How Mulan got the Rey Palpatine Treatment

by Ginny O'Keefe

After I watched Mulan (2020), the lackluster live-action remake of the beloved 1998 animated movie, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the bitterness and anger I felt after watching The Rise of Skywalker back in December. The feelings of disappointment and resentment were incredibly familiar, all stemming from the fact that both Mulan (2020) and The Rise of Skywalker (2019) refute the idea that a hero can be anyone and come from anywhere. This is where both films ultimately fail their two female leads. 

In the original animated film, Mulan is an ordinary girl who feels incredibly out of place and cannot seem to do right by her family or the deeply ingrained misogynistic society that surrounds her. She has no fighting skills, no hunger for war, no royal heritage, no outstanding measure of beauty. She has nothing that could suggest she is “special” besides her brave and kind heart...

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We're puzzled by the Dear Evan Hansen casting...

by Nathaniel R

They could play sisters!

Have you heard the news that Julianne Moore will be play Heidi, the awards-ready role of Evan Hansen's stressed out single mom in the feature adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen? Normally we'd applaud our beloved Julianne getting a juicy part but we find this puzzling given her lack of musical experience. You see there are two mom characters in the melodramatic high school set musical, Heidi and Cynthia, whose children become entangled. The show opens with a duet between them "Anybody Have a Map?" but Cynthia's role recedes thereafter and she never gets a solo while Heidi gets the 11th hour showstopper "So Big / So Small".

Here's the weird part...

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New Mutants and New Films. What did you see this past week?

Everyone is wondering when it will be safe to go back to movie theaters, or, in some markets (like here in NYC), when theaters will reopen at all? Vanity Fair sent Richard Larson to his home town of Boston for a wonderfully evocative piece about returning to the movie theater... for The New Mutants of all things. That Fox movie's long troubled voyage to cinemas has been well documented on the internet and Vulture recently tried to sum it all up, if you haven't been following along.

I was an avid reader of comic books when The New Mutants first emerged (September 1982) and I gobbled that book right up...

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The New Classics: Lincoln

By Michael Cusumano 

Abraham Lincoln abilities as a writer probably would have earned him a place in history even without his accomplishments as a statesman. He is surely the best writer that has ever occupied the Oval Office. Capable of expressing complex ideas with remarkable economy, he had a deft hand with allusions and was responsible for many evocative turns of phrase that resonate far outside the political context of their time, “The better angels of our nature” or “The dogmas of the quiet past”.  Hell, simply opting for “Four score and seven” over “eighty-seven” reveals a writer’s ear for the musical potential of language.

It's a fitting tribute then, that the most prominent film about the sixteenth president, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, with a screenplay by Pulitzer prize winning playwright Tony Kushner, exudes that same love of language. There’s scarcely a scene without some memorable linguistic spin. There's much to admire in Spielberg’s film from the beautifully worn production design to the momentous performances, but the real reason I’ve returned to it repeatedly since 2012 is simply because the characters are such fun to listen to. All of the film’s dramatic peaks involve the spectacle of verbal fireworks, particularly my favorite scene, where Tommy Lee Jones blasts his way out of a political trap firing off ornately worded insults like cannonballs... 

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Our Links Are Sealed

• AV Club Steve Martin and Schitt's Creek cast pay tribute to Eugene Levy
• MNPP Josh O'Connor six times
• Variety uh oh trouble on the new live action adaptation of Avatar The Last Airbender. The original creators are leaving. That's a pity because the last adaptation was widely considered to be horrendous and the animated show is so fun.

After the jump The Go-Gos, Madonna and Diablo Cody, AMC reopening, the musical Diana and more... 

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