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Troy Kotsur’s moving Oscar win brings audience to their feet with silent applause | CNN

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Troy Kotsur’s moving Oscar win brings audience to their feet with silent applause | CNN



CNN
 — 

Troy Kotsur made historical past on the 2022 Oscars, turning into the primary deaf performer to win an Academy Award in the perfect supporting actor class for his position in “CODA.”

His co-star within the movie, Marlee Matlin, grew to become the primary deaf actor to ever win an Oscar when she gained for greatest actress in 1987 for her efficiency within the film “Kids of a Lesser God.”

Visibly moved by the acknowledgment, Kotsur had tears in his eyes as he took the stage. Many within the viewers on the Dobly Theatre rose to their ft and signed silent applause by waving their fingers.

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Actress Youn Yuh-jung offered Kotsur together with his award, holding it for him whereas used signal language to simply accept his Oscar.

“That is superb to be right here on this journey. I can’t consider I’m right here,” Kotsur signed. “I actually need to thank the entire fantastic deaf theater levels the place I used to be in a position to develop my craft as an actor.”

He continued, “My dad he was the perfect signer in our household however he was in a automotive accident and he grew to become paralyzed from the neck down and was now not in a position to signal … you’re my hero.”

Kotsur added that his Oscar is “devoted” to the deaf neighborhood.

The actor beforehand gained a Golden Globe and Display screen Actors Guild Award for his efficiency within the movie.

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Movie Reviews

Spellbound 2024 Movie Reviews: Critics Share Strong First Reactions

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Spellbound 2024 Movie Reviews: Critics Share Strong First Reactions

Critics got their first look at Netflix’s new 2024 movie, Spellbound, which yielded impressively positive results ahead of its debut.

Marking the first of a trio of upcoming movies for Rachel Zegler, Spellbound is Netflix’s latest animated movie coming in late November.

The story centers on a young girl named Ellian who lives in a world of magic called Lumbria. This is where she has to break a spell that splits her kingdom in two and turns her parents into monsters.

Critics’ First Reviews for Spellbound 2024 Movie

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Following press screenings for Netflix’s Spellbound, critics offered their first reactions to the upcoming animated movie.

Variety’s Katcy Stephan described the film as “magical,” praising Rachel Zegler for “[nailing] the princess role” and highlighting Alan Menken and Glenn Slater for the film’s music:

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“Netflix’s ‘Spellbound’ is magical! Rachel Zegler nails the princess role as the headstrong and optimistic Ellian, while Alan Menken and Glenn Slater deliver the kind of soaring emotional ballad we’ve come to expect from them with standout song ‘The Way It Was Before.’”

Rama’s Screen did not view Spellbound as highly despite describing the film’s central themes as “admirable.” He felt it had a “preachy message” built around a “lackluster adventure:”

“‘Spellbound’ theme of assuring children of divorced parents that life would get better was admirable. But therein also lies the problem. They built the story around the preachy message, so the result was a lackluster adventure with mid songs, mid humor & mid characters”

The Direct’s own Russ Milheim saw Spellbound as a fun film “that boasts a surprisingly mature message” while praising Rachel Zegler for her musical musings:

“‘Spellbound’ is a fun adventure that boasts a surprisingly mature message. Its unique world is vibrant and fully realized, with lots of songs to enjoy as the story plays out. Rachel Zegler’s musical talent shines bright, as one would expect.

Spellbound on Netflix is a true delight,” exclaimed critic Amanda Taylor, who complimented the way it “captivates with its heartwarming story and stunning animation:”

“‘Spellbound’ on Netflix is a true delight! This magical film captivates with its heartwarming story and stunning animation. Alan Menken’s beautiful score elevates every scene, while Rachel Zegler shines with soulful brilliance. Don’t miss it!”

Freelance journalist Jamie Jirak loved the film, particularly “the pairing of Nathan Lane and Tituss Burgess,” telling fans it is “worth checking out on Netflix:”

“‘Spellbound’ is so sweet! An animated princess musical with songs by Alan Menken… from Skydance?! I’m always happy when Rachel Zegler sings, and I loved the pairing of Nathan Lane & Tituss Burgess. The film has a nice message and is worth checking out on Netflix next week!”

Screen Rant’s Joe Deckelmeier described how the film “weaves heartfelt storytelling with breathtaking animation” and “strikes a perfect chord:”

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“‘Spellbound’ on Netflix is fantastic! The way this film weaves heartfelt storytelling with breathtaking animation is just magical. It strikes a perfect chord, exploring family dynamics and connection in such a relatable and profound way. Kudos to the brilliant team behind it, especially Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, for injecting so much soul into the music!

CBR’s Ashley Saunders heaped heavy praise on Spellbound, telling fans that it was “beautifully animated” and “brimming with heart and humor:”

“‘SPELLBOUND’ is beautifully animated, brimming with heart and humor. Alan Menken’s score hits all the right nostalgic notes for this millennial. Pure magic. Rachel Zegler once again wows & John Lithgow is a scene-stealer! Perfect watch for the whole family”

Nerdtropolis founder Sean Tajipour called Spellbound “a beautiful yet powerful story with fantastic visuals,” highlighting the way it “tackles tough themes…through a child’s eyes:”

“Netflix’s ‘Spellbound’ is a beautiful yet powerful story with fantastic visuals that tackles tough themes like parental separation through a child’s eyes. It explores the journey of kids who blame themselves and try to ‘fix’ their parents’ relationship, all wrapped in a magical and adventurous fairy tale filled with song and dance.”

These critic responses appear to indicate that another hit animated Netflix movie may be on the way, even though some noted an occasional flaw or two. The cast seems to have put forth their best efforts, and Alan Menken continues his trend of excellence after projects like The Lion King (which continues to expand in live-action).

Featuring major stars like Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem next to Zegler, Spellbound looks to become the next great animated musical in an era somewhat lacking in that genre at times.

Whether this film leads to more stories from this universe is a mystery, but for now, plenty of hype is building for a fun new film fans can enjoy for the holiday season before the year ends.

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Spellbound will debut on Netflix on Friday, November 22.

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Roy Haynes, jazz drummer and band leader, has died

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Roy Haynes, jazz drummer and band leader, has died

Roy Haynes, a jazz drummer and band leader whose skill and versatility led to performances with such diverse artists as Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Chick Corea and Pat Metheny over the course of his seven-decade career, has died.

A representative for Haynes confirmed to The Times that the prolific percussionist died Tuesday. His daughter, Leslie Haynes-Gilmore, told the New York Times her father died after a brief illness. He was 99.

Haynes’ far-reaching résumé boasted expertise in most of the stylistic areas of jazz history. Called upon to play New Orleans music, swing, bebop, avant-garde, fusion, modal jazz, jazz rock, acid-jazz and more, he responded with extraordinary skill and imagination.

“One can hear the essences of all of those bandstands, concert jobs, dances, parties and jam sessions in the freedom of his beat and command of tempo,” critic Stanley Crouch, a drummer himself, wrote for the online magazine Slate. “Haynes,” he added, “has no date on the way he plays. It is and always was contemporary.”

Haynes’ remarkable longevity as a performer was underscored over the decades whenever he played at New York City’s venerable jazz club Birdland. In December 1949, he was the drummer with the group that opened the room — the Charlie Parker Quintet, with guest vocalist Harry Belafonte.

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His playing from the ’40s, when bebop was becoming the principal jazz dialect, still sounds remarkable. Along with such contemporaries as Kenny Clarke, Max Roach and Sid Catlett, Haynes helped transform the drums from their traditional time-keeping role into a crisp assemblage of percussion and cymbal sounds designed to keep the music alive and thriving.

The high quality of his work from that period is apparent on such classic recordings as Parker’s “Anthropology,” Miles Davis’ “Morpheus” and Bud Powell’s “Bouncing With Bud.” Often called “Mr. Snap, Crackle” in tribute to his brisk, articulate drumming style, he wrote a signature tune with the same name for his own 1962 album, “Out of the Afternoon.”

What made Haynes different from many of his contemporaries, however, was his constant musical receptivity and adaptability. As new attitudes and styles arrived — the avant-garde of the 1960s, the fusion of the ’70s and ’80s — he quickly grasped their techniques and incorporated them into his own persistent musical vision.

Haynes “has a way of being inside the musical moment with a depth that is truly rare,” Metheny told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003. “He has a listening sensitivity that allows him to not only play beautifully every time out, but to make the musicians around him become the beneficiaries of his musical wisdom.”

Roy Owen Haynes was born March 13, 1925 in Roxbury, Mass. His parents, Gustavus and Edna Haynes, had moved to the area from Barbados. Roy was the third of four children, all boys. His older brother Douglas was a trumpet player who introduced him to jazz. Another older brother, Vincent, was a photographer and football coach, and younger brother Michael served several terms in the Massachusetts Legislature.

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Haynes was still in his teens when he made his professional debut in the early 1940s. By mid-decade, he was playing with a variety of swing bands, as well as the Luis Russell big band — one of his rare extended associations with a large ensemble.

By the late ’40s, he had become a member of the group of arriving new young players associated with bebop. In a remarkable string of gigs, he successively played with Lester Young, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan and Thelonious Monk. In the ’50s, he was with George Shearing, Stan Getz, Kenny Burrell and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. From 1961 to 1965, he filled in as Elvin Jones’ substitute in the John Coltrane Quartet.

In his early career, Haynes was not as highly visible to the broader jazz audience as Max Roach, his senior by a little more than a year. In part, that can be attributed to the fact that Haynes rarely led his own groups, spending most of his time as a first-call sideman. He once jokingly pointed out that he was far more concerned with making sure his mortgage payments were made than he was with establishing himself as a leader.

But Haynes was always universally admired by other drummers.

“What Roy has as a musician is a very, very special thing,” drummer Jack DeJohnette told Smithsonian magazine in 2003. “The way he tunes his drums, the projection he gets out of his drums, the way he interacts with musicians onstage: it’s a rare combination of street education, high sophistication and soul.”

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Despite his relatively low visibility, Haynes’ complex but always swinging style has had a significant impact — first upon the playing of such otherwise highly original drummers as Jones, DeJohnette and Tony Williams and in more recent years on Jeff “Tain” Watts, Eric Harland, Matt Wilson and others.

Small and compact, always fit, Haynes balanced his sophisticated drumming with an equally stylish wardrobe. Esquire magazine, in 1960, listed him as one of the best-dressed men in America, along with Clark Gable, Fred Astaire and Cary Grant.

In the last of his playing years, Haynes frequently led a changing group of musicians in a band known as the Fountain of Youth. It was an appropriate title, given the fact that the musicians he chose to work with were often three and four decades younger. But from his seemingly ageless perspective, when it came to making music, there were no differences.

“When we get on the bandstand,” he told the Albany, N.Y., Times Union in 2007, “we all become one age — the same age. It has nothing to do with how old you are or where you’re from, it’s what you can do musically.”

Haynes, who was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1995, is survived by his daughter and two sons: Graham, a jazz cornetist, and Craig, a drummer. His grandson Marcus Gilmore is also a drummer. Haynes’ wife, Jesse Lee Nevels Haynes, died in 1979.

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Heckman, a longtime jazz critic for The Times, died in 2020. Staff writer Alexandra Del Rosario contributed to this report.

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Birth of Kitaro: The Mystery of GeGeGe Anime Movie Review

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Birth of Kitaro: The Mystery of GeGeGe Anime Movie Review

Modern folklore-focused anime and manga owe a huge debt to the work of 1960s manga Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro‘s artist and writer Shigeru Mizuki. A second world war veteran, the traumatic amputation of his left arm, due to an air raid explosion, never held back his pre-existing artistic ambitions. An avid researcher of international folklore, he poured his encyclopedic knowledge of the supernatural not only into his wildly influential manga, but also into countless factual tomes – some of which are available in English. Mizuki made his journey to the otherworld in 2015, at the age of 93, leaving an unparalleled legacy that this movie attempts to do justice to, acting as a prequel to the most recent anime adaptation and as an entry point for newcomers.

I’ll admit it now – before watching this, I was only familiar with Kitaro, and Mizuki’s work in general. Mainly on the strength of Scotland Loves Anime’s presenter Jonathan Clements‘ urgings, in preparation for this review I sought out several volumes of the original manga and episodes of the 2018 TV anime. It appears I am now very much a Mizuki fan, though not necessarily due to this movie.

Oddly, while Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro‘s TV incarnation is aimed primarily at children (with a theme song that claims it’s more fun to be a ghost because school attendance isn’t required), Birth of Kitaro is a grim and gritty horror film targeted at an adult audience. It loosely adapts a short manga chapter from 1966, however only uses the most basic of elements from it, crafting a mostly original story, tonally removed from the progenitor TV show. There’s even an “uncut” version, released only very recently in Japan, that dials up the already bloody violence even further. Birth of Kitaro has an unusual pedigree: it’s written by Hiroyuki Yoshino of Macross Frontier and Dance in the Vampire Bund, while directed by Gō Koga, best known for Precure and Digimon.

We’re first subjected to a baffling non-sequitur of a prologue that clumsily attempts to tie into TV show continuity with an appearance from Kitaro and pals in the “modern” day before jarringly segueing into the film’s primarily historical setting – it’s not a promising start. Most of the action transpires in 1956, during Japan’s post-war Showa-era economic recovery. Protagonist Mizuki (who is apparently a stand-in for author Mizuki himself) is an ambitious middle-management businessman who works for the “Imperial Blood Bank,” a company run by the mysterious Ryuga family. When the family head dies, Mizuki is summoned by his boss to the Ryuga’s remote mountain village estate to observe the transfer of power to the deceased head’s nominated heir. As expected from this genre, events don’t exactly proceed according to plan.

It’s immediately obvious this village is a strange place – accessible only by dangerous, unmaintained mountain roads, even locals from nearby areas avoid it entirely. Mizuki’s arrival is viewed with either novelty (from a village child), interest (from the main female character), or outright hostility (from most of the rest of the cast). His status as an unwelcome outsider is constantly reinforced by various senior Ryuga family members. Once poor Mizuki realizes he’s now trapped in a Hinamizawa/Twin Peaks/Royston Vasey-esque situation, it’s too late. This section of the film is slow-moving, perhaps as an attempt to build dread, but so many characters involved in random mafia/yakuza movie-style politicking are introduced that it’s extremely hard to follow. Eventually, this doesn’t matter, as most of the extended cast are murdered horribly anyway. There’s a lot of death in Birth of Kitaro, probably unsurprising for a character that fans already know will be born from the corpse of his mother, as the last of his kind. (So, spoilers for the uninitiated… I guess?)

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Kitaro himself only barely appears in this prequel – instead, the focus is on the horribly-out-of-his depth Mizuki who finds an ally in the mysterious, white-haired, googly-eyed interloper he named “Gegero”. (The Japanese sound “ge” typically means “creepy” or “icky”, and when repeated like “gegege” it adds emphasis.) Gegero is really Kitaro‘s father, Medama-oyaji, who is destined to become a talking, disembodied eyeball who resides in Kitaro‘s empty left eye socket.

Mizuki and Gegero investigate the creepy Ryuga family’s secrets to discover the truth of “Substance M,” an experimental blood product marketed by Mizuki’s employers. It doesn’t take a doctorate in hematology to intuit that the Ryuga are up to no good. Once all of the narrative pieces are in place (and various Ryuga family members are either impaled by trees or otherwise mutilated horrifically), the plot finally rushes headlong into batshit insanity. The final forty minutes or so are a relentless descent into stunningly animated violent hell, with some truly breathtaking action sequences. A particular highlight is Gegero’s battle with an army of armored ninja dudes atop a multi-leveled tower, depicted with stylish, fluid, incredibly kinetic animation. A final confrontation centered around a demonic underground tree almost reaches Evangelion-esque levels of surreal metaphysical nonsense.

Birth of Kitaro‘s ultimate antagonist is somewhat difficult to take seriously (the audience audibly laughed when they revealed themselves), but really isn’t that incongruous when viewed in the context of the often goofy manga. I do wonder that if there had been a bit more of that unselfconscious goofiness added to this film, it might have been more entertaining. Without author Mizuki’s more whimsical influence, at times Birth of Kitaro feels disappointingly like a more by-the-numbers anime horror without much personality of its own. Its overall seriousness meshes uncomfortably with its more outlandish character designs (such as the Mizuki-accurate cartoony undead, who appear later on), and its overly complex story really doesn’t amount to anything by the end, considering the literal mountain of corpses left in the film’s wake.

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Japanese folklore fans will enjoy the glimpses of yokai, like the water-borne Kappa who briefly appear, while there are plenty of rich cultural references likely to fly over the heads of most Westerners. By the time Kitaro himself arrives, we’ve seen so much death and destruction that we’re almost numb to it, so his birth scene plays as more silly than tragic. That part is adapted more or less panel-for-panel from the original manga, even if the circumstances leading up to his birth are completely different. A bookending flash-forward epilogue re-contextualizes the odd prologue in a genuinely emotionally affecting way – but doesn’t make up for the tonal disconnect that makes the opening so off-putting. It would have been better to move the prologue to the end, uniting it with the epilogue.

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While I enjoyed the action aspects of Birth of Kitaro, I can’t say it works that well as an entry point for new fans. Tonally, it’s completely different from both manga and TV shows, plus it’s also quite dull and plodding in its first half. Existing fans might get a kick out of this darker, more violent incarnation of the franchise, but I’d recommend newcomers start with the manga or 2018 TV series, which a lot more fun.

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