Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix review

Disney's Mulan, Cultural Appropriation, and Exploitation

I’m late on this one I know. I wasn’t willing to spend thirty bucks back in September for a movie experience I knew was going to be far poorer than if I had paid half that at a theatre. So I waited for it to hit streaming for free to give it a shot. In the meantime I heard that it wasn’t very good, but I remained determined not to skip it entirely, partly out of sympathy for director Niki Caro and partly out of morbid curiosity. Disney’s live-action Mulan I was actually mildly looking forward to early in the year in spite of my well-documented distaste for this series of creative dead zones by the most powerful media conglomerate on earth. Mulan was never one of Disney’s classics, a movie extremely of its time in its “girl power” gender politics and with a decidedly American take on ancient Chinese mythology. It got by on a couple good songs and a strong lead, but it was a movie that could be improved upon, and this new version looked like it had the potential to do that, em...

The Wizard of Oz: Birth of Imagination

“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue; and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” I don’t think I’ve sat down and watched The Wizard of Oz in more than fifteen years. Among the first things I noticed doing so now in 2019, nearly eighty years to the day of its original release on August 25th, 1939, was the amount of obvious foreshadowing in the first twenty minutes. The farmhands are each equated with their later analogues through blatant metaphors and personality quirks (Huck’s “head made out of straw” comment), Professor Marvel is clearly a fraud in spite of his good nature, Dorothy at one point straight up calls Miss Gulch a “wicked old witch”. We don’t notice these things watching the film as children, or maybe we do and reason that it doesn’t matter. It still doesn’t matter. Despite being the part of the movie we’re not supposed to care about, the portrait of a dreary Kansas bedighted by one instant icon of a song, those opening sce...

So I Guess Comics Kingdom Sucks Now...

So, I guess Comics Kingdom sucks now. The website run by King Features Syndicate hosting a bunch of their licensed comic strips from classics like Beetle Bailey , Blondie , and Dennis the Menace to great new strips like Retail , The Pajama Diaries , and Edison Lee (as well as Sherman’s Lagoon , Zits , On the Fastrack , etc.) underwent a major relaunch early last week that is in just about every way a massive downgrade. The problems are numerous. The layout is distracting and cheap, far more space is allocated for ads so the strips themselves are displayed too small, the banner from which you could formerly browse for other strips is gone (meaning you have to go to the homepage to find other comics you like or discover new ones), the comments section is a joke –not refreshing itself daily so that every comment made on an individual strip remains attached to ALL strips, there’s no more blog or special features on individual comics pages which effectively barricades the ...

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