A little dark, and a little melancholy for kids, but for me, near perfection.
Kubo is a little boy with a magical, ancient Japanese banjo. Well, technically the banjo wasn’t ancient at the time – he lives in ancient Japan. And the banjo isn’t actually a banjo, it’s a shamisen. When he plays his magical shamisen, his origami comes to life and helps him tell awesome stories about warriors and samurai. He’s busking, essentially, and the captivated crowd rewards him with a few coins – a good thing because he provides for his sick mother, who lives outside the village in a cave. When she’s not in a trance, she’s adamant that Kubo always return before sundown. It was surprisingly sound advice from the mentally ill because THE ONE TIME he doesn’t, hell breaks loose. Ancient Japanese hell.
Turns out, Kubo’s grandfather is some sort of Moon God. Grandfather has already “stolen” one of Kubo’s eyes and wants to get his hands on the other – in blindness, his grandson can join him in immortality, ruling the sky. He sends his 2 creepy daughters to do the dirty work while his 3rd daughter, Kubo’s mom, struggles to protect him with what little magic she has left.
The movie is a grand adventure with more beauty in any random 30 seconds than The Secret Life of Pets has in its entire running time. As usual with Laika productions (they brought you Coraline), there are darker feelings at play, a sometimes ominous and foreboding tone unusual in a children’s movie, and yet the kids in the audience seemed to tolerate it better than they did Pete’s Dragon. It’s a glorious act of story-telling that feels like something genuinely passed down for generations. Every time Kubo picks up his shamisen, be prepared for some of the loveliest music you’ll hear at the movies. It sweeps you up into the magic of his origami, and the whole thing feels alive and vibrant, steeped in a culture filled with divine tradition.
Kubo And The Two Strings is surprisingly well-balanced tonally, able to incorporate gags meant 
just for kids between bouts of horror, humour, and yes, tragedy. It’s quite brave, when you think of it. Suicide Squad pulled back on the Joker’s villainy, and Ben-Hur rewrote some of its savagery. This, a meticulously animated piece of art, has the backbone to trust children with some rather heavy themes. And it does it while also being the most visually arresting thing I’ve seen at the movies this year. It’s a spectacle, and a technical triumph. Having no wordly idea how they pulled some scenes off just adds to the magic. Laika is no stranger to Oscar nominations for animation, and is sure to earn another, but this movie demolishes even their own high bar. Laika doesn’t have the cachet of Pixar so politically, beating Finding Dory will be difficult. But the proof is on the big screen: it is undoubtedly the better film.
model?” Charlize said in the May issue of British GQ, whining that “when meaty roles come through, I’ve been in the room and pretty people get turned away first.”
Devil’s Advocate because director Taylor Hackford thought she was too good looking to play such a gritty role. “Devil’s Advocate was probably the hardest — they put me through the wringer,” Charlize told the publication recently, “Taylor just wasn’t convinced. He was like, ‘If you were his wife, why would he cheat on you?’ So there. She’s also too pretty to be cheated on. And definitely too pretty to realize how stupid she sounds. I mean, if you’re going to show up to accept Spike TV’s “Decade of Hotness” award, you just have to be prepared to accept all the terrible fallout that comes along with it.
Nicole Kidman – this ugmo got the lead role in Moulin Rouge instead of Charlize, who can’t sing, incidentally, but the main reason was of course, her distracting beauty, which is why they replaced her with Kidman, who after all, only models for Chanel, Jimmy Choo, and Omega, though that’s not an exhaustive list.
beautiful, so she has to be replaced by someone far plainer – Gwyneth Paltrow (who admittedly models for Hugo Boss and Estee Lauder), who actually was still too damned beautiful, so they got rid of her and went with the plainest woman they could think of, Marion 
Cotillard (yes, she technically models for the same brand as Charlize – Dior – but it’s in the uglier handbag section, so it barely counts), and then they thought, jeez, I don’t know, maybe even crummy old Marion is still just a little too pretty for this, so let’s call up that frumpy dancer, Alicia Vikander (who barely manages a Louis Vuitto
n campaign)
Theron was in consideration for the role of Helen Gandy in J. Edgar, but the director realized, no, this woman is just too beautiful, and so he hired the repulsive Naomi Watts instead, once voted #2 in the French edition of FHM magazine’s “100 Sexiest Women in the World 2006”, presumably right behind Miss Theron, and a model for Pantene and Ann Taylor.
And then there was the time Charlize auditioned for the role of Rose in Titanic. James Cameron must have also been ultimately discouraged by her exquisiteness, poked around for someone a little less stunning and thankfully landed upon the face of Lancome herself, Kate Winslet. Gross.
definitively a few rungs lower, a solid 6 on a good hair day, she was able to land the role of a video game character, who are known for their realistic-looking women.
Wow! I was excited going in to Mad Max last night. I was expecting something crazy and strange. I got that, only ten times more crazy and strange than I thought. And that is a very, very good thing.
It’s sweet and wholesome and damn if that song wasn’t catchy – it even got played on our 1996 radio waves for a brief blip in time. Real 60s music was too expensive (and it had been done well and to death in Forrest Gump, thought Hanks) so it was cheaper just to have stuff written. That Thing You Do! was the result of a competition for a “faux-Beatles” song, and it was Adam Schlesinger, the bass player from Fountains of Wayne, who won. When you hear the song in the movie (and BOY do you hear the heck out of that song in the movie!- 11 different times, and the song went on to be nominated for an Oscar but lost to You Must Love Me from Evita), the actors aren’t really playing, but they could have been. Tom Everett Scott, Steve Zahn, Ethan Embry and Jonathan Schaech all learned to play their instruments, and learned every note of every song that appeared in the movie.
only her second movie credit. Tom Hanks auditioned her and knew instantly that she’d be famous one day. She was the first person he auditioned, and the first person he cast.”No matter what, I will always claim to have discovered you” he wrote in her script. She won her first Oscar in 2004.
showed up to work on it. Wife Wilson appears as a cocktail waitress, but Hanks was so tired from pulling 19-hour days the day she showed up on set, he didn’t even recognize her, merely noting that she was “an attractive lady” and he hoped she’d be nice to him. His son Colin also briefly appears in the film, and his daughter Elizabeth even brieflier. Unrelated but also of note: keep your eye out for Bryan Cranston playing an astronaut, and Jonathan Demme playing the director of a major motion picture.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 