Category Archives: Family films

Living in a woman’s body: I want my daughter to be inspired by my miraculous scars

Posted on by

When I was pregnant, I discovered that I had developed breast cancer – just like my mother before me. One day, the child I was carrying may face the same hard choices

When I was five, I would talk to my mother while she was in the bath. When she stood to get out, the water fell from her, her skin pink from the heat. Her body was miraculous to me. Women’s bodies are miraculous, with the things they can do, but I didn’t know any of that then. I just knew that she was soft and perfect, and mine.

By the time my mother developed breast cancer, I was 30. She was double that age and there was an ocean between us: I was married and living in New York, so when the news came, I couldn’t hold her to me, or be a practical support. I sat on my bed and cried. The next time I saw her, it was all over. One breast removed and carefully reconstructed. The cancer gone. My husband asked me, as we approached my parents in the airport, whether it was OK to give my mum a hug. The surgery was recent; I wasn’t sure. But it was OK. She seemed the same.

Continue reading...

The Home Alone house is on Airbnb. Sounds like a trap | Stuart Heritage

Posted on by

Just how lucky will the guests who get to stay at the McCallister house later this month be? I foresee trouble

In the interests of public service, I need to make you aware of a trap. Yesterday, a property became available on Airbnb. It is a large home in the Chicago area, available for one night only and it is suspiciously cheap. Look, it’s the Home Alone house.

Apparently, for $18 (£13.50), you and three friends can stay overnight in the iconic McCallister residence. You will be greeted by the actor who played Buzz McCallister. There will be pizza and other 90s junk food. There will be a mirror for you to scream into. There may well be a tarantula. It all seems too good to be true, doesn’t it? This is why I am convinced that whoever ends up staying there will be robbed.

Continue reading...

Over the Moon review – Netflix family animation is more Disney than Disney

Posted on by

The voices of Cathy Ang, John Cho and Sandra Oh star in this K-poppy, trippy fantasy about a girl who builds a rocket and flies to the moon

Watch your back, Disney; here comes Netflix in Hollywood studio mode, flexing its ambition with an animated family fantasy adventure about a sunny, 13-year-old girl called Fei Fei who flies to the moon in a homemade rocket. It’s a film for the globalised 21st century (and presumably Netflix’s global audience): a Chinese story directed by an American – the veteran Disney animator Glen Keane – and voiced in English by actors of (mostly) east Asian heritage.

Cathy Ang is Fei Fei, who is horrified when her dad (John Cho) brings home a new girlfriend (Sandra Oh) four years after her mum’s death. Fei Fei is a true believer in the mythical goddess Chang’e, who is said to languish on the moon, pining for her mortal lover. Our heroine reasons that if she can prove Chang’e and eternal love really do exist, her dad will have to chuck his girlfriend and devote himself to the memory of her mumThus, as a science whizz, she builds a spaceship. It’s a contrived plot but Keane’s character design is beautifully expressive, adding real emotional force – Fei Fei’s face scrunched in anguish when she realises her dad plans to remarry is very touching.

Continue reading...

Grounded? How Disney’s Dumbo flop could threaten its master plan

Posted on by

The corporation’s buying spree has other studios trembling in its mouse-eared shadow. But are hard times ahead for the entertainment behemoth?

You’ve seen a horse fly, you’ve seen a dragon fly, you’ve seen a house fly. Now watch as a computer-animated elephant with oversized ears … crashes to the ground from a very great height. The reviews are in on Disney’s new Dumbo – reworked from the 1941 classic with “the imagination of Tim Burton” – and they are not unanimously positive, to say the least. “It transforms a gentle and miraculous tale into a routine story by weighing it down with a lot of nuts and bolts it didn’t need,” says Variety. “Floats just high enough to clear the incredibly low bar that it sets for itself,” writes IndieWire. In this paper, Peter Bradshaw calls it “a flightless pachyderm of a film” with a “pointlessly complicated and drawn-out story”. Roll up! Roll up!

If Dumbo flops, it could represent a major disturbance in Disney’s grand master plan. The corporation’s recent buying spree has left other studios trembling in its mouse-eared shadow. Over the last decade or so, Disney has snapped up plum properties such as Star Wars, Marvel and Pixar, culminating in last week’s $71bn (£54bn) acquisition of rival studio 21st Century Fox.

Continue reading...

Spandex snobbery smackdown: why the liberal elite snubs wrestling

Posted on by

The sport has drama, showmanship, and gender equality – as the film Fighting With My Family proves. Yet, because it’s working class, it’s marginalised, writes director Stephen Merchant

In 2014, after years of struggle, a working-class British woman, aged just 21, was awarded the highest honour her profession can bestow, live, in front of 20,000 people and a television audience of millions.

The Guardian didn’t report it. In the days following, there were no laudatory profiles, no in-depth interviews, no op-eds about her stratospheric success in a male-dominated world.

Continue reading...