"Jangle" is a Middle English word that means to "talk excessively or noisily, squabble." This definition cannot be applied to our protagonist in Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, the 2020 Netflix Christmas movie written and directed by David E. Talbert. When we meet Jeronicus Jangle, he is a toymaker on top of the world and is played in the opening scenes by Justin Cornwell. There is nothing he...
Wednesday, December 25, 2024
Sunday, December 8, 2024
Return to Oz
Return to Oz is not a sequel to The Wizard of Oz. It shares considerably less of the same DNA than, say, the new hit adaptation of Wicked. Viewers will recognize this almost immediately because within seconds, there is an obvious melancholy that might strike some as peculiar (if their only reference...
Sunday, October 13, 2024
Dìdi
ChatGPT is less than two years old, and yet it feels like it's already a feature of everyday life, especially for teenagers who might be using it to cheat on homework assignments. But there is also evidence that the platform can be used to help young people navigate life. How do I know? I asked it, of course, and it provided me with a list of things the site claims to help with, like providing educational...
Sunday, August 18, 2024
Aisha
"Only the thing for which you have struggled will last."-Nigerian (Yoruba) proverbAisha is often in a difficult place. She is a young refugee from Nigeria trying to persevere through the tedious refugee process of the Republic of Ireland. Ireland is an interesting country when it comes to migration. For the first time since 1851 during the Great Famine, the population of Ireland exceeded five...
Tuesday, April 9, 2024
Nobody Knows
Japan may have earned new fans of its cinema recently with its successful night at last month's Academy Awards in Hollywood. The Boy and the Heron won Animated Feature Film, and Godzilla Minus One took home the big win for Visual Effects, the first Oscar in the franchise's seventy-year history. Japan...
Thursday, March 28, 2024
The Man With the Golden Arm
In 1955, three titans of 20th-century art (Otto Preminger, Elmer Bernstein, and Frank Sinatra) united to adapt Nelson Algren's novel The Man with the Golden Arm into a motion picture. A critically acclaimed hit at the time, it remains a powerful (albeit adulterated) look at substance abuse from a time...
Saturday, March 9, 2024
All 53 of the 2024 Oscar-nominated Films Ranked
Ben Zauzmer is a baseball statistician and assistant general manager of the New York Mets. He's also really good at predicting Oscar winners. Last year, he accurately predicted nineteen out of twenty wins. His book about using math to predict the winners is called Oscarmetrics; think of him as the Nate...
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