CULTURE

Rihanna's Fenty Show Provokes Muslim Outrage

Rihanna's Fenty lingerie event featured a song that sampled a sacred Islamic verse. I understand why people are upset. I'm upset, too.

Rihanna

Photo by Image Press Agency-NurPhoto-Shutterstock

In Islamic culture, anything to do with the prophet Muhammad P.B.U.H. is held sacred.

His image, his habits, and his words must all be regarded with great reverence. And reverence is not what Rihanna's Fenty lingerie show was about–not even a little bit.

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FILM

The Awkward Racial Undertones of "Maleficent 2"

Who knew xenophobia was routine in Disney movies?

Maleficent 2 really missed the mark with fans, critics, and general movie-goers, bringing in a disappointing $36 million at its box office opening weekend.

All the charm and female empowerment themes from the original seem to be missing in this installment, with Director Joachim Rønning instead opting for a princess-wedding-warfare mess of epic proportions. But where the bloodshed and pageantry fell short, two obtuse colonial narratives emerged: people of color represented as mythical monsters, and the colonizer instigating war against the colonized. It's hard to overemphasize how obtusely this film handles its oppressed people, so let's just dive in.


1. The Marginalized Fairies

Let's start with Maleficent herself. She's a powerful fairy, vilified by the townsfolk, and self-appointed as the protector of the Moors––a mystical forest where all other fairies, tree giants, and assorted mythical creatures live. She's attacked by the Queen and subsequently rescued by a mysterious creature, revealing itself to be a fairy just like Maleficent. They're actually part of a special fairy race called Dark Feys. The Fey once roamed the entire world, inhabiting deserts, jungles, and grasslands, until the warmongering humans drove them underground to live in massive caves below the earth. Now the Fey have lost their lands, their culture, and their prosperity.

As far as the casting and wardrobe choices go, most of the Fey are portrayed by people of color, a smattering of Asian, Black, and Brown folk from myriad colonized diaspora (with the occasional White Fey tucked in the corner, out of focus). Their clothes are awkwardly tribal, mostly consisting of woven animal skins, feathers, and wrapped fabrics resembling buckskin dresses and breechcloths worn by indigenous people of the Americas.

The tribal allegories go further, with the Fey communicating to each other through howling, indiscernible chanting, and chest-beating. Tribal drums and guttural shouts accompany every scene with the Feys, and they go so far as to bow down on their hands and knees when honoring a fallen Fey comrade, eerily imitating an Islamic prayer pose (or "downward dog" for you yogis out there). Every character's hair is long or dreadlocked, and as they prepare for battle they lather up with face paint. The only narrative we get for what these people want comes from two comically hackneyed characters: Cornal, played by academy-award winner Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Borra, played by English rapper and actor Ed Skrein.

I won't belabor this point, but basically Cornal is all about making peace with the humans and getting their land back with peace and peacefulness and more peace, and Borra is all about f*cking the humans up. Cornal falls into the "magical Black character" trope pretty quickly, as his whole purpose in the film is to repeatedly save Maleficent from death and reiterate the importance of making peace with the humans for some altruistic reason that's never explained. He sacrifices himself to save her, which is ultimately worthless, since Maleficent proceeds to declare war on the humans alongside Borra, anyway. I really hope Ejiofor got a fat paycheck.

2. The Fascist (aka The Queen)

If you saw the posters for Maleficent 2, you know Michelle Pfeiffer is in this movie. She plays Queen Ingrith, the mother of Prince Philip, and easily the most dynamic character in the whole film. Her hammy, villain-of-the-week performance is mesmerizing, even if her motives are nothing short of autocratic fascism. In an expository scene with Maleficent's daughter Aurora, Queen Ingrith explains how she considers the Fey "savages" and that leaders who support civility and tolerance are "weak." Her mission is to conduct a fairy genocide so that she can plunder the Moors for its natural resources.

The crux of her scheme is the invention of a weaponized magical powder (from here on to be referred to as a WMP) that evaporates fairies on contact. There's a particularly cruel, drawn-out scene wherein her warlock henchman, played by the esteemed Warwick Davis (who played Filius Flitwick from the Harry Potter franchise), is instructed to murder a fairy with the newly formed powder. We're forced to bear witness as the fairy screams and writhes in terror until the powder hits, disintegrating them into an inanimate flower. Kinda heavy for a Disney movie, right?

Here are just a few more of Queen Ingrith's excessive tyrannical exploits, which Maleficent 2 seems keen on showing children:

  • She invites all the mythical folk from the Moors to the palace for a royal wedding, where the unassuming fairies are bombarded with the WMPs inside the chapel. We're treated to a close-up of a tree monster's face as it's struck – weeds and vines sprout out of its open eyes and mouth, a belabored sigh escaping as it dies.
  • She catapults WMP bombs at the Fey as they approach the palace, disintegrating them by the hundreds out of the sky. When the Fey reach the walls, imperial soldiers harpoon them with steel grappling hooks and blast them apart with WMP grenades.
  • Queen Ingrith shoots a WMP arrow at Aurora, striking Maleficent as she pulls Aurora aside. Maleficent then disintegrates in Aurora's arms, leaving her to weep in despair (This film is rated PG, by the way).
  • With Maleficent's ashes blowing in the wind, Queen Ingrith explains to Aurora that what makes a great leader: "The ability to instill fear in your subjects, and then use that fear against your enemies." She continues to say that all the murder and carnage she caused was all in the name of the State – I mean, the kingdom of Ulstead.

All of the motivation for Pfieffer's character is so ham-fisted and excessive that I actually enjoyed her performance in spite of myself. With a master plan straight out of Stalin's playbook, mixed with some Hitleresque sentimentality, she made for a comically malevolent villain that the titular Maleficent couldn't even come close to matching.

3. The White Savior Wedding

Alright. This is the lamest and most contrived part of the entire movie, and I hate it more than words can describe.

The bloodshed ends when Maleficent gets reincarnated as a Phoenix from Aurora's tears, and literally everyone, human and Fey, stops fighting to look at the giant bird. Prince Philip takes this opportunity to proclaim to everyone (in earshot, I guess?) that Alstead will never attack the Moors again, and from that day forth they will "move forward, and find their way in peace."

All's well that ends well, right? Ha, you wish—you may have forgotten this was a princess movie, but Rønning sure didn't! Aurora belts out that there's going to be a wedding, like right then, and it will be a uniting of two kingdoms (the Moors and Alstead, presumably). Everyone's invited and she pinky promises everybody will be safe. You know, not like the wedding that happened an hour ago where half of her friends and subjects were brutally massacred. This one's gonna be all about peace. And…love, I guess.

The best part is the look on everyone's faces, Fey and soldiers both, as confusion and apprehension runs rampant. They have no idea who this lady is. Can you imagine spending hours fighting for your life, and then you immediately have to go to some random girl's wedding? Can't it wait until tomorrow? Apparently not. Prince Philip presumably hires a minister and procures floral arrangements, and there's a 4-minute sequence of Aurora walking down the aisle. They say "I do," and everyone in the whole kingdom cheers. It's truly insulting to watch—especially considering a blue-eyed, blonde-haired, white woman is representing the Fay and the fairies, whom we've already established represent marginalized people from oppressed lands. A Christian wedding saves the day, and everyone lives happily ever after. I guess they didn't move the dead bodies from the chapel, since this wedding took place outside on the lawn. Whoops.

So what have we learned from Maleficent 2? Well for one, colonialist narratives are so ingrained in our culture that appropriating the expression of indigenous people is a go-to aesthetic for representing the "other" in a fantasy story. Finding common ground with those different than you is best accomplished under the conditions of archaic Christian rituals. And Michelle Pfieffer can play any villainous role that's handed to her and blow it out of the water. This movie isn't worth watching, but if you do, at least you'll be entertained. I'm not sure anything I enjoyed about it was necessarily intentional, but given the track record for these Disney live-action cash-grabs, you gotta take what you can get.

TV

4 Burning Questions After Watching “Mindhunter” Season Two

What's the deeper message Mindhunter is trying to tell us?

Netflix FYSEE 'Mindhunter' TV Show Panel, Los Angeles, CA, USA - 01 Jun 2018

Photo by Eric Charbonneau (Shutterstock)

There's a scene in episode six of Mindhunter 's season two wherein detective Holden Ford, played by Jonathan Groff, tells the police chief in Atlanta that all serial killers want a lasting story: a mythos.

His tone implies that this is something ultimately distasteful, something to manipulate for the sake of coercing the killer to make a mistake. The irony, of course, is that Mindhunter's entire existence creates that mythos for real-life serial killers. I'm far from the first to say that elevating murderers to mythical status for the sake of sensationalism is irresponsible and vapid.

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FILM

"Child's Play" Is a Waste of Chucky's Talent

The script feels like the first draft of a screenplay written by a bot—which is a problem when you already have one character that's actually a robot.

The Child's Play remake is a waste of everyone's talent—especially Chucky's.

The movie's clearly not aimed at adults, since most of the plot follows a 14-year-old and his witless friends. But it's not directly aimed at kids, because it has a seriously hard R rating for violence. The writing is atrocious, the directing is comically confused, and so the biggest question remains: Who is this movie for?

In the original 1988 Child's Play, we follow a murderous doll who'd been inhabited by a serial killer's spirit as he seeks to get his old body back, killing innocent people along the way. The kills are ridiculous, the one-liners are cringey, but overall the Chucky franchise is a lot of fun. They weren't cinematic masterpieces or beautifully written dramas—they were campy, brutal, classic 80's slasher films.

And then we have the 2019 remake.

Instead of charm and camp, we get…sarcasm? Awkward pauses? Millennial humor at its absolute worst. Some jokes did get a laugh, mostly thanks to the charm of Brian Tyree Henry. But even he can't salvage dialogue like, "White man dies in a watermelon patch. That's poetic." Is it, detective Morris? Is it, really? (I'm going to start a petition to stop letting white people write white people jokes.)

Let me back up a bit. This new film starts with a disgruntled factory worker disabling the security features on a high-tech "Buddi" smart doll before throwing himself out of a window. Pretty strong start. The hacked doll then ends up in the hands of Andy Barclay, who shares a name with the original character and absolutely nothing else. With the security features disabled, Chucky is able to curse, commit foul acts, and eventually establish an affinity for bloodshed.

The plot is contrived, but that's not the biggest issue. The biggest flaw is Andy. He is an incredibly boring character, doesn't have much in the way of a personality, and spends an awful lot of time crying. I mean, in the original, Andy cried a lot too, but he was six - not fourteen. I don't understand why he is our main character when you have incredible talents like Aubrey Plaza playing his single mother and Brian Tyree Henry playing the friendly neighborhood detective. This would be the chance to make some very warranted creative liberties. But the director seems completely unaware of how to leverage his actors' strengths, as Plaza is left for most of the movie to play a clueless but loving mother, and Henry to a charming but ultimately useless cop.

What's worse is that this new A.I. "evil robot" angle could have totally worked as a Chucky reboot concept. The doll learns to love killing by misunderstanding human emotion; then he just starts slashing up the town. His wifi-enabled A.I. could hack into everyone's connected devices to create some really inventive kills! Instead, we get someone trapped in a smart car driving in circles, only to have Chucky pop up and stab the victim. I think the new Chucky design really worked, too: The dead, vacant eyes and creepy smile were really suitable updates to the already iconic doll we all know and love.

Unfortunately, the script feels like the first draft of a screenplay written by a bot. You knew what every character was going to say before they said it, and no one acted like a human. Which is a problem when you already have one character that's actually a robot.

You might find yourself thinking: "Who the hell made this?" And you might not be surprised to find that it's… some random guy. Lars Klevberg has directed a total of one other movie, also released in 2019 (he has a pretty cool Vimeo page, though). The writer, Tyler Burton Smith, also has a limited portfolio of feature films—this one. He's written some video game stories before, and his twitter is funny. So we have two guys who have never done this before and none of the original creative team (notably Chucky creator Don Mancini, and the legendary Chucky himself, Brad Dourif) to help move the project along.

The movie ends up being a wasted opportunity to bring life back to a dusty franchise. The ideas are there, and the characters are serviceable, but the execution holds the film back from being memorable in any way. Say what you will about the old series, but it had style—something this film does not.

So… who is this movie for? Definitely not me. But if you're looking for something new to watch and don't care about the purity of the Chucky franchise, you could do worse than this. But not by much.

Rating: ⚡⚡/5

The live-action Aladdin remake is what you get when you take what white people think the Middle East is and colonize it with peppy, witless background actors.

I don't need to set up the premise of Aladdin for you; you already know the story. And that's what the new Disney live-action remake assumes, too, skipping character introductions in the beginning for a montage of the hot-spots in the fictional city of Agrabah - from the Sultan's palace overlooking the sprawling city to the Cave of Wonders with its Mufasa face. It's a sweeping CGI landscape, and after the nauseating roller coaster we meet our hero, Aladdin, played by newcomer Mena Massoud. He's running from the palace guards and bumps into Jasmine in the market, played by Disney Channel's Naomi Scott; he immediately charms her. Their chemistry is as instant and intolerable as a TV dinner.

All this action takes place on a painfully tacky sound stage, bustling with vaguely Middle-Eastern-looking people of all different kinds. Beards and burkas, eyeliner and turbans; it's like the wardrobe department raided the "Oriental" section of a Halloween Adventure store. And that's what the painful points of this film are: its creative failures. The Disney Aladdin story in itself is an American-made bastardization of Middle Eastern and Oriental cultures blended together to be consumed. Much like Pocahontas and Mulan, it was a story written by white people to sell toys to all the little boys and girls of America. So no one should expect this movie to depict literal Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, or Lebanon, or a whole host of other cultures that are being flimsily referenced. But to anyone who has actually been to the Middle East… the environment looks more like an amusement park attraction than a place anyone could conceivably live in. Guy Ritchie puts so much effort into imitating the world of the animated original that the film misses opportunities to shine on its own.

Massoud does a serviceable job as Aladdin, as his handsome blank expression becomes endearing after a while. But Scott steals the spotlight with her genuinely compelling performance as a politically-minded princess who longs to be sultan. As the movie chugs along, you start to get the sense that this should have been Jasmine's movie. Her character motivation is much stronger than Aladdin's, who ultimately just wants to impress some chick he met one day earlier. Luckily, Jasmine gets plenty of screentime to show off her acting and singing chops, which provide the only breaks from obnoxiously noticeable autotune.

Surprisingly, Will Smith is pretty good in this movie. That is to say, when he isn't the weird, uncanny-valley/blue-man-group Will Smith we glimpsed in the film's trailers, he holds it down as the Genie. The most glaring moments of disillusionment come when Robin William's iconic one-liners are recited word for word. For instance, Smith just can't quite capture the comedic timing Williams had with his "teeny-tiny living space" line. The musical number "Friend Like Me" was particularly painful, but that might have been my stomach adjusting to the sight of a blue, photo-realistic, steroided Will Smith floating on a cloud. With that being said, when Smith isn't blue, he's fun to watch. His best moments come from playing the classic, 6'2, lovable Will Smith. There's a particularly phenomenal scene in which Aladdin is attempting to impress the princess as Prince Ali, and Smith's ad-libs were the freshest part of the entire film. I won't spoil them, but you'll be genuinely laughing the entire time.

Should you see this movie? Eh, sure. It offers some good new ideas that I would have loved to see explored more, like Genie hanging out among the humans and Jasmine's growth as a royal leader. Those concepts stand up well on their own and allow the actors to leverage their very obvious strengths. But director Guy Ritchie either didn't have a vision for this film or he wasn't allowed by the Disney powers that be to realize it. So instead, we have cartoonish acting, hokey sets, and very, very low stakes in a movie that should be a mystical adventure. If you're not too concerned with something new and just want to watch a bunch of faux-Arabs onscreen acting out your favorite childhood movie, then this live-action remake of Aladdin is for you.

Rating: ⚡⚡

The 2019 Hellboy reboot was a colossal, $50 million failure. From the script, the story, and the pacing to the special effects, tone, and acting, this movie manages to be terrible in almost every conceivable way.

But let's be fair: it did get some things right. They surely used an expensive camera to shoot the movie, and you can tell because you couldn't see any pixels on the screen. The actors memorized all their lines, and from the looks of it, they fit into their outfits really well. David Harbour, who plays the titular Hellboy, looks very well-fed, so the craft-service situation on set must have been A+. It's nice to know that Milla Jovovich is still able to find work after the Resident Evil series prematurely ended. Her dead, vacant eyes lend themselves perfectly to the role of the Evil Bad Lady #2. Plus, Daniel Dae Kim is hot, so the producers were smart to get him shirtless within the first hour of screen time. We can all be thankful for that. And Sasha Lane was there too! Is she the first clairvoyant millennial with dreadlocks to fight evil in a Hollywood "movie?" Probably. That's fun.

If you've Google'd "Hellboy" at any point recently, you've probably read all this. But here are highlights from five of the most reputable news sources with their take on this shit-pile of a film:

Roger Ebert

- You will never realize how much you need Guillermo del Toro in your life until you see the reboot of "Hellboy."

- "Hellboy" stops being fun when it stops being funny

The New York Times

- …"Hellboy" is a crack pipe of a movie.

- Marshall… directs like a dog at a squirrel convention,

Washington Post

- At one point, Hellboy and his colleagues must fight zombies bursting out of the ground. The actors seem to realize this scene is just filler…

- (Harbour's) dramatic scenes fall curiously flat, and his comic one-liners inspire little more than stony silence.

NBC News

- The new, inexcusable Hellboy movie, was directed — if that's the word I want — by Neil Marshall, whose terrific horror flick "The Descent" suggested that he might be up to the job of making a fun and scary Hellboy movie. He was not.

- "Hellboy" is not even really a movie; it's a launchpad for five different movies that will never get made because no one wants to watch a launchpad for five different movies when they've paid to watch this movie.

The Atlantic

- The end result is an R-rated slog that's heavy on bad attitude and creative dismemberments, and completely missing the humane core of Mignola's original story.

- …this film ends up perfectly laying out the case against its own existence.


Ahmed Ashour is a media writer, tech enthusiast, and college student. He has a Twitter: @aahsure


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