Eva Longoria (pictured at left) in “Eva Longoria: Searching for Mexico” (Photo courtesy of CNN)
The following is a press release from CNN:
CNN Original Series will premiere Eva Longoria: Searching for Mexico on Sunday, March 26, 2023, at 10pm ET/PT on CNN. Produced by RAW, the film and television company behind the two-time Emmy® Award-winning Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, the six-part series follows award-winning actress, producer, director and activist Eva Longoria across the many vibrant regions of Mexico, revealing its unique and colorful cuisines.
“I am so excited for viewers to tune in and see firsthand what I love so much about Mexico – the food, the people, the cultures,” said Eva Longoria, Host and Executive Producer. “This journey allowed me to further appreciate and fall in love with my roots and I feel so honored that CNN entrusted me with this unforgettable, once in a lifetime, experience.”
Executive produced by Stanley Tucci, Searching for Mexico invites audiences to journey with Longoria across the lands of her ancestors as she explores how Mexico’s rich culture, landscape, and history have helped shape its cuisine, loved the world over. This season, Longoria surveys the cutting-edge gastronomic fare of Mexico City; discovers Mayan influences in Yucatan cuisine, including the slow-cooked cochinita pibil; and ventures to the home of Latin America’s chocolate trade, Oaxaca, where she samples the velvety chocolate mole. As Longoria enjoys a festive carne asada in Nuevo Leon, traditional birria stew in Jalisco, and walks in the footsteps of her own ancestor, Lorenzo Longoria, in the exact spot in Veracruz where he arrived 400 years ago, she unlocks the secrets behind Mexico’s most treasured and sometimes surprising dishes. Searching for Mexico will regularly air Sundays at 9pm ET/PT.
“CNN Original Series have transported us around the globe and our viewers are always eager for a journey, especially when it involves food,” said Amy Entelis, Executive Vice President for Talent & Content Development, CNN Worldwide. “We are honored to partner with the multi-talented Eva Longoria on her first hosted non-fiction series, introducing CNN audiences to new dishes and flavors – and a new side of Eva – as she explores the many of wonders of Mexico.”
Executive Producers for Searching for Mexico are Eva Longoria, Ben Spector and Stanley Tucci with RAW’s Shauna Minoprio, Eve Kay and Jess Orr. Amy Entelis, Lyle Gamm and Jon Adler are the Executive Producers for CNN Original Series.
Searching for Mexico will stream live for pay TV subscribers via CNN.com and CNN OTT and mobile apps under “TV Channels” or CNNgo where available. The series will also be available On Demand the day after the broadcast premiere to pay TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN apps, and Cable Operator Platforms. Ahead of the broadcast premiere and beginning March 17, the “Jalisco’ episode of Searching for Mexico will be available On Demand to pay TV subscribers via the CNN app and Cable Operator Platforms.
Images of food feautured on “Eva Longoria: Searching for Mexico” (Photo courtesy of CNN)
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About CNN Original Series The CNN Original Series group develops and produces unscripted programming for television. Amy Entelis, executive vice president of talent and content development, oversees CNN Original Series and CNN Films for CNN Worldwide. Lyle Gamm, senior vice president of current programming, supervises production of CNN Original Series. Since 2012, the team has produced over 45 CNN Original Series, including Peabody Award winning and 13-time Emmy® Award-winning Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown, five-time Emmy® Award-winning United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell, two-time Emmy® Award-winning Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, and critically acclaimed series including This is Life with Lisa Ling, First Ladies, the “Decades” series, American Dynasties: The Kennedys, The Windsors: Inside the Royal Dynasty, The History of Comedy, Race for the White House, and many others. CNN Original Series can be found on CNN, the CNN Originals hub on discovery+, HBO Max, and for pay TV subscription via CNN.com, CNN apps and cable operator platforms. For more information about CNN Original Series, please follow @CNNOriginals via Twitter, and join Keep Watching, an exclusive, members-only community that enables fans to stay engaged with their favorite CNN Original Series & Films https://cnn.it/3qOXGNz.
About RAW
RAW is the global producer of premium documentaries and docuseries including the recent Netflix hits The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker, Vatican Girl,The Tinder Swindler, Train Wreck: Woodstock 99, The Most Hated Man on The Internet, The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman, Catching Killers and Don’t F**K With Cats, as well as the award-winning feature films Three Identical Strangers, American Animals and The Imposter. RAW, an All3Media company, produces Discovery’s highest-rated show Gold Rush; for CNN, RAW has also produced the Emmy winning series Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, feature doc The Lost Sons and the doc series Reframed: Marilyn Monroe. RAW’s most recent U.K. TV credits include BBC docs Parole, Head On: Rugby, Dementia and Meand ITV’s Heathrow: Britain’s Busiest Airport.
About Warner Bros. Discovery Warner Bros. Discovery (NASDAQ: WBD) is a leading global media and entertainment company that creates and distributes the world’s most differentiated and complete portfolio of content and brands across television, film, and streaming. Available in more than 220 countries and territories and 50 languages, Warner Bros. Discovery inspires, informs and entertains audiences worldwide through its iconic brands and products including: Discovery Channel, discovery+, CNN, DC, Eurosport, HBO, HBO Max, HGTV, Food Network, OWN, Investigation Discovery, TLC, Magnolia Network, TNT, TBS, truTV, Travel Channel, MotorTrend, Animal Planet, Science Channel, Warner Bros. Pictures, Warner Bros. Television, WB Games, New Line Cinema, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Turner Classic Movies, Discovery en Español, Hogar de HGTV, and others. For more information, please visit www.wbd.com.
Culture Representation: Taking place from 1983 to 2012, in various parts of the world, the dramatic film “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” features a cast of African American and white characters representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: Entertainment superstar Whitney Houston has struggles with her public image, her sexuality, fame, drugs, her parents and a volatile marriage to singer Bobby Brown.
Culture Audience: Besides appealing to the obvious target audience of Whitney Houston fans, “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” will appeal primarily to people who want to see music-video-styled recreations of her life and relatively tame depictions of her biggest public scandals.
Nafessa Williams and Naomi Ackie in “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” (Photo by Emily Aragones/TriStar Pictures)
At times, “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” looks more like a cliché checklist of the legendary diva’s high points and low points instead of being an insightful biopic. However, the cast members’ performances, led by a dynamic Naomi Ackie, elevate this uneven movie. The recreations of some of Whitney Houston’s most beloved performances and music videos are among the highlights of this biopic, which sometimes gets dragged down by corny dialogue and tedious pacing.
Directed by Kasi Lemmons and written by Anthony McCarten, “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” is a movie sanctioned by the Whitney Houston estate, which is overseen by her sister-in-law Pat, who is one of the movie’s producers. Whitney Houston—who died at age 48 in 2012, of a drug-related drowning in a Beverly Hills hotel bathtub—has been the subject of some tell-all documentaries and books since her death. Therefore, the only people who might be surprised by what’s in “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” are those who don’t know what’s already been revealed in these tell-all stories or in the tabloid media.
That’s why everything in “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” feels like a retread with nothing fresh or innovative to offer in telling Whitney’s story. However, the movie delivers in its intention to be a nostalgia trip for her music and in doing faithful and meticulous staging of many of Whitney’s iconic moments. This is a movie made for fans who don’t want to see anything too shocking or too unflattering about Whitney.
Ackie’s performance as Whitney admirably captures some of the magic of this entertainment superstar. However, this depiction of Whitney never looks like a true embodiment but more like a better-than-average imitation. Some of Ackie’s real singing is in the movie, but the majority of Whitney’s singing in the movie consists of the real Whitney’s recordings. (And wisely so, since no one can completely duplicate Whitney’s extraordinary vocal talent and style.) Ackie, who is British in real life, also does a credible but not outstanding imitation of Whitney’s speaking voice.
Because this movie does not aspire to be prestigious, award-winning art, “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” serves its purpose in delivering Whitney’s hits as a soundtrack to the portrayal of her life’s melodrama. Much of the real-life raunchiness and decadence are toned down to make her story more appealing to audiences of wide age ranges. The movie never takes the time to understand Whitney’s inner thoughts, but instead gives viewers plenty of behind-the-scenes drama that was already exposed years ago.
There are some touches of comedy that generally work well to lighten the mood. But sometimes, “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” tries too hard to gloss over much of her emotional pain. Anything truly depressing in her life (which might have contributed to her drug addiction) is never fully examined, because the movie then jumps back into showing another Whitney performance. In other words, these are surface-level portrayals of Whitney’s problems.
For example, the 1991 miscarriage that Whitney had while filming the 1992 film “The Bodyguard” (her feature-film debut, which spawned the blockbuster soundtrack of the same name) gets less than two minutes of screen time. It breezes by with a scene of Whitney being comforted on a hospital bed by then-fiancé Bobby Brown (played by Ashton Sanders), with him telling her they can have other children in the future. And the miscarriage is never mentioned again. In real life, according to several people who knew Whitney and talked about her in interviews, this miscarriage had a profound and traumatic effect on her, but you’d never know it from watching this movie.
“Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” screenwriter McCarten also wrote the divisive screenplay for “Bohemian Rhapsody” (the Oscar-winning 2018 biopic of British rock band Queen), which got a lot of criticism for jumbling the band’s timeline too much and fabricating important details. “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” doesn’t have those problems, since the movie sticks to the basic, well-known facts of Whitney’s life. The film’s tweaks to Whitney’s life timeline are minor and do not significantly rewrite factual history. The movie shows a good balance of Whitney in the recording studio and on stage, but the depictions of how she deals with her personal problems are often reduced to soundbites.
“Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” (which takes place from 1983 to 2012) is told mostly in chronological order, except for the movie opening with the introduction to her performance at the 1994 American Music Awards. It’s a scene that the movie circles back to at the end of the film, which concludes in a somewhat long, drawn-out and awkward way: Her entire medley performance (of “I Loves You, Porgy,” “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” and “I Have Nothing”) is recreated on screen when the end credits should have already been rolling.
The movie depicts Whitney’s rise to stardom, beginning in 1983, when she was 19 or 20 years old and a backup vocalist for her gospel singer mother Cissy Houston (played by Tamara Tunie), who had a great deal of influence on Whitney as a singer. Cissy is portrayed as loving but also very strong-willed and domineering with Whitney. As a performer, Cissy was well-known but not rich by any stretch of the imagination.
Cissy’s headlining status was mostly at large nightclubs and small theaters. And even though Whitney’s cousin is Dionne Warwick, Whitney’s godmother was Aretha Franklin, and the Houston family mingled with showbiz royalty, Whitney grew up in a middle-class home in the New Jersey cities of Newark and East Orange. Cissy often spent a lot of time away from home as a touring artist to pay the family’s bills. Cissy’s then-husband John Houston (played by Clarke Peters) was also Cissy’s manager. Like many famous divas, Whitney’s first manager was also her father.
As shown and told repeatedly in the movie, Cissy and John (who would eventually divorce in 1990, after 31 years of marriage) frequently argued because John expected Cissy to be a more attentive to the family despite her busy touring schedule, while Cissy resented having to be the family’s main source of income for years. Whitney’s older brothers Michael (played by JaQuan Malik Jones) and Gary (played by Daniel Washington) are briefly seen near the beginning of the movie, in a scene where all three siblings are smoking marijuana together in one of the family’s bedrooms. In real life, Gary (who married Pat in 1994) and Michael have admitted that they introduced Whitney to marijuana and cocaine, which became longtime addictions for her. (Whitney’s older brother John Houston III is not shown and is barely mentioned in the movie.)
How did John and Cissy Houston’s troubled marriage affect Whitney? The movie quickly depicts a young adult Whitney looking sad and disturbed as she listens to her parents arguing in another room. But she’s never really shown opening up to anyone about how all of this turmoil affected her. By the time Whitney meets Robyn Crawford (played by Nafessa Williams), who’s three years older than Whitney, on a basketball court, Whitney is all too happy to name drop the famous people who are in her family, in order to impress Robyn. The movie portrays Whitney and Robyn’s first meeting in 1983, when they actually met in 1980.
As shown in the movie, Whitney and Robyn became fast friends and eventually became lovers. For a while, Whitney and Robyn lived together before Whitney became famous and during the early years of her fame. It’s a romance that the real Crawford publicly confirmed in her 2019 memoir “A Song for You: My Life With Whitney Houston,” after years of speculation and gossip about the true nature of their relationship. Brown, who was married to Whitney from 1992 to 2007, also told intimate details about his volatile relationship with Whitney (which included love-triangle jealousy between him and Crawford) in his 2016 memoir “Every Little Step: My Story.”
“Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” then shows the expected rise to fame of Whitney, beginning with a very contrived-looking scene of Cissy seeing Arista Records founder Clive Davis (played by Stanley Tucci) in the audience before the start of one of Cissy’s shows at Sweetwater’s Club in New York City. Cissy pretends to lose her voice, so that a confused Whitney would go on stage in Cissy’s place. Whitney sings a cover version of George Benson’s 1977 song “The Greatest Love of All,” which later became a hit from Whitney’s 1985 self-titled debut album. Clive is predictably blown away by Whitney’s talent; some variations of “I can make you star” scenes happen; Whitney signs a record deal with Arista; and Whitney becomes an instant smash.
Throughout the movie, Whitney is shown being torn between her public image and how she lived in private. From the beginning of her career at Arista, it was planned that she would have the image of a clean-cut princess who would have wide crossover appeal among many races and generations. Behind the scenes, Whitney is shown as someone who was already using drugs, and she didn’t really like wearing the dresses and wigs that she was pressured to wear as part of her “princess” image.
Behind the scenes, Whitney and Robyn were open about their relationship, but Whitney’s father/manager and other handlers told Whitney to appear like a heterosexual bachelorette who wanted to eventually get married to a man. Because of Whitney’s religious Christian upbringing, the movie shows her often being personally conflicted about her same-sex romance with Robyn, while Robyn had no such doubts. When the tabloid media would later report that Whitney was a lesbian, Whitney would deny it, which is technically an accurate denial, because she was also sexually attracted to men, and she probably identified as queer or bisexual.
When Whitney has a short-lived affair with singer Jermaine Jackson (played by Jaison Hunter), her duet partner on 1985’s “Nobody Loves Me Like You Do,” the movie shows Robyn flying into a rage and trashing the home where she and Whitney live. The movie does not mention that Jermaine was married to his first wife, Hazel Gordy (daughter of Motown founder Berry Gordy), at the time of Jermaine’s affair with Whitney. Eventually, Whitney and Robyn moved on to other love partners, but Robyn and Whitney continued to work together.
The movie also shows how Whitney’s relationship with Robyn led to clashes with Whitney’s father/manager John (who didn’t like that Whitney hired inexperienced Robyn as Whitney’s personal assistant) and later conflicts with Whitney’s husband Bobby, when Robyn had been promoted at the time to being Whitney’s creative director. (“She’s my princess!” John sneers at Robyn, during one of the movie’s cringeworthy lines of dialogue.) When the addictions to drugs and alcohol got out of control for Whitney and Bobby, the movie portrays Robyn as one of the few people in the couple’s entourage who would try to put a stop to it. But those efforts got stubborn resistance from self-destructive Whitney and Bobby. Robyn, who eventually quit working with Whitney in 2000, left the entertainment business.
Whitney’s relationship with Robyn in the early years of Whitney’s career are the scenes that seem the most genuine in portraying the “real” Whitney Houston. In a somewhat amusing scene, Robyn and Whitney both barge into John’s office, where he and his mistress/secretary Barbara (played by Andrea Eversley) are interrupted while being affectionate with each other. Whitney reacts like she knows that her father has been cheating on her mother, but Whitney doesn’t want to talk about it. Meanwhile, before Barbara leaves the room, she calls Whitney the family nickname for Whitney—Nippy—and Whitney and Robyn give each other a look, as if they’re thinking, “Say what? How dare she use the name Nippy!”
“Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” has repetitive scenes of Whitney being bothered by criticism that she wasn’t “black enough” for some black audiences because of her choice of music, her mainstream success and her “America’s sweetheart” image. In other scene, Whitney gets defensive and angry with a radio DJ who tells her that many black people think she’s a sellout to her race. Whitney also makes a point of telling people that she didn’t grow up spoiled and rich.
The movie shows how Whitney tries to keep her composure in the audience when she gets booed at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards while her name was announced as one of the show’s nominees for Best Music Video, and losing in that category to Janet Jackson. Robyn is Whitney’s date at this show. The movie alters a few details, because the booing incident actually happened at the 1988 Soul Train Music Awards, not at the 1989 Soul Train Music Awards.
The 1989 Soul Train Music Awards was where Whitney met Bobby, who was seated in front of her. Whitney gets his attention by swinging her purse deliberately so that the purse hit his head. (In real life, Whitney said she got his attention by kicking his chair, and he was really irritated by it.) Sanders portrays Bobby as someone who can be both a selfish troublemaker and a generous charmer, but the movie still leaves out some of the worst public information about Bobby.
Tucci’s portrayal of music mogul Clive is surprisingly subdued and not as interesting as it could have been, considering the real Clive Davis (who is one of the movie’s producers) has a reputation for being very charismatic. The movie shows Whitney telling Clive before she makes her first album with Arista that she doesn’t want to make white music or black music. She just wants to make great music. It’s one of several examples of the movie’s hokey dialogue that doesn’t ruin the movie but certainly lowers the quality of the film. Another example is when Clive first sees Whitney perform at Sweetwater’s Club, and he declares to his subordinate Gerry Griffith (played by Lance A. Williams), who persuaded Clive to be there: “I believe I’ve heard the greatest voice of her generation.”
The movie makes a half-hearted attempt to explain why Whitney didn’t go to rehab sooner for her addictions. In a scene shortly before Whitney records her first album, Clive promises that he won’t judge her or lecture her about her personal life. It isn’t until Whitney starts canceling performances, and the record company is losing money in other ways because of her drug problems, that Clive finally intervenes and tells her that she needs to go to rehab. It’s a very over-simplified scene because there were a lot more people involved in enabling Whitney and getting her to go to rehab. Her first public stint in rehab was in 2005.
What stands out most in this movie are undoubtedly the near-perfect recreations of Whitney’s on-stage performances, with the best highlight being Whitney’s performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Super Bowl XXV in 1991. The scene is shown with the pomp and circumstance of immersing audiences into a VIP experience of that spectacular performance. Even though in real life, Whitney used a prerecorded track instead of singing live, the energy in the performance and her vocal expressions are what really captivated people the most.
Other recreations in the movie include Whitney’s performance of “Home” on “The Merv Griffin Show” in 1983; her music videos for 1985’s “How Will I Know,” 1987’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” 1992’s “I Will Always Love You” and 1998’s “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay”; and 1994’s Whitney: The Concert for a New South Africa. The movie also has performances depicting some of her tours spanning several decades, from the 1980s to her ill-fated 2009-2010 last tour. The songs she performs in these concert scenes include “I’m Your Baby Tonight,” “I’m Every Woman,” “So Emotional” and “One Moment in Time.” There’s also a depiction of Whitney’s musical director Rickey Minor (played by Dave Heard) convincing a reluctant and skeptical Whitney in a rehearsal space to do her 1994 American Music Awards medley and rehearsing it for the first time.
The movie accurately shows how her final tour wasn’t exactly a triumph, since many of the shows were not well-attended, started late, or were canceled. In addition, Whitney got some negative reviews for not being able to hit the same notes that she could in the past. Whitney’s financial problems and her legal battles with her father (who sued her for $100 million in 2002, as he was dying in a hospital) are also depicted like more plot developments in a soap opera. Pat Houston (played by Kris Sidberry), who took over as Whitney’s manager after Whitney fired her father, is portrayed as the person who pointed out to Whitney that John Houston’s irresponsible spending led to Whitney’s losing so much money, she describes her fortune as “almost gone” in a scene where she confronts her father about it.
For every showstopping musical performance in the movie, the off-stage recreations are hit and miss, usually marred by shallow dialogue and very contrived scenarios. When Bobby and Whitney begin dating and are labeled an “odd couple” by the media, Bobby is defensive and tells Whitney why they have so much in common: “We from the ‘hood!” Bobby’s marriage proposal in a limousine is made to look intentionally comedic. As soon as Whitney says yes, he confesses that one of his ex-girlfriends is pregnant with their second child. Whitney gets angry, storms out of the limo, and the couple has one of many arguments shown in the movie.
Whitney and Bobby’s 1992 wedding, which was extravagant and had about 800 guests in real life, looks like a cheap imitation in the movie, which does a quick montage that makes it look like hardly anyone was at the wedding. Don’t expect the movie to give much insight into how Whitney was as a mother. Whitney and Bobby’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina (played as an adolescent by Bria Danielle Singleton), is portrayed as Whitney’s sidekick who doesn’t have much of a personality. (Bobbi Kristina’s tragic death at age 22 in 2015 is not mentioned in the movie.)
To its credit, “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” is more candid and a better-made film than Lifetime’s relatively low-budget 2015 movie “Whitney” (starring Yaya DaCosta as Whitney), which was directed by Angela Bassett. Lifetime’s “Whitney” movie was not sanctioned by the Whitney Houston estate, which might be why “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” excels in showing Whitney as a music artist. For all of its shortcomings, “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” at least gets it right when it comes to representing Whitney’s musical essence that remains her greatest legacy.
TriStar Pictures will release “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody” in U.S. cinemas on December 23, 2022.
Culture Representation: Taking place in unnamed locations in England, the dramatic film “Supernova” features an all-white cast representing the middle-class.
Culture Clash: Two middle-aged men (one British, one American), who have been love partners for about 20 years, have very different ways of coping when one of them gets early-onset dementia.
Culture Audience: “Supernova” will appeal primarily to people who like well-acted and understated dramas about how loved ones cope with a health crisis.
Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth in “Supernova” (Photo courtesy of Bleecker Street)
The dramatic film “Supernova” deftly and admirably avoids a cloying and melodramatic tone that “disease of the week” TV-movies tend to have. Instead, this thoughtfully made movie (written and directed by Harry Macqueen) dispenses with syrupy sentimentality and realistically captures the gradual heartbreak of two love partners who must come to terms with one of the partner’s early-onset dementia. Thanks to emotionally authentic performances from Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci, “Supernova” doesn’t have a lot of flash but it has a lot of heart.
“Supernova,” which takes place in unnamed locations in England, features a road trip during a large section of the movie. However, don’t expect this road trip be a madcap adventure. The trip is somewhat tense, occasionally somber and peppered with occasional jokes that come as a distraction for the two middle-aged lovers who are on this trek. Therefore, the pace of “Supernova” might be a little to slow for some viewers, but there’s a reason for a lot of the emotional weight that these two partners are feeling.
In the beginning of the movie, Sam (played by Firth) and Tusker (played by Tucci) are shown in their Autotrail Cheyenne RV camper, as they drive in scenic areas of England. They have some mild bickering that’s not unusual for couples who’ve been together for a long time. Tusker wants Sam to drive faster, while Sam thinks his driving is just fine.
Tusker wants to change the music that’s playing in the car. And later, Tusker gripes that the female voice on the GPS “sounds like Margaret fucking Thatcher.” If Tusker seems cranky, he has good reason to be: He has dementia, and this trip is a vacation to help ease the stress of this medical problem.
It’s never stated if Sam and Tusker are officially married, but they wear wedding rings. Sam is British and a classical pianist, while Tusker is American and a novelist. They’ve been together for about 20 years. It’s revealed later in the movie that Tusker moved to England to be with Sam, but it’s not clear how they met. Tusker and Sam have their dog Ruby with them on this road trip.
During the course of the movie, it’s clear that Tusker and Sam love each other deeply, but they have different ways of coping with Tusker’s dementia. Sam, who is more of a serious-minded introvert, tends to keep his feelings to himself and plans to retire so that he can become Tusker’s full-time caretaker. Tusker, who is more of a fun-loving extrovert, hates the idea of Sam retiring because Tusker doesn’t want to think of himself as a burden. However, Tusker is more realistic about how much his personality will change from the dementia, while Sam is in denial and tries to fool himself into thinking that Tusker’s personality won’t change.
Sam and Tusker also disagree on how Tusker should medically treat his dementia. Sam is more open to using prescribed medication, while Tusker doesn’t want to take any medication at all. During their road trip, Sam finds out that Tusker had secretly removed Tusker’s pills that Sam had packed for the trip and deliberately left the pills at their home.
Sam is upset about Tusker not having the pills, but Tusker adamantly says: “I don’t want them … They remind me that I’m ill. And I don’t want that. Not right now.” Meanwhile, Sam worries that Tusker refusing to take the medication will make the dementia worse at a faster rate. Tusker wants to block out those concerns and just live his life the best way that he can.
It’s not stated how long it’s been since Tusker got his diagnosis, but he mentions more than once that in about six months, it’s very likely that he won’t remember the identities of the people in his life. It terrifies Tusker, but he’s more willing than Sam to talk openly about this mental deterioration. Sam wants to change the subject every time Tusker wants to talk about it.
There are also signs that Tusker is already becoming forgetful. In an early road trip scene, Sam wakes up in bed to find that Tusker isn’t there. Sam frantically drives until he finds Tusker calmly out standing near a road with their dog Ruby and seemingly unaware of the panic he’s caused. Sam hugs Tusker in a way that they both know that Tusker is losing his faculties and they feel powerless to stop it.
Despite this depressing health problem, Tusker tries to keep his sense of humor intact. While he and Sam are at a diner during their road trip, Tusker plays a harmless prank on the waitress by telling her different ways that she can get Sam’s autograph. The waitress doesn’t know who Sam is or why he might be “famous,” but she doesn’t want to be rude. She’s perplexed and doesn’t quite know how to respond, so she just nods her head vaguely.
As the waitress walks away, Sam mildly scolds Tusker for confusing the waitress and tells Tusker that it’s time to retire the prank because it doesn’t work half of the time. Tusker chuckles and says he likes this prank precisely because it does work half of the time. This back-and-forth banter is affectionate and shows that despite these minor irritations, this couple has a loving relationship.
During their road trip, Sam and Tusker visit Sam’s sister Lilly (played by Pippa Haywood), Lilly’s husband Clive (played by Peter Macqueen) and Lilly and Clive’s daughter Charlotte (played by Nina Marlin), who’s about 7 or 8 years old. Lilly and Clive apparently live in the house where Lilly and Sam grew up.
In another realistic “slice of life” couples scene, Sam and Tusker briefly disagree about where they’re going to sleep while visiting. Lilly says that they can sleep in the bedroom that Sam had as a child, while Sam doesn’t like that idea and offers to sleep in the camper. Tusker doesn’t want to sleep in the camper and convinces Sam that they should sleep in the bedroom, which is decorated in the same way that Sam had it before he moved away from home. The bed is barely big enough for two people, and Sam accidentally has a mild fall out of the cramped bed. It’s played for laughs.
Sam and Tusker keep each other amused by making tape recordings of each other’s conversations. They role play as if they’re doing an interview for a radio broadcast. Tusker says during one of these taping sessions: “Welcoming to Dementia Hour on BBC Four.” Tusker asks Sam, “How has it been for you?”
Sam replies, “It has its moments.” Tusker then says, “If you had one wish in the world, what would it be.” Sam responds, “I wish this holiday wouldn’t end. And you?” Tusker says in an affectionately exasperated voice, “I wish I didn’t have this thing [dementia], idiot!”
Unbeknownst to Sam and Tusker, Lilly and Clive have planned a surprise dinner party for them with several of Sam’s and Tusker’s friends. It’s at this dinner party that Sam sees more uncomfortable signs that Tusker’s condition has worsened. Tusker is about to read a speech, but he can’t do it because of the dementia. Instead, he asks Sam to read it.
It’s one of the best scenes in the movie because it shows Sam trying not to lose control of his emotions while he reads Tusker’s words of love and loyalty, while Tusker is trying not to look embarrassed that he couldn’t read his own speech. In the beautifully written speech, Tusker says about Sam: “He’s the best thing that ever happened to me, and I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
Outside during this evening party, Tusker shares his knowledge of astronomy with Charlotte. He points to the stars in the sky and tells her about the life span of a star: “When the body gets really old, it runs out of fuel, and it explodes like a firework. And when that star has died, it becomes really, really bright and shoots out all this stuff … And eventually, all that stuff travels over years and years … and it’s eventually what makes us.”
This supernova description, which obviously inspired the movie’s title, is a metaphor for how Tusker wants to live out his last days and what he hopes his legacy will be. Earlier in the movie, there’s another scene where Tusker and Sam look at a celestial map on their camper ceiling and Tusker points out the stars on the map. It’s one of many glimpses into how this couple had been living a relatively quiet and stable life together until the dementia diagnosis changed everything, but Sam and Tusker are still trying to hold on to a sense of normalcy.
When Lilly and Tusker have a private conversation together at the party, he tells her how the dementia is affecting his relationship with Sam. “You know what the hard part is?” Tusker comments. “You’re not supposed to mourn someone while they’re still alive.” Lilly replies, “You’re still you, Tusker. You’re still the guy he fell in love with.” Tusker says ruefully, “No, I’m not. I just look like him.”
During the party, one of the friends named Tim (played by James Dreyfus) tells Sam privately that Tusker confided in Tim that Tusker can no longer write with a pen and paper. Later, when Sam and Tusker get home, Sam discovers that it’s true: Sam looks through Tusker’s journals and finds that the most recent journal entries are illegible scribbles.
And later, Sam finds something else that is heartbreaking and devastating. It leads to Sam and Tusker having a reckoning and being forced to confront each other on how they’re going to prepare for Tusker’s worsening dementia. And that includes having the difficult conversation over what to do if Tusker has to be put in an assisted care facility.
“Supernova” could easily have been a stage play because of how the dialogue is written, but the story benefits from being a cinematic version. Cinematographer Dick Pope perfectly captures the scenic outdoor locations during the road trip. These wooded areas and mountain-surrounded lakes provide a great counterbalance of tranquility to the slowly building storm in Sam and Tusker’s relationship.
Writer/director Macqueen brings a simple intimacy to the movie that might disappoint people looking for showboat-ish dramatic scenes, but it actually works better that this movie isn’t so heavy-handed with its difficult subject matter. And unlike a lot of movies about someone facing a medical crises, “Supernova” doesn’t have any scenes in a hospital, clinic or doctor’s office. It’s another reason why the movie isn’t as weepy as it could have been, although there are some definite tearjerking moments.
Firth and Tucci, who are longtime friends in real life, have a natural and easy chemistry with each other that suits the respectful nature of Sam and Tusker’s relationship. Sam and Tusker are affectionate with each other, but their romance is relatively reserved and doesn’t have a lot of over-the-top passion. Tusker might want to go out in a blaze of glory like a supernova, but he and Sam have the type of enduring love that’s more like the steady light of the sun.
Bleecker Street released “Supernova” in select U.S. cinemas on January 29, 2021. The movie’s digital/VOD release date is February 16, 2021.
Eugenia Caruso, Penny Lisle, Josette Simon, Anne Hathaway, Orla O’Rourke and Ana-Maria Maskell in “Roald Dahl’s The Witches” (Photo by Daniel Smith/HBO Max)
Culture Representation: Taking place primarily in Demopolis, Alabama, in 1978, the family-friendly horror/fantasy film “Roald Dahl’s The Witches” has a predominantly white cast of characters (with some African Americans) representing the middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A widowed grandmother and her orphaned grandson encounter evil witches who want to turn children into mice.
Culture Audience: “Roald Dahl’s The Witches” will appeal primarily to people looking for lightweight, fantasy entertainment about good versus evil that has the same formula as many other family-oriented films about wicked witches who don’t like children.
Jahzir Bruno, Octavia Spencer and Stanley Tucci in “Roald Dahl’s The Witches” (Photo by Daniel Smith/HBO Max)
“Roald Dahl’s Witches” should’ve been named “Anne Hathaway Hamming It Up as a Witch,” because that’s really the main attraction for this duller-than-it-should-be movie. Hathaway’s Grand High Witch character—who is the leader of a coven that’s flocked to Demopolis, Alabama, in 1978—is the only one in the coven who has a distinct personality. The rest of the witches are essentially backdrops to Hathaway’s over-the-top performance in a very formulaic and unimaginative movie. Considering all of the Oscar winners who were involved in making this movie, “Roald Dahl’s Witches” isn’t horrible, but it’s a big disappointment from people who can do and have done much better work.
Directed and co-written by Oscar-winning “Forrest Gump” director Robert Zemeckis, “Roald Dahl’s Witches” (adapted from Dahl’s 1983 novel “The Witches”) is the second movie version of the book. The first movie version was 1990’s “The Witches,” directed by Nicolas Roeg and starring Anjelica Huston. The 2020 movie version changed the story’s location from Europe to the United States, and made the witch-hunting grandmother and grandson African American.
It’s a change that is significant only in that the movie briefly makes some subtle references to racism, and the grandmother listens to a lot of 1960s and 1970s R&B music. Other than that, the premise of the movie remains the same: The grandmother (played by Octavia Spencer) and her orphaned grandson (played by Jahzir Bruno), who do not have names in the movie, go on a mission to hunt down and stop a coven of witches who plan to turn children into mice, in the hopes that the mice will be killed as rodent pests.
Hathaway and Spencer are both Oscar winners. Zemeckis co-wrote the screenplay to this movie with “The Shape of Water” Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and “Black-ish” creator Kenya Barris. The movie’s cast also includes Oscar nominee Stanley Tucci. On paper, it sounds like a winning combination to make a spectacular, award-worthy classic movie. The reality is that “Roald Dahl’s Witches” is frustratingly average and at times a boringly repetitive film.
We’ve seen many movies already with an over-the-top evil witch, animated animals that interact with live-action humans (in this movie’s case, the animated animals are mice and one obligatory witch’s black cat), and one big race against time to stop the chief villain from doing what the villain plans to do. Nothing in this movie is award-worthy.
That’s not to say “Roald Dahl’s Witches” doesn’t have entertaining moments. But they are arrive in between long stretches where not much happens except the grandmother and her hero son talk about and plan what they need to do to stop the witches. The boy, whose parents died in a car accident, has been living with his grandmother since becoming an orphan. (Chris Rock does voiceover narration as the hero boy as an adult.) His grandmother is slowly able to lift him out his depression over his parents’ death, and she buys him a pet female mouse that he names Daisy.
And it’s around this time that the hero boy encounters a witch with a snake coming out of her sleeve while he and his grandmother are in a hardware store. The witch’s name is Zelda (played by Josette Simon), and it turns out that she used to be the grandmother’s best friend when they were children. Zelda was turned into a witch by the Grand High Witch and has been in the coven ever since. The grandmother figures out that her grandson encountered Zelda, based on her grandson’s frightened description of the witch he saw in the hardware store.
The witches in this story have several distinctive features, which the grandmother tells her grandson about when she teaches him how to spot a witch: The witches, who are demons disguised as humans, always wear long gloves because they have claws, not hands. The witches always wear wigs, because they are actually bald. The witches have unusually long corners of their mouths, which they cover with heavy makeup. The witches have feet without toes and have oversized nostrils that become more pronounced when they can catch the scent of children.
The witches hate kids and want to get rid of all the children in the world. The witches offer candy (such as taffy) to children entice them. And witches are repulsed by clean children because these children smell like defecation to the witches. The cleaner the children are, the more they stink to the witches.
After the grandson’s scary encounter with Zelda, the grandmother and grandson check into a swanky hotel called the Grand Imperial Island Hotel, which they are able to do because of a favor from a hotel employee whom the grandmother knows. The grandmother says that she figures that her grandson will be safe to hide there because “ain’t nothin’ but rich white folks” at the hotel and “witches prey on the poor, the overlooked, the kids they think nobody’s going to make a fuss about if they go missing.”
The movie’s other reference to racism and social-class disparities in America is when the grandmother and the grandson check into the hotel and the hotel manager R. J. Stringer III (played by Tucci) looks surprised to see them there. R.J. makes a comment to the grandson that the hotel normally doesn’t get a kid like him as a guest. It’s a racially tinged, condescending remark that the grandmother picks up on right away, and she lets this stuck-up manager know that she and her grandson will be treated with the same amount of respect that the other hotel guests get.
And speaking of the other hotel guests, there’s a snobbish British couple named Mr. Jenkins (played by Charles Edwards) and Mrs. Jenkins (played by Morgana Robinson) who are at the hotel with their insecure son Bruno Jenkins (played by Codie-Lei Eastick). Bruno tries to make friends with the grandson, but Bruno’s domineering mother won’t let him. And there’s a convention going on at the hotel for a group calling itself the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, whose members are all women who wear long gloves. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out who these women really are.
“Roald Dahl’s The Witches” is a by-the-numbers story that hits all the familiar beats of similar movies, and it culminates in a showdown that goes exactly how you would expect it to go. There’s nothing wrong with the acting from the cast, but it’s just so predictable and generic. (Spencer plays yet another matronly woman who gets sassy when she has to be.) Children under the age of 14 will probably enjoy this film the most. But for people who’ve got more life experience and have seen enough movies like this already, “Roald Dahl’s The Witches” is just too cookie-cutter to really have much substance and make a lasting impact on viewers.
HBO Max premiered “Roald Dahl’s The Witches” on October 22, 2020.
