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It’s weird to call an adaptation of a long running, moderately popular show a sleeper but that’s where we are. The Bob’s Burgers Movie is a throwback to the old school simple comedy theaters used to run on hot summer days. It’s modest with low stakes and a very chill energy level. Yet is it weird I enjoyed this more than almost every other franchise movie we got this year. Marvel hasn’t touched the heights of a family trying to float a single payment.
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Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time is a film of a rather significant first, because it is the first film with a budget of over $100 million to have been directed by an African-American woman. While it’s certainly admirable on Ava DuVernay’s end that she managed to get this made, unfortunately talking about the film itself will be a whole other story. The film’s social significance cannot be overstated but because of that whole other story regarding the actual quality of the film, it also sets a worrying note for WOC filmmakers working in Hollywood. It’s worrying because of the possibility that this film will end up being weaponized against them, especially when it isn’t so much a failure as said concept would end up making it out to be.
Don’t let that title deter you from reading more, I’m not going to cover my own opinion of Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time but rather the worrying note it leaves for the future of female POC filmmakers working in Hollywood. From directing Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time, director Ava DuVernay, whose previous films include the Academy Award-nominated Selma and 13th, had become the first black woman to direct a live-action film with a budget that exceeds $100 million. Of course, its release was set to become a big deal within the film industry across the globe but its fate at the box office was perhaps one thing that was always going to be leaving us feeling uncertain about what it means for WOC filmmakers in the future.
Kind of like The Lego Movie in a sense that it would not be easy to expect something along these lines at first to be half as good as it was, but it manages to succeed in bringing good fun. The unexpected success of The Lego Movie was one among many of the decade’s biggest surprises for it managed to capture a certain playfulness in itself that in turn created a product far better than it really had much right to be, but with The Lego Batman Movie now focusing on DC characters, one can only have enough of Will Arnett’s Batman impression filling up the final product. Turns out what I got was exactly what made The Lego Movie work nearly as well as it did although probably not to the same degree of effectiveness as said film, but maybe the same sort of fun.
Cinema from the Spectrum 