Overlooked Specials 6th Day of Christmas

6^th Day of Christmas:

"It’s Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown"

We all know “A Charlie Brown Christmas” rightfully so -it’s great and one of the holiday classics! But no one ever talks about its’ follow-up in 1992 which is a very good special in its own right. Unlike the narrative of the first special, this one is composed of a series of vignettes. But they’re GOOD vignettes. Like Charlie Brown trying to buy a pair of gloves for his love interest Peggy Jean, or Sally struggling with her one line in the Nativity play, in which Peppermint Patty is also begrudgingly participating. It’s a Charlie Brown special that’s more sure of itself and has more of the humour of the strip than its predecessor. Also, this special has a few more of my favourite characters, introduced after the original, like Peppermint Patty, Marcie, and Woodstock. I’d say it’s definitely one of the best Peanuts specials and like A Charlie Brown Christmas, worth watching every year.

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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 Subtle Sensitivity of the Cinema of Wong Kar-wai

When I think of Wong Kar-wai, I think of nighttime and neon lights, I think of the image of lonely people sitting in cafes or bars as the world passes behind them, mere flashes of movement; I think of love and quiet, sombre heartbreak, the sensuality that exists between people but is rarely fully or openly expressed. Mostly I think of the mood of melancholy, yet how this can be beautiful, colourful, inspiring even. A feeling of gloominess at the complexity of messy human relationships, though tinged with an unmitigated joy in the sensation of that feeling. And a warmth, generated by light and colour, that cuts through to the solitude of our very soul. This isn’t a broadly definitive quality of Wong’s body of work -certainly it isn’t so much true of his martial arts films Ashes of Time and The Grandmaster. But those most affectionate movies on my memory: Chungking Express , Fallen Angels , Happy Together , 2046 , of course In the Mood for Love , and even My Blueberry Nig...

The Prince of Egypt: The Humanized Exodus

Moses and the story of the Exodus is one of the most influential mythologies of world history. It’s a centrepoint of the Abrahamic religions, and has directly influenced the society, culture, values, and laws of many civilizations. Not to mention, it’s a very powerful story, and one that unsurprisingly continues to resonate incredibly across the globe. In western culture, the story of Moses has been retold dozens of times in various mediums, most recognizably in the last century through film. And these adaptations have ranged from the iconic: Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments; to the infamous: Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings . But everyone seems to forget the one movie between those two that I’d argue has them both beat. As perhaps the best telling of one of the most influential stories of all time, I feel people don’t talk about The Prince of Egypt nearly enough. The 1998 animated epic from DreamWorks is a breathtakingly stunning, concise but compelling, ...

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