Tag: Oprah Winfrey

A Wrinkle In Time

Ava DuVernay’s “A Wrinkle in Time” wants to be the most glorious, inspiring movie you’ve ever seen. It’s also ridiculous.

A Wrinkle In Time PosterAva DuVernay truly wants “A Wrinkle In Time” to be the most glorious, inspiring movie you’ve ever seen. She wants you – yes you, little black girl who has never seen herself represented on screen before – to believe in yourself so you can bring light into the world and be a force for positive change. DuVernay believes this so strongly that she’s even dressed Oprah in space age chain mail, glued-on diamonds and a glittery lip gloss that looks like it cost half of the movie’s $100 million budget so that Oprah can do what Oprah does best and make it seem like she’s speaking directly to you.

DuVernay certainly can’t be faulted for ambition, and at times, “A Wrinkle In Time” really does reach that high standard. It has color and beauty and a humanistic touch that another director, even one more suited to a franchise, tentpole budget, could not bring to the film.

But “A Wrinkle in Time” has no room for cynicism and snark, and it’s near impossible to avoid them for a movie with as many garish costumes, laughable set pieces, nonsensical plot threads and inflated sense of importance as this film. For as much as “A Wrinkle In Time” wants you in awe, it’s a frustrating, bizarre mess of a movie that gets harder and harder to love. Continue reading “A Wrinkle In Time”

Lee Daniels' The Butler

“Lee Daniels’ The Butler” is a “quietly subversive” film with surprising depth and nuance despite its massive cast and ambitions.

There’s a scene in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” where Martin Luther King Jr. is speaking with Louis Gaines (David Oyelowo), the Freedom Rider son of the film’s eponymous protagonist. Louis is ashamed that his father Cecil (Forest Whitaker) is a servant for a living, but Dr. King corrects him and says that the butler’s hard work ethic and dignity has a long history of slowly breaking down black stereotypes.

They’re “quietly subversive,” he says, which is a perfect label for “The Butler.” This loosely true story about a White House Butler who served through five administrations and 20 years is strongly melodramatic, but it views our nation’s most iconic racial history through a more critical, nuanced lens. Cecil’s complex persona goes against some of the themes depicted in modern race relations films, and it broadens Daniels’ scope to a film that is saccharine, suspenseful and silly.

It’s a fine line for any specifically “black” film to walk. We’ve come a long way from the days when Sidney Poitier was leading the charge in African American cinema, an actor who “The Butler” name drops directly. The Civil Rights era has been tread so many times that the genre itself has evolved to something of a post-racial state, even if the reality we live in hasn’t. Continue reading “Lee Daniels' The Butler”

The Princess and the Frog

There isn’t a song, gag, art design, character, moral or plot point in “The Princess and the Frog” that doesn’t seem patently borrowed, adapted and simplified from every other Disney movie ever.

But you know what? I don’t care.

“The Princess and the Frog” is highly watchable, charming, artistic, amusing and funny in the spirit of any of the Disney classics I grew up with as a kid. The film is done in a stunning, colorful 2-D. It has a textbook, but workable story structure. It forces its audience to think, engage with the characters, feel emotions and do it all simply. It does everything an animated movie was supposed to do before chaotic digitally animated action sequences took over or before Pixar made their kids movies a little too smart and started scaring lackadaisical parents and their kids back to the former. Continue reading “The Princess and the Frog”