Red One movie review: a very copaganda Christmas
Unfunny action comedy can’t even pull off sloppy Yuletide kitsch. The anti-chemistry among its likable stars is “bested” only by the ugly CGI. Have some light festive violence — you know, for kids!
Lucy Liu
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya movie rating: green light
With an irrepressible heroine full of life and joy and humor, this is an ancient Japanese folktale fresh with immediacy and relevance.
question of the day: How can we update archetypal stories and characters (such as Sherlock Holmes) to be more gender equitable?
Are there cases where it wouldn’t make the most sense to leave an entire story intact and simply change the protagonist’s gender? Would a better updating be retelling classic stories from the perspective of female characters who would have been on the periphery?
dream cast: not-so-hypothetical ‘Magnum, P.I.’ movie
I feel like I’m flogging a dead horse keeping up with Dream Cast, but I’m willing to give it a few more weeks to prove itself either vital or a goner. This week: Magnum, P.I., the 1980-88 CBS action detective series starring Tom Selleck as a former Navy SEAL and Vietnam vet now working as … more…
Mission: Impossible 2 and Shanghai Noon (review)
Can it be a coincidence that both of the big new flicks this Memorial Day weekend — the kickoff for Hollywood’s first summer movie season of the twenty-first century — are basically Hong Kong action movies? The people who think about these kinds of things — current-events journalists, mainly — have already predicted that if the 1900s were the American century, the 2000s may well be the Asian century… but they were speaking economically and politically. I guess it’s probably inevitable that Asia would start to hold some cultural sway in the West, too.
