Hey Y'all!
Happy Sunday! Hope everyone had an amazing week! Really not much of a spiel this week. I remember when I used to have more interesting spiels for the Cavalcade, lol! Every once in awhile I guess I still have a lot to say in the spiel, and I probably will again at some point, loool! Basically the same as last week, I hope to update you guys soon about some goings ons regarding the Cavalcade that are being worked on at the moment and a lot of interesting reviews to look forward to!
I guess that's all for the spiel this week. As always, links to the MRC Sign-Up Form, Cavalcade Archive, Cavalcade Categories and the MRC Website password can be found below. And as always any feedback, recommendations, or any thoughts is always awesome and much appreciated! On to the Cavalcade!
(Song Of The Week: "Until The Summer Ends" by I Am Boleyn. The summer is ending, noooo! The cold, the cold is soon to be here! Loool! What a nice song with a cool retro 80s vibe to it! I hope y'all enjoy the rest of your summers or are in some place where it's summer year round, lol! JK, I heart snow!)
Ask any American what "state-capture" is and they would likely look at you blankly. But if you ask a South African what "state-capture" is you might get an entirely different answer. It's interesting to think about how different nations can have totally different memes which affect the people of a nation in ways which would be completely foreign to someone unfamiliar with the zeitgeist of any said particular country. Which really has nothing to do with the 2022 film Beast [In theaters in the US currently. All the trailers and teasers online give away too much of the movie imo!] except to say that it takes place in South Africa, lol!
But not just any part of South Africa, bumble-&*$% South Africa, lol! It's a film about a widower doctor named Nate Samuels (Idris Elba) and his two young daughters Mare and Norah. Nate is an American but he was married to a native South African who passed away from cancer sometime back, much to the tremendous ongoing anguish of his two children. To reconnect with them and to maybe help them with their process of grieving, Nate decides to take Mare and Norah on a trip to South Africa so they can visit the place where he first met and fell in love with their mother.
There, they meet close friend of the family Martin Battles (Sharlto Copley) a South African national park ranger who was the person who introduced his now-deceased wife to Nate. Martin takes Nate, Mare, and Norah out into the South African wild lands to give them a closer look at the scenery and all the animal life, but while there they get waylaid by a disgruntled and fierce beast of a lion whose pride was recently decimated by a gang of poachers. The lion is unbelievably upset, and because some switch of insight has gone off in it's brain, the lion has started killing any humans it can find, with no thought of eating them, just for the pure revenge.
You know, Beast is by no means some amazing movie. But it's so inoffensive* and harmless and just thrilling enough that I can see this movie being a huge sleeper financial success for it's producers. I mean this film has international broadcast and streaming rights written all over it. It hits such a sweet spot for easily digestible family entertainment that it will surely be endlessly rebroadcast on many, many pay-tv and cable-tv channels and streaming services the world over for years and years to come.
And it's really not that bad of a movie, it kind of gets more entertaining as it goes on. And the computer generated lion is, for the most part, quite astounding. It really does look like a real lion for the vast majority of the movie, or at least real enough for a viewer to easily be able to suspend their disbelief. If this is what completely fake lions can look like now, I can't imagine what they'll look like in 10 or 20 years.
Also, Idris Elba completely pulls off being a doctor. In fact, he seemed like the coolest doctor of all time. Forget about James Bond, this guy needs a TV series about being some kind of Doctors Without Border (Médecins Sans Frontières for real tho wassup!) M.D. who gets into all sorts of awesome adventures while being inserted (for humanitarian reasons) into various political conflicts around the world. Not only that, I feel bad for all the real doctors out there. Now everytime I visit a doctor I am just gonna be wishing they were Dr. Idris Elba loool, this guy has portrayed a way too cool doctor, one that no real doctor, who actually has to study for years and years and see many patients on a daily basis, could ever live up to, loool!
And, there are a few brief scenes in this movie, especially at it's conclusion, where you get just a subtle sense of all the amazing wonder the continent of Africa has within it that Western audiences may not be aware of and where you get the idea that the future for Africa could likely truly be amazing.**
2022's Beast is not really a bad movie by any means. It might not even be a bad choice to watch in theaters, but if you see it on a streaming service or on TV at some point, it really wouldn't be a bad choice to watch at all. It's completely inoffensive and relatively short, and offers just enough thrills to be a totally palatable and somewhat entertaining diversion (actually the climax of Beast is kind of awesome). Which I guess is not that bad these days. It's not a film that shoots for the moon, but that's okay. Not every movie has to be some kind of life-changing journey, although in the context of Beast, Dr. Nate Samuels and his two daughters would probably say they became more tightly knit as a family and resolved a lot of their issues. Therapy by way of angry lion who may or may not kill you by the end of this film's runtime. "Film, what film!? This is really happening to me, I'm not a character in a movie mr. writer," loool!
Well that's it for this week's Cavalcade! I hope everyone has an amazing week! As always any feedback, recommendations, or any thoughts is always awesome and much appreciated! Much more next week and much more after that!
Peace Y'all!
-Nandhish
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*I have no idea, but I'm sure there are people out there who are pro-poaching, probably poachers, lol.
**In the present, state captures South Africa, in the future, state captures you! -Yakov Smirnoff from the year 2084, loool! Jk, jk! That won't happen, but it's a funny joke in our current febrile climate, loool!