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The Weight Matches Thrilling Grit with Endurance and Craft

One of the best segments from a mainstream TV interview in recent years has to be when Ethan Hawke showed up on Jimmy Kimmel’s show (incidentally the night after he came back from that brief pull off the air) and spent the majority of his time speaking praises from the heart to Robert Redford, who had passed away a few weeks before. It was a great mix of tribute, personal anecdote, and education on just what kind of a legacy -as an artist and as a human being- that Redford left behind. Hawke clearly was a big fan, as he has expressed in other contexts through the years. And so I know he would take it as a great compliment that his performance in The Weight channels the spirit of Redford more than anything else he has done. Certainly it feels like the kind of movie that might have come out during the era of Redford’s height. Director Padraic McKinley articulates well that flavour of 70s grit through a style and a premise descended from rugged survivalist thrillers like John Boorman’s ...
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The Weird, Bombastic Memories of Forgotten Island

American studio animation has felt quite safe as of late -DreamWorks movies especially. Consistent and reliable brands are maintained or else original movies that follow very tried and true formulas. It’s not always a bad thing -some really strong and meaningful storytelling came out of the Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon sequels. And The Wild Robot did some pretty stellar things within its standard narrative. But there’s not typically the same kinds of ambition or thematic innovation to these movies as you might find in animated works from other countries -and that is true even if the animated work is about another country. Pinpointing a culture and compressing it into a movie is another popular trend of mainstream animation lately -the trope that resulted in Moana , Coco , Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto among others. Good movies (most of them), but always just a little distant and inauthentic. You can feel the narrative, tonal, and thematic strictures upon them...
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A Cute Claymation Seasonal Adventure with Shaun the Sheep

I was very surprised to find that the new Shaun the Sheep movie was getting a theatrical release this side of the Atlantic. The last one, Farmageddon , didn’t get much play out here and Shaun the Sheep is far from ubiquitous as a brand. But there were a few children in my audience who laughed at the right moments and seemed genuinely engaged with the cute claymation farm animals. And that’s good, because it’s an endearing, intriguing art that only Aardman Animation seems to be doing anymore. And Shaun the Sheep , which is still producing new episodes, is the main thing keeping the lights on at that company. The Beast of Mossy Bottom is certainly a daring choice of title for a movie that otherwise taps into a Halloween theme fairly well. There’s been a shortage in the last decade or so of Halloween movies for kids, perhaps due to a lack of an audience in a young generation more desensitized and attuned to adult horror or an absence of imagination or impetus from the movie industry -...
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Futurama Reviews: S11E08 -"Oceans Three"

Though some of the writers on the Hulu run of Futurama have been necessarily younger, let it be remembered that the show is primarily staffed by b oomers and the oldest of Gen-X. An episode like “Oceans Three”, with a demographic audience age of about seventy-five, is a reminder of that. None of its trilogy of parodies are very culturally understood among people under forty, even the one that is only about thirty years old. I’m aware of them because I’m a nerd for movie and TV history, yet some referential jokes even flew over my head. And maybe this genre of sixty-year-old pop culture pastiches would work fine if they didn't come boxed in another lame anthology episode. After last season didn't include one I believed the Futurama writers had realized the gimmick had run its course, but apparently no t . "Oceans Three", as its title implies, is a collection of stories set out on the sea . A particular thing that does distinguish this one is that each narrative ...
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Why You Should Watch Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

The most cardinal sin that an extension to a popular media franchise can make is to be different. Formula, aesthetics, tone, canon -these mean everything and fresh ideas mean little. A lot of the homogeneity in our current mainstream media landscape has a lot to do with the fact that such brands refuse to take risks, adopt more provocative themes, or challenge existing norms within that brand. We've seen the intensity of the backlash when Star Wars does it, and we've seen it also when Star Trek has done it. 'Boldly going' apparently only means so much. And yet, going a different route and taking new chances has often resulted in better art, art that has elevated the brand it is created within. Case in point: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . Granted, when the third live-action Star Trek show first debuted in January 1993, it was not greeted with immediate positivity for these same reasons. The internet was not ubiquitous at the time but there were certainly voices objecti...
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