Films and Feelings

The unceasing search for new acting talent to mine continues with Netflix's new film,  All Together Now, which premiered this week on the service. This film features Moana alum Auli'i Cravalho as Amber Appleton, a bright but underprivileged high schooler with high aspirations. Netflix's new film plays like a trial run for Cravalho to see if this Disney starlet can lead a live-action film outside the Disney umbrella. Cravalho would need to play against a slightly stronger narrative backbone for us to know for sure, but early signs are promising.  All Together Now follows Amber Appleton, a musically talented teen overflowing with love for her classmates, her coworkers, and her community. Amber reads like George Bailey reincarnated as a high school girl, throwing herself into any opportunity to better the world around her, like hosting her high school's annual for benefit Variety Show. But Amber's boundless optimism conceals an impoverished home life. She and her moth...

In both my Les Miserables and Moulin Rouge! pieces, I made some comment about the musical as the genre that receives the least love in the modern era of film. I stand by that, but I acknowledge there is one other genre for which you could potentially make a similar case. I am referring of course to the western film. Musicals at least have Disney keeping them on life alert, and maybe one day we’ll get the  Wicked  movie Universal has been promising us for ten years [FUTURE EDIT: All good things, folks ]. But westerns don’t really have a place in the modern film world. Occasionally we’ll get a film like  No Country for Old Men  which use similar aesthetics and themes, but they are heavily modified from the gun-blazing-horseback-racing-wide-open-desert w esterns  of old.  Those died, oddly enough, around the same time musicals fell out of fashion.              Professors Susan Kord and Elizabeth K...

In another timeline, one in which this movie was allowed to make its projected theatrical release, Thea Sharrock's The One and Only Ivan might have been a reprieve from the explosions and car crashes that stuff the theaters around this season. But alas, this is the world in which we live, a world in which even curated blockbuster champions such as the Mulan remake are liable to be demoted to an online premiere. A world in which an unassuming film such as  The One and Only Ivan  never stood a chance at holding onto its coveted release window. However, viewers can take solace in the film's own private successes. Though the film's moving parts don't always congeal as they ought, the movie's glowing painting of friendship and kindness is uplifting just the same. Ivan (Sam Rockwell) is the star attraction of a miniature circus housed inside a shopping mall, which also features animal performers like the matriarchal Stella the elephant (Angelina Jolie). Ivan's greate...