The Bizarre World of PN & Friends Episode 30: Reboot
“Reboot” can be crass and has much room to improve, but with investments of time and care, could flower out of the seed of a vision.

Hong Kong, twenty years later. The city is a perpetual construction site where the wheel of development must turn to build more shopping malls and higher residential towers. Enter members of the all-girl pop sensation, Heartbeat 48, an ever-expanding army of eco-warriors who are tasked with checking the heartbeats of centuries-old trees and villages and losing no time to pronounce their deaths. When Doy, an internet nerd and one of the few surviving village natives, is transported from the past into the fanciful realm of cute tutu outfits dresses, toy stethoscopes and hugging farewell routines – all staged for the benefit of the camera – he gets trapped a nightmare he can’t wake up from.
“Reboot” can be crass and has much room to improve, but with investments of time and care, could flower out of the seed of a vision.
It only seems to prove that when the company had their backs against the wall and needed an all pleasing, generic movie that had to make up for The Last Jedi, they chose to sacrifice almost everything that made their main protagonist interesting and that made her stand out as the strong female character that a generation of young movie goers was supposed to look up to. Instead, we were left with a Rey that was so much less than she could have been. And I guess that’s the real story of Rey and The Rise of Skywalker; they could have been so much more, but they were just more of the same.
If Miguel Alexandre were trying to make a revenge story seem dull without using all the effective formulas that work great in this catchy genre, he could not have accomplished his purpose much better than he unintentionally has in Black Island.
Lee Daniels’s Billie Holiday biopic The United States vs. Billie Holiday was released on February 26th, 2021, and my immediate reaction to it was one of discomfort.
In Saudi Arabia, a little girl (Wadjda) is told she can't have a bike because she's a girl. Wadjda struggles to obtain a bicycle to race her friend, Abdullah, due to the gender inequality and cultural norms of Saudi Arabia.
The director's latest is a dreamlike exploration of a consciousness torn between two homelands, and the implications of history and memory suspended in limbo.