Marilyn Monroe unfortunately lived a very difficult life. One that has been explored in film time and time again. Blonde does things a little differently, however. Based on a book that looks at points in Marilyn’s life through a fictitious lens, Blonde is a trippy, disturbing, and perplexing film that had me leaving the theatre speechless. It’s hard to pinpoint the last time a film has left me so confused not just about what I had just watched, but how I felt about it.
This review is part of my coverage of TIFF ’22, which held Glass Onion’s world premiere.
Writer/Director Rian Johnson perfected the whodunnit mystery genre in Knives Out, one of my favourite films of 2019. While it could have very easily been a rehash of the first film, Glass Onion once again breathes new life into this genre with a completely new cast, a new mystery to solve, and a familiar central character whose exciting return appears to be building him up as the modern-day Sherlock Holmes.
As I’ve been trying to get back into writing film and TV reviews on here, WandaVision is one I wanted to discuss since watching the first episode a couple months back. It became a Friday tradition for me to watch the latest episode of WandaVision those 7-8 weeks, as I was very eager to see a little bit more of events taking place after Avengers: Endgame. While I must warn all of you that this review will contain spoilers so that I can give my full thoughts on the series, I will say that WandaVision, at least the first few episodes, is one of the most unique, original and fun pieces of media to come out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and while the show does kind of go back to Marvel’s brand of action later on, this is still a series that I found very enjoyable overall, not to mention gripping and mysterious.
It’s no secret that over the past decade, Disney has been in a “revival” era. With masterpieces like Zootopia, Princess and the Frog, and Wreck-it Ralph, along with other astonishing efforts like Tangled, Moana, and Big Hero 6, Disney has been knocking it out of the park. However, Disney Animation has been in a little bit of a slump since, I’d say, 2018. Ralph Breaks the Internet was a perfectly serviceable sequel, but was a notch below the original and took its meta humour to some questionable places. And Frozen 2… don’t get me started on Frozen 2. And I’m sorry to say that Raya and the Last Dragon is not much different. It’s not as good as Ralph Breaks the Internet, but almost as disappointing and lacking as Frozen 2. It’s still better, but not by a lot. Raya and the Last Dragon, while it has stellar animation and world-building and exhilarating action scenes, is a lacklustre Disney Animation effort that could have been so much more had it not fallen into the Disney Princess story trap, and had not featured such bland and uninspired writing.
Pixel Perfect 