Luca is probably the most summery movie that Pixar’s ever made — a light, gentle, sweet tale of a young boy and his best friend who go on an adventure in a tiny Italian town. (They’re also both sea monsters, but more on that later.) There is pasta and gelato, fountains and cycling, a mustache-twirling villain and starry night skies. It’s a tiny vacation with a healthy serving of imagination.

Director Enrico Casarosa says the look of his new film is inspired by everything from Renaissance maps — the kind haunted around the edges by scaly sea monsters — to Japanese woodcuts and his own childhood memories of summers in southern Italy. It has a softer, more hand-drawn feeling than some other Pixar offerings, almost as if it’s 2D in places, which gives the impression of timelessness.

Luca could take place this summer or a century ago. It’s a folk tale, or perhaps a fable. And just like those kinds of stories, there’s a buried wisdom within Luca that shifts a little depending on who’s looking at it, like the color of light refracting off a wave.

The story centers on Luca (voiced by Jacob Tremblay), a shy young sea monster who herds fish by day in a cove off the coast of the Italian Riviera. He lives with his mother Daniela (Maya Rudolph), father Lorenzo (Jim Gaffigan), and crotchety badass of a grandmother (Sandy Martin). Luca is a good kid. He watches over the fish, who are little bubbly airheads with the mannerisms of sheep, and stays away from the surface. According to his parents, it’s dangerous up there. Especially for sea monsters, who are not themselves dangerous to humans but are regarded as such and hunted with fearsome spears. Don’t go near the humans.

Yet, like the Little Mermaid before him, Luca is curious about what’s going on up above. And when he finds some random detritus scattered in his fishes’ grazing region — an alarm clock, a little picture, a wrench — he starts to daydream.

One day, another young sea monster named Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer) appears to retrieve some of the artifacts. He coaxes Luca up to land. Luca reluctantly follows, and discovers to his amazement that he’s more well-equipped to survive above water than he’d expected. Alberto and Luca are fast friends, bound together by their mutual love of Vespas and, eventually, a grand adventure they embark upon to a nearby village called Portorosso. They meet a girl named Giulia (Emma Berman), who lives with her fisherman father (Marco Barricelli) and her marshmallow-shaped cat named Machiavelli. She enlists their help in winning Portorosso’s annual race.

Luca and Alberto are constantly worried they’ll be found out as loathsome sea monsters, not “normal” boys. And so they’re always hiding their true identities.

In some ways, it’s the oldest plot in the book: Someone who is an outsider — a beast, a poor stepsister, a mermaid, a princess with a hidden power — must conceal their identity in order to avoid detection among “normal” people. The message is familiar, too, the oldest in the Disney canon: Don’t be afraid to be yourself, because nobody else can be you, and those who love you are the only ones who matter.

Luca’s sun-drenched spin on the story locates it in a coming-of-age tale that’s also about overprotective parents (reminiscent of Finding Nemo) and the importance of having a friend who can pull us out of our darkest moments. I thought a little of last year’s Wolfwalkers (a non-Disney film, and probably better for it), which resonates with some of the same themes.

Despite its many plot threads, Luca is not the most complex film, philosophically, that Pixar has served up, or its most well-thought-out. Characters develop without warning or much explanation, which could be irritating if you’re entranced by Luca’s universe. Though it’s firmly rooted in an old-world Italian village, the evocation isn’t as luminous or all-encompassing as a film like Coco.

But Luca does make space for a prismatic variety of readings, a simple allegory with a few different applications. One it seems to allow, if not outright invite, is that it’s a little fable about quietly realizing a queer identity. Luca at first tells Alberto he’s a “good kid” and that “it’s bad up here.” A villain tells him that “everyone is afraid of you and disgusted by you.” Late in the film, we hear that he may never be accepted for who he is, but at least he’s learning to find people who will accept him anyway. (A quick reveal right at the end involving two elderly residents of Portorosso seems to underline the point.)

That’s not the only reading, probably because no matter who you are, you’ve probably lived through a time of feeling like the one on the outside who has to learn to blend in, to go undetected in order to save yourself. Being awkward, or artsy, or neurodivergent, or less well-off than your friends, or just not into whatever the in-crowd likes — that can feel dangerous and hazardous, especially to a child whose parents have warned them away from some other world. (There’s a special thanks in Luca’s credits to the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, an organization that fights religious prejudice, which gave me a whole new window into what the movie could be about.)

Does Luca follow those threads through to a meaningful ending? Not really. The film is more fairy tale than anything else; if a young viewer walks away with some affirmation of their feeling that they’re different, it won’t come with much guidance on how to cope with a society that still won’t accept them. Life rarely ties up so nicely. That’s always been a problem with Disney’s storytelling — easy answers and wishful thinking that could set up young audiences with expectations that the real world will never fulfill.

Still, what a work of art means to the audience depends on who’s looking at it. Luca has left all kinds of room for us each to walk around in its story. No matter how you read it, the film is a sparklingly rendered, inventive little comedy with nods to Italian films and Japanese art and a world that seems like it wandered out of a storybook and onto a screen. It’s a little summertime gift, a treasure from under the sea.

Luca premieres only on Disney+ on June 18.

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By Frank Pallotta, CNN Business

Updated 4:30 PM ET, Tue July 6, 2021

One theme in the documentary is the Maels’ lifelong interest in film, and their multiple near-misses in trying to bring their music to the big screen, including a proposed collaboration with the French comedian Jacques Tati and a project with Tim Burton. So it’s ironic that just weeks after “The Sparks Brothers” arrives, they have another movie release: “Annette,” a musical written by the Maels, directed by Leos Carax, and starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. The story of a comedian and opera singer who give birth to a daughter with a “unique gift,” it will open the Cannes Film Festival in July.

“Even before we had a band, the merging of music and movies just seemed so perfect,” Ron, 75, said, adding, “To be sitting on a movie set in Brussels and watching Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard singing something you wrote — it’s surreal, way beyond what we expected.” (Carax was unavailable for comment.)

Wright presented his idea to the Maels that night he saw them onstage, but they expressed some trepidation, for the same reasons they had turned down previous offers for a documentary.

“We always say that we don’t like looking back because we think it kind of paralyzes you,” said Russell, 72, encapsulating the constant creative forward motion that has defined the band’s oddly incomparable history. “The proposition of doing a documentary is kind of the opposite of that, and in our minds we thought, is it like an obituary in some sense?”

The film adaptation of the Tony-winning musical “In the Heights” was released this month, one of the first Blockbuster movies to arrive after more than a year of pandemic shutdowns. The original musical was the breakthrough for Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote its music and lyrics and went on to gain global fame with “Hamilton.”

The film opened to successful box office numbers, but also spawned several critical conversations, particularly about the lack of Afro-Latino representation among the film’s lead actors, and the ways in which it failed to capture the full mosaic of the actual neighborhood of Washington Heights.

On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Miranda’s evolutionary approach to the musical theater lineage, how the film left certain elements of the musical on the cutting room floor and the critical blowback brought on by the film’s casting choices.

Guests:

• Sandra Garcia, a Styles reporter for The New York Times

• Isabelia Herrera, an arts critic fellow for The New York Times’s Culture desk

• Lena Wilson, a film critic who has written for The New York Times, Slate and others

Fear Street’s first movie, set in 1994, might have only just set its slasher sights on Netflix. But the anthology is back for more this Friday, teasing that, as with any good horror killer franchise, it’s never over when our heroes think it is.

The streamer has just dropped the first trailer for the middle entry of director Leigh Janiak’s three-part adaptation of the beloved R.L. Stine horror series. While last week’s 1994 took us to the town of Shadyside, Ohio to uncover a dark past of haunted witchings and undead killers ran amuck. Central to 1994‘s mystery was the sole survivor of a similar incident at a Summer camp in 1978—which becomes the focal point of Part 2, as our surviving young heroes, desperate to lift the curse of the Fier witch, look to the past to avoid bloody doom in the immediate future.

Set at Camp Nightwing—where there’s already a divide between the downtrodden kids from Shadyside and the elitist families from its neighboring town of Sunnyvale—1978 follows young campgoers as they find themselves under attack from a series of possessed killers. But things connecting Nightwing’s grounds to the mysteries that have plagued Shadyside for centuries are quickly uncovered, as the desperate survivors seek to overcome their murderous assailants and put an end to Shadyside’s curse for good…

Which, we know won’t ultimately be the case yet, of course, as this is a precursor to 1994‘s events for the most part. But no doubt we’ll find out more about Shadyside’s, well, shadier side when Fear Street Part 2: 1978 hits Netflix this Friday, July 9—ahead of the third and final movie in the series, 1666, releasing on July 16.

Wondering where our RSS feed went? You can pick the new up one here.

Wipro Group founder Azim Premji on Wednesday has said that science and truth are the foundation on which India can tackle the COVID-19 crisis, and urged the citizens of India to come together and fight the pandemic unitedly. The industrialist was speaking at an online lecture series organised by the Sangh and other civil society groups to ‘infuse confidence and positivity’ among people as they fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

Called “Positivity Unlimited” series, the event has been organised by the ‘Covid Response Team’ (CRT), an outfit formed by the RSS and its affiliates in association with various civil services groups.

In his address, Premji started by condoling the deaths of those who have lost their lives in the pandemic and expressed solidarity with those who have lost their loved ones. He said that India must act with the “greatest of speed on all fronts” and that these actions must be based on good science.

“Actions that are not based in science, in reality, have a detrimental effect on the cause. At the core of the idea of good science, is a matter of being willing to accept and confront the truth. We must confront this crisis, its scale and spread and its depth truthfully. Science and truth are the foundation on which we can tackle this crisis and ensure that this is not repeated,” Premji said in his two-minute video.

Premji added that the country must come together as one, and we must drop all our differences, understanding that this situation requires unity of action.

“Together we are stronger, divided we continue to struggle,” he added.

Premji also stressed upon the importance of focusing on the plight of those most vulnerable, like the people in rural India and those in poverty.

“As it is, the overall situation is heartbreaking but if we are to look at the villages and those in poverty, it is not only the pandemic but also the economic effects that are devastating people’s lives. All of our actions must give the vulnerable the priority as they deserve and so that we come out of this crisis, we need to restructure our society and economy such that our country does not have this kind of inequity and injustice,” he said.

At the end of his speech, Premji urged people to come together and do everything they can and more, because the hour demands it.

Other than Premji, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and spiritual gurus Jaggi Vasudev and Sri Sri Ravishankar of Art of Living are among the speakers of the online lecture series. This team is organising the lecture series to infuse confidence in the common man to fight the pandemic, Lt Gen (retd) Gurmit Singh, the convener of CRT, said in a statement.

“This online talk series with the tagline, ‘Positivity Unlimited’ for over 30 minutes each day leading to Akshay Tritiya will cover possible responses on different aspects of life ranging from spirituality, dharmic course, mental health to enhancing physical strength,” he said.

“Imbibing confidence in the society setting aside fear, hopelessness, helplessness and negativity, motivating people to brace up for a long haul with huge societal changes after Covid-19 is the idea behind ‘Positivity Unlimited’ talk series,” he said. These talks would be telecast live on the Facebook page of the Sangh’s communication arm Vishwa Samwad Kendra and its YouTube page.

In 2020, Pegg, who has portrayed Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott, a.k.a. Scotty, since J.J. Abrams’ reboot, suggested that instead of trying to compete with the likes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Star Trek franchise should instead embrace its roots and try to do something more in line with the original series.

Does this mean Pegg, or anyone else from the current film franchise, will return in the future? It’s hard to say, especially with fans beginning to give up on a fourth film. But, hey, with another Star Trek movie in the works, this might not be the end of the road for Starfleet.

He’s also not sure how many copies they’ve sold – if you trust Wikipedia, it’s more than 400 million, but, according to the man himself, “that’s got to be a made up number – who counted that?”

Sony has released a new image of the Uncharted movie featuring stars Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg.

According to the New York Times, which first published the image, Sony is spending $120 million making the film, which is based on the PlayStation property created by Naughty Dog and launched in 2007.

Rather than following the plot of the games, which have sold over 41 million units, the movie tells a prequel story featuring Nathan Drake (Holland) as a young treasure hunter learning from his mentor Victor Sullivan (Wahlberg).

Directed by Ruben Fleischer (Venom, Zombieland), the Uncharted movie is the first feature film from PlayStation Productions, a studio formed by Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt its original game properties for film and television in partnership with Sony Pictures.

Further reading

The division is headed up by veteran Sony marketeer Asad Qizilbash, who’s also head of product for PlayStation Worldwide Studios.

“We have three objectives,” he told the New York Times. “Grow audience size for games. Bring product to Sony Pictures. Showcase collaboration.”

When it was suggested that a cinematic flop could negatively impact the Uncharted game franchise, Qizilbash acknowledged: “It’s risky. But I think we can do it.”

The Uncharted film’s release date was recently delayed by six months to February 18, 2022.

PlayStation Productions is also working on a The Last of Us adaptation with HBO, a live-action Ghost of Tsushima movie helmed by John Wick director Chad Stahelski, and a Twisted Metal TV series from Deadpool’s writers, among other projects.

A Sony spokesperson reportedly told the New York Times that contrary to speculation, God of War isn’t set to be adapted for film or TV, at least not anytime soon.

Director JJ Abrams has claimed that his proposed Portal movie is still in development, eight years after the Valve collaboration was first announced.

Abrams first announced his intention to work with the Half-Life developer during a DICE talk in 2013, but little has happened since in turns of concrete developments.

Speaking to IGN in a new interview published this week, the director provided an update on the Portal movie and said that it looked like it was finally moving forwards.

“We actually do have a script that’s being written for the Portal movie now at [Warner Bros.]. We’re really excited about the take and the pitch, so it feels like that thing’s finally on the rails,” he said.

Abrams didn’t reveal the writer(s) behind the Portal script, or if any directors have been approached, but said that he was excited to expand the story around the video games.

“It’s got enormous potential for a lot of reasons, one of which is because of the limited narrative of the game, as ingeniously told as it is, the potential of it is so huge. It’s gonna be super fun,” he said.

The news sounds less positive around Half-Life: asked about the status of the Half-Life movie, which Abrams’ production company Bad Robot was developing as of September 2016, Abrams said “the Half-Life thing, we’re not actively involved with at the moment.”

Portal follows the silent protagonist Chell as she battles to escape the decommissioned test facility of Aperture Science using only a gun that creates portals.

Aperture Science’s insane AI, GlaDOS, is one of few talking characters in the games, alongside robot Wheatley (Stephen Merchant) and recordings of Aperture founder Cave Johnson (J.K. Simmons).

Warner Bros. has enjoyed success with its recent video game adaptions. In 2019, Detective Pikachu became the highest-grossing film based on a video game, bringing in $436 million worldwide and surpassing the record previously set by Warcraft.

More recently, Mortal Kombat beat expectations with the US’s biggest box office weekend since the start of the pandemic.

Valve CEO Gabe Newell recently confirmed that Valve has multiple games in development and that it is keen to make more single-player experiences following Half-Life: Alyx’s release last year.