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The Joy of Imagination and Childhood Whimsy Fuels The Magic Faraway Tree

Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree books were written in the 1930s and 40s, and watching their first film adaptation many decades later, you can really tell. It’s style and language of fantasy are very quaint, derived more from children’s fancy and fairy tales than the more sophisticated storytelling that came about in the wake of The Lord of the Rings . There is a real charm to those kinds of stories - At the Back of the North Wind , Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , and perhaps the big one Peter Pan . But it is hard to imagine them connecting now in quite the same way. Writer Simon Farnaby and director Ben Gregor make their best attempt though. And Farnaby has experience translating old British children’s literature through his involvement in the Paddington movies (he wrote Paddington 2 -the best received of them) and Wonka . And certainly The Magic Faraway Tree has a similar earnestness to it, unbothered by the cute or saccharine elements of its premise, using smart but kid-frien...
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There's Something Wrong with The Wrong Girls

It’s weird that a mediocre ston er comedy somehow hit on a brilliant idea for a superhero comic that seemingly none have tried yet. Heroes come into their powers via so many routes -alien DNA, spider bite, radioactive waste; why couldn’t they just come from taking a bad drug? I suppose the Comics Code Authority would never allow that in a medium that is predominantly all-ages in output, but The Wrong Girls doesn’t have to worry about that. The directorial debut of screenwriter Dylan Meyer, it is the second effort this year after Pizza Movie to revive the stoner comedy -though while Pizza Movie took its stylistic cues from a modern kind of rapid-fire absurdist internet humour, The Wrong Girls is more in the traditional vein of something that Cheech and Chong might have made: a pair of stoners caught up in a ridiculous premise where their intoxication factors more into the humour than the trip itself. This approach means that more of the film is carried on the back of the personaliti...
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Sex, Death, and the Mesmerizing Mindscape of Camp Miasma

“Now if it gets too real, you can always turn it off.” You don’t see a lot of movies about sex anymore, not really. The mainstream film industry has been generally pretty sexless for a while now, but even apart from depiction there’s just not much of an interest in discussing sex with a genuine curiosity as to its complexities. Granted it was never a regular occurrence, but through previous decades there was every once in a while an Eyes Wide Shut or Crash that would show up in the zeitgeist and strike up conversations. It increasingly feels like that may be something that is needed again. Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is as its title suggests a movie about sex and death -and it is very intentional that the two are linked. Whether Schoenbrun was driven to their choice of genre structure by these themes or if their compulsion to explore them came about as a byproduct of the kind of film they were already drawn to pursue, it is rather ideal that the slasher mov...
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Futurama Reviews: S11E04 -"The Charm Offensive"

  It’s been a long time since Futurama has engaged in a relevant way with popular music. Depending on your mileage, it's either when Beck showed up to go on tour with Bender in season three or when the Beastie Boys made a prominent appearance back in season one. That was over twenty-five years ago and the music industry has changed dramatically -it is an ample environment for the show to comment on. And “The Charm Offensive” does just that and in a pretty good way as it targets the pop stardom of figures like Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter. Admittedly some of the jokes are very easy and others quite cliché to Futurama ’s brand, but you can’t really knock the episode for them. The subject demands it. Coco Charm is the pop megastar stand-in here, a teen sensation poised to sell out Madison Cube Garden within quantum-seconds for her upcoming concert. Amy is apparently a big fan and her birthday is coming up so Kif determines to get tickets for her, expressing a certain insecurity...
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A Beautiful Balancing Act: The Exuberant Tones, Joys, and Energy of The Rivals of Amziah King

The Rivals of Amziah King is something like a beehive. Within it there is an abundance of sweetness produced by an intensity of driven, like-minded community fellowship, a heaviness of necessity for the work and the vitality of what it means, and a sense of awe with the process and structure so critical to that taste that is yearned for. But be careful, because it also stings and stings hard when disturbed. The compulsively eclectic sophomore feature from director Andrew Patterson I find myself at a bit of a loss to characterize with its equal elements of western noir, crime drama, coming-of-age film, and slice-of-life vibes movie -arguably also a low-key rural musical. It runs in and out of each of these qualifiers yet manages to largely stay cohesive somehow, its texture as multifarious yet fitting as a honeycomb. Exuberant in its style and by turns endearing, eccentric, and dramatically mystifying in its story, it is one of the more inspired movie concepts we’ve seen all year and c...
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Queens of Pop: SIX is a Splendid if Shallow Concert

The concept of SIX is quite fun for a musical. It is also exactly the kind of concept you would expect from a pair of theatre kids in university -which is indeed when Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss first created the show. Crossing the stories of the wives of Henry VIII with the aesthetics of girl pop and some very blunt themes on patriarchal readings of history and the notion of restoring these women’s own agency to their stories feels like the kind of idea that would originate in the context of learning academic theories of historiography and feminism for the first time and melding that with some familiar nostalgia. That’s not a knock on the show necessarily , it clearly worked -and Marlow and Moss had the talent to compose it all in a competent way and the foresight to understand the structural limitations of the idea. This likely wouldn’t work as a Hamilton -style epic, it needed to be a short and simple yet striking concert. And as a concert it is a pretty good one. SIX is the latest...
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Creative Dinosaur Mayhem Thrills at the End of Oak Street

In the wake of Jurassic Park and its groundbreaking dinosaur effects, one of the popular imagined ideas for its potential sequels was to take the dinosaurs off the sequestered island and put them in a more recognizable and immediate environment. Spielberg did this briefly at the end of The Lost World where a T-Rex is unleashed on San Diego, but subsequent movies for whatever reason had no interest in going there. Then finally, 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom ended on the clear note of dinosaurs off the island and unleashed into civilization. However Jurassic World: Dominion came along next and tossed out that premise for the familiar very promptly. I wonder if David Robert Mitchell saw that and figured he would make his own ersatz sequel to Fallen Kingdom that did in fact take advantage of the concept of dinosaurs infiltrating our everyday lives. Because that is what The End of Oak Street feels like, a movie that really is what any of those Jurassic World films should have ...
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