Movie Review Wonder

Wonder (2017) 

Directed by Stephen Chbosky 

Written by Stephen Chbosky, Steven Conrad, Jack Thome 

Starring Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson, Jacob Tremblay, Mandy Patinkin, Daveed Diggs 

Release Date November 17th, 2017 

Wonder is a real, well, wonder. Rarely do tear-jerkers work as well as what director Stephen Chbosky assembles here. Everything in Wonder seems set to be a clichéd way of sucking out tears. A child with a facial deformity, a pair of goodhearted parents, a sick dog, these are all elements that under the guidance of a lesser director, would be used to physically assault audiences in the search for tears. Stephen Chbosky is, quite thankfully, a terrific director and he employs these elements in the way a good director does.

Wonder stars the exceptional young Jacob Tremblay as Augie Pullman, a boy born with a facial deformity that caused him to go through several life-altering surgeries. Auggie is about to go to public school for the very first time on the insistence of his mother, Isabel (Julia Roberts). Isabel has home-schooled Auggie for the first years of his school life but at nearly 10 years old, she feels it’s time for him to be around other kids, to begin trying to find normalcy.

Auggie is enrolled in a private school run by Dr. Tushman (Mandy Patinkin) who has instructed several students to welcome Auggie and be his friend. Auggie is initially troubled but eventually earns a genuine friend in Jack (Noah Jupe), though not without the pitfalls of youthful struggle. The journey of Auggie toward a normal life at school would appear to be the focus of Wonder but director Stephen Chbosky, who shares screenplay credit with Jack Thorne and Stephen Conrad, smartly breaks up Auggie’s story with those of Auggie’s sister, Via (Izabel Vidovic), Via’s friend Miranda (Danielle Rose Russell), and Jack, each of whom is given the chance to give layers of much needed and welcome life and story to their characters.

The screenplay for Wonder is quite smart about not pushing Auggie’s story so much that it becomes cloying or pushy, and Tremblay does a wonderful job of giving Auggie a life we genuinely care about versus just relying on the facial deformity and a simpleminded face off with a villainous bully. Tremblay is a character beyond the face and the film is smart to let Tremblay explore the space of Auggie. Chbosky gives everyone in the cast weight and care, and the way their struggles underline Auggie’s struggling is exceptionally well-done by all involved.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal. 

Movie Review The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid (2023) 

Directed by Rob Marshall 

Written by David Magee 

Starring Halle Bailey, Jonah Hauer King, Javier Bardem, Melissa McCarthy, Daveed Diggs 

Release Date May 26th, 2023 

Published May 26th, 2023 

I can't sit here and tell you I was a big of The Little Mermaid. I am not a fan of director Rob Marshall's bombastic, somewhat chaotic, and often wonky vision of this Disney classic. I was all set to write a mostly negative review of The Little Mermaid. Then, when the movie ended, I stood outside of the theater and watched the crowd making their way out of the theater and I was struck by the reaction of others. Specifically, I saw a uniformly joyous response from young girls leaving the theater. More than one said they wanted to be Ariel for Halloween. They were singing the songs, the choruses anyway. 

It was the best possible review anyone could give to The Little Mermaid. The young girls from 4 years old to 12 years were in universal praise of The Little Mermaid. And listening to that broke through my cynicism. Their joy reframed my context of The Little Mermaid. This movie is not to my taste at all, but it's not meant to be. If a movie can inspire this much joy in the audience intended to enjoy it, who am I as a middle aged dude to say that's bad. 

Halle Bailey stars in The Little Mermaid as Ariel, the youngest daughter of King Triton (Javier Bardem). Ariel is an endlessly curious young woman, her eyes filled with wonder, she explores the seas searching for human treasures that fall into the ocean. With her pal Flounder (Jacob Tremblay), she also finds trouble. While searching for treasure in one of the many sunken ships at the bottom of the ocean, she and Flounder narrowly and daringly escape a very hungry and determined shark. For Ariel, this is just another day of adventure. 

However, this is not just another day in her kingdom. This is the day that her sisters from around the world are visiting to meet with the King and when Ariel fails to show up on time, the rift between Father and Daughter is further exposed. King Triton wants his youngest daughter to be more careful. He especially wants Ariel to shake off her fascination with humans. According to Triton, it was human who murdered his wife, Ariel's mother and his grief has curdled into anger and suspicion of all humans. 

This does not curb Ariel's curiosity however, and when she spots a ship caught in a storm and dashed on some rocks, she leaps in to help the ship's captain, Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer King). Saving his life, Ariel doesn't fully reveal herself to him but her voice is burned into his memory. He vows to search for the mysterious young woman who saved his life. Meanwhile, the scheming Ursula (Melissa McCarthy), has witnessed all of this and sees Ariel's desire to be a human as her chance to upend her brother, King Triton, as the ruler of the seas. 

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media

Movie Review: Blindspotting

Blindspotting (2018) 

Directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada

Written by Daveed Diggs

Starring Daveed Diggs, Rafael Cassal, Janina Gavankar, Ethan Embry

Blindspotting is a stunningly modern, of the moment movie. Directed by first time feature director Carlos Lopez Estrada and written by and starring Daveed Diggs, Blindspotting attacks our moment in time with a powerful story of race, crime. Fear and getting by. Set in Oakland, the film makes the changing city a character as well as Silicon Valley spills outward, gentrification feels like a threat, not exactly the worst threat these characters face. 

In Blindspotting Daveed Diggs stars as Collin, an Oakland twenty-something with just three days left on his probation. Collin spent several months in jail and has spent the past year in a halfway house but in three days he’s free. All he has to do is stay out of trouble. This is harder than it seems as Collin’s best friend, Miles (Rafael Casal) appears determined to locate trouble. One of the first scenes in the movie finds Miles, with Collin unwittingly in tow, buying a gun. 

Miles says it is to protect his family but Collin doesn’t care, he just wants to never see it and hope that he doesn’t get in trouble for being near it. The two men have been friends since childhood and it was Miles who came to see Collin in jail every week and gave him money and generally looked after him. Miles makes this very clear in conversations about Collin’s ex-girlfriend and current boss at a moving company, Val (Janina Gavankar). 

But that isn’t the story. One night after dropping off Miles and returning the moving truck to the company, Collin sees a young black man run past his truck, followed by a white police officer (Ethan Embry). The officer shoots the man in the back as the young man yells ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!.’ Collin and the cop lock eyes for a moment before other cops arrive and Collin is told to leave the scene. 

You think you know where Blindspotting might be headed after that but you will be surprised. The film is rarely about the shooting. The full breadth of this story is about the shooting but it’s about it in a much wider context of racism in general. The shooting is endemic of the larger problem at the heart of American race relations. It’s about how we see each other, the assumptions we make and how we fail to question those assumptions. 

Blindspotting features one of the best scenes of 2018. I won’t spoil it for you, it’s the ending of the movie. Daveed Diggs is known for his stage performance as Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton and he takes some of that Hamilton stage skill and bring it to this powerful scene in which he raps about all that we’ve seen before in the film and in the life experience of the character. It’s stagy, yes, but I could not rip myself away from it. 

The scene is incredibly powerful and director Carlos Lopez Estrada deserves a lot of credit for the staging of the scene. He creates a suspenseful ticking clock using a security system that keeps the scene incredibly tense throughout on top of Daveed Diggs’ incredible monologue. Rafael Casal’s Miles is only a witness in the scene but even how he’s used plays into the deep emotions of the scene, his face is indelible in the moment. 

The use of close-ups in Blindspotting is also quite powerful. A scene where Collin is walking down an empty street with a gun in his pocket and a cop pulls u-turn is punctuated by a close-up of Diggs’ face in the bright light of a police spotlight and then darkness. It’s a minor scene but it is filled with a remarkable level of emotion and that close-up is stunning. There are other powerful close-ups as well in the shooting scene and in that powerhouse ending that I talked about. 

Blindspotting is a testament to the powerful words of Daveed Diggs who wrote the screenplay and stars and to director Carlos Lopez Estrada who found a terrific way to introduce himself to feature filmmaking. This is an arresting, fascinating, suspenseful and emotional movie. Diggs and Casal use their friendly dynamic to make the movie less oppressive and more watchable than my description, the film does loosen its grip to let you breath and even laugh but, for the most part this is a tightly wound and engrossingly modern drama.