known in China. Director Caro puts her through the Hero’s Journey paces, with one notable exception. In Joseph Campbell’s formulation, the hero must first hear the call of adventure, then refuse it, before finally being forced into action by forces beyond their control. Mulan never refuses the call. She is already being held back from her destiny by the patriarchal forces of traditional Chinese society, as personified by the village matchmaker (Pei-Pei Cheng, a veteran of both the Shaw Brothers’ legendary Hong Kong studio and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.) When her aged father Zhou (Tzi Ma) is called up to protect the realm against invasion by the forces of Böri Khan (Jason Scott Lee) and the witch Xianniang (Li Gong), Mulan jumps at the chance to swing a sword in drag.

Unlike some movies in the $100-million club, Mulan puts the money on the screen. There are sweeping vistas of bamboo forests and a sprawling set-piece battle that takes visual inspiration from the climax of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus. Like Daisy Ridley’s Rey in the Disney-fied Star Wars, Liu hits her marks with a flawless physicality, but never emotes much more than a dutiful jaw-clench. Caro knows how to deploy the Spielberg punch-in to keep the action coherent, though things do get a bit muddled at the end as Mulan races to save the emperor (Jet Li). While expertly made, the whole thing seems bloodless and restrained, and definitely conservative.

With the theatrical situation uncertain, Disney decided to punt on Mulan in America, releasing it as an add-on to the Disney+ streaming service, and go with a full theatrical release in China, where the virus is under control. The streaming numbers are unknown, but the Chinese audiences so far have not shown up. Mulan is an artistic success, but Disney, who six months ago was at the helm of the global film business, now seems rudderless.

Mulan Now streaming on Disney+

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

From Netflix to Criterion: All You Need to Know About What’s Streaming

Those of us who are not doctors, nurses, or EMTs or others on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19 are faced with some time on our hands. The only silver lining to the situation is that our new reality of soft quarantine comes just as streaming video services are proliferating. There are many choices, but which ones are right for you? Here’s a rundown on the major streaming services and a recommendation of something good to watch on each channel.

Stevie Wonder plays “Superstition” on Sesame Street.

YouTube

The granddaddy of them all. There was crude streaming video on the web before 2005, but YouTube was the first company to perfect the technology and capture the popular imagination. More than 500 hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Cost: Free with ads. YouTube Premium costs $11.99/month for ad-free viewing and the YouTube Music app.

What to Watch: The variety of content available on YouTube is unfathomable. Basically, if you can film it, it’s on there somewhere. If I have to recommend one video out of the billions available, it’s a 6:47 clip of Stevie Wonder playing “Superstition” on Sesame Street. In 1973, a 22-year-old Wonder took time to drop in on the PBS kids’ show. He and his band of road-hard Motown gunslingers delivered one of the most intense live music performances ever captured on film to an audience of slack-jawed kids. It’s possibly the most life-affirming thing on the internet.

From Netflix to Criterion: All You Need to Know About What’s Streaming

Dolemite Is My Name

Netflix

When the DVD-by-mail service started pivoting to streaming video in 2012, it set the template for the revolution that followed. Once, Netflix had almost everything, but recently they have concentrated on spending billions creating original programming that ranges from the excellent, like Roma, to the not-so excellent.

Cost: Prices range from $8.99/month for SD video on one screen, to $15.99/month, which gets you 4K video on up to four screens simultaneously.

What to Watch: Memphian Craig Brewer’s 2019 film Dolemite Is My Name is the perfect example of what Netflix is doing right. Eddie Murphy stars as Rudy Ray Moore, the chitlin’ circuit comedian who reinvented himself as the kung-fu kicking, super pimp Dolemite and became an independent film legend. From the screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski to Wesley Snipes as a drunken director, everyone is at the top of their game.

Future Man

Hulu

Founded as a joint venture by a mixture of old-guard media businesses and dot coms to compete with Netflix, Hulu is now controlled by Disney, thanks to their 2019 purchase of Fox. It features a mix of movies and shows that don’t quite fit under the family-friendly Disney banner. The streamer’s secret weapon is Hulu with Live TV.

Cost: $5.99/month for shows with commercials, $11.99 for no commercials; Hulu with Live TV, $54.99/month.

What to Watch: Hulu doesn’t make as many originals as Netflix, but they knocked it out of the park with Future Man. Josh Futturman (Josh Hutcherson) is a nerd who works as a janitor at a biotech company by day and spends his nights mastering a video game called Biotic Wars. A pair of time travelers appear and tell him his video game skills reveal him as the chosen one who will save humanity from a coming catastrophe. The third and final season of Future Man premieres April 3rd.

Logan Lucky


Amazon Prime Video

You may already subscribe to Amazon Prime Video. The streaming service is an add-on to Amazon Prime membership and features the largest selection of legacy content on the web, plus films and shows produced by Amazon Studios.

Cost: Included with the $99/year Amazon Prime membership.

What to Watch: You can always find something in Amazon’s huge selection, but if you missed Steven Soderbergh’s redneck heist comedy Logan Lucky when it premiered in 2017, now’s the perfect time to catch up. Channing Tatum and Adam Driver star as the Logan brothers, who plot to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Inside Out

Disney+

The newcomer to the streaming wars is also the elephant in the room. Disney flexes its economic hegemony by undercutting the other streaming services in cost while delivering the most popular films of the last decade. Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars flicks are all here, along with the enormous Disney vault dating back to 1940. So if you want to watch The Avengers, you gotta pay the mouse.

Cost: $6.99/month or $69.99/year.

What to Watch: These are difficult times to be a kid, and no film has a better grasp of children’s psychology than Pixar’s Inside Out. Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) is an 11-year-old Minnesotan whose parents’ move to San Francisco doesn’t quite go as planned.

Cleo from 5 to 7

The Criterion Channel

Since 1984, The Criterion Collection has been keeping classics, art films, and the best of experimental video in circulation through the finest home video releases in the industry. They pioneered both commentary tracks and letterboxing, which allows films to be shown in their original widescreen aspect ratio. Their streaming service features a rotating selection of Criterion films, with the best curated recommendations around. You’ll find everything from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent epic The Passion of Joan of Arc to Ray Harryhausen’s seminal special effects extravaganza Jason and the Argonauts.

Cost: $99.99/year or $10.99/month.

What to Watch: One of the legendary directors whose body of work makes the Criterion Channel worth it is Agnès Varda. In the Godmother of French New Wave’s 1962 film, Cleo from 5 to 7, Corinne Marchand stars as a singer whose glamorous life in swinging Paris is interrupted by an ominous visit to the doctor. As she waits the fateful two hours to get the results of a cancer test, she reflects on her existence and the perils of being a woman in a man’s world.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

The Mandalorian

Under that fashionable armor is Pedro Pascal as The Mandalorian bounty hunter.

Star Wars has always worn its influences on its sleeve. Its most direct influence was, of course, the cheap Flash Gordon matinee serials of the 1940s. But George Lucas was a fan of all kinds of movies, like the samurai epics of Akira Kurosawa, such as The Hidden Fortress, which gave its plot to A New Hope; and World War II air combat films such as Twelve O’Clock High and The Dam Busters, which Lucas plundered for the Death Star trench run. In the prequels, he expanded his palette ever further, mounting Ben Hur’s chariot race with rocket pods in The Phantom Menace and a sword-and-sandals gladiator match in Attack of the Clones.

Hovering in the background, as it does in most American action movies, was the Western. The famous double sunset shot from A New Hope is a copy of a single-sunset shot in The Searchers. Put a hat on Han Solo’s vest and gunbelt combo and he becomes a cowboy. Now, with the premiere of the first ever live action Star Wars TV show, The Mandalorian, the Western aspects take the forefront.

The Mandalorian, created by Iron Man director Jon Favreau and a team which include The Clone Wars’ Dave Filoni, is set in Star Wars’ equivalent of the frontier, the Outer Rim. The title character comes from the same warrior culture as Boba Fett, who apparently prize armor couture above all else. Pedro Pascal’s titular Mandalorian With No Name has yet to even take his helmet off, but he’s already hit a few choice Western tropes, like breaking a wild horse (in this case, a toothy biped lizard-thing), a rowdy bar fight that turns deadly, and a gatling-gun enhanced town square shootout. The details, such as the hero’s pitchfork-shaped energy weapon, which references the original Boba Fett cartoon from the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, put it in sci fi drag, but at its core, the show is basically Bounty Law from Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

Werner Herzog as The Client.

The House of Mouse has a lot riding on this Lucasfilm production, which is the flagship show for its new Disney+ streaming channel. It’s clear from the cinematic sweep of the pilot that no expense has been spared. Pascal is appropriately stoic, and he’s surrounded by colorful characters. Chief among them is the legend Werner Hertzog, whose appearance as a former Imperial official who offers a big money job to the Mandalorian is used to establish the post-Return of the Jedi setting. Taika Waititi appears in the pilot as the amusingly literal bounty droid IG-11, and Carl Weathers is our anti-hero’s agent. So far, the show’s biggest problem is its lack of a decent female character, which is unfortunately consistent with the Western blueprint.

The pilot ends with the revelation of the biggest Western trope of all: the worldly gunfighter seemingly finding his humanity when forced to travel with and protect a young innocent. It has proven quickly that it can deliver on the thrills front, but the jury’s still out as to whether Favreau and company can deliver depth.

The Mandalorian

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Film Features Film/TV

Coco

One of the biggest changes in the Hollywood film business is the increased importance of the international markets in studio balance sheets. It’s just not possible to make the math work on a $150 million budget (and the tens of millions of hidden dollars used for marketing and promotion) without selling a lot of tickets in Europe, Japan, South America, and, most importantly of all, China. Everybody likes explosions, good guys vs. bad guys, and sexy starlets. But there are some things that just won’t fly in Beijing — like comedies that are too dependent on the nuances of language. The complaint (which I frequently make) that big blockbusters have gotten stupider is only half true. In fact, they’ve just become easier to translate.

The chase for offshore money has inspired a number of strategies, such as releasing different cuts in different countries which feature more prominent roles for native language speakers, as happened in both Kong: Skull Island and Independence Day: Resurgence, resulting in crappy, disjointed editing. But those results are considered a small price to pay for market flexibility, and the assumption is that white American audiences don’t want to watch Asian heroes and heroines. But it’s not just box office that the studios are after, it’s investment money, too. Attracting Asian capital by making Hollywood product designed for Asian audiences has led to such tone deaf debacles as Matt Damon fighting Mongol tentacle monsters in The Great Wall.

On the other hand, there’s Coco. The new film from Pixar is a master class in how to make stories with a definite cultural identity that have broad appeal to all audiences. Coco‘s dual settings are Mexico and the hybrid Catholic/Mesoamerican afterlife hinted at by Dia de los Muertos iconography. Putting a film in a holiday tradition is, of course, a time honored Hollywood trick that has brought us everything from Bing Crosby crooning “White Christmas” in Holiday Inn to Bruce Willis battling terrorists in Die Hard.

Coco‘s hero is Miguel, voiced by Anthony Gonzalez, a young boy born into the sprawling Rivera family. The clan’s stock and trade is shoemaking, a craft that has kept them afloat and prosperous for four generations. Miguel’s great grandmother Imelda (Alanna Ubach) was married to a musician who ran off to pursue his career after their daughter Coco (Ana Ofellia Murguía) was born. Ever since then, the family has operated on a strict no-music policy, forcefully enforced by Elana (Renee Victor). But Miguel, naturally, loves music and has secretly become a skillful mariachi, and when he accidentally breaks a picture frame from the family’s Day of the Dead ofrenda, he discovers that his missing great grandfather probably became Mexico’s most famous musician, Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt). Miguel’s quest to reclaim his family’s musical heritage gets twisted when he accidentally transports himself to the Land of the Dead, where he meets his deceased family members who still hate music, and Héctor (Gael García Bernal), a down on his luck troubadour who offers to take Miguel to meet de la Cruz. For Miguel, returning to the Land of the Living is dependent on resolving old family mysteries.

Coco is visually as sumptuous as anything Pixar or any other animation studio has ever produced. Director Lee Unkrich and the Pixar team of hundreds of animators of all possible specialities take complete advantage of the 4K format to bring sparkling lights and eye-popping color to every frame. The facial animation, particularly when Miguel sings, is worlds better than even Unkrich’s last Pixar outing, Toy Story 3. Aside from the fact that virtually everyone involved is Latino, the story and characters are pretty standard Disney fare. Hector, for example, is basically a skeletonized Baloo the Bear from Jungle Book. But even if it’s formulaic, the formula is executed with love and care and extended to an audience which hasn’t had it before. The wisdom of this strategy became obvious earlier this month, when it took Coco two weeks to become the highest grossing film in Mexican history. The real secret to making it in the globalized film market is there is no secret, just solid fundamentals and a dash of love.

Coco
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