JustinJKanter

What a luminous, affecting film this is-a triumph that honors its characters with such tender reverence, never stooping to exploit them for some shabby, unearned purpose. How deeply we come to care for them, as if they've been plucked from our own lives and given song and story.

Ariana Grande glimmers with a radiance straight out of the golden age-a star who sings, dances, and emotes with a seamless grace that feels almost otherworldly.

And Cynthia Erivo, oh, she does something alchemical: she makes you believe-not in the trite notion of magic, but in the solemn, aching wonder of being different and still being loved.

This is no mere movie musical; it is a study of the human condition, steeped in concern and gilded with a rare, unyielding hope. Its world is our world, its joys and sorrows as recognizable as our own. We have known these people. We are these people. And through its melodies and grandeur, it builds a bridge-a wide, shimmering bridge-to someplace better.

It is, above all, a movie's movie: unapologetically big, grandly silver, meant to be drunk in on a screen vast enough to house its dreams. To confine it to the smallness of streaming would feel almost sacrilegious, like pressing a firefly between the pages of a book. It dazzles and dances with a magic so pure, it doesn't merely celebrate the art of cinema-it reimagines it as a future yet unwritten, a promise instead of a memory.

And that world it conjures? I did not want to leave it. Not for anything.

Ah, yes, the Eden film a near beat by beat rip off of 1997's Endangered Species by Rick Boyer -both are, in essence, meditations on the disintegration of civility under the strain of survival, with stranded souls contending with scarcity, fear, and a profound sense of their own mortality. Both, of course, are marinated in conflict, with a handful of characters left to wrestle not only with nature's indifference but with their own, rather unflattering, tendencies toward selfishness and betrayal. Power plays, snatched rations, and violent spats unfold with all the subtleness of a bar brawl, while tension simmers just beneath the surface, ready to boil over into something decidedly ugly. But here's where the comparison falters-Eden, as much as it may try, is a bit like a dinner party that starts with potential and ends with drunken fistfights. Its penchant for melodrama and gratuitous violence smothers any deeper examination of character or purpose. Meanwhile, Endangered Species, without the need to shout, whispers with a sharper clarity-a far more sophisticated and restrained study of human nature. One attempts to wrangle meaning from its chaos, while the other... well, it's a bit too fond of the chaos to bother with meaning. One has to wonder why if you're going to steal every major event from this incredibly novel, you are just gonna dress it down with such mediocrity.

In the past year, Netflix has shifted gears, abandoning the pursuit of quality in favor of becoming a mere content aggregator. Nowhere is this more evident than in their treatment of Black Stories-shallow, tokenistic offerings that scream, "Here's something we think the community will tolerate," devoid of any genuine effort to deliver quality entertainment.

Take, for instance, their recent Shirley Chisholm Movie debacle. It looked as though they threw spare change at it and managed to get everything about Chisholm wrong.

Now Good Times. This insulting portrayal, steeped in old stereotypes, is just the tip of the iceberg. And I highly doubt this poorly executed, offensive mess will win them any new audience.

Netflix originals have become increasingly unbearable. From the disaster that was the Zack Snyder debacle to the mishandling of "3 Body Problem," it's evident that Netflix's enthusiasm for new creators and bold ideas has waned, replaced by tired clichés and a race to the bottom.

We may be witnessing the twilight of the streaming golden age, but I never imagined quality would plummet to such depths in a business model reliant on subscriber retention.