#BizTrends2020: 2020 at the movies

My original article here.

09 Jan 2020

Here's what to look forward to on the big screen in 2020

Welcome to 2020 at the movies, let's see what this new decade has in store for us.

Reboots and long-awaited sequels

As ol’ King Solomon once said, there’s no new thing under the sun. This year’s reboots kick off with the horror feature, The Grudge – which will be released in theatres on 17 January. This is a reboot of three existing films released between 2004 and 2009, and those movies are based on the Japanese franchise!

Will Smith and a chubbier Martin Lawrence are back for one last ride as Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett in Bad Boys for Life. This is one we’ve been waiting for since 2003’s Bad Boys II. Belgian directors Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi have taken over the reins from Michael Bay but it looks like we can still expect a whole lot of explosions, car chases and gunfights. Bad Boys for Life hits our screens on 24 January.



Move over Eddie Murphy (and, I guess, Kyla Pratt from the straight-to-DVD versions), it’s Robert Downey Jr’s turn to take a crack at the eccentric Dr John Dolittle character in Dolittle also being released on 10 January. The man who can talk to animals is accompanied by a wealth of talent voicing all of his friends, including Rami Malek, Octavia Spencer, Kumail Nanjiani, John Cena, Emma Thompson, Antonio Banderas, Michael Sheen, Jim Broadbent, Marion Cotillard, Frances de la Tour, Carmen Ejogo, Ralph Fiennes, Selena Gomez, Tom Holland and Craig Robinson. The film is directed by Stephen Gaghan (Syriana, 2005).

HG Wells’s The Invisible Man gets a remake starring Elisabeth Moss (The Handmaid’s Tale), Aldis Hodge (Clemency) and Oliver Jackson-Cohen (The Haunting of Hill House). The film, written and directed by Leigh Whannell, comes out on 13 March. 27 March sees Disney continue with its live-action/hauntingly real CGI adaptations in the form of Mulan, directed by Niki Caro and starring Yifei Liu, Donnie Yen and Jet Li.




Daniel Craig is back in his fifth film as James Bond in No Time to Die on 3 April, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. The movie picks up after Bond has left active service and is enjoying a tranquil life in Jamaica and co-stars Rami Malek, as the Bond villain, Léa Seydoux and Lashana Lynch. Apparently, people have been waiting for a sequel to 1986’s Top Gun and their prayers have been answered! Tom Cruise is back as the legendary fighter pilot, Maverick in Top Gun: Maverick on 3 July.

Hollywood is taking another stab at Ghostbusters this year after the 2016 version didn’t go down so well. They are linking this one right back to the originals and tapping into that glorious ‘80s nostalgia that’s keeping Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard employed. 10 July gives us Ghostbusters: Afterlife with the original feature’s director’s son, Jason Reitman, in the director’s chair. The movie starts good ol’ Finn Wolfhard, Paul Rudd, Mckenna Grace, Carrie Coon and Bokeem Woodbine.



We’ve had Kingsman: The Secret Service and Kingsman: The Golden Circle and now we go back in time with the prequel to discover the origins of the very first independent intelligence agency, The King’s Man, on 14 February. The King's Man stars Harris Dickinson, Ralph Fiennes, Gemma Arterton and Djimon Hounsou. Matthew Vaughn is back as director.

The comic book stuff

DC kicks off things with Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn on 7 February. Remember Suicide Squad? I guess this movie picks from there. Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn’s broken up with the Joker and is looking to start a new life. I don’t even know. At some point, Harley Quinn joins superheroes Black Canary, Huntress and Renee Montoya to save a young girl from an evil crime lord, Black Mask. Birds of Prey stars Margot Robbie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Rosie Perez, Chris Messina, Ella Jay Basco, Ali Wong and Ewan McGregor. The film is directed by Cathy Yan (Dead Pigs, 2018).



3 April gives us director Josh Boone’s horror-influenced X-Men movie New Mutants, hopefully. The movie was supposed to be released in 2018 but was delayed. It stars Game of Throne's Maisie Williams and Anya Taylor-Joy. Marvel Studios opens their Phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Black Widow on 1 May. The film is directed by Cate Shortland (Berlin Syndrome, 2017) and stars Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow, alongside David Harbour, Florence Pugh, O-T Fagbenle and Rachel Weisz. Set after the events of Captain America: Civil War (2016), the film sees Romanoff on the run and forced to confront her past.

2017’s Wonder Woman was a huge hit and we’re super excited about the sequel, Wonder Woman 1984. The sequel hits screens on 5 June, it’s set in the ‘80s (like so many films and series these days) and sees the return of Steve Trevor somehow. The movie is the ninth instalment in the DC Extended Universe and is directed and co-written by Patty Jenkins. It stars Gal Gadot as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman, alongside Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal, Robin Wright and Connie Nielsen.

More highlights

Other films to look forward to in 2020 are The Turning, based on Henry James’s novel – which is the story of a nanny hired to take care of two creepy kids in a creepy house in Maine. The film stars Mackenzie Davis, Finn Wolfhard (this kid again), Brooklynn Prince and Joely Richardson. Sonic the Hedgehog is a thing that’s happening. In this live-action adventure comedy, Sonic and his new best friend Tom (James Marsden) team up to defend the planet from the evil genius Dr Robotnik (Jim Carrey) and his plans for world domination.



A film I’m looking forward to – because I loved the books as a kid – is Artemis Fowl, which is about a 12-year-old Artemis who is a millionaire, a genius and a criminal mastermind. But Artemis doesn’t know what he's taken on when he kidnaps a fairy, Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon Unit to harness her magic to save his family. Disney Pixar is also releasing an interesting project with Soul, a journey from the streets of New York City to the cosmic realms to discover the answers to life’s most important questions. Soul stars Jamie Foxx and Tina Fey and is directed by Inside Out's Pete Docter.

I wish you 2020 vision at the movies this year.

Jozi: The City Under the City

© Pierre Blignaut

“So, if a city has a personality, maybe it also has a soul. Maybe it dreams.” — Worlds' End

Eish, Jozi . . . Ja, neh . . . Jozi, that great city where dreams and their dreamers are swallowed up whole more often than not. To survive in Jozi you don’t necessarily need the right tools, you need the creativity to make the wrong tools work for you. Like many major cities around the world, Jozi is made up of layers. The top layer is the rough and tough face of its everyday business, that mainly being people going about their business at a furious pace. The first lesson my mother taught me about this city is to keep moving and not to speak to anyone. On its surface, this warning always seemed like it was about avoiding being a victim of crime but it also served as a warning about something stranger. The warning sometimes included the word amasilamusi. A word that both intrigues and frightens me to this day. A word that made quite the impact on Twitter last week.

The great city of Jozi has a mystical layer that appears on the surface every now and then but that usually exists under everything else or on the fringes. In Neil Gaiman’s novel, Neverwhere another London exists below the hustle and bustle of the familiar one on the surface, a mysterious and magical London Below. Inspector Tyador Borlú finds himself trying to solve a crime that spills over into a city that occupies the same space as his city in China Miéville’s novel, The City and the City. A city most can see from the corner of their eye but avoid focusing on. In Jozi, too, below its bustle and grime, there exists another Jozi. One most of us have heard about but tend to look at only from the corner of our eye, if ever at all. The citizens of Jozi learn to navigate the city around its strange elements.

© Austin Malema

One of these strange elements made an appearance on Twitter last week with Noluthando Zuma’s Tweet asking if people know about the taxi from Fourways to Bree that’s driven by a cat. Her Tweet blew up as others came forward with their own stories of this taxi driven by a cat looking to make ends meet. More people came forward with other equally strange experiences or stories from sources like cleaning ladies at work. In my own experience, cleaning ladies at work are an excellent source of all things weird and to do with witchcraft. The story with the cat makes for great memes but what stands out is how many people seem to have encountered this cat driving his route between Fourways and Bree. We might not be sure if this cat plays Maskande or Amapiano on his drive but we all do believe the story on some level. The concept of isalamuzi or amasilamusi came up, with people reporting having had their heartbeats stolen by a driver that made sounds like a baby or purred like a cat.

My mother’s warning about Jozi was also a warning about amasilamusi, whose powers seem to change according to whoever tells the story but there are overlapping elements in all the stories. One of my mother’s experiences with these people, creatures or whatever they are, happened in the late ‘90s. She was coming out from the now infamous Smal Street Mall when she was stopped by an old lady asking for directions. My mother made the rookie mistake of stopping the hear the lady out and fell under some spell. She says she lost control of her wits and found herself going to an ATM with this lady and withdrawing her daily limit. The whole thing was like being in a dream. Next thing she was in an alley with this woman and some men carrying a suitcase filled with money. The old woman told my mom to hand over the money to the men and take the suitcase from them. The idea was that the two of them split the money in the suitcase. My mother obliged and made the exchange. And just like a dream, the next thing she remembers is being in a taxi from Faraday to Turffontein. The suitcase was now a Checkers plastic bag in her lap filled with cut-up newspaper. She told the people in the taxi what had happened to her and, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, they told her it was the work of amasilamusi.

© Thandile Zwelibanzi

Apparently, some amasilamusi are so powerful that they can steal all the money on your person by merely touching you and when you get home all you have is worthless paper where the money was. This only happens if you talk to them, though. That seems to be their one binding rule, that their powers can’t affect you unless you speak to them. Most of us have a blueprint to navigate this other Jozi because our parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents told us these stories but it becomes buried in our subconscious at some point, operating in the background. Noluthando Zuma’s Tweet about that industrious cat has taken the world of amasilamusi and introduced it to Twitter. The result has been largely hilarious and a bit frightening but my thinking here, eyam’ iworry is whether amasilamusi are ready for Twitter? Can their world still exist in the shadows with Black Twitter’s finest on the lookout?

Todd Phillips's Joker doesn't reach the lofty heights it's reaching for

My original article here.

23 October 2019

I remember first hearing about Joker around this time last year and not giving it much attention - until I started seeing the marketing footage over the next few months.

A lot of the visual style made me think of Lee Bermejo’s illustrations in Brian Azzarello’s brilliant 2008 graphic novel, Joker. The end result does bear some resemblance but you can see that there isn’t a direct inspiration or anything. 

Scorsese in the Batman universe 

Some of Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke is in there somewhere. And I can even argue for Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum inspiring a lot of the film’s take on mental health in the modern age. 

I would say that writer/director Todd Phillips (War Dogs) went with his own take on this iconic character, though. And the result is a character study that leaves the viewer feeling unsettled.


Phillips and his team draw heavy inspiration from Martin Scorsese’s films, Taxi Driver (1976) and The King of Comedy (1982). Quite amusing. Scorsese views all these comic book movies from the last decade as not being “real” cinema – much in the same way that comic books are often not viewed as “real” literature.

The comic book film aspect of Joker sits in the back row of what this film is about, even more so than in Christopher Nolan’s gritty and “realistic” Batman trilogy. So, what I’m saying is that Joker is a Scorsese-esque film that happens to play out in the Batman universe.

Dark and twisted 

The film has a lot going for it. The cinematography is gorgeous! This 1980s Gotham City is dark, gritty, straight up dirty and the atmosphere is oppressive. The city itself makes you feel depressed, and it’s the sort of place where people’s psyches are broken. 


Joaquin Phoenix (Irrational Man) portrays the mentally-troubled comedian Arthur Fleck, who lives with his ill and equally mentally-troubled mother. 

He’s bullied at work and in public and just waiting to have a nervous breakdown. Phoenix’s performance is breathtaking but also feels forced at times.

The supporting cast consists of Robert de Niro as Murray Franklin, a talk show host Fleck admires; Zazie Beetz as Fleck’s neighbour and love interest, Sophie Dumond; Frances Conroy plays Fleck’s mother, Penny; and Brett Cullen plays a Thomas Wayne who is more ruthless businessman than the philanthropic version we’re used to.


As a character study, Joker focuses on the circumstances that eventually lead to Fleck’s utter and violent breakdown. This is a character suffering from mental illness, who comes from a broken and abusive home trying to survive from day to day in a city whose institutions fail to help him. 

Mental illness and economic inequality 

This is something we see in our own societies, where funding meant to assist people who need it never seems to actually make it to the institutions responsible for this assistance. Meanwhile, you have people like Thomas Wayne sitting in their mansions and judging the people on the ground as being clowns who are too lazy to do anything with their lives. 

Fleck is also misunderstood at work, adding to his difficulties to deal with his reality.

When he finally has a nervous breakdown, a wave of violence ensues and this is where people are divided on what to think of the film.


Are we to sympathise with this character? Is the film a warning to us of what happens when we ignore the troubles of those around us? Does the film encourage violence in a time where mass shootings in the United States have become a fairly regular occurrence? It’s all up for discussion.

Joker is a film that tries to take us deep into the troubled mind of someone alienated by society, and explores the catastrophic results of that alienation. The film succeeds in many ways to do this but a lot of it also just feels flimsy, like the whole premise is built on a house of cards. 

Especially when you look at all the characters around Fleck, most of them are having just as difficult a time as he is but they don’t go on any shooting sprees. His neighbour is a struggling single mother living in the same squalid apartment block he does. You could centre a whole film around her. The film also doesn’t actually do much work exploring Fleck’s mental illness. 

An incomplete character study

He bursts out laughing at inappropriate times and has delusions, but we aren’t given any deeper explanation than that. In the end, I’d say that the film gives us an incomplete character study compared to let’s say a great example like Walter White from Breaking Bad but that’s an unfair comparison, perhaps.

Joker is less of a tour de force and more of tragic caricature

I am as big a champion of the villain's story being told as you could hope to find. My academic research and vast collection of Evil Queen memorabilia can attest to this...

BY NATALIE LE CLUE 10 OCT 2019

A better comparison is to the other portrayals of the character in cinema over the years, especially to Jared Leto’s take on the character in Suicide Squad and Heath Ledger’s take in The Dark Knight. I still find it difficult to make a comparison because all the other portrayals are very much comic book villains with the usual outlandish evil plans. 



Jared Leto’s Joker is silly at best and Heath Ledger’s version makes for a better comparison. The Heath Ledger version has the advantage of being able to stay shrouded in mystery and that being the whole point. He’s a force of chaos and we don’t know where he got those scars, but that’s what makes him scarier. He’s also not the focal point and responsible for carrying the whole film so it’s easier to praise him as the better Joker.

My verdict is that the film has a lot going for it, and it’s worth the trip to the cinema. The cinematography is a thing of beauty and the acting brilliant (with some over-the-top moments from Phoenix) but the movie doesn’t reach the lofty heights it’s reaching for.

Occasional Letters to Death #3 / Letters to God #8 / Chill Sessions with Joy #1

"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."

- Sir Philip Sidney

Hello,

Death, God, Joy,

Remember me? It's been a while since I wrote to you last. I apologise. Life happened. I should be thankful for Life, I guess.

Death, you've been sticking quite close to me these last years. I won't even front, your call has been very enticing and I'm hoping to find a way to stave you off a while by writing these letters. I'm trying for that Drake More Life kind of thing.

God, how are you? I sure have strayed far from the flock. I've been busy being woke. So, no time to talk when I don't even know if I believe. The prodigal son returns it would seem.

Joy, I've been very far from you, indeed. You think it would be okay if we talk every now and then?

"Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show"

I'm 32 now! I've has some success and just a whole lot of failure. I got married. In that time I've caused my wife more tears than laughter.  I miss laughter. I became part of a team writing children's books. That fell apart. I joined a team working on some EduTech software. That relationship fell apart. Life's been hard but I really want to change that for the better. So, I'm thinking that I need to sit down and put my thoughts to paper, make that commitment.

I want to fall in love with Life. I'm hoping that turning to verse or, rather, turning to the written word in general, I can explore that love in fall deeper into it in the process. I'm 32 now and can feel that this living in the light of past mistakes isn't working out for me. I need to do better and to be better.

I've picked up my pen again and hope that these sessions with all of you result in me being a better person.

Let's talk again, right? This is good, right?

Charles

Will we ever witness a superhero spectacle as grand as Avengers: Endgame?

My original article here.

6 May 2019

Last year, at pretty much exactly this time I sat down and wrote about how Avengers: Infinity War lives up to the 10 years and 18 Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies worth of hype. And here I am doing it again for the spectacle that is Avengers: End Game.

Avengers: Infinity War lives up to high expectations

Ten years, 18 movies, a lot of hype and finally Avengers: Infinity War arrives. The question is, does the movie deliver?

BY CHARLES SIBOTO 2 MAY 2018

I say spectacle because this is what directors, Anthony and Joe Russo, have given us. They’ve made a film that surpasses ridiculously high expectations and services, now, 21 preceding MCU films with an insane amount of love and detail. This is by no means a perfect film in the sense that when YouTubers pick it apart and agonise over every detail that everything makes sense. We live in a time in which everyone’s a screenwriter and knows better than the people paid to do so – no film or series can meet those expectations.


This past weekend was huge for the geeky fandom. Avengers: Endgame was released to huge hype and the third episode of the last season of Game of Thrones promised us the biggest and longest night battle sequence since the battle of Helm’s Deep in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Social media was buzzing (and still is) with memes, spoilers and on Monday morning perhaps a sense of disappointment. I think both Endgame and Game of Thrones delivered and that emptiness that we now feel is that we won’t see such spectacle for a long time. Both Thanos and the Night King represent such a huge scale of threat and villainy that we just honestly don’t know where to go after this.

Picking up where we left off

I digress, though, we’re here for me to tell you about Endgame. I thought that after Avengers: Infinity War that all this movie could hope for is to be as good as that but, no, it goes and far surpasses that movie! The 181 minutes of runtime means that the movie pays attention to all the characters and give them all a bit of the spotlight. This also means that the movie can hit different thematic beats in its story. The movie opens with the remaining Avengers and the rest of the world recovering from and dealing with the repercussions of that finger snap from the last film that resulted in half of all life in the universe being wiped out. Everyone’s grieving and we spend time with the surviving characters, all of whom have lost people. The Avengers are not used to losing and Thanos has soundly defeated them so they’re at their lowest.

Avengers: Endgame is emotive and impactful

Avengers: Endgame has ensured that a 10-year journey has come to an end with a film so emotive and impactful that it will be spoken about, in reverence, for some time to come...

BY NATALIE LE CLUE 30 APR 2019

All the characters deal with their grief in their own way. Hawkeye is back and pretty much on a criminal murder spree after his family gets dusted. Tony Stark is angry at Captain America for not being there when he needed him and for the rift created between the team after the events of Captain America: Civil War. The Cap is running a survivor’s support group where he helps people move on from their grief but admits that he can’t move on.


Natasha tries to hold the rest of the Avengers team together because they’re the only family she has. Thor is in a state of self-loathing because he should have gone for the head. Everyone’s pretty much not having a great time. This part of the story also reveals a flaw in Thanos’ plan. He erased half of life in the universe but the remaining half hasn’t forgotten and instead of moving on people are stuck in their grief and the world goes through somewhat of an apocalypse because, well, half of the universe’s workforce is just gone.

Fan service and Easter eggs abound (*Spoiler alert*)

You can’t keep the Avengers down for too long, though, and the movie kicks it up a gear when Ant-Man escapes from the quantum realm and puts time travel on the table for the team. They come up with a plan they refer to as a time heist and go off to try and get back everything they lost. The time heist allows for many, many callbacks through the MCU’s past movies. This part is pure fan service and just a treasure trove of Easter eggs. The references to the MCU are just brilliant and the nods to other time travel movies make for a lot of laughs.

This part of the film is Marvel showing off their amazing ability to use humour whilst still making you feel like everything you love will be lost. It’s quite magical. The time heist itself is wibbly wobbly timey wimey and probably doesn’t make sense if you overthink it. Things obviously go wrong when you mess with time and the action kicks in on an epic scale from here on. It would be too much of a spoiler to tell you how huge everything becomes from here! Again, all I can say is that it’s a spectacle of astounding proportions! Thanos is still very much the main threat and he is still as menacing as ever.



Marvel has crafted a masterpiece with Endgame and I think whatever they do from here on out, it will remain as a highlight that will not be overshadowed anytime soon. You don’t need to have watched all the 21 preceding movies to enjoy this movie, but it sure as hell makes your experience so much better if you did. The MCU has taken what for the longest time could only be successfully done on the pages of comic books, showing off the sheer spectacle of a huge space villain like Thanos, that Mad Titan hell-bent on destroying half the universe on a massive scale. You don’t even understand, this movie is me reading Grant Morrison’s epic comic book, Final Crisis (DC, I know) and wondering how a comic book can be so massive in scale and emotion. Watching Endgame is like that and as the credits roll up you wonder if you’ll ever feel this way again.

#BizTrends2019: 2019 at the movies

My original article here.

15 Jan 2019



Let's take a look at what 2019 has in store in the movies, shall we?

In tribute to the creator of worlds

On 13 November 2018, we lost the great Stan Lee, the man who gave us iconic comic book characters like Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, and Black Panther. In tribute to this storytelling icon, we’re going to kick off our 2019 at the movies with all the comic book goodness in store for us.

“Unbreakable, what, you thought they'd call me Mr. Glass?” Are we allowed to still quote Kanye West? Anyway, we kick things off with M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass. The sequel to Unbreakable (2000) and Split (2016), making up the third part of the Unbreakable series. Bruce Willis returns as the superhero David Dunn and James McAvoy in the persona of The Beast and his other split personalities. Samuel L Jackson’s Mr. Glass serves as the villain that orchestrates events. Glass hits cinemas on 18 January.



Avengers: Infinity War left many cinemagoers traumatised by Thanos’s finger snap and we need to know how the good guys will make a comeback in the sequel. From the end credits scene, we do know that Captain Marvel is going to play a part in saving the day. So while we wait for the second part of Infinity War we can get ourselves clued up on Carol Danvers’s backstory in Captain Marvel on 8 March. Then bounce right over to DC’s Captain Marvel, who can’t be called by that name, Shazam. On 5 April, we get Shazam! The comic book movie we never really asked for. But here we are and at least it means we’ll see The Rock play Black Adam’s character somewhere down the line. The Hellboy series gets a more welcome revamp with David Harbour (Stranger Things) as the Big Red Demon. The film’s coming out guns blazing with an R-rating on 12 April. We get the Infinity War sequel, Avengers: End Game, on 27 April. You know, the story we’re really looking forward to.



Ah, the X-Men film series, where I have only the vaguest idea of what the timeline is. The 12^th film in the series, Dark Phoenix comes out on 7 June with Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones) reprising her role as Jean Grey and unleashing the iconic Phoenix character. Apparently, our favourite neighbourhood Spider-Man survives that whole Infinity War mess, but he’s going to make it home late for supper and poor Aunt May’s worried. Spider-Man: Far From Home comes out in theatres on 5 July. The rest of the year gives us New Mutants on 2 August and Joker on 4 October.

“Go then, there are other worlds than these . . .”

It’s always okay to quote Stephen King. There’s more to the world than just comic book movies, so let’s look into that.

Remember that amazing 2011 French film, The Intouchables? It’s a pretty great film, right? Well, now you get to see it in American as The Upside, starring Bryan Cranston and Kevin Hart on 11 January. Who understands French anyway? The Lego Movie gets a sequel on 8 February and How to Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World gets a 22 February release.



Jordan Peele brings us another horror film on 15 March titled, well, Us. Plot details are still pretty hush-hush for now and the film stars Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, and Tim Heidecker. Tim Burton has not just been sitting around twiddling his thumbs either and 29 March sees his take on Dumbo. The film stars Colin Farrell, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, and Eva Green.



As I said, you can never go wrong with Stephen King and Hollywood agrees. We get two movies based on his books in the form of Pet Sematary on 5 April and It Chapter Two on 6 September. Another movie that we didn’t know we want but it turns out we really do is Pokémon: Detective Pikachu! I can’t even front, you guys, I’m in. I’ll be there on 10 May to watch Pikachu solve things.



John Wick is not done killing his way through hordes of bad guys in John Wick 3: Parabellum on 17 May. Disney is still on a roll and Aladdin gets the live action treatment on 24 May; Will Smith gets the role of Genie. A living legend, Sir Elton John gets a biographical musical film based on his life in the form of Rocketman on 31 May, the same day we have Godzilla trampling a city or two in Godzilla: King of Monsters. You still have a friend in Toy Story in its fourth installment on 21 June.



The second half of the year brings highlights such as The Lion King in its CGI format, Artemis Fowl and Frozen 2. We also get a Quentin Tarantino picture titled, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood on 26 July with the Manson Family murders of 1969 serving as a backdrop. The film stars names like Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, and Dakota Fanning. We get a Star Wars Christmas again this year with Episode IX on 20 December. JJ Abrams is back in the director’s chair in the closing chapter of the new trilogy.



That's that from me. Here’s to a great 2019 at the movies. Excelsior!

The Blacksmith and the Dragonfly

Ndiliswa dreams of becoming a warrior and the commander of the royal guard. But she is the daughter of a poor blacksmith, who makes spears just to get by. Prince Siyabulela has never been a soldier like his younger brother and his father fears that he's not fit to be the next king. When Siyabulela is transformed into a dragonfly by a wicked spell, it is up to Ndiliswa to save the prince.
I'm super excited to be able to finally announce the beautiful South African fairy tale I've been working on with Riana Louw and Christelle Lambrechts! The Blacksmith and the Dragonfly is being published by Human & Rousseau and will be available in all good bookstores and from online retailers like takealot from the beginning of November 2018 for R160.

#YouthMonth: Check up on your "strong friends"

My original article here.

14 June 2018

In my last two #YouthMonth articles I've admired the youth for speaking that slick talk that we do and for our creative hustles. We're pretty damn golden! This #YouthMonth I want to address something serious, something that we usually avoid talking about and something I wrangle with personally.

As I write this I’ve just found out that celebrity chef and all-around television personality, Anthony Bourdain has committed suicide. Fashion designer Kate Spade also committed suicide recently. In the last few years, the world has lost Robin Williams, Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington, and many other people to suicide. I have lost two friends to suicide in the last two years.

RIP Anthony Bourdain

CNN has confirmed the death of American chef, author, and television personality, Anthony Bourdain, who was 61 years of age...

BY JUANITA PIENAAR 8 JUN 2018

When I was growing up most of the suicide stories on the news were people who were in debt or whose lives were ruined on a tragic Shakespearean scale. Depression, in its many forms, existed then too and many people who suffered from it did commit suicide but it wasn’t reported much and was surrounded by stigma. While there's still a stigma around depression and other forms of mental illness today, we’re moving forward and recognising it and talking about it.

Royce da 5'9"

The vocal generation

Young people are dealing with a lot of things and, contrary to what older people believe, life is difficult. We're standing on the shoulders of giants like umama uWinnie Mandela and we're trying our best to build the sort of society they envisioned and fought for. The older generation was made of tougher stuff, the stuff of legends really, but they did sweep some issues under the ol' rug and we're trying deal with those issues today. After apartheid, we didn't have the tough conversations we needed to and that can be seen in the racism and inequality that still plague us and we're plagued by sexism and homophobia.

We're the generation that is starting to speak up about things like the sexual abuse that women have been dealing with and continue to deal with. Our Truth and Reconciliation Commision is taking people to task and having them take responsibility everywhere we can, whether it's on Twitter, in the workplace or our universities. We're trying to build a nation here and every topic, no matter how uncomfortable, is on the agenda. Depression is definitely on the agenda because we need to take care of our mental health as much as we take care of our physical health so that we can get on with the business of nation-building.

Popular music dealing with depression

I've been listening to a lot of the new releases in popular music over the last months and I've noticed depression as a running theme with a lot of new albums, especially in hip-hop. J. Cole dropped KOD (Kids on Drugs, King OverDose or Kill Our Demons) in April and explores drug addiction in the music business and just in normal life as a result of modern society's pressures and depression. He goes on to recommend meditation over medication. The ever-controversial Kanye West has been seemingly losing his mind more than usual on Twitter making comments about slavery being a choice and praising a very problematic Trump. I've always been a fan of Ye's music because of its poignant tones of existential crisis. The dude was clearly busy in the studio whilst being crazy on Twitter, though, working on three projects: Pusha T's Daytona, his own Ye and his collaboration with Kid Cudi, Kids See Ghosts. 



On the latter two projects, Kanye gets into his struggles with mental health (the text on the cover reads: I hate being Bi-Polar it's awesome) and Kid Cudi's struggles with depression and suicidal urges have been in the public sphere for years. In a 2014 interview Kid Cudi stated, "I’ve dealt with suicide for the past five years. There wasn’t a week or a day that didn’t go by where I was just like, ‘You know, I wanna check out.’ I know what that feels like, I know it comes from loneliness, I know it comes from not having self-worth, not loving yourself." He checked himself into rehabilitation for depression and suicidal urges in 2016.

What really got me thinking about depression and mental health more than I usually do, though, was Royce da 5'9"'s Book of Ryan. He has a song on there, Strong Friend, in which he explores depression and suicide in some detail, especially among friends we think of as strong. These strong friends are usually the ones that are hurting the most and are barely holding it together. They keep their pain to themselves because of the stigma associated with mental illness. He encourages people, especially black people, to seek out help and for us to check on our friends more and not to think they're okay because they look okay on the outside. At the end of the song he quotes other personalities (and himself) in the entertainment business who've committed suicide or addressed mental illness:



Depression and other mental illnesses are serious and we have to address them the same way in which we would a disease that afflicts our bodies. Life is difficult for young people and many of us are strong and it amazes me how so many of us overcome almost insurmountable challenges in the pursuit of our dreams. Young people hustle hard but we must also take care of ourselves and our friends. Instead of making it difficult for people who struggle with depression we should create an environment where people can come and talk to us about their struggles. I love how people are sharing information on job opportunities, information on where to get psychiatric help, ways for women to access safe abortion clinics or pretty much anything helpful on Twitter in the form of RT to save a life. That's exactly how we should look out for each other. Check up on your friends this #YouthMonth and beyond, even if they seem to be strong on the outside.

Check out The South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG), they are SA’s largest Mental Health Advocacy Group.

You can find them on:
Twitter: @TheSADAG (RT to save a life), 0800 21 22 23 or 0800 12 13 14 (24Hrs) or sadag.org.

Avengers: Infinity War lives up to high expectations

My original article here.

2 May 2018

Ten years, 18 movies, a lot of hype and finally Avengers: Infinity War arrives. The question is, does the movie deliver?

Especially when expectations are so high? When the Avengers first assembled in 2012 it was the sort of ambitious event that comic book fans never dreamed was possible for a film. When 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron landed the magic was still there but Joss Whedon, the man at the helm of both those Avengers films felt the strain and bowed out. After a great showing with Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), directors Antony and Joe Russo were hired to direct Infinity War and its 2019 sequel. 

One epic package

Over the last 10 years, Marvel Studios has managed to deliver blockbuster after blockbuster and the Russos were tasked with taking all of that material and putting it together in an epic package. I am happy to report that they deliver a movie that takes all the different tones and characters from all of the preceding movies and blends them together to produce something quite magical. There are a lot of moving parts in this movie and somehow it all comes together perfectly.

Infinity War is not the best movie Marvel Studios has produced if you look at it as a standalone and it was never meant to be. This is meant to be grand-scale spectacle following 10 years of build up and, yet, the movie manages to have pathos and carry itself with a sort of grace I did not expect. You know that the stakes are quite high coming into the film but you don't expect the movie to make you feel as deeply as it does. As a fan who knows that the movie draws heavily from Jim Starlin's 1991 comic book The Infinity Gauntlet, I knew what to expect coming in but somehow the events that take place managed to surprise and somewhat shock me. 


All the characters we know and love are all there but this is Thanos's story, for the most part, Thanos on his quest to collect all of the Infinity Stones. Josh Brolin's Thanos is larger than life, he has gravitas, commands respect and dominates all the scenes he is in. As soon as you first see him you feel that you are in the presence of a superior being. He is on a mission to wipe out half of life in the universe, balance the scales, as it were and he has an indomitable will to get it done. He is not just a generic big bad, there is a charm to him and a certain sadness. You almost want to take his side.

Character continuity

We have seen the Avengers assemble and have had a bunch of them onscreen at the same time, but not like this. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) did stand out for me among the good guys and his arc is quite strong and well done. All your other favourites are here and definitely not to be messed with. Events pretty much kick off straight after Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther. All the players in those movies are where we last saw them, in space and in Wakanda. 

The Guardians of the Galaxy show up (with all the humour they always bring to a party), as do Doctor Strange, Wong, Iron Man, Spider-man, Captain America, Black Widow, Falcon, Scarlett Witch, Vision, and War Machine. There are some surprise characters that are a nice touch as well. The story even takes time to throw in some Norse mythology Easter eggs with Thor's storyline. You can't be a self-respecting villain without some henchmen and Thanos has some zealous and pretty scary ones referred to as his Children. There is the hulking (pun intended) Cull Obsidian, the truly terrifying sorcerer Ebony Maw, Proxima Midnight, and Corvus Glaive.

The film is quite long at 149 minutes but the pacing is done so well that you don't get tired of watching or feel like scenes are merely there as padding, which was the case in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Like The Last Jedi, this movie does spend some time subverting fan theories and delivers some nice surprises as a result. Many people will find it annoying that issues aren't resolved and that is to be expected. The movie does all it can to be the spectacle that it is and that we wanted, it delivers a villain worthy of waiting 10 years for and it is a good story that manages to juggle a huge cast of characters and locations quite nicely. 



Avengers: Infinity War manages to live up to very high expectations and though it's quite self-contained it does leave you wanting more, which you will get in the 2019 sequel. As is tradition, stay for the end-credits scene and its Easter egg.