Three New Netflix Releases Reviewed Including Spellbound
Image Courtesy of Netflix
By Dean Robbins
Spellbound: Skydance Animation has been trying to become the Disney killer for seven years now to general failure. They hired Pixar’s embattled former chief creative officer John Lasseter and a slew of other Mouse House talent. Their first film Luck released on Apple TV+ to tepid critical and audience response. Apple then cut their deal with Skydance that would have included Spellbound, leaving it now to end up in the hands of Netflix.
Spellbound is a 3D animated fantasy musical from Vicky Jensen, the co-director of Shrek and director of Shark Tale. It follows Princess Ellian (Rachel Zegler), whose parents have been cursed to become monsters. With the king and queen out of commission, Ellian has to manage kingdom politics. She enlists the help of the magical oracles Sunny (Tituss Burgess) and Luno (Nathan Lane) who are also heavily implied to be a couple.
Jensen’s script with Lauren Hynek and Elizabeth Martin is a metaphor for divorce under the thinnest of veils. In that regard, it is unique as far as I am aware.
The songs, sung primarily by Zegler, are written by Disney Legend Alan Menken, best known for his work on Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Tangled, and other animated classics. Sadly, Menken’s work here is competent but forgettable. The highlight is “The Way It Was Before,” a classic Disney-esque torch song in the vein of Mulan’s “Reflection.”
Where Spellbound falls especially short of its predecessors is in the animation and the story. The word to describe the art style is “lifeless,” which is so, in fact, dull that makes Wish look great. The kingdom of Lumbria where Ellian rules is rendered with great detail and yet seemingly little heart. Everything feels sterile and clean to a detriment.
Rating: 2 out of 5.
The Remarkable Life of Ibelin: Mats Steen was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, an incurable disease that slowly deprives one of movement ability until they pass away. He died at the age of 25. Up until that point, his parents believed he lived a life of isolation in which he spent hours a day playing World of Warcraft. But upon announcing his death on a blog he wrote about the disease, they quickly discovered that Steen had been a pillar of his virtual community as the character Ibelin.
I was worried at first that the documentary was going to be yet another formulaic one from Netflix. The first twenty or thirty minutes does little to dissuade the viewer of that. And then, it opens up into something much more ambitious, original, and moving. Most of the last two-thirds of the film takes place inside a recreation of Ibelin’s World of Warcraft gameplay. We experience the often deep conversations he had with his roleplaying group Starlight.
In an age of technological doomerism, it is refreshing and heartening to see something showing the bright side of the Internet and gaming. Without World of Warcraft, Mats would likely not have been able to experience the same community, romantic love, and sense of freedom.
So yes, this is the rare Netflix doc that is actually worth your time. Make sure to have a box of tissues ready.
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Emilia Perez is an operatic musical about a Mexican drug cartel kingpin (Karla Sofia Gascon) who decides to escape a life of violence by transitioning. It is directed by a Frenchman, and it won two top prizes at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Despite all that, the result is unmemorable at best and an outright disaster held up by genuinely stellar performances at worst.
Zoe Saldana plays an attorney who helps the titular kingpin transition while Selena Gomez also appears as the kingpin’s estranged wife. All three actresses are being touted for Academy nominations. Gascon and Gomez are good, but Saldana gives a career-best performance. She is being run in the supporting category despite having more screen time than Gascon who is running in lead. This is absolute category fraud but, at the end of the day, awards shows really do not matter much in the grand scheme of the cosmos.
With the positives out of the way, everything else in Emilia Perez falls completely flat. As a trans story, it fails because it is blatantly inaccurate and stereotypical which alienates the crowd which otherwise would have championed the film in the face of the usual anti segment. As a musical, the film is failed by a nonsensical, attention-deficit script that hops from beat to beat without rhythm or clear structure. The narrative will occasionally jump forward into some new crisis.
Emilia Perez starts with Saldana’s character only for her to take a backseat until the end. In lieu of better developing her character, we get a literal rehash of Mrs. Doubtfire and utterly pointless diversions like a romance between Emilia and a woman (Adriana Paz) recently freed of an abusive relationship.
Director Jacques Audiard wants to make a sweeping epic about the possibility of redemption from violent, patriarchal systems, but the result is misguided if not offensive and, worst of all, not that engaging.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5.
