June is African-American Music Appreciation Month — Black Music Month, as President Barack Obama officially shortened it in 2009 — and digital television channel Bounce TV, as well as its streaming-platform arm Brown Sugar, is celebrating the month with a bevy of films and documentaries.
Houston's own Beyoncé Knowles Carter will be featured in two such productions.
Over at Bounce, you can see her in Cadillac Records, the 2008 biopic on legendary Chicago blues label Chess Records. She plays Etta James, while Mos Def takes on Chuck Berry and Jeffrey Wright assumes the role of Muddy Waters. (The movie will air on these days and times.)
Meanwhile, on Brown Sugar, you can also see Beyoncé: On Top, the hour-long, 2018 doc that chronicles her rise from Houston girl to Destiny's Child frontwoman to the all-powerful Queen Bey.
Bounce TV will also show the 1978 musical The Wiz, starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross; the 2005 Dirty South rap drama Hustle & Flow, starring Terrence Howard; Idlewild, that 2006 musical starring Big Boi and Andre 3000 from OutKast; and the 1992 inner-city drama Juice, starring the late, great Tupac Shakur.
And, on Brown Sugar (which will be free to anyone accessing the service through Xfinity X1 from June 15-21), look for documentaries and concert films featuring such icons as Michael Jackson, Prince, Al Green, Rihanna, and gospel legend Mahalia Jackson.
For more information, visit the Bounce TV site here.
Kaitlyn Santa Juana in Final Destination: Bloodlines.
On the surface, the Final Destination films really shouldn’t work. There is no villain other than the concept of death itself, and nearly every death that occurs is foreshadowed so heavily that it removes the normal suspense that comes in horror films. And yet the franchise was successful enough to spawn five films over 11 years in the early 2000s, and now a reboot, Final Destination: Bloodlines.
A fantastic opening sequence set in the 1960s sets both the tone and the plot of the film, in which Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) has a recurring nightmare about a disaster that her grandmother, Iris (Gabrielle Rose), helped to avert. A visit to the reclusive Iris convinces Stefani that she and her family should not exist, and that each one of them is destined to meet a grisly end in the near future.
Met with resistance from her family members, Kaitlyn is unsurprisingly proven right as the film goes along, with different people dying in a variety of bizarre ways. A visit to William Bludworth (the late Tony Todd), a mortician who’s been the one constant in the series, provides a glimmer of hope that they can cheat death. But will they figure it out before it’s too late?
Directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, and written by Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor, the film does not try to reinvent the wheel for the concept. The entire point is to get as creative as possible with the death scenes, and the filmmakers take that mandate seriously, with each successive death becoming increasingly gruesome. The Rube Goldberg-like manner in which each death occurs makes the scenes come off as entertaining instead of off-putting.
The idea of Death hunting down an entire family line due to the actions of the family elder is a solid twist on the series’ central premise, and that change keeps the film from feeling repetitive. The story also introduces the possibility that the entire series is connected due to Iris’ actions, with the character possessing a scrapbook that references well-known incidents from previous films, a fun Easter egg for longtime fans.
The creativity of the kill sequences does not carry over to the overall story, though. Almost every character in the film only exists in order to meet a horrific end, so anything that they have going on outside of being stalked by Death is purely window dressing. Consequently, it’s hard to really care about anybody, even if they are all related to one another.
Because characters are so easily dispatched in the film, the cast is devoid of well-known actors. This is by far Santa Juana’s biggest role to date, and she does well enough to want to see more of her in the future. Adults like Alex Zahara and Rya Kihlstedt are character actors who bring some history with them, while the younger group is composed of people still trying to make names for themselves.
Final Destination: Bloodlines is a solid return for the franchise, even if it feels more like a one-off film rather than a justification for more stories in the future. But given how easily the concept can be adapted into new circumstances, don’t be surprised if another movie pops up in a couple of years.
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Final Destination: Bloodlines opens in theaters on May 16.
