You know what that means, many studios and advertisements will be elevating Black voices for the entire month. But, what about the rest of the year? Rather than only uplifting voices for 28 days, it seems like many companies are listening and starting to do something about it.
Before Dominic, Jamal, Keith, and Britney break down the finale for Disney+’s The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, the trailer for Shang-Chi, or the #1 movie in America, Mortal Kombat, the crew has to talk about all the WTF moments from Sunday’s Oscars telecast!
With the release of Pixar’s Elemental just a few short weeks away, the studio has dropped some incredible marketing pieces from its massive debut at Cannes to a clip. Now, they have dropped a few new posters teasing the theatrical viewing experiences you can watch and an all-new featurette of the cast and crew talking about the recording process.
Pixar’s Elemental is set to hit theaters soon, and to help celebrate, Disney is launching a one-of-a-kind immersive experience that invites fans to dive into a world that only the studio can create. The exciting multi-city mall tour, which starts in New York and goes across the country before ending in San Fransisco, offers an immersive thematic environment for visitors of all ages. This means guests will feel the elements of Fire, Water, Wind, and Earth in fun and interactive ways.
Hot off the releases of its Cannes debut, and poster and featurette drops earlier this week, Pixar has unveiled the original song “Steal the Show” for their upcoming original feature Elemental.
The concept that opposites attract has been the basis for our favorite rom-com films. Of course, as humans, we are more alike than we are different. So, Pixar put a creative elemental spin on that for their forthcoming animated film, Elemental. And now, the newly released trailer shows us what happens when two elemental forces like Fire and Water come into each other’s lives.
Elemental made a big splash over the weekend with its international debut at the Cannes Film Festival. There, the main voice cast of Leah Lewis (Ember) and Mamoudou Athie (Wade), plus members of the French-language voice cast Adèle Exarchopoulos (Ember) and Vincent Lacoste (Wade) tonight on the beach joined director Peter Sohn, producer Denise Ream, and EP and CCO of Pixar Pete Docter. And now, the studio has released a brand-new clip showing what a meet cute looks like between fire and water.
We knew with all of the casting calls for Barbara Gordon, Scarecrow, and Tim Drake that Titans this season would be dealing with the Bat-Family and their time in Gotham City. And, with the new trailer for HBO Max’s Titans, we were correct in that assumption. The gang — Nightwing (Brenton Thwaites), Starfire (Anna Diop), Beast Boy (Ryan Potter), Raven (Teagan Croft), Hawk (Alan Ritchson), Dove (Minka Kelly), Donna (Conor Leslie) [yes, she lives!], and Conner (Joshua Orpin) — all head to Gotham to face a foe after learning that Jason Todd (Curran Walters) aka the second Robin has been killed by the Joker.
Are you a fan of Cobra Kai? How about Superman & Lois? This is Us? Maybe Better Call Saul? If you said “yes” to any of those, and you live in the LA area, there’s a really fun event you need to checkout! PaleyFest LA!
Heyyy! It’s Kuya P back again with another NOC EXCLUSIVE! I was lucky enough to sit down for a quick conversation with Actors, Ludi Lin & Max Huang! Both will be appearing as Liu Kang & Kung Lao respectively in Mortal Kombat premiering in Theaters and HBO Max this Friday!
President-elect Donald Trump has decided to go after Civil Rights movement icon — and national hero — Congressman John Lewis. The attack comes after Rep. Lewis told NBC’s Chuck Todd that he didn’t view Trump as a legitimate president due to Russia’s interference with the 2016 election. Lewis isn’t wrong, and it is more than hypocritical for the PEOTUS to lash out at people questioning his legitimacy since that’s what he has done to President Obama for the last five years. In the meantime, Twitter has clapped back at Trump, and many of Lewis’ colleagues in congress have pledged to boycott the inauguration. We want to help out by pointing our readers to Lewis’ award-winning graphic memoir trilogy, March. Let’s all pitch in to make his books #1 bestsellers on Amazon this Martin Luther King Day weekend.
It’s ironic that this would be a review I’m covering following Godzilla Vs. Kong because it actually has the opposite problem. It’s great from a POC standpoint. But it’s just not a very good movie, I’m afraid. Yes, it’s my unfortunate responsibility to tell you that Mortal Kombat is a dud. It’s a bland entry to the list of barely passable video game adaptations that would ultimately leave Shang Tsung starving, because it has no real soul to suck from it anyway. While not completely atrocious, it is about as forgettable and lifeless as, say, 2018’s Tomb Raider reboot.
With the pandemic still very much interwoven into our lives, so has it affected film festivals around the world as they had to adapt quickly and either convert their screenings to drive-in theaters or go completely virtual. And for folks like myself and my fellow NOC writing & real life partner, Josephine Chang, our timing couldn’t be any worse as our short film Make A Wish started its festival circuit run right when the U.S. shutdowns occurred in March (or at least it did for us Californian folks at that time).
But we’ve been very fortunate to be accepted by so many wonderful genre/horror film festivals that took a chance with our fun little project. And along the way, one in particular stood out and it is here that I want to bring a special spotlight to a horror film festival that’s coming up virtually on September 1 and running till September 7th (available only for the West Coast and South West United States areas as it is geolocked). That festival is the Horrible Imaginings Film Festival which is located in Santa Ana, California.
Disney+ made its D23 Expo debut this afternoon with a presentation filled with several classic movies and TV series and new original content for their new streaming service at the Anaheim Convention Center. The showcase was met with cheers as actress Yvette Nicole Brown, who stars in Disney+ live action film Lady and the Tramp, hosted presentation which included new series and films from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic.
Romantic comedies are speculative fiction. No need to debate or qualify it. They have a lot of permutations, all of them fantastic (in the Todorov sense). And just like the majority of television/film speculative fiction, there is a default that is rather gross. Despite women being the target audience for Rom-Coms, so many of them prioritize men winning the girl, not the women choosing who is best for her. Continue reading “In Defense of Romantic Comedies”
Recorded live during the Asian American ComiCon Summit on Art, Action, and the Future.
Marvel’s Iron Fist has generally been seen as a major disappointment — and it could’ve been so much more, if only Marvel and Netflix had embraced a not-so-radical rethinking of their martial artist hero as an Asian American. Some Asian American filmmakers actually brought their reimagined concepts for an Asian American Iron Fist to life, and they’ll share their short videos as part of a conversation with the creator of the #AAIRONFIST hashtag.
This past weekend in Washington DC, the Smithsonian’s historic Arts & Industries building was home to the most important gathering of artists you have ever seen. The CrossLines pop-up culture lab on intersectionality brought together over 40 artists and scholars to explore race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, disability, etc.
I was fortunate enough to be invited and helped organize a Reading Lounge and live podcasts — while artist Matt Huynh painted a mural in real time the entire weekend. One of the questions I got asked the most was about the books we included, so after the jump you can find a complete list of books we had in the Lounge! Continue reading “The Official NOC #CrossLines Reading List”
To get to my failure, I should start with a childhood that took place in Los Angeles. Hawthorne, California is a small community situated in Southwest Los Angeles. With Inglewood to the north, Gardena to the east, Torrance to the south, and the glamorous beach communities to the west, it was basically the edge of working class/POC Los Angeles butting up against the elite.
When it’s all said and done, 2016 will be long remembered as the year everything (including American democracy) went to hell. Pop culture did not go unscathed either. We said goodbye to all of our heroes: Prince, Bowie, Ali, Phife, Kanye… and hello to the worst the internet could offer. From misogynist Ghostbusters haters to problematic faves, it was the year the ugly side of internet culture went mainstream. I mean, we literally elected an internet troll the leader of the free world.
Still, the geekosystem was able to produce a few silver linings in the massive dark cloud that was the last 12 months. Here are ten… or so.
Last week, we discussed a comic that won’t be in stores for another couple weeks. Today, I wanted to look at a book that actually hit stores two Wednesdays ago. Eventually, we’ll use the Wednesday Comics feature to talk about a comic that actually comes out on the same day as the column. But it would have been remiss of me to ignore the fact that today marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech. In honor of this milestone anniversary, Top Shelf Productions recently publishedMarch: Book One, the first of a trilogy of graphic novel memoirs written by Congressman John Lewis in collaboration with co-writer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell. After being released on August 13, the book has already reached #1 on the New York Times‘ list of best selling graphic novels.
Last week, North Korean hackers allegedly broke into the personal files of Sony Pictures execs as retaliation for the studio producing the James Franco and Seth Rogen comedy The Interview, which is about a CIA plot to assassinate Kim Jong Un. Normally, we’d be all over the nerd-friendly news about, say, Spider-Man coming home to Marvel Studios, but that’s been covered plenty of times on the web. Besides, we already told the world the best way to mashup Spidey and the MCU.
The thing to emerge out of the Sony leak that really bugged me was the assertion by Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin that “there aren’t any Asian movie stars.”
“The X-Men are hated, feared and despised collectively by humanity for no other reason than that they are mutants. So what we have here, intended or not, is a book that is about racism, bigotry and prejudice.” —Uncanny X-Men writer Chris Claremont, 1981
You may recall back in April, we let you know about the Old School Kung Fu Film Fest in New York City. To coincide with the films shown, the festival’s organizers commissioned the homey Jerry Ma — of Epic Proportions — to curate a little art show with world renowned artists interpreting their own movie posters for each of the films shown.
Well, this weekend, those pieces of art (and more) are going to be presented at Lincoln Center as part of the New York Asian Film Festival! Featuring the work a slew of NOC-friendly artists, including Larry Hama, Bernard Chang, Jef Castro, Ken Knudtsen, and John Jennings!
Check out the official announcement after the jump.
Last week, we discussed a comic that won’t be in stores for another couple weeks. Today, I wanted to look at a book that actually hit stores two Wednesdays ago. Eventually, we’ll use the Wednesday Comics feature to talk about a comic that actually comes out on the same day as the column. But it would have been remiss of me to ignore the fact that today marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech. In honor of this milestone anniversary, Top Shelf Productions recently published March: Book One, the first of a trilogy of graphic novel memoirs written by Congressman John Lewis in collaboration with co-writer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell. After being released on August 13, the book has already reached #1 on the New York Times‘ list of best selling graphic novels.
