Review: Charlie's Angels (2019)

Box office and reviews have been tough on the new Angels. I guess today the contrarian corner is a theme here at TFE. Tony likes it! - editor.

by Tony Ruggio

We'll start with where I'm coming from: I’m no fan of the original series. The early-Aughts adaptations were mostly forgettable save a dance or two from Cameron Diaz and Sam Rockwell. But these 2019 Angels are surprisingly fresh and fun. It’s an IP brought back from irrelevant hell and updated with verve.

About the three new Angels. Elizabeth Banks is clearly in love with Kristen Stewart, and who can blame her? Stewart is a charisma machine as the weird, spunkiest Angel of the bunch. She's so good you almost wish she took movie star roles more often. You also forget there was once a time when she got gruff for playing mopey all the time. Those days are long gone...

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Queer TIFF: "Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy"

by Chris Feil

The newest from King Cobra director Justin Kelly, Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy, opens with Laura Dern’s gruff, heavy twang voiceover echoing through a dark theatre. Even though the film charts the wild rise of the famous alias author before inevitable and controversial decline, the shock of her accented voice is about as gasp inducing as the film gets. Dern stars as Laura Albert, the artist that created the LeRoy illusion and wrote several successful novels in his voice. The film also stars Kristen Stewart as Savannah Knoop, the woman that Albert convinced to portray JT in public and helped shape him in non-binary Warhol-ish mode. “JT” claims that fiction can be more true than truth (or... something), but Kelly’s film is far from making that case.

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The Love That Dare Not Axe Murder Its Name

by Jason Adams

In the small city of Fall River, Massachusetts in the year of our lord (somebody's lord, anyway) 1892 the father and step-mother of Lizzie Andrew Borden were found hacked about the head and face with a hatchet until dead - the nursery rhyme says they got forty and forty-one whacks respectively but father got eleven while the late Mrs. Borden got a few more, if not quite twenty. The next eleven months after that moment, until the end of Lizzie's trial in June of 1893, were spent speaking of little else - a well-to-do lady murderess! What a lark!

The case of Lizzie has held a dark fascination ever since, inspiring countless plays and rhymes and episodes of Law & Order: SVU, but it's been an especially Borden-full couple of years now what with Christina Ricci's Lifetime-movie-turned- miniseries-turned-movie and now Craig William Macneill's feature film simply called Lizzie. Out this weekend and starring Chloë Sevigny, Lizzie injects a timely dose of patriarchal oppression and same-sex repression to the mix, theorizing that Lizzie was caught up (not to mention just plain caught) in a love affair with the Borden's maid Bridget (played by Kristen Stewart).

If the life not lived between Lizzie and Bridget represents a road not traveled thanks to the impossible time and place that the women found themselves in, the film Lizzie feels like a venture in the right direction...

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Good Morning, Charlie!

By Spencer Coile  

It’s been 18 years since the film remake of Charlie’s Angels was released and 7 since the failed television reboot aired – not to mention over 40 years since the original television series premiered. But as time has shown us in the past few years, nostalgia sells. And so we have news of a new Charlie’s Angels.

With Elizabeth Banks set to direct and star in the film and the three leads rumored to be played by Lupita Nyong’o, Naomi Scott, and Kristen Stewart, our anticipation escalates. A story about strong women told by women! Although casting is still in the works, the film is rumored to be looking at the summer of 2019.  

Does this news excite you, or have you had enough of reboots? Who will voice Charlie (fingers crossed on Judi Dench or Viola Davis)? But perhaps most importantly, is anyone else a huge fan of 2003’s Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle?  

Today in Showbiz History: JLo, Moulin Rouge!, and Norma Jean

June will soon be bustin' out all over! If you're a June birthday we're Gemini kindred spirits. If you're not you can still find some event or personality to inspire you today. Here's a look at key showbiz happenings on June 1st in history...

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