The Witches – 1990

The spirit and mythos of witches, it’s always been a part of storytelling. From Harry Potter to The School Of Necessary Magic, we will always hold these mythical and−in many ways real−fantastical folks in our hearts. One of my favorite movies as a kid was The Witches by the amazing writer Roald Dahl.

The 1990 movie not only had his story, it had Jim Henson and Anjelica Huston behind it. Well, it is getting a reboot. No one can ever replace Jim Henson or Anjelica Huston, however, some living legends are now on board.

It is rumored that Octavia Spencer will be in it as well as Anne Hathaway. People complained about the ending of the 1990 movie because it didn’t stay true to Dahl’s story. This one is reportedly destined to be different and stay true to the original idea of Dahl.

And guess who is directing it? You guessed it, Robert Zemeckis.

The original story had a boy get turned into a mouse and face a team of witches. The 1990 film version did stay true to that idea, however, it did change the ending. Many didn’t like that. Enter Zemeckis.

He is touted to be a visionary director and is most famous for the movies Romancing the Stone and the Back to the Future Trilogy. He also directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Forest Gump.

Guess who will be producing it? If you said Guillermo del Toro, you guessed right. None other than the visionary director behind Pan’s Labyrinth will be helping get this story straight on the screen.

The actual story is about a boy whose parents die in a car crash. He then goes on a vacation and ends up near the ocean where read more…

Netflix Release Premiere Date & Character Poster For ‘The Umbrella Academy’

Based on the Eisner Award-winning comic book by My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way and artist Gabriel Bá, the first season of this show of dysfunctional superheroes dropped on Netflix on February 15th. Starring Ellen Page, Tom Hopper, Robert Sheehan, Aidan Gallagher, Ashley Madekwe, David Casteñeda, and Mary J Blige. An interesting look at what happens when child heroes grow up and have to be adults with their myriad abilities.

Beware, what follows may contain spoilers.

While the idea, itself, is not original, we’ve seen stories about child heroes growing up and how it could be a struggle to cope with what you can do as an adult, The Umbrella Academy plays this more true than other stories with the same idea. Klaus, who can speak to ghosts, keeps himself high all time as to make himself unable to hear most of them, and Allison, who can make anyone do what she says, used her powers to not only further her acting career, but also gain a relationship and eventually parent her child. This is what would happen to children who were raised by a father who only wanted them for the expressed purpose of forming a crime-fighting team, we see it with kids who have overbearing parents bent on living vicariously through them, at least the maladjusted ones anyway. They weren’t even given names except by the android their father created to help raise them that they to the present day refer to as Mom.

Furthermore, the world around them is also interesting. Number Five, who seemed to never got one of those names, can teleport and time travel and begins the first episode returning to family after being lost in time for nearly two decades for the rest of the family, but much longer for him. He’s chased by a group of time traveling assassins, and he knows that the world is going to end in little more than a week. Only brought together by the death of their father, who is survived by the aforementioned robot and material figure as well as an intelligent and well-dressed chimpanzee butler named Pogo, it had been thirteen years, since the death of their brother Ben, who could summon a Cthulhu-like monster from within him.

A great cast and an astounding soundtrack are what makes this show fun to watch, and it’s pacing both takes time to explore each of the six remaining Hargreaves children, without ever losing momentum towards the thrilling end of the first season. The show has just the right about of silliness sprinkled into it so that you don’t get too bogged down in the darkness of it all. How would you be if you spent the last nearly five decades completely alone in a hellscape that you have no idea how to prevent only to escape it only eight days before it happens? That would be terribly depressing, but then put all of that into someone with the body of a boy now going through puberty? That’s still dark, to be sure, but it’s also hilarious.

Special praise must be given, however, to Ellen Page, who plays Vanya/Number Seven, who is told all her life that read more…

(Image Courtesy of Netflix)

Dropped on the first day of Black History Month, Netflix’s most recent show about witches leaves me confused. While originally marketed under its original title in Spanish, Siempe Bruja, but listed under its English translation, Always a Witch centers around the adventures of Carmen, an Afro-Latina witch from the late 1600s who time travels into the present day. What the ad campaign did not bother to mention is that this adventure is driven by Carmen’s desire to save the life of her love, who also happens to be the son of her master.

While the show, in and of itself, is enjoyable as it conjures feelings of other witch based TV dramas like Charmed, this premise and the timing of its release leaves me wondering about it’s intent. We see scenes of Carmen being sold, her as a child using her powers to heal the wounds from lashings, and her being burned at the stake by the Inquisition, but when she arrives in the future, she never comments on how black people, or women for that matter, can walk in modern-day Colombia with an ease that she herself would have never known.

When she arrives, she finds the house where she resides and convinces the woman who now owns it, a distant relative of the original owners, which is to say her owners and convinces her to let her live there in return for household chores, allowing her to stay in the room, we find out not that much later, was the room where she slept as a slave. It’s only mentioned in passing in Carmen’s inner monologue, so we never have the time for the horror of that to sink in.

Right before the burning at the stake, Cristobal proclaims that if the Church wants to burn Carmen at the stake, they should burn him too, and apparently believing that Carmen has tempted him with magic, his father shoots him. Carmen speaks with another magic user, an old wizard imprisoned in the cell next to hers, go to the future to complete a task for him, and he will bring her back to before Cristobal was killed so that they may live out their lives together. Not only read more…