A temporary replacement for TMINE’s Orange Thursday feature in which I review a readily available movie you’ve probably already seen
As I’ve mentioned before, there is a hole in my mind. Through a weird combination of timings, I missed out on watching pretty much every Disney movie ever made. I just grew up in the wrong years relative to Disney release days. It’s weird.
But we’re in lockdown and one of the great successes of this period has been Disney+. Disney had a five-year plan for obtaining subscribers to its new streaming service… but is already more or less there. And we’re one of them.
So Lovely Wife, who had a similar gap in her cinematic education, and I decided to take advantage of the lack of new movies and new TV being released at the moment to watch some of those cultural touchstones we’d missed out on. Plus anything else that took our fancy.
We’re still working our way through them, so there’ll be more to come, and there’s absolutely no point properly reviewing them either, so after the jump you’ll find a potted selection of potted reviews of just a few of the things you can find on Disney+: The Jungle Book (1967), Aladdin (1992), Mulan (1998), Brave (2012), Moana (2016) and The Lion King (2019).
A temporary replacement for TMINE’s Orange Thursday feature in which I review a readily available movie you’ve probably already seen
It’s funny what a difference a couple of weeks makes. When I watched this over the Bank Holiday weekend in May, Just Mercy (2019) was just a movie about an important subject – something more or less in the same vein as The Banker (2020), being about historic discrimination against African-Americans.
It was a bit more potent than The Banker, however, seeing as it also directly addressed the issue of capital punishment in the modern day, particularly in southern states like Alabama that have a 10% inaccuracy rate when it comes to Death Row prisoners. But that was more or less its scope.
But with the current situation in America, Just Mercy is taking on new significance, since it’s also an indictment of racism and the police’s attitudes to black people, particularly black men. In the US, Warner Bros is making the movie free on all digital platforms for the whole of June.
That’s apparently a step too far for the rest of the world – apparently, whatever lessons the movie has to offer that make it important everyone see it in the US aren’t applicable elsewhere – so you’re all going to have to pay to watch this real-life story about a Harvard lawyer (Michael B Jordan) who decides to open a service in Alabama dedicated to correcting judicial injustices, starting with the wrongful incarceration of small business owner Jamie Foxx.
I’ll let you know if it’s worth it after the trailer and the jump.
Most of the current crop of quarantine viral videos are reunions where people talk about past work, are new episodes made during lockdown about lockdown itself, or are read-throughs of previous episodes.
So today’s Quarantine Viral Video is a little different in that it’s a genuine High School Graduation Ceremony address made during lockdown. The celebrities involved? Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter, who played/are playing Bill and Ted in the various Bill and Ted movies. The High School? San Dimas High.
