CliqueClack

Big Eyes is Tim Burton’s least Burtonesque movie yet – and that’s a good thing

When you have created something, you have an attachment to it. For art, that is just as true. Not only that, but there is a conflict inherent in the creation of art; money versus substance. Sometimes you are lucky enough to have something that touches a nerve or interests a crowd, and that’s a great thing. But it’s easy to fall into enjoying success without thinking about why you were successful in the first place? Some might say that success implies quality, but others may assert that money isn’t everything. Sometimes art doesn’t stand the test of time because it wasn’t that good to begin with, or because it just only meant something once, but never again. Even so, every artist has one thing in common: They want people to know they were the creator.

Big Eyes is the latest movie from director Tim Burton and tells the true story of Margaret Keane, the artist of a very popular series of paintings of children with unusually large eyes. However, her husband Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz) specifically took credit for the art and sold it under his name when the pieces came out in the late 1950s and 1960s. Up until his death, Walter insisted that he was the true artist, although the evidence against him was staggering. Margaret starts the story leaving her first husband and traveling with her daughter to San Francisco, seeking something she can’t yet define. Her work is noticed by Walter, who claims to be a fellow artist. After her work gets a lot of attention, Walter decides that nobody will buy a painting drawn by a lady. Heaven forbid!

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Selma is a powerful movie that resonates with today’s challenges

In 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed, ensuring protection for minorities and preventing any racial discrimination when voting. But it wasn’t an easy journey. Although desegregation had been outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this didn’t prevent corrupt government officials from creating essentially impossible hurdles for blacks to go through just to register to vote. The city of Selma in Alabama was 57% black, but only 1% were registered, making it of particular concern for civil rights activists. In order to attempt to change the law, many demonstrations were held, but this still hadn’t changed anything significantly.

Selma begins with a tragedy, showing immediately the horrors of racism in an instantly personal and understandable way. Although the tragedy really happened, it also serves as a way to demonstrate the importance of the civil rights efforts past anything political and to the personal and human. The movie tells the story of what happened as protestors attempted to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama and the brutality they were subjected to during that attempt. We see what happens as Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) works to coordinate the efforts, dealing with difficulties from all sides.

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The Good Lie is captivating on Blu-ray

Captivating is the word that may immediately come to the minds of individuals who take a gander at Warner Brothers’ The Good Lie. As a matter of fact, awesome and fascinating may also be suitable words. Academy Award winner Reese Witherspoon is the sole headliner in a film concerning a few smart and determined survivors of the civil war in Sudan back in the 1980s. The film was screened at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this year before opening on October 3. The Good Lie was met with positive reviews from critics and that’s the same thing it’s going to get here.

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Take a magical, musical journey Into the Woods

Disney, musicals and fairy tales. A match as perfect as peanut butter and jelly or wine and cheese. Add some Stephen Sondheim into the mix, and you have a very curious combination. Of course the new Disney cinematic musical Into the Woods started out life on Broadway and as far from Disney as one could imagine … and seven years before Disney even hit Broadway with its own musical fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast.

Sondheim’s take on some well-known fairy tale characters, like Cinderella, Rapunzel and Jack (of beanstalk fame), was more Grimm than Disney. Not many people realize that the tales we all know and love today, courtesy of Disney, are much darker and violent, and they don’t always end happily ever after. In Sondheim’s musical fantasia, our beloved fairy tales are close to what we know but with a little bit of a twist: a wicked witch is brought into the mix to stir things up after placing a curse on the home of the Baker and his wife (James Corden and Emily Blunt). Because of the misdeeds of Baker’s father (he stole vegetables and magic beans from the Witch’s garden), the house would forever be childless.

It’s up to the Baker to bring the Witch four items: a cape as red as blood, hair as yellow as corn, a cow as white as milk, and a slipper as pure as gold. You can pretty much figure out which characters the Baker and his wife will run into in the woods.

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Unbroken exposes the beautiful resiliency of the human spirit in time for Christmas

The atrocities of war are ugly, but the resiliency of the human spirit to survive against all odds is nothing short of beautiful. Based upon the remarkable true story of Louis Zamperini, Universal Pictures’ Unbroken has taught me these life truths. If you ask me, it couldn’t have come at a better time than Christmas, a time of the year when we’re supposed to care about the plight of our fellow man – even if that plight and suffering occurred some 70 years ago.

Directed by Angelina Jolie, Unbroken is based upon the 2010 bestseller Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, which was written by Laura Hillenbrand (who also penned the bestseller about Seabiscuit). Although Louis Zamperini died this past summer at the ripe old age of 97, his spirit lives on – reaching an almost legendary status – thanks to the book and film about his life.

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The Legend of Korra searches for balance in it’s final episodes

Ten years, seven seasons, fifty-six hours, and one terrible live action adaptation … now we’re here at the end of the avatar’s world — no not the “Dances with Smurfs” one. The world of Avatar: The Last Airbender is no more, at least for the foreseeable future. After three seasons of the original Avatar, many wondered if their follow-up, set seventy years after the first series, would be as well-done or as well-received by the viewing public. While not as consistently great as its parent series, The Legend of Korra had many moments that were well deserving of its lineage.

It’s a shame that such a well done piece of animation failed to find the number or quality of audience that Nickelodeon was hoping for. If it had, the last year could have gone much differently. After moving to streaming online only, scaring fans that the show would end without a proper finale, Nickelodeon moved the show back to airing for the end of the season just as suddenly.

After all that drama, it came out in the press that the budget for the final season was slashed heavily. To the point that one episode of the final season would be a clip show. Luckily the writers were clever enough to take this setback and give us an especially funny episode, albeit one with practically no plot or character development. Continue reading 'The Legend of Korra searches for balance in it’s final episodes' »

Annie is relevant yesterday, today and Tomorrow

Refreshing! That’s the first word that came to mind as I walked out of the movie theatre after seeing the new movie musical Annie. Annie isn’t a new story, it’s an old story revamped with a funky fresh point of view. The story takes place in modern day New York City, and you’ll see a lot of changes; changes you can live with. There’s a diverse cast, Annie is no longer an orphan but a foster kid, she lives in a row house instead of an orphanage in the present instead of The Great Depression, and Daddy Warbucks is now William Stacks.

Annie follows a ten year old foster kid (Quvezhane Wallis) through her day-to-day interactions with fellow foster kids and foster mother all while in pursuit of her real parents. Annie tries to have an upbeat attitude, making the best of each situation even when she’s often disappointed by her lack of parental love. Miss Hannigan (Cameron Diaz) doesn’t make life any easier for her or the other girls in her care.

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Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb bids farewell to the franchise and Robin Williams

Although it’s been nearly five months since Robin Williams died, the devastating ripples his death left on the entertainment industry – and really the world at large – are still being felt. Ever the busy entertainer, Williams had five films released posthumously, the latest being 20th Century Fox’s Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb. I think the only other film with Williams that has not yet been released is Absolutely Anything, which is due in February according to IMDb but he is credited for voice work only in that film. To my knowledge, Night at the Museum marks the final time one can view him on the silver screen, which makes it somewhat special despite what other film critics are saying about it.

I’ve been a longtime fan of the Night at the Museum franchise since the first installment came out in 2006 for several reasons. One, I really love that it makes history come alive in a fun, meaningful way that children especially can relate to (for if we don’t learn from the past, we’re doomed to repeat it). I know I’ve said this before, but anything we can do to get kids interested in – and actually revved up – about history from an early age should be done. When I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was a Canadian children’s program titled Today’s Special, which featured a department store at night. The main characters were Sam Crenshaw, a night security guard, Muffy the talking mouse, Jodie the store’s window dresser and a mannequin named Jeff who magically came to life each night as long as he was wearing his special magic hat. The premise of the Night at the Museum franchise has always reminded me a lot of that old TV show. Each night, the magic of Ahkmenrah’s tablet brings all the inanimate objects in New York’s American Museum of Natural History to life and only the night security guard Larry Daley gets to witness it all.

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Win passes to the advance Washington DC screening of Selma

ALL PASSES HAVE BEEN CLAIMED. COMMENTS ARE CLOSED.

CliqueClack has partnered with Paramount Pictures to offer readers in Washington, DC an opportunity to attend an advance screening of the new true-life drama Selma starring David Oyelowo, Tom Wilkinson, Cuba Gooding Jr., Alessandro Nivola, Giovanni Ribisi, Common, Carmen Ejogo, Lorraine Toussaint, with Tim Roth and Oprah Winfrey as “Annie Lee Cooper.”

Selma is the story of a movement. The film chronicles the tumultuous three-month period in 1965, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a dangerous campaign to secure equal voting rights in the face of violent opposition. The epic march from Selma to Montgomery culminated in President Johnson (Wilkinson) signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most significant victories for the civil rights movement. Director Ava DuVernay’s Selma tells the story of how the revered leader and visionary Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Oyelowo) and his brothers and sisters in the movement prompted change that forever altered history.

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Hamlet in Leather: The Sons of Anarchy series finale

Who would have thought a drama about a biker gang would last seven years? Who would have thought a drama about a biker gang would be riveting, well-written television … for five of those years. Yes Sons of Anarchy has grown a bit long in the tooth and finally taken out to pasture, and while it was a wild ride it petered out in the end. Without a clear adversary like Clay Morrow, the show has felt unfocused for the last two years. Where the first five seasons felt like they had a clear direction, Jax struggling with his outlaw ways and the wishes of his dead father to legitimize their club, these last two seemed to forget that and dive headfirst into the seedy criminal world of Samcro. The series finale tries to rectify this somewhat, returning to a Jax who knows that he and his brothers in arms are bad men that do bad things. If it did nothing else, this change redeems the mess the series had become. We get to see our anti-hero reconcile what he is and what he’s done and finally take responsibility for his sins… on his own terms of course. Continue reading 'Hamlet in Leather: The Sons of Anarchy series finale' »