Tag: Warner Bros.

Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021)

SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY (2021) *
I am not exactly sure why I decided to watch Space Jam: A New Legacy on a Saturday afternoon, following hot on the heels of the Disney live-action films Midnight Madness and Condorman.

I mean, I am not the biggest fan of the original Space Jam from 1996, basically a feature-length advertisement for the greatness of Michael Jordan with Looney Tunes and Bill Murray and Wayne Knight and everybody else guest stars or glorified cameos. Never thought it was all that great even back during the height of the Chicago Bulls — Space Jam came out Nov. 15, 1996, just a few months after the Bulls put together a 72-10 regular season and won an NBA title — and it has aged worse. Of course, it seems to have a major cult following, but then again, so does Howard the Duck.

Also, I have never been much of a LeBron James fan, since his arrival upon the scene in 2002. I’ve never cared for his style of play, his flopping and floundering about like he’s been shot when selling a foul despite the fact that he’s easily the size of an NFL tight end and bigger than most NBA players, his celebratory antics, his aping Michael Jordan from the shoes, money, and the uniform number to the chalk toss and now his very own Space Jam movie, his ring chasing and team hopping, and his outright hijacking of ESPN for the last two decades. He’s arguably been even more omnipresent in our lives than Jordan, one of the most famous people in the world during his glory days in the ’90s, given the social media factor.

For example, I liked and shared one LeBron traveling GIF, and the Facebook algorithms just won’t show me any mercy in the two or three years since. LeBron this, LeBron that, just because I thought it was funny to see LeBron travel across the desert with basketball in hand. Now, I have to see a brilliant quote like this one, I don’t give a fuck what nobody think. I’m him. I get shit for making the right play. Four motherfuckers on me. Motherfucker wide open right here. We are a team and I trust them. Why wouldn’t I have thrown it to them? I don’t care about the results. What?

Anyway.

You guessed it, Space Jam: A New Legacy is a $150 million and 1-hour, 55-minute advertisement for the greatness of LeBron James.

You can even play a drinking game with A New Legacy: Take a swig of the sauce every time you hear King James. It’s a lot safer than drinking every time they say Carol Anne in Poltergeist III or Cheech and Chong utter Hey, man in Up in Smoke.

I found very little to like in A New Legacy. A lot of the movie felt like watching a mash up of the plots from Hook and Space Jam. Also, the Looney Tunes more or less serve LeBron James and his greatness, aside from very fleeting isolated moments that don’t add up to any of the Looney Tunes shorts like Duck Amuck or The Great Piggy Bank Robbery or Porky in Wackyland or You Ought to Be in Pictures or any number of the brilliant shorts of the ’40s and ’50s.

Wile E. Coyote proves though he could be ideal halftime entertainment.

I absolutely hated what they did with all the Warner Brothers intellectual properties: Turn them into fans in The Big Game that closes out the picture. I mean, seriously, do you take King Kong or Pennywise for a basketball fan? I don’t see Pennywise cheering for anything. Come on, man. I didn’t catch Dirty Harry or Rick Deckard or Stanley Kowalski or Jack Torrance or Pazuzu in the crowd, but I sincerely hope that doesn’t mean we’ll see them in Space Jam 3.

I must admit to rooting for the villains, or the goons, during A New Legacy and found the greatest entertainment when they dunked on LeBron real good in the first half.

Of course, I understood the second half would take a dramatic turn and give us a great big happy ending for LeBron and his celluloid family. Wasn’t it cast in stone?

I just hope that LeBron (and his legion of fans) do not try and count his victory in A New Legacy toward his NBA titles.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)


GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS (2019) ***
The latest Godzilla: King of the Monsters inspires mixed feelings.

On the one hand, Warner Bros. pumped an estimated $170-200 million into King of the Monsters (likely more spent on this one Godzilla picture than all the Toho Studios productions combined) and cast a diverse, multinational group of actors and actresses, Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Bradley Whitford, Sally Hawkins, Charles Dance, Thomas Middleditch, Aisha Hinds, O’Shea Jackson Jr., David Straithaim, Ken Watanabe, and Zhang Ziyi. Perhaps, most importantly for them, they are not dubbed, badly dubbed.

On the other, King of the Monsters spends way too much time in banter and disputes between scientists, military men, etc., and it’s still cliché dialogue no matter what if read by an Oscar winner or not. When the monsters Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Mothra, and Rodan do fight, it’s somehow not enough and I wanted King of the Monsters to give us a good old Royal Monster Mash Rumble right out in the middle of the streets in broad daylight, for crying out loud. Watching King of the Monsters for a second time, I felt tempted to begin chanting “No rain! No rain! No rain!” but I doubted there were any Woodstock or Live Rust fans aside from me in the house, so I restrained myself and thought better to save it for this review.

Honestly, I definitely miss all the bizarre little touches Toho sprinkled throughout their Godzilla films, especially the 1954-75 Showa Era. For example, it took a little time to wrap my warped little mind around seeing Mothra without her representatives from Infant Island, two tiny twin fairies who speak for and accompany Mothra and sing “Mothra’s Song,” “Mothra oh Mothra / If we were to call for help / Over time, over sea, like a wave / You’d come / Like a guardian angel / Mothra oh Mothra.” To be fair, King of the Monsters references the twins through twin scientist characters Ilene and Ling Chen (played by Ziyi) and we do get an instrumental version of “Mothra’s Song” late in the picture.

King of the Monsters could have used a lighter touch.

I liked the first Warner Bros. Godzilla more than King of the Monsters and I have no doubt Godzilla 2014 benefited more from the novelty of being a serious Godzilla film, which took so many of us by surprise because that’s not what we expected from an American Godzilla film after the disastrous 1998 production brought to us kind folks by TriStar Pictures and the creative partnership — writer and director Roland Emmerich and writer and producer Dean Devlin — who previously dumped Stargate and Independence Day on humanity.

Regardless, I am looking forward to Godzilla vs. Kong whenever that moment will come.