Movies

Awkwafina's new movie The Farewell has not come to my area yet. (Well I started looking last week and there was a one-night showing listed at an Alamo theatre in Dallas, but now it's gone from there. Was it just a preview for local movie critics, or what?) I did see a poster for it at a Grapevine theater, but no date, and the Angelika theater has a coming soon listing for July 26th, so I guess that's when it's coming back to Dallas. I really want to see it, but it's so far to drive. I want to wait until it comes closer, but I hope I don't miss it due to a short release window. I must be misremembering, because I thought I previously heard that this movie would come out on Netflix. Did I confuse it with something else?

As for other movies, I don't want to see Toy Story 4, because Pixar has to stop going back to this well; they need to leave endings alone and move on already. Other studios keep having revivals of franchises that are decades old too. I'm kind of curious about the new Lion King because I did love Favreau's Jungle Book. But then I remember how stupid and illogical it is for prey animals to bow down to their predators in Lion King, and how unfair it is for the hyenas to be depicted as greedy villains who devastate the lands. It's like how the Western ranchers demonized wolves as pests to be exterminated, leaving a giant hole in the ecosystem for years. In real life nature, there's no good or bad animals; it's just life and survival. I wonder if it will be worse to see this imaginary human-made political kingdom grafted onto CGI photorealistic animals like it's pretending to be a nature documentary instead of a fantasy. I've been ambivalent about the original film for years, and this remake probably isn't going to update the parts I didn't like before. I did watch the recent Aladdin and enjoyed most of it except some slow parts and prolonged dancing scenes.

In this unending summer heat, an escape to an cool movie theater is very refreshing, but I wish the selection of movies were better. When is the new Miss Fisher movie going to arrive, or at least announce a release date?

There's always TV I guess, and PBS has a new kids show Molly of Denali about a girl in Alaska, and her friends and family. There was a good episode called "Grandpa's Drum" which mentioned how Molly's grandfather was sent away to the old Indian boarding schools where they tried to make kids be white and destroy their ties to their family and Native culture. Such a dark time, with lasting effects.