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

Disney Doesn't Care About Your Childhood: “The Lion King” Is Just a CGI Flex

Photo-realistic lions singing to each other is an uncanny valley experience you'll never got used to.

Are we sure this isn't a nature documentary?

Disney

The Lion King "live-action" remake, visually speaking, is an artistic and technological marvel.

Every single character in this film is depicted as a photo-realistic animal, right down to the wrinkles on Timone's nose and the tufts of dirt in Rafiki's hair. Even the characters' movements are completely rooted in reality, with each digital character having weight and presence on screen so convincingly real that you honestly forget you're looking at CG characters at all. The attention to detail in this film is truly awe-inspiring.

Look. At. Those. Hairs.Disney

But while the incredibly talented VFX team at Disney rooted every animal in reality, the basic demands of The Lion King story seemed to have been a secondary concern—namely, the singing and speaking. The Lion King is a musical, after all, and what we got in the 1994 original were characters who had moving lips and big, expressive eyes to illustrate their emotions and motivations—you know, the kind of thing you can do with hand-drawn animation. Since Disney decided to have a completely realistic take on these characters, a lot of that personality and expression just doesn't come across. When Mufasa and Simba are having a conversation, for example, it just looks like two lions staring at each other with human voices coming vaguely from their direction. Their mouths move up and down, but their dead, beady little eyes show nothing but emptiness. It's weird.

Which begs the question: Was this the best story to tell with photo-realistic animals? The Lion King is essentially Hamlet the musical, and most would assume that a literal lion might not be able to pull off the emotion and charisma required of a Shakespeare story. With that being said, The Lion King 2019 tries to stay beat-for-beat with the original animated classic. If you look at the original movie's runtime compared to the 2019 remake, you'll notice there's an additional 30 minutes in the remake. Most of that time goes to the first act, which was my favorite part of the movie, with baby Simba and baby Nala simply playing and romping about. Granted, this definitely dragged on way too long before we got the story really going—but c'mon. Did you see the stills from this movie? Baby Simba is cute as f**k.

I mean...Disney

Can the whole movie be about baby Simba?Disney

There were also some character changes in this film that really elevate the experience—namely Timon and Pumbaa. Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen bring these intensely realistic characters to life in a way that's sorely missing in the remake's other performances. The two have such delightful chemistry that it made me want to just stick with them for the rest of the movie. The decision to add their off-the-cuff jokes to the script was a commendable choice from director Jon Favreau, who clearly saw the talents of these two performers and let them take the lead.

For instance, my favorite line comes at the end of the "Simba growing up" montage, right when it looks like it's going to be a shot-for-shot remake of the original. When Simba continues to sing after the music stops, Pumbaa quips, "You've gained 400 pounds since you started!" I didn't think a Disney movie could be so tastefully meta, but I was pleasantly surprised.

I just want to watch these three for two hours <3Disney

The heroes of the movie.IMDB

As for the rest of the performances, everyone is pretty good. John Oliver plays a great Zazu; but again, his performance is neutered by the fact that his character doesn't have lips: It just looks like a very normal bird flapping hysterically at lions for two hours. Mufasa is actually great, because James Earl Jones has the presence of God in his voice, so at least that loans itself well to watching a photo-realistic king of the jungle roam around the screen. Scar is also good; there have been complaints online about Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance compared to that of Jeremy Irons, but at least Ejiofor's quiet confidence is fitting for his commanding photo-realistic character. Frankly, the animated Scar had so much dimension and expression that complemented Irons' vocal articulation, you're just not going to be able to replicate that expression in CG—let's not forget when Will Smith unfortunately tried it.

#HyenaGangEntertainment Weekly

Since this film is technically a musical, let's briefly touch on the musical performances: They're fine. It really seems like they were an afterthought, and I can't really blame Favreau for this. This biggest challenge to overcome was making literal singing lions seem convincing on screen, and I think he did the best he could. Still, the musical numbers from the original are so poorly replicated here that if they were something you loved from the original, you're going to be seriously disappointed. "I Just Can't Wait to Be King," the song that really kicks off the musical energy in the film, is very lackluster in its presentation. Remember that the hand-drawn original had colorful spectacles and dramatic actions, like Simba and Nala riding on the backs of f**cking ostriches and a cohort of zebras saluting them, culminating with a massive animal tower made of parading elephants, giraffes, gazelles, anteaters, and flamingos, with Simba and Nala standing on top! In comparison, this remake has Simba and Nala running around a pond, with those same animals there but not seeming to notice them: not really the same impact. They also dare to cut down one of the best songs from the original, "Be Prepared," to a 30-second chant, which I take personal grievance with. With the last song of the film, the quintessential "Can You Feel the Love Tonight," Faverou decided to have the whole song sung in Simba and Nala's heads, probably to avoid the awkward lip-syncing issues. It ends up feeling like a Nat Geo documentary with Beyoncé's vocals in the background.

Oh look... some regular a** lions. How romantic.Disney

Surprisingly, the most disappointing performances come from Donald Glover and Beyoncé as Simba and Nala. I would guess they were both picked for their star-power and not necessarily for their voice acting abilities. Glover plays a pretty forgettable Simba, who lacks the headstrong and playful personality that Mathew Broderick brought to the original. That's not a huge gripe compared to Beyonce's performance, though. I'm honestly not sure what happened there. All of her lines are spoken as overly-enunciated statements rather than normal conversation, and it's so, so distracting. At first I couldn't understand why the first interaction between Simba and Nala is so awkward. There are long beats of painful silence between their lines, which gives you too much time to remember that you're looking at CG lions with inexplicably human voices… And then you keep thinking: "Oh, sh*t…Beyoncé's in this movie!"

Mufasa is a badass, even in photorealism.Disney

Honestly, this movie is a lot of fun if you just enjoy it for what it is and don't expect it to capture the same wonder of the original. This movie is a big creative leap for Disney, but it's not exactly what any of us were expecting. The CG effects and character design in The Lion King 2019 are the absolute best I've ever seen, which is enough for me to want to see it again. But if you care more about seeing your beloved musical numbers and characters brought to new life on screen, you might not want to put down $15 to see this in theaters. If you've got kids, take them, and you won't be bored. But if you're emotionally invested, maybe wait for this to drop on Disney Plus in a few months. After all, this is just the latest flavor of 90s nostalgia for Disney to exploit, and amidst the company's ever-growing arsenal of remade animated classics, this one is sure to make a heap of money.

Rating: ⚡⚡⚡/5

FILM

"Spider-Man: Far From Home" Is the Best Sequel of the Year

Also, Jake Gyllenhaal is super hot and that makes up for his character's cliché motivation.

Spiderman, Disney

After the dark ages of Sony's floundering Spider-Man reboot, there's one thing fans and critics can all agree on: We love the new Peter Parker.

Tom Holland has brought fresh life to a character seemingly long-abandoned, and director Jon Watts cemented Spider-Man's comeback with the highly praised Spider-Man: Homecoming. But sequels are notoriously hard to get right, so Spiderman: Far From Home had a very big suit to fill.

And it filled the suit well. The main glowing achievement in this film, as with the previous one, was the superb acting from the main and supporting cast. Every single character was a pure delight to watch, and returning director Watts managed to keep a youthful, light-hearted tone throughout the whole film.

Disney

It was a little disappointing that Far From Home wasn't as much a buddy-comedy with Peter and Ned as it was in Homecoming. But what was lost in bromance was made up for with actual romance. MJ (played by the exceptional Zendaya) comes into the fold as the coolest kid you never actually spoke to in high school. Her chemistry with Peter is charming and undeniable; they play off each other effortlessly. I honestly haven't been this invested in a teen romance since Freaks and Geeks was taken off the air (RIP Lindsay and Daniel's misplaced love).

Jake Gyllenhaal's presence in the film is very appreciated, even if it seems to come out of nowhere. His is a really interesting take on the Mysterio character, replacing the magical element of his illusions with science and future-tech. Without delving too deep into spoiler territory, Mysterio's motivation ends up being a bit hackneyed.

Disney

It could be argued that this was intentional, poking fun at the tired "bad-guy" trope that's permeated the Marvel universe since the first Iron Man. But being tongue-in-cheek doesn't make the premise any more compelling, even if it is playful. Not a huge sticking point, but compared to the spectacularly menacing performance from Micheal Keaton as Vulture in the last Spider-Man film, Mysterio leaves a bit to be desired.

The only real complaint I can see being made about this film is that Spider-Man doesn't really have a character arc. His main goal in the film is to relax and tell MJ how he feels. Maybe what Watt was trying to do was show Peter attempting to have a normal life, then deciding that he needs to step up and take responsibility for his powers.

Disney

But that doesn't really happen. Instead, Peter says he wants to have a normal vacation and tell MJ how he feels, but at the first sign of chaos he jumps straight into action. For the rest of the film, he's complaining about having to fight evil, but he doesn't actually make any decisions about it. He just kind of does what he's told.

No one really cares about character arcs, though, so odds are that you won't really be bothered by this. The movie gets so many things right: authentic romance, genuine laughs, touching character moments, and top-notch special effects. The battle scenes, in particular, were thrilling, maybe even making it worth an IMAX ticket. If you loved the first movie, you're going to love this one. And stick around for the post-credit scene, which has definitely been spoiled online at this point—I think we're all ready for the next Spider-Man installment.

Rating: ⚡⚡⚡⚡/5

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