Musical

Flower Drum Song

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  • Title: Flower Drum Song
  • IMDb: link

Flower Drum Song

Adapted from the Broadway musical of the same name, Flower Drum Song became the first contemporary Asian-American story featuring an Asian cast produced as a major Hollywood feature film. Like the play, the movie met with mixed responses with some praising Hollywood focusing on Asian-American characters while others took issue with Asian stereotypes, casting both Japanese and Chinese actors for the Chinese roles, and some problematic lyrics (also causing major productions of the play to halt for decades). In 2008 the film was added to National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as culturally significant, so significant it took Hollywood three decades to release another major film centered around, and starring, predominantly Asian leads.

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The Little Mermaid

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  • Title: The Little Mermaid (2023)
  • IMDb: link

The Little Mermaid

The latest unnecessary live-action Disney remake cast Halle Bailey as mermaid princess Ariel who dreams of visiting the surface world despite her father’s (Javier Bardem) distrust of humans. While not the most awkward adaptation Disney has tried, there’s nothing in this version of The Little Mermaid that doesn’t feel like a pale comparison to the original 1989 animated-film whose theme of a girl giving up her own voice for love I’ve always found a bit problematic.

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Leo

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  • Title: Leo
  • IMDb: link

Leo

Leo starts with the same premise of one of my favorite films from one of my favorite years of movies. Joseph Vijay stars as a shop owner who defends his cafe against armed intruders. News of the event, however, brings out even more trouble. First we get the wave of violence from the dead robbers’ friends and family which only draws more attention to the reclusive Parthiban. This brings the attention of a criminal empire who believes this local hero to be a mass murderer known as Leo.

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The Color Purple

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  • Title: The Color Purple (2023)
  • IMDb: link

The Color Purple

Taken from the Broadway musical which was itself adapted from Alice Walker’s 1982 novel, we meet Celie (Fantasia Barrino) who, like the other African-American women in the story, is treated rather shabbily over the first two-thirds of the film by men before standing up for herself to her abuser (Colman Domingo) and, at least in this version, having her story turn on a dime (which may or may not give you whiplash) where she receives everything she could ever have wished for over the film’s final act.

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Wonka

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  • Title: Wonka
  • IMDb: link

Wonka

The attempt to tell the origin story for Roald Dahl‘s famous eccentric chocolatier is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand we get Timothée Chalamet as the still naive young man seeking his fortune creating chocolate for the world to enjoy which provides the heart of the film. There’s enough here that we can see the possibility of this version of Willy Wonka growing into the far more gruff character we see played by Gene Wilder. On the other hand we’re left with a script that turns out to have little to do with chocolate and more to do with crazy antics, involving bumbling bad guys, really only suited for small children.

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